The Secret Sentry (25 page)

When civil war erupted in Lebanon in 1975, followed almost immediately by Syrian military intervention in the country, NSA
stepped up its SIGINT coverage of what was going on there, including the redeployment of a MiG-21 fighter regiment to Al Qusayr,
in northeastern Syria, where it could be used in Lebanon.
⁴⁹

SIGINT and the Panama Canal Negotiations

In 1974, President Gerald Ford opened negotiations with Panamanian strongman General Omar Torrijos over transferring control
of the Panama Canal from the United States to Panama. By 1976, the two countries were beginning to make significant headway
in their negotiations, despite the fact that Torrijos had sought added leverage by having Lieutenant Colonel Manuel Noriega,
the head of the Guardia Nacional G-2, Panama’s foreign intelligence organization, stage demonstrations and attacks on Americans.

Virtually everything Torrijos said over the telephone from his office and from his home in Farallón, outside Panama City,
was carried over an easily intercepted and American-built micro wave network. His conversations were secretly sucked up by
a nondescript U.S. Army antenna array at Albrook Air Force Station, which overlooked Panama City. Torrijos’s calls were immediately
forwarded to U.S. Army intercept operators at Fort Clayton, inside the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone, who taped the calls
and urgently forwarded all the processed material to NSA headquarters.
⁵⁰
Klar’s Spanish linguists and analysts in the G6 office, on the third floor of the NSA operations building, sent hastily made
translations and analysts’ comments via teletype to the State Department and the NSC “within 24 hours after their Panamanian
counterparts got them.”
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This continued from 1975 to 1977, providing the United States with not only salacious material about Torrijos’s extracurricular
love life, but also vital details on the protracted canal negotiations. The White House and State Department customers effusively
commended NSA for this invaluable information, and in 1978, NSA awarded the annual Travis Trophy, denoting the best strategic
SIGINT unit working for NSA, to the U.S. Army’s 470th Military Intelligence Group in Panama.
⁵²

But in the spring of 1976, U.S. Army intelligence officials picked up the first indications that Colonel Noriega had penetrated
the American SIGINT operation in Panama, and they soon discovered that a twenty-year-old sergeant and Spanish linguist assigned
to the 408th ASA Company at Fort Clayton had passed classified information to Noriega’s Guardia Nacional G-2. A full-scale
inquiry, designated Canton Song, was launched into the sergeant’s activities on April 23, 1976.
⁵³

After an intensive investigation of, and a grant of immunity to, the sergeant (who also implicated another linguist in his
unit), it was determined that vital intelligence, including details on how the U.S. Army intended to defend the Panama Canal,
had been betrayed to the Panamanians. For his work, the sergeant received only sixteen thousand dollars, much of which he
quickly blew on local prostitutes. In January 1976, he tried to sell the same information to the Cuban embassy in Panama City,
but the Cubans threw him out, believing that he was a CIA agent provocateur.
⁵⁴

Though the two sergeants were guilty of espionage, the army decided that, because they had been immunized, it would be too
difficult to prosecute them and dropped the case. But senior officials at NSA demanded that the Ford administration not let
these men go unpunished, and in late 1976, NSA director Allen sent a memo to CIA director George H. W. Bush recommending that
both sergeants be prosecuted for espionage. Bush declined Allen’s request, arguing that he had no authority to overturn the
army’s decision, but the real reason for not doing so was that it would have exposed the ongoing intelligence operations in
Panama, and even possibly derailed negotiations over the draft Panama Canal Treaty.
⁵⁵

In January 1977, Gerald Ford left office and was replaced by President Jimmy Carter. The Carter administration felt that it
had to inform the House and Senate intelligence committees about the compromise of the NSA operation, but asked the committees
not to do anything about it because the matter “was still under investigation.”
⁵⁶
In the end, the two sergeants were given honorable discharges, the case was closed, and on September 7, 1977, the Panama Canal
Treaty was signed.

Bobby Ray Inman

On July 5, 1977, Lieutenant General Allen stepped down as director of NSA, was given another star, and was appointed commander
of the U.S. Air Force Systems Command. A year later, he became the air force chief of staff, serving until his retirement
in June 1982.

His replacement as NSA director was forty-six-year-old Vice Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, the youngest man ever to hold the position.
The son of a gas station owner in tiny Rhonesboro, Texas, Inman was a childhood prodigy, graduating from the University of
Texas with honors at nineteen. After graduation, he taught school for a year, then joined the navy in 1951, never intending
to do more than a single three-year tour of duty. But Inman chose to remain in the navy, and over a thirty-year career he
rose rapidly through the ranks, holding a series of increasingly important positions in naval intelligence. He was a protégé
of Admiral James Holloway III, who first got Inman the job of chief of intelligence at Pacific Fleet. When Holloway became
chief of naval operations in July 1974, he got Inman promoted to rear admiral and the position of director of ONI, which Inman
held from September 1974 to July 1976, before becoming vice director of DIA, a position he held from 1976 to 1977.
⁵⁷

Agency veterans were stunned by the torrid pace that the workaholic Inman set; he got up at four a.m. every day except Sunday
to read the stack of intelligence reports that had come in overnight and was usually in his office at Fort Meade by six. He
drove his senior managers and support staff nuts as they tried to keep up with their demanding boss. A typical workday was
ten to twelve hours, six days a week and half a day on Sunday after church services. But Inman was perpetually late for appointments
and required a bevy of executive assistants to help him keep track of all the meetings he needed to attend and the papers
that required his signature. An NSA historian has written of him, “He appeared perpetually calm, but in reality was about
as stable as high voltage across an air gap.”
⁵⁸

Charming and possessing a dry sense of humor, Inman was infamous within NSA for his awkwardness and clumsiness, earning himself
the nickname the Blue Klutz. But those who worked for him, almost without exception, liked and respected him.
⁵⁹

Inman proved to be a relentless and vociferous advocate for his agency, which immediately put him at odds with the CIA. Antagonism
between the two agencies’ top brass had been growing since the 1973 Arab-Israeli War debacle, leading one senior CIA official
to recall the days when “NSA looked respectfully and appreciatively to CIA for guidance as to what it should collect and produce.
It also depended frequently on the Agency for support in its annual quests for funds . . . As time passed and its bud get
doubled, tripled, and quadrupled, NSA began to swell its corporate chest and develop a personality and style of its own. An
organization which began with a serious inferiority complex gradually developed a feeling that it has ‘a corner on the market’
in terms of intelligence fit to print.”
⁶⁰

When the CIA’s new director, Admiral Stansfield Turner, tried to rein NSA in by cutting its $1.3 billion budget, Inman went
around the CIA and began intensively lobbying on behalf of his agency at the White House. In the process, he made a number
of important friends, particularly President Carter’s crusty national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Brzezinski’s
deputy, Colonel William Odom, who would become the director of NSA in 1985. Inman also became a one-man public relations firm
trumpeting NSA’s accomplishments, even giving on-the-record press interviews, something that previous NSA directors had never
done.
⁶¹

After a somewhat rocky start, Inman’s relationship with Brzezinski became increasingly close, even though “Zbig” sometimes
wanted, according to Inman, “to push me to do things that I think the Agency should not be involved in.”
⁶²
Like Henry Kissinger, Brzezinski insisted that NSA send him, on an “eyes only” basis, any decrypts containing his name or
the name of any other senior Carter administration official. Inman was only too happy to oblige. His brilliant performances
before the Senate and House intelligence committees are legendary. During his tenure at NSA, Inman assiduously courted Congress,
established an NSA Legislative Affairs Office, and, for the first time, sent reports detailing NSA’s highly sensitive SIGINT
activities to the two congressional intelligence oversight committees.
⁶³

He needed all the friends on Capitol Hill he could get. Upon moving into the director’s office at Fort Meade, Inman discovered
that NSA, with a staff of forty thousand soldiers and civilians, needed money— lots of money— to deal with a number of major
problems that he inherited from Allen. Before taking over at NSA, Allen gave Inman a report on the Soviet cryptanalytic effort,
which was on the verge of major success but in desperate need of more money and personnel, which were needed to achieve the
anticipated breakthroughs. Another briefing paper given to him in 1977 noted that the new generation of SIGINT satellites
in orbit over the Earth had “achieved outstanding performance in a number of areas.” But the report noted that more could
be done and a rationale was needed for the next generation of huge SIGINT satellites due to be launched into space in the
late 1970s. The most pressing problem he inherited was an old one— NSA’s analysts were drowning in a sea of intercepts that
was growing incrementally every day. A report noted that NSA had “not developed capabilities to efficiently deal with the
increased amount of raw data generated by new collection systems.”
⁶⁴

Inman got $150 million in 1977 to modernize NSA’s worldwide operations, with huge appropriations in the following years to
expand NSA’s SIGINT coverage to previously ignored areas of the world, build new and improved SIGINT satellites, and develop
and build a host of new high-tech systems to gain access to a new generation of Soviet communications systems. Inman’s advancement
of NSA’s interests earned him the enmity of many within the U.S. intelligence community, particularly CIA director Turner.
⁶⁵

Inman’s numerous battles with Turner still reverberate in the halls of NSA and the CIA. Turner was determined to gain a greater
degree of control over NSA. Years later, he would describe it as “the largest agency in the intelligence community; a top
command of some general or admiral; and a proud, highly competent organization that does not like to keep its light under
a bushel . . . a pretty remote member of the [intelligence] community. The physical remoteness [from Washington] is compounded
by the fact that the NSA deals in such highly secret materials that it is often reluctant to share them with others lest a
leak spoil their ability to get that kind of information again. It is a loner organization.”
⁶⁶

Inman struggled to get NSA out from under the control of the CIA’s National Intelligence Tasking Center, Turner’s creation
designed to coordinate intelligence tasking and requirements within the U.S. intelligence community. The two men were soon
no longer on speaking terms, forcing Frank Car-lucci, the deputy director of the CIA, into the uncomfortable position of acting
as go-between. But most of all, Inman fought to dismantle Turner’s proposed APEX code word classification system, because
NSA feared that it would ultimately give the CIA control over the dissemination of NSA-produced intelligence. Inman and his
deputies managed to stall implementation of the APEX system until the Reagan administration came into power in January 1981
and promptly killed the plan.
⁶⁷

Under Inman’s direction, by the late 1970s, NSA had become the top U.S. producer of hard, usable intelligence. During Inman’s
watch, the agency broke into a series of high-level Soviet cryptographic systems, giving the U.S. intelligence community high-level
access to Soviet military and political thinking for the first time in years.
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The Soviet Target

Going into the 1970s, NSA and its British partner, GCHQ, were deriving a moderate degree of high-level intelligence about
the USSR from sources like the Gamma Guppy intercepts from Moscow, and another program that enabled NSA to read communications
traffic between Moscow and the Soviet embassy in Cairo in the months leading up to the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War.
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In the United States, Project Aquarian gave NSA the ability to tell which U.S. government telephone calls the Soviets were
intercepting from inside their diplomatic establishments in Washington, New York, and San Francisco. One intercept caught
the KGB listening in on Attorney General Griffin Bell discussing classified information on an unsecure telephone line.
⁷⁰

But according to some sources, the overall importance of SIGINT within the U.S. intelligence community continued to decline
in the 1970s, particularly with regard to the USSR. This was due in part to a GCHQ official named Geoffrey Arthur Prime, a
Russian linguist at Cheltenham from 1968 to 1977, who was arrested in 1982 and charged with spying for the Soviet Union. NSA
officials confirmed that while Prime was working at GCHQ headquarters, NSA and GCHQ lost their ability to read a number of
important Soviet systems when the Russians abruptly and without warning changed their codes or modified their communications
procedures in order to make them impenetrable to the American and British cryptanalysts. In November 1982, Prime pleaded guilty
and was sentenced to thirty-eight years in prison.
⁷¹