The Secret Sentry (26 page)

A 1976 study of U.S. intelligence reporting on the Soviet Union, however, found that virtually all of the material contained
in the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimates about Soviet strategic and conventional military forces came from SIGINT and
satellite imagery. A similar study found that less than 5 percent of the finished intelligence being generated by the U.S.
intelligence community came from HUMINT.
⁷²
Moreover, rapid changes in intelligence-gathering and information-processing technology proved to be a godsend for NSA. In
1976, NSA retired its huge IBM Harvest computer system, which had been the mainstay of the agency’s cryptanalysts since February
1962. It was replaced by the first of computer genius Seymour Cray’s new Cray-1 supercomputers. Standing six feet six inches
high, the Cray supercomputer was a remarkable piece of machinery, capable of performing 150–200 million calculations a second,
giving it ten times the computing power of any other computer in the world. More important, the Cray allowed the agency’s
crypt-analysts for the first time to tackle the previously invulnerable Soviet high-level cipher systems.
⁷³

Shortly after Bobby Inman became the director of NSA in 1977, cryptanalysts working for the agency’s Soviet code-breaking
unit, A Group, headed by Ann Caracristi, succeeded in solving a number of Soviet cipher systems that gave NSA access to high-level
Soviet communications. Credit for this accomplishment goes to a small and ultra-secretive unit called the Rainfall Program
Management Division, headed from 1974 to 1978 by a native New Yorker named Lawrence Castro. Holding bachelor’s and master’s
degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Castro got into the SIGINT business in 1965
when he joined ASA as a young second lieu-tenant. In 1967, he converted to civilian status and joined NSA as an engineer in
the agency’s Research and Engineering Organization, where he worked on techniques for solving high-level Russian cipher systems.
⁷⁴

By 1976, thanks in part to some mistakes made by Russian cipher operators, NSA cryptanalysts were able to reconstruct some
of the inner workings of the Soviet military’s cipher systems. In 1977, NSA suddenly was able to read at least some of the
communications traffic passing between Moscow and the Russian embassy in Washington, including one message from Russian ambassador
Anatoly Dobrynin to the Soviet Foreign Ministry repeating the advice given him by Henry Kissinger on how to deal with the
new Carter administration in the still-ongoing SALT II negotiations.
⁷⁵

The Iranian Revolution

NSA was successful in deciphering the most sensitive communications traffic and high-level thinking of the Irani an government
prior to the fall of the shah in February 1979, but there is little indication that the intelligence analysts at the CIA took
much note of this material. Instead, Langley seems to have relied on the daily reporting of the U.S. military attachés in
Tehran, who generally presented a more optimistic view of the viability of the shah’s regime than most other experts.
⁷⁶

When the February 1979 revolution brought the Islamic fundamentalist cleric Ayatollah Khomeini to power, the CIA’s Tacksman
intercept bases in Iran, which monitored Russian missile telemetry signals, were shut down. However, NSA continued to exploit
high-level Iranian diplomatic and military communications traffic, the best intercepts coming from the Rhyolite SIGINT satellites
parked over North Africa, which were retargeted to intercept Irani an military tactical radio traffic.
⁷⁷

The 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War

After Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia in late December 1977, Beijing ratcheted up a war of words directed at Vietnam, forcing
it to withdraw its troops in January 1978. The first signs that China had begun preparing for a potential war with Vietnam
came in October 1978, when SIGINT detected Chinese army units leaving their garrisons in and around the southern Chinese city
of Kun-ming and taking up positions along China’s border with Vietnam. The buildup of troops and aircraft continued until,
by January 1, 1979, the Chinese troops deployed along the Vietnamese border outnumbered the Vietnamese troops four to one.
War was imminent. It was just a question of when it would break out.
⁷⁸

On the morning of January 4, over one hundred thousand Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia, and in a matter of a few weeks
they destroyed the military forces of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime and forced its despotic ruler, Pol Pot, and his minions
to flee to neighboring Thailand. The next day, NSA and the Australian SIGINT agency, the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD),
declared a SIGINT alert, anticipating that the invasion would almost certainly provoke a forceful Chinese response.
⁷⁹

NSA and DSD watched and listened as the Chinese ultimately positioned 320,000 ground troops and 350 combat aircraft in the
area adjacent to the Vietnamese border by early February, as well as activating special communications circuits connecting
Beijing with a special Chinese general staff command post at Duyun, in southern China, one that had previously been activated
only in time’s of hostilities. On January 19, the CIA had reported, “The manner of the buildup, its timing and the mix of
forces involved suggest offensive rather than defensive preparations.” CIA and Australian intelligence analysts in Washington
and Canberra also believed that outright war between the two countries was unlikely. So it came as a shock to many policy
makers in Washington when seven Chinese armies surged across the border into Vietnam at dawn on the morning of February 17.
⁸⁰

NSA’s performance during the run-up to the Chinese offensive appears to have been a mixed bag, largely because its overall
collection efforts were hampered by communications security measures taken by both the Chinese and the Vietnamese militaries,
such as extensive use of landlines instead of radio.
⁸¹

The Fall of Somoza and the Russian Brigade in Cuba

On July 17, 1979, the longtime Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio “Tacho” So-moza fled Nicaragua for Miami, but was denied entry
to the United States by President Carter. Two days later, the Sandinista guerrillas who had battled So-moza for a decade entered
the Nicaraguan capital of Managua and declared themselves the new rulers of the country.

The Carter administration ordered intensified intelligence coverage of the new regime because it was supported by the Soviet
Union and Cuba. In particular, the White House wanted to know if the Sandinistas were providing material or financial support
to the Marxist guerrillas operating in neighboring El Salvador, who called themselves the Faribundo Martí National Liberation
Front (FMLN). As part of the “surge” effort, Norman Klar’s G6 stepped up SIGINT reporting on Nicaragua. U.S. Navy SIGINT reconnaissance
aircraft were deployed to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to monitor developments in Nicaragua, and NSA’s listening posts in the region
were tasked with greater coverage of Sandinista communications.
⁸²

By 1980, Klar’s cryptanalysts had solved and were reading some high-level Nicaraguan diplomatic communications traffic, but
much less SIGINT was being obtained from the Salvadoran FMLN guerrillas, who communicated by radio far less often than their
Nicaraguan counterparts.
⁸³

Administration officials, particularly Zbigniew Brzezinski, were convinced that the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua and the
growing power of FMLN in El Salvador were being directed by Fidel Castro in Havana, almost certainly with backing from the
Soviet Union, so NSA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community were ordered to intensify their reporting on Cuban military
and clandestine activity in Central America as well as Soviet activities in Cuba itself. Accordingly, in July and August 1979,
NSA dramatically stepped up its SIGINT coverage of Cuba.
⁸⁴

The U.S. intelligence community knew the Russians had maintained a sizable military training mission in Cuba since 1962, and
the CIA reported to President Carter in May 1979 that there were two thousand Soviet military personnel serving as advisers
to the Cuban military and conducting SIGINT collection at a large listening post in Lourdes, outside Havana. The report stated
that, according to some fragmentary SIGINT, Soviet pilots were flying Cuban MiG fighters, but it made no mention of Soviet
combat troops being in Cuba.
⁸⁵

Based on a few intercepts, some CIA agent reports, and some satellite imagery, during the period from April to July 1979 Klar’s
G6 office came to the conclusion that a Soviet combat unit of brigade size was stationed in Cuba. As former CIA director Stansfield
Turner notes in his memoirs, this “was a big inference from a sparse fact or two.” Without the approval of the CIA, NSA published
its findings in the July 13 edition of the “Green Hornet,” as NSA’s daily compendium of SIGINT “news,” the
SIGINT Summary
, was widely known in Washington.
⁸⁶

The U.S. intelligence community, already concerned about the Cuban military’s role in Angola and Ethiopia, as well as the
increasingly unstable political situation in Central America, was upset by NSA’s action, and an incensed Stan Turner informed
the White House that NSA’s actions constituted a direct violation of the prohibition against its producing finished intelligence
reports for the president, a function reserved for the CIA.
⁸⁷

On July 19, the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community issued a report that tentatively concluded “that a Soviet
ground forces brigade was
possibly
stationed in Cuba, but that its size, location(s), and mission were uncertain.” Then, triggered by an intercepted message,
on August 17, a CIA reconnaissance satellite passed over Cuba and found the brigade, engaged in a routine military exercise,
which led to the CIA’s issuing a report on September 18 (basically confirming the original NSA missive) stating that a twenty-six-hundred-man
Soviet combat brigade was then in Cuba and had probably been there since at least 1964, if not since the 1962 Cuban Missile
Crisis.
⁸⁸

When this leaked out to the press, it touched off a political firestorm in Washington that almost destroyed whatever gains
had been made since the signing of SALT I in 1972 in terms of improving U.S.-Soviet relations, which was perhaps the reason
the report was leaked in the first place.
⁸⁹

The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan

Since there have been so few success stories in American intelligence history, when one comes along, it is worthwhile to examine
it to see what went right. NSA’s performance in the months prior to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 was
one of these rare cases. Not only did all of the new high-tech intelligence-collection sensors that NSA had purchased in the
1970s work as intended, but the raw data that they collected was processed in a timely fashion, which enabled Bobby Ray Inman
to boast that his agency had accurately predicted that the Soviets would invade Afghanistan.
⁹⁰

As opposition to the Soviet-supported Afghan regime in Kabul headed by President Nur Mohammed Taraki mounted in late 1978
and early 1979, the Soviets continued to increase their military presence in the country, until it had grown to five Russian
generals and about a thousand military advisers.
⁹¹
A rebellion in the northeastern Afghan city of Herat in mid-March 1979 in which one hundred Russian military and civilian
personnel were killed was put down by Afghan troops from Kandahar, but not before an estimated three thousand to five thousand
Afghans had died in the fighting.
⁹²

At this point, satellite imagery and SIGINT detected unusual activity by the two Soviet combat divisions stationed along the
border with Afghanistan.

The CIA initially regarded these units as engaged in military exercises, but these “exercises” fit right into a scenario for
a Soviet invasion. On March 26– 27, SIGINT detected a steady stream of Russian reinforcements and heavy equipment being flown
to Bagram airfield, north of Kabul, and by June, the intelligence community estimated that the airlift had brought in a total
of twenty-five hundred personnel, which included fifteen hundred airborne troops and additional “advisers” as well as the
crews of a squadron of eight AN-12 military transport aircraft now based in-country. SIGINT revealed that the Russians were
also secretly setting up a command-and-control communications network inside Afghanistan; it would be used to direct the Soviet
intervention in December 1979.
⁹³

In the last week of August and the first weeks of September, satellite imagery and SIGINT revealed preparations for Soviet
operations obviously aimed at Afghanistan, including forward deployment of Soviet IL-76 and AN-12 military transport aircraft
that were normally based in the European portion of the USSR.
⁹⁴

So clear were all these indications that CIA director Turner sent a Top Secret Umbra memo to the NSC on September 14 warning,
“The Soviet leaders may be on the threshold of a decision to commit their own forces to prevent the collapse of the Taraki
regime and protect their sizeable stake in Afghanistan. Small Soviet combat units may have already arrived in the country.”
⁹⁵

On September 16, President Taraki was deposed in a coup d’état, and his pro-Moscow deputy, Hafizullah Amin, took his place
as the leader of Afghanistan.

Over the next two weeks, American reconnaissance satellites and SIGINT picked up increased signs of Soviet mobilization, including
three divisions on the border and the movement of many Soviet military transport aircraft from their home bases to air bases
near the barracks of two elite airborne divisions, strongly suggesting an invasion was imminent.
⁹⁶