The Secret Sentry (27 page)

On September 28, the CIA concluded that “in the event of a breakdown of control in Kabul, the Soviets would be likely to deploy
one or more Soviet airborne divisions to the Kabul vicinity to protect Soviet citizens as well as to ensure the continuance
of some pro-Soviet regime in the capital.”
⁹⁷
Then, in October, SIGINT detected the call-up of thousands of Soviet reservists in the Central Asian republics.
⁹⁸

Throughout November and December, NSA monitored and the CIA reported on virtually every move made by Soviet forces. The CIA
advised the White House on December 19 that the Russians had perhaps as many as three airborne battalions at Bagram, and NSA
predicted on December 22, three full days before the first Soviet troops crossed the Soviet-Afghan border, that the Russians
would invade Afghanistan within the next seventy-two hours.
⁹⁹

NSA’s prediction was right on the money. The Russians had an ominous Christmas present for Afghanistan, and NSA unwrapped
it. Late on Christmas Eve, Russian linguists at the U.S. Air Force listening posts at Royal Air Force Chicksands, north of
London, and San Vito dei Normanni Air Station, in southern Italy, detected the takeoff from air bases in the western USSR
of the first of 317 Soviet military transport flights carrying elements of two Russian airborne divisions and heading for
Afghanistan; on Christmas morning, the CIA issued a final intelligence report saying that the Soviets had prepared for a massive
intervention and might “have started to move into that country in force today.” SIGINT indicated that a large force of Soviet
paratroopers was headed for Afghanistan—and then, at six p.m. Kabul time, it ascertained that the first of the Soviet IL-76
and AN-22 military transport aircraft had touched down at Bagram Air Base and the Kabul airport carrying the first elements
of the 103rd Guards Airborne Division and an in dependent parachute regiment. Three days later, the first of twenty-five thousand
troops of Lieutenant General Yuri Vladimirovich Tukharinov’s Fortieth Army began crossing the Soviet-Afghan border.
^{100.CIA, Afghan Task Force, intelligence memorandum,}

The studies done after the Afghan invasion all characterized the performance of the U.S. intelligence community as an “intelligence
success story.”
¹⁰¹
NSA’s newfound access to high-level Soviet communications enabled the agency to accurately monitor and report quickly on virtually
every key facet of the Soviet military’s activities. As we shall see in the next chapter, Afghanistan may have been the “high
water mark” for NSA.
^102.Johnson,

Postscript

By the end of the 1970s, NSA had been largely rebuilt thanks to the efforts of Lew Allen and Bobby Ray Inman. Despite the
dramatic cuts in its size, the agency remained, as a former senior NSA official, Eugene Becker, put it, “a several billion
dollar a year corporation, with thousands of people operating a global system.”
¹⁰³
It had, thanks to a new generation of spy satellites and other technical sensors, once again gained access to high-level
Soviet communications. It did not take long before NSA was producing reliable intelligence on what was going on behind the
iron curtain. According to a declassified NSA history, “even with decreased money, cryptology was yielding the best information
that it had produced since World War II.”
¹⁰⁴

CHAPTER 10

Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano

NSA During the Reagan and Bush Administrations

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

—PERCY BYSSHE SHELLY, "OZYMANDIAS"

General Lincoln Faurer: April 1981–April 1985

On April 1, 1981, Admiral Bobby Inman became the deputy director of the CIA. He was replaced at the helm of NSA by Lieutenant
General Lincoln Faurer of the U.S. Air Force. A 1950 graduate of West Point, Faurer had a résumé filled with intelligence
experience, including DIA vice director for production and director of intelligence of U.S. Eu ro pean Command in West Germany.
¹

Amiable and easy to get along with, Linc Faurer seems to have been liked by virtually everyone, including his predecessor
and six former senior NSA officials interviewed for this book, who felt he was a man to whom you could take problems without
fear of recrimination. He was fortunate to have as his deputy Ann Caracristi, an extremely capable NSA cryptanalyst, who served
as deputy director of NSA from April 1, 1980, to July 31, 1982. Caracristi’s successor, Robert Rich, who served from August
1, 1982, to July 1986, was a Far East expert. Caracristi and Rich handled internal management while Faurer focused on NSA’s
relations with Washington and foreign collaborating agencies.
²

Faurer’s four years at NSA were tumultuous. Shortly after President Ronald Reagan took office, Faurer persuaded Congress to
allocate a huge amount of funding for a dramatic expansion of NSA’s workforce, which grew by 27 percent, to twenty-three thousand
personnel, between 1981 and 1985; the agency was forced to lease space in nearby office buildings to temporarily house the
staff overflow. In 1982, Congress funded two new large buildings adjacent to NSA headquarters, Operations 2A and 2B, and NSA
expanded its mission to include operations security and computer security.
³

When Faurer became director, 58 percent of the agency’s resources were devoted to covering the Soviet Union and its Eastern
European allies. The remainder was dedicated to some twenty “hard target” countries, including China, North Korea, Vietnam,
Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, and Libya. But within the first months of his tenure, NSA’s
SIGINT operations took on new directions as innovative high-tech collection systems came online—while new crises erupted and
targets of opportunity presented themselves.
⁴

The Gulf of Sidra

In July 1981, President Reagan ordered the U.S. Navy to conduct a naval exercise in the Gulf of Sidra, which Libya claimed
as its territorial waters but which all other nations held to be international waters. The CIA warned the White House and
the Pentagon, “The Libyan Government is likely to view the exercise as a conspiracy directed against it. The possibility of
a hostile tactical reaction resulting in a skirmish is real. Even without such a skirmish, the Libyan Government may view
the penetration of its claimed waters and airspace as ‘an incident’ and that Syrian pilots operating Libyan MiG fighters at
Benina Air Base were the most likely to attack U.S. aircraft if the Libyans chose to initiate combat.”
⁵

Despite the CIA’s warning, the exercise proceeded as planned, and on August 19 a Libyan SU-22 Fitter fighter fired an air-to-air
missile at two U.S. Navy F-14 Tomcat fighters from the aircraft carrier USS
Nimitz
over the Gulf of Sidra. The missile missed its target, but the Tomcats shot down the Libyan jet. U.S. Navy radio intercept
operators on a nearby SIGINT EA-3B aircraft and aboard the destroyer USS
Caron
monitored all of the radio traffic of the Libyan fighter pilot during the engagement, which showed that the Libyans had deliberately
sought a fight with the American planes.
⁶

Unbeknownst to Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, the cryptanalysts in NSA’s G Group had for years been able to read the
most sensitive Libyan diplomatic and intelligence ciphers. The agency was also listening to all of Qaddafi’s telephone calls,
which proved to be an important source of intelligence about the Libyan leader’s intentions. A day or two after the Gulf of
Sidra shootdown, an American listening post intercepted a phone call from an enraged Qaddafi to Ethiopian leader Mengistu
Haile Mariam, in which Qaddafi swore that he would kill President Reagan to avenge the insult. As a result of this warning,
the U.S. Secret Service increased the level of its protection of President Reagan, but no tangible threat surfaced and the
security alert was called off in December 1981.
⁷

The CENTAM Conundrum

In August 1981, the Reagan administration began to publicly assert that the United States now had firm intelligence showing
that Nicaragua’s Sandinista government had intensified its covert arms supply to the FMLN guerrillas inside El Salvador. NSA
had been reading Nicaragua’s diplomatic codes for months, as well as intercepting most of the radio traffic between Managua
and the rebels in El Salvador. At the request of the White House, in November the agency increased its SIGINT coverage of
the Sandinista regime and began tracking the movements of the FMLN guerrilla units, who were now powerful enough to threaten
the stability of the newly elected Salvadoran government of José Napoleon Duarte.
⁸

NSA threw a vast amount of SIGINT collection resources at the FMLN guerrillas. In July 1981, huge RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft
flying from Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska began conducting SIGINT collection missions off the coast of El Salvador, followed
by other airborne intercept operations through October, enabling U.S. intelligence to monitor FMLN activities and share the
take with the Salvadoran military. If the locations of FMLN radio transmitters were triangulated, U.S. Air Force AC-130 gunships
were called in from Panama to destroy the guerrilla bases, all of which was done in complete secrecy. It was a very serious
and very secret war that was being fought in El Salvador.
⁹

In December, the U.S. Navy began stationing a SIGINT-equipped destroyer off the coast of El Salvador as part of Jittery Prop,
an operation to intercept radio traffic related to arms shipments and to pinpoint the locations of Nicaraguan military and
Salvadoran guerrilla radio transmitters. When the U.S. press broke the story about Jittery Prop in February 1982, the FMLN
guerrillas switched radio frequencies, and NSA temporarily lost its ability to listen to the transmitters, but by the early
summer of 1982 Jittery Prop ships had restored their SIGINT coverage of the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran guerilla radio nets.
¹⁰

Virtually all of the best evidence available was coming from SIGINT, including NSA’s almost daily intercepts containing status
reports from almost all FMLN units operating inside El Salvador. But the Reagan administration chose not to make the evidence
provided by the intercepts public, apparently to avoid compromising the source.
¹¹

Beginning in late 1983, however, NSA’s access began to drop off dramatically as the Nicaraguan regime began to tighten up
its communications security. New Russian-made cipher machines were put into use on all major Nicaraguan communications circuits,
and communication between Managua and the FMLN was converted to unbreakable one-time pad systems.
¹²

KAL 007

At three twenty-six a.m. (local time) on September 1, 1983, Major Gennadiy Nikolayevich Osipovich, a veteran SU-15 fighter
pilot assigned to the Soviet 777th Fighter Aviation Regiment at Dolinsk-Sokol Air Base on Sakhalin Island, fired two AA-3
Anab missiles at a Korean Airlines Boeing 747 as it was exiting Soviet airspace west of the island. The airliner, whose flight
number was KAL 007, was flying from New York to Seoul via Anchorage. Both of Osipovich’s missiles hit the passenger aircraft.
For the next twelve minutes, the 747 spiraled downward, before impacting on the water below. All 269 passengers and crew were
killed, including U.S. congressman Lawrence “Larry” McDonald.
¹³

U.S. Air Force radio intercept operators working the night shift at the NSA listening post at Misawa, Japan, had monitored
the entire sequence of events from the moment the Korean airliner had veered off course and entered Soviet airspace over the
Kamchatka Peninsula. An hour before KAL 007 was shot down, the intercept operators at Misawa had noted an increased volume
of Soviet air defense radio transmissions as the Korean airliner crossed Kamchatka. Russian radar tracking activity throughout
the Far East increased dramatically, and several MiG fighters were detected in intercepts taking off from Petropavlovsk-Yelizovo
Air Base on Kamchatka. SIGINT analysts in the Far East concluded at the time that in all likelihood the activity was part
of an unannounced air defense exercise.
¹⁴

As the 747 crossed Sakhalin Island, unaware of the chaos going on around it, a highly classified thirty-man NSA radio intercept
facility at Wakkanai on the northernmost tip of the Japanese island of Hokkaido, called Project Clef, began intercepting,
at two fifty-six a.m. (thirty minutes before the shootdown took place), highly unusual radio transmissions from four Russian
fighter interceptors who appeared to be conducting live intercept operations just across the La Perouse Strait (between Sakhalin
Island and Hokkaido) against an unknown target. One of the intercept operators at Wakkanai happened to be sitting on the air-to-ground
radio frequency of Major Osipo vich’s fighter regiment at Dolinsk-Sokol, which proved to be providential because as he sat
listening to the Russian fighter pilot’s radio transmissions he heard the fateful transmissions at three twenty-six a.m. indicating
that Osipovich had fired his missiles (“I have executed the launch”), followed two seconds later by the Russian fighter pilot
reporting to his ground controller that “the target is destroyed.” It was this tape recording that was to figure so highly
in the days and weeks that followed.
¹⁵

When the first CRITIC report from Misawa hit Washington early on the morning of September 1, it set into motion a chain of
events that would have severe repercussions for U.S.-Soviet relations. Secretary of State George Shultz pushed hard to get
NSA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community to agree to allow him to release to the public the tape-recorded intercept
of Major Osipo vich shooting down the airliner, later telling an interviewer, “It’s a pretty chilling tape. It seemed to me
that was a critical thing to get out. With the President’s support I managed to get the intelligence people to release it.
It was hard because they didn’t want to release it.”
¹⁶

At ten forty-five a.m. (Washington time), Shultz walked to the podium in the Press Briefing Room at the State Department and
laid out the facts about the shootdown, such as they were known at the time. But in doing so, he revealed a great deal about
NSA’s role in the affair, something which the astute reporters in Washington quickly picked up on, to the intense chagrin
of senior agency officials at Fort Meade.
¹⁷

But it turned out that in their rush to pillory the Soviets, much of what Shultz told the press about the incident turned
out to be flat-out wrong. NSA analysts were still trying to put together a complete and accurate translation at the same time
the Reagan administration was releasing selected extracts from the intercepts to buttress their case that the Soviets had
committed an act of mass murder. It was not until late on the afternoon on September 1 that NSA completed its “scrub” of the
intercept tapes and found that, according to former CIA deputy director for intelligence Robert M. Gates, “the story might
be a little more complicated.” The new NSA-produced translation showed that the Russians thought they were tracking an American
RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft, not a Boeing 747 airliner, and that Major Osipovich, the SU-15 pilot who fired the fatal missiles,
never identified the aircraft as a civilian airliner, believing that the “bogey” he was trailing was actually an American
military aircraft. All of this information ended up in the next day’s edition of the CIA’s
President’s
Daily Brief
, as well as in a briefing for the National Security Council by CIA director William Casey.
¹⁸

Everyone is familiar with the age-old adage “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.” That is exactly what Reagan
administration officials did. On September 5, President Reagan went on national television and delivered a harsh and uncompromising
attack on Moscow’s actions, describing the KAL 007 shootdown as a “crime against humanity.” He played carefully selected extracts
of the NSA intercepts, then forcefully argued that the Russian fighter pilot must have known that he was shooting down a civilian
airliner despite the fact that he had been told four days earlier that the tapes indicated otherwise. The next day, the U.S.
ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, played three carefully selected extracts from the NSA tapes before astanding-room-only
session of the U.N. Security Council, again using the occasion to accuse the Soviets of having committed mass murder.
¹⁹

The crux of the problem was that Reagan’s and Kirkpatrick’s presentations were only half true. Gates later admitted that much
of what they had said was not entirely factual, writing in his memoirs that “the administration’s rhetoric outran the facts
known to it.”
²⁰
Alvin Snyder, the former head of television for the U.S. Information Agency, whose staff was given the job of producing the
slick audio-video presentation given by Ambassador Kirkpatrick at the United Nations, later admitted that he was given only
selected portions of the NSA intercept tapes. He only learned later that the complete, unabridged version of the NSA intercept
tape showed that the Russians had tried to warn the Korean airliner by firing tracer bullets in front of the aircraft, but
the Korean pilots never saw them.
²¹