The Secret Sentry (29 page)

Washington Post
journalist Bob Woodward described Odom, perhaps politely, as “an intense, thin, stony man.” Former NSA officials frequently
used the words “acerbic,” “fractious,” “combative,” and “hardheaded” in interviews to describe his personality, along with
more colorful descriptions that cannot be printed here.
³⁶

Given these descriptions, it should come as no surprise that Odom’s tenure as NSA director, from 1985 to 1988, was not a happy
one. In a matter of months, he dismantled virtually all of the internal reform mechanisms put in place by former director
Bobby Ray Inman, including the system designed to identify and promote talented managers. Commenting on this, Inman said,
“I think much of it [the reform initiatives] died with Bill Odom, who had his strong likes and dislikes and zero interest
in systems.”
³⁷

A polarizing figure, Odom had an autocratic style that instantly put him at odds with many of NSA’s senior civilian officials.
There were resignations by key senior personnel and a minirevolt in 1988 after Odom’s censure and demotion of the number-three
man in NSA’s Communications Security Organization, John Wobensmith, for assisting Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, which was
regarded as making Wobensmith the scapegoat for the agency’s involvement in North’s Iran-Contra scheme.
³⁸
By mid-1988, many of Inman’s protégés were fighting what they regarded as a purge of their ranks by Odom and his supporters.
Things got so bad that Inman actually testified against Odom’s actions at a personnel hearing at Fort Meade.
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Odom made few friends in Washington and plenty of enemies because of his lobbying to increase the independence and power of
NSA at the expense of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, which were already concerned about the burgeoning power of
NSA. When CIA director Casey was told that Odom had been spotted on Capitol Hill leaving the office of a senator on the intelligence
committee, Casey erupted in anger, telling one of his deputies, “This S.O.B. is incredible!”
⁴⁰

The Spy Satellites

NSA’s SIGINT effort against the USSR during the 1980s was radically improved by a constellation of four new spy satellites
parked in geosynchronous orbit twenty-two thousand miles above the earth called Vortex (previously known as Chalet), which
was designed to suck up a huge amount of Russian communications traffic. Vortex was created in the early 1970s to replace
the older Canyon as NSA’s primary means of intercepting vast quantities of telephone traffic deep inside the Soviet Union.
Sporting a huge parabolic receiving antenna, the eleven-foot long, eight-foot wide, 3,087-pound Vortex satellites were equipped
with state-of-the-art intercept receivers that had the capacity to simultaneously intercept over eleven thousand telephone
calls and faxes carried on Soviet microwave radio-relay circuits; the satellites then chose which signals to beam back to
NSA-operated mission ground stations at Men with Hill, in northern England, and Bad Aibling, in West Germany, in near real
time based on a sophisticated “watch list” maintained by its onboard computers.
⁴¹

The quantity and quality of intelligence coming from the Vortex satellites was impressive. Vortex intercepted to great effect
the operational and tactical radio traffic of Soviet military forces deep inside Afghanistan throughout the 1980s, and it
monitored the radio circuits used by Russian SS-20 mobile intermediate-range ballistic missile firing units and SS-24 mobile
ICBM batteries to communicate with their operating bases. The best intelligence coverage of the April 1986 disaster at the
Russian Chernobyl nuclear reactor available to the U.S. intelligence community came from intercepts supplied by Vortex satellites,
which listened in on the Russian government’s reaction to the disaster, including the telephone traffic of the Soviet general
staff and the KGB. Two years later, in May 1988, a Vortex satellite picked up radio traffic indicating that a huge explosion
had taken place at a Russian fuel propellant plant at Pavlograd, which made fuel components for Soviet ICBMs.
⁴²

Ronald Pelton

Arguably the worst damage that has ever been inflicted on NSA was not done by an enterprising journalist or a White House
official leaking information. Rather, this dubious honor is held by a former NSA official named Ronald Pelton, who had worked
in NSA’s A Group, which was responsible for all SIGINT operations against the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, for his entire
career. As chief of a key staff unit within A Group, Pelton had complete access to the details of all the unit’s sensitive
compartmented programs.

In July 1979, Pelton was forced to resign from NSA after filing for bankruptcy three months earlier. Desperate for money,
on January 15, 1980, Pelton got in touch with the Russian embassy in Washington, and in the months that followed, he sold
them, for a paltry thirty-five thousand dollars, a number of Top Secret Codeword documents and anything else he could remember.
For the Soviets this was pure gold, and a bargain at that.
⁴³

The damage that Pelton did was massive. He compromised the joint NSA– U.S. Navy undersea-cable tapping operation in the Sea
of Okhotsk called Ivy Bells, which was producing vast amounts of enormously valuable, unencrypted, and incredibly detailed
intelligence about the Soviet Pacific Fleet, information that might give the United States a clear, immediate warning of a
Soviet attack. In 1981, a Soviet navy salvage ship lifted the Ivy Bells pod off the seafloor and took it to Moscow to be studied
by Soviet electronics experts. It now resides in a forlorn corner of the museum of the Russian security service in the Lubyanka,
in downtown Moscow.
⁴⁴

Even worse, Pelton betrayed virtually every sensitive SIGINT operation that NSA and Britain’s GCHQ were then conducting against
the Soviet Union, including the seven most highly classified compartmented intelligence operations that A Group was then engaged
in. The programs were so sensitive that Charles Lord, the NSA deputy director of operations at the time, called them the “Holiest
of Holies.” He told the Russians about the ability of NSA’s Vortex SIGINT satellites to intercept sensitive communications
deep inside the USSR that were being carried by microwave radio-relay systems. Pelton also revealed the full extent of the
intelligence being collected by the joint NSA-CIA Broadside listening post in the U.S. embassy in Moscow. Within months of
Pelton being debriefed in Vienna, the Soviets intensified their jamming of the frequencies being monitored by the Moscow embassy
listening post, and the intelligence “take” coming out of Broadside fell to practically nothing. Pelton also told the Russians
about virtually every Russian cipher machine that NSA’s cryptanalysts in A Group had managed to crack in the late 1970s. NSA
analysts had wondered why at the height of the Polish crisis in 1981 they had inexplicably lost their ability to exploit key
Soviet and Polish communications systems, which had suddenly gone silent without warning. Pelton also told the Russians about
a joint CIA-NSA operation wherein CIA operatives placed fake tree stumps containing sophisticated electronic eavesdropping
devices near Soviet military installations around Moscow. The data intercepted by these devices was either relayed electronically
to the U.S. embassy or sent via burst transmission to the United States via communication satellites.
⁴⁵

In December 1985, Pelton was arrested and charged in federal court in Baltimore, with six counts of passing classified information
to the Soviet Union. After a brief trial, in June 1986 Pelton was found guilty and sentenced to three concurrent life terms
in prison.
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Gulf of Sidra II and La Belle Disco

The year 1986 was one of dangerous confrontation between Muammar Qaddafi and the Reagan administration. In January, the U.S.
Sixth Fleet’s Freedom of Navigation exercises off the Libyan coast (designated Operation Attain Document) gave NSA an opportunity
to monitor the reactions of Libyan MiG-23 and MiG-25 fighters. On January 13, two MiG-25s attempted to intercept a U.S. Navy
EA-3 SIGINT reconnaissance aircraft flying over international waters southwest of Sicily. The Libyan aircraft retreated when
a pair of navy F-18 fighters from the aircraft carrier USS
Coral Sea
arrived on the scene.
⁴⁷

A month later, on February 28, the Joint Chiefs of Staff requested NSA SIGINT support for enlarged navy exercises in the Gulf
of Sidra, a move sure to produce a violent Libyan reaction. Pursuant to the request, NSA quickly reallocated otherwise dedicated
resources for monitoring Libyan military communications traffic, among them one of the Vortex SIGINT satellites, a number
of navy warships with embarked SIGINT intercept detachments, and a number of air force and navy SIGINT reconnaissance aircraft.
In March, the increased tempo of American reconnaissance flights triggered an attempted intercept by two Libyan MiG-25s of
a navy EA-3B reconnaissance aircraft flying from the aircraft carrier USS
Saratoga
120 miles north of Tripoli. No shots were fired, but it became clear that the Libyans were serious about stopping American
eavesdropping activities.
⁴⁸

Since NSA could read the Libyan cipher systems, the agency knew virtually everything worth knowing about the capabilities
and locations of Libyan air and ground units, including the Libyan air defense system’s radar and fire control systems. In
early 1986, NSA learned that Qaddafi had ordered his tiny navy out onto the high seas to avoid being destroyed in port and
had told his air force to increase the number of sorties being flown. But Libyan warships were prone to mechanical difficulties
caused by poor maintenance, their crews were hindered by a lack of blue-water experience, and there were also operational
difficulties, including an inability to replenish and refuel ships at sea. And the Libyan air force, NSA discovered, had serious
problems operating its complex Russian-made fighters. Nevertheless, NSA monitored more than two hundred sorties by Libyan
fighter aircraft trying to engage their more capable U.S. Navy counterparts over the Gulf of Sidra. An air force radio intercept
operator at Iráklion, Crete, later recalled that “a fistfight with Qaddafi was coming. It was just a matter of when and where.”
⁴⁹

On March 23, a Libyan SA-5 SAM battery launched four missiles at U.S. Navy aircraft that had deliberately flown across Qaddafi’s
so-called Line of Death over the Gulf of Sidra. The missile launch was detected by a U.S. Air Force RC-135 Burning Wind reconnaissance
aircraft, which warned the navy fighters in time for them to do evasive maneuvers. The next day, U.S. Navy fighter-bombers
destroyed the Libyan SAM battery and two Libyan guided missile patrol boats.
⁵⁰

Qaddafi demanded retaliation for the humiliation visited on his forces. On March 25, an NSA listening post intercepted a three-line
telex message from the head of the Libyan Intelligence Service in Tripoli to eight Libyan embassies (called “People’s Bureaus”)
in Europe, including East Berlin, instructing them to target places in which American servicemen congregated. An intercepted
March 23 message from Tripoli to the People’s Bureau in East Berlin had demanded an attack “with as many victims as possible.”
This was followed by an intercepted message from East Berlin reporting that “an operation would be undertaken shortly and
that Libyan officials would be pleased with it.”

At one forty-nine a.m. on April 5, a bomb went off inside La Belle discotheque in West Berlin, killing two American servicemen
and a Turkish woman and wounding 230 others. Shortly after, an intercepted message from Libya’s East Berlin outpost reported
that “the operation had been successfully completed, and that it would not be traceable to the Libyan diplomatic post in East
Berlin.” According to the files of the former East German secret service, the intercepted message stated, “At 1:30 this morning
one of the acts was carried out with success, without leaving a trace behind.”
⁵¹

On the evening of April 7, President Reagan went on national tele vision to announce that the U.S. government had incontrovertible
evidence proving that the Libyan government was behind the La Belle Disco bombing. The Libyans immediately changed all of
their codes and ciphers and purchased a new cipher machine from a Swiss company, negating many of NSA’s gains made since the
first Libyan cipher systems were solved in 1979.
⁵²

On April 14, eighteen U.S. Air Force F-111 fighter-bombers took off from air bases in En gland for a twenty-four-hundred-mile
flight to bomb targets in Libya. The American air strikes hit selected targets in Tripoli and Benghazi, killing at least fifteen
people, including Qaddafi’s adopted daughter, and wounding more than one hundred others. But they did not succeed in killing
Qaddafi.
⁵³

Admiral William Studeman, who would become director of NSA two years later, recalled that the entire intelligence community
was scooped by CNN: “When we bombed Libya . . . we got more bomb damage assessments and a sense of what was going on inside
Tripoli around those targets listening to the CNN guy talking on the balcony of a hotel in Tripoli than we did from all the
electronic surveillance devices that we had focused on the problem.”
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Admiral William Studeman: August 1988–January 1992

On August 1, 1988, General Odom retired from the military after the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously recommended against
extending his three-year tour of duty as director of NSA. Despite support from the Pentagon’s number-two man, William Taft,
Odom’s abrasive personality and autocratic style had rubbed too many people in the Defense Department and the intelligence
community the wrong way.
⁵⁵

Odom was replaced by career naval intelligence officer Rear Admiral William Studeman. Bill Studeman was born in Brownsville,
Texas, on January 16, 1940, the son of an American aviation pioneer who had flown during World War I and helped build Pan
American Airways. He graduated from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, in 1962 with a B.A. in history, then
joined the navy to become a pilot. Studeman’s subsequent advance through the navy’s ranks was meteoric, taking him from ensign
to rear admiral in only twenty years. His big break came when he was assigned to be the executive assistant to the director
of the Office of Naval Intelligence, Rear Admiral Bobby Ray Inman. Inman took Studeman under his wing and helped guide him
through the ranks of naval intelligence. In September 1985, he became the fifty-third director of ONI and remained there until
his assignment as director of NSA.
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