Authors: Matthew M. Aid
Quiet and thoughtful, during his career in the navy Studeman had earned a reputation for blunt honesty and candor that had
occasionally bruised some of his colleagues in naval intelligence, some of whom derisively referred to him as “the Boy Scout.”
It had fallen to Studeman, as director of ONI, to deal with the fallout of the Walker-Whitworth spy ring, which he had handled
with aplomb despite the fact that it was arguably the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history before the 2002 Iraqi weapons
of mass destruction scandal.
57
He was pleasantly surprised to get the nod to head NSA. Former agency officials who served under him believe that Studeman’s
three-year tenure there is under appreciated. He is credited with “righting the ship” after Odom’s bruising and contentious
tenure, restoring the shaken morale at the agency, and renewing NSA’s sense of purpose and mission at a time when it needed
it most.
58
And most important, the agency was regarded as far more effective by its consumers after scoring some important intelligence
coups, such as information concerning the Chinese military’s bloody suppression of the democracy movement in Beijing’s Tiananmen
Square in June 1989. Intercepts collected by NSA detailed the reluctance of the commander of the Chinese Thirty-eighth Army
in Beijing to attack the student protesters camped out in the square. When the Thirty-eighth Army would not move, SIGINT tracked
the Chinese Twenty-seventh Army and the elite parachute divisions of the Fifteenth Air Army being brought into Beijing to
put down the student-led movement. The intercepts confirmed that units of the Twenty-seventh and Thirty-eighth Armies had
clashed with each other and that casualties had been sustained by both forces. The clandestine listening posts inside the
American, British, Australian, and Canadian embassies also showed that the Chinese army had deployed forces around the Zhongmanhai
Leadership Compound in Beijing to protect the Chinese Politburo.
59
Then, in December 1989, SIGINT coming out of the joint NSA-CIA listening post inside the U.S. embassy in Bucharest proved
to be vitally important during the military coup d’état that overthrew Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaussescu. According to
the late Ambassador Warren Zimmermann, once the coup began, “the CIA station started giving the ambassador intercepts which
were of course, tremendously valuable to letting him make up his mind about how the coup was going and the direction it was
going in and what would happen to Ceaussescu.”
60
Operation Just Cause: The Invasion of Panama
In the late 1980s, relations between the United States and the Panamanian regime led by Manuel Noriega, formerly the darling
of the Reagan and Bush administrations, deteriorated rapidly. In June 1987, the chief of staff of the Panamanian Defense Forces
(PDF) publicly accused Noriega of having engaged in drug trafficking and other assorted criminal enterprises. In 1988, Noriega
was indicted by a federal grand jury in Tampa, Florida, for narcotics trafficking. As a result of the increasing tension between
the United States and Panama, NSA was ordered to intensify its intelligence coverage of the country beginning in 1988, but
this effort was hampered by the fact that Noriega had constructed a secure internal communications system, which NSA could
not penetrate. Making matters even worse, as a 1994 paper written by a U.S. Army intelligence officer later revealed, Noriega’s
frequent purges of the PDF officer corps, which removed dozens of unreliable men from command positions, “had eliminated most
of SOUTHCOM’s [U.S. Southern Command’s] and the CIA’s HUMINT capability.” Events continued to spin out of control during 1988
and 1989. In March 1988, there was an unsuccessful coup attempt to oust Noriega. In April 1989, a CIA operative in Panama
was arrested. The following month, Noriega won a rigged national election. This was followed by another unsuccessful coup
attempt in October 1989. By the late fall of 1989, U.S. intelligence resources, including those of NSA, were heavily committed
to closely monitoring events in Panama.
61
When the United States invaded Panama on December 20, 1989 (an action designated Operation Just Cause), NSA had been providing
intelligence to its customers through a special “Panama Cell.”
62
The agency’s primary target was Noriega, who proved to be an elusive target, moving around “many times during the day and
night” and sending “false radio and telephone traffic to further conceal his whereabouts.” On December 19, the day before
the invasion was due to begin, NSA lost Noriega because, according to a report written by an army intelligence officer, he
“took an unexpected trip to Torrijos/Tocumen airport to visit one of his prostitutes.” NSA informed the U.S. Army Ranger battalion
whose mission it was to capture Noriega of the latest information, but the intelligence came too late. According to the report,
the rangers “missed him by the narrowest of margins.”
63
As it turned out, Noriega’s sudden disappearance may well have been due to a warning he had just received. While Noriega was
visiting Colón, NSA intercepted a telephone call from an unknown person in Washington to Noriega warning him that, according
to a State Department source, the United States was about to invade Panama. At ten p.m. on December 19, shortly before the
invasion, NSA intercept operators listened as the radio station servicing the PDF general staff in Panama City began urgently
transmitting messages to all Panamanian military units, warning them that the U.S. invasion was to start in three hours. The
warning message ordered all troops to “report to their barracks, draw weapons and prepare to fight.” Looking at the intercept,
the commander of the American assault force, Lieutenant General Carl Stiner, advanced the time that the attack was to begin
by fifteen minutes in the hope that he would be able to achieve some degree of surprise, but resistance from PDF forces was
still heavier than expected.
64
Postscript
The 1980s saw NSA grow from more than fifty thousand military and civilian personnel to seventy-five thousand in 1989, twenty-five
thousand of whom worked at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. In terms of manpower alone, the agency was the largest component
of the U.S. intelligence community by far, with a headquarters staff larger than the entire CIA.
65
As the agency’s size grew at a staggering pace, so did the importance of its intelligence reporting. The amount of reporting
produced by NSA during the 1980s was astronomical. According to former senior American intelligence officials, on some days
during the 1980s SIGINT accounted for over 70 percent of the material contained in the CIA’s daily intelligence report to
President Reagan.
66
Former CIA director (now Secretary of Defense) Robert Gates stated, “The truth is, until the late 1980s, U.S. signals intelligence
was way out in front of the rest of the world.”
67
But NSA’s SIGINT efforts continued to produce less information because of a dramatic increase in worldwide telecommunications
traffic volumes, which NSA had great difficulty coping with. It also had to deal with the growing availability and complexity
of new telecommunications technologies, such as cheaper and more sophisticated encryption systems. By the late 1980s, the
number of intercepted messages flowing into NSA headquarters at Fort Meade had increased to the point that the agency’s staff
and computers were only able to process about 20 percent of the incoming materials.
68
These developments were to come close to making NSA deaf, dumb, and blind in the decade that followed.
Troubles in Paradise From Desert Storm to the War on Terrorism
The surest guarantee of disappointment is an
unrealistic expectation.
—THOMAS PATRICK CARROLL
For NSA, the 1990s started with a resounding explosion and ended with a barely discernible whimper. 1989 will forever be remembered
as the year that marked the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist regimes in Eastern Eu rope. In
an event that most people alive at the time remember well, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came crashing down, and what
was left of the shell-shocked East German government succumbed and allowed its people to leave the country for the first time.
By June 1, 1990, the Berlin Wall had ceased to exist and all crossing points between East and West Berlin had been opened.
Four months later, East and West Germany were united as a single country on October 1. Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev radically
changed course and adopted
perestroika
and
glasnost
as the bywords of his government. Gorbachev’s reforms set forth a chain reaction of events that were to dramatically change
the face of the world. Over the next two years, all Soviet troops were withdrawn from Eastern Eu rope, the Warsaw Pact was
disbanded, all Eastern Euro pe an nations became democracies, and the Soviet Union disintegrated into sixteen separate countries.
In the blink of an eye, the Cold War was over, and with it, all of NSA’s principal targets since the end of World War II vanished.
But despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was to be no respite for NSA.
1
Desert Storm
The invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein caught the U.S. intelligence community by surprise once
again. In a familiar but worrisome pattern, intelligence indicating the possibility of the invasion was not properly analyzed
or was discounted by senior Bush administration officials, including then–secretary of defense Dick Cheney, who did not think
that Hus-sein would be foolish enough to do it. General Lee Butler, the commander of the Strategic Air Command, was later
quoted as saying, “We had the warning from the intelligence community— we refused to acknowledge it.”
2
It took five months for the United States to move resources by land and sea to implement Desert Storm’s ground attack by three
hundred thousand coalition troops. The operation began at three a.m. Baghdad time on January 17, 1991, with a massive series
of air strikes and cruise missile attacks. The air campaign lasted thirty-eight days, battering the Iraqi military into a
state of submission. On February 24, the much-anticipated ground offensive was launched. One hundred hours later, the war
was over. President George H. W. Bush, who had no intention of “driving on to Baghdad,” declared a cease-fire on February
27, and the Iraqi forces signed a formal agreement for cessation of hostilities on March 3.
Operation Desert Storm was a military victory of historic proportions— one whose like would probably never be seen again.
In the span of only forty-three days, forty-two Iraqi combat divisions were destroyed and 82,000 prisoners taken, the entire
Iraqi navy was sunk, and 50 percent of Iraq’s combat aircraft were destroyed or fled to Iran to avoid destruction. The total
number of Iraqi dead and wounded, including civilians, will probably never be known.
3
The cease-fire proved to be premature; despite the annihilation of Iraq’s navy and combat aircraft, significant remnants of
its military, including the Republican Guard, were never destroyed.
However, the crushing victory by U.S. and coalition forces would not have been possible without the benefit of NSA’s flood
of intelligence, which was particularly successful in helping to neutralize the huge Iraqi air defense system— over 700 radars,
almost 3,700 SAMs, and 970 antiaircraft artillery sites spread throughout Iraq and occupied Kuwait, which was denser than
the Soviet air defenses on the Kola Peninsula at the height of the Cold War. In the five-month interval after the Iraqi invasion
of Kuwait, NSA’s SIGINT satellites, ground-based listening posts, and reconnaissance aircraft mapped the locations of all
Iraqi SAM sites, radar stations, and command centers, analyzed the system’s capability— and figured out how the system worked
and how to defeat it. Within hours of the initial attack against it, the system was reduced to rubble, giving the coalition
unchallenged air supremacy.
4
Most of the Iraqi command-and-control targets hit during the air campaign were based on SIGINT information. NSA coverage of
Iraqi government and military strategic communications helped the U.S. Air Force to target virtually all key radio stations
and fiber-optic communications nodes inside Iraq and Kuwait. The monthlong air strikes, according to future NSA director Rear
Admiral John “Mike” McConnell, “prevented communications up and down the Iraqi chain of command and contributed to the confusion
and lack of cohesion among Iraqi ground forces as co alition ground forces moved into Kuwait and Iraq.”
5
But four sites were spared— ones that the surviving Iraqi commanders in Kuwait would be forced to use to communicate with
their superiors in Basra and Baghdad. The gamble succeeded. An army intelligence history notes, “Just before the ground war
[began] allied intelligence agencies . . . left four [signal nodes] intact . . . leading to valuable NSA intercepts which,
in conjunction with JSTARS [the army radar surveillance aircraft], brought into view a vivid picture of their movements and
intentions.”
6
NSA’s interception of messages to and from Nazar Hamdoon, Iraq’s U.N. ambassador, showed that Hussein really believed his
army could inflict heavy losses on the allied forces and repel any attempt to liberate Kuwait. The intercepts also revealed
that Hussein refused to concede defeat until virtually the end of the war, suggesting to American intelligence analysts that
the Iraqi dictator was delusional and/or operating in an information vacuum.
7
But many senior American intelligence officials and military commanders found NSA’s performance disappointing. First, the
agency was unable to gain access to the communications of the Iraqi army and Republican Guard in Kuwait and southern Iraq
until the very end of the war because of tight and doggedly maintained Iraqi communications security discipline until the
air offensive began on January 17—to the extent that Iraqi commanders were “even pronouncing death sentences for those who
used two-way radios or telephones.”
8
Not even the Russians had been able to maintain such discipline at the height of the Cold War. As a result, the Iraqis effectively
neutralized much of NSA and the U.S. military’s ability to collect intelligence on enemy forces before and during Desert Storm.
9
According to David McManis, NSA’s representative at the Pentagon during the war, Hussein “learned what his vulnerabilities
were, and, boy, I’ll tell you he’s played it right. We’ve never faced a tougher partner in terms of [SIGINT] access.”
10
SIGINT did not become a significant factor in the ground war until it began on February 24, when the Iraqis hurriedly began
redeploying their elite Republican Guard divisions from their reserve positions to face the U.S. and allied invasion force.
This meant that they had to stop using their buried land-lines. After that, NSA’s SIGINT intercept operators had a field day.
For example, NSA provided critical intelligence about the movements of three key Republican Guard divisions on February 26,
which revealed that the commander of the Iraqi Third Corps had ordered his units to withdraw as rapidly as possible from Kuwait,
a withdrawal that quickly turned into a rout.
11
The greatest threat, at least psychologically, was presented by the limited-range Iraqi Scud missiles, which after the invasion
of Kuwait were dispersed to presurveyed bases throughout Iraq. On January 18, the day after the U.S. air campaign began, the
Iraqi missile batteries began lobbing Scud at Israel and later at Saudi Arabia. While none hit any military targets, public
anxiety in the United States and Israel about these attacks forced the White House to order NSA and U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM)
to dedicate a significant amount of their SIGINT collection resources to locating the missiles so that they could be destroyed
by air strikes.
12
This proved to be virtually impossible. A study written by a U.S. Army intelligence officer who served in Operation Desert
Storm notes. “The quick nature of Iraqi ‘shoot and scoot’ tactics made detection extremely difficult, if not near impossible.
The Iraqi missile units maintained excellent radio security, only infrequently communicating target data and fire commands
with higher headquarters.” The net result was that SIGINT, despite intensive efforts, did not find a single Scud missile launcher
during the entire Persian Gulf War.
13
Because of the limited use of radio communications by the Iraqis, U.S. Army and Marine Corps tactical SIGINT collection units
produced virtually no intelligence during the war, which came as a nasty shock to U.S. military intelligence officials. Moreover,
army and marine field commanders below the corps level confirmed that they received no SIGINT support from NSA during Operation
Desert Storm. Apart from onerous security limitations on the dissemination of SIGINT material to the commanders who needed
it the most, NSA tried to disguise the SIGINT origins of what intelligence it did provide, and generated reports that were
so chopped up that they were virtually useless.
14
But the greatest problem for SIGINT was the perpetual shortage of Arabic linguists, which forced NSA and the U.S. military
to grant emergency security clearances to a number of Iraqi Americans serving in the military when Kuwait was invaded and
ship them to the Persian Gulf to become instant radio intercept operators. In addition, three hundred Kuwaiti students were
recruited from U.S. universities. They were given a crash course in the rudiments of SIGINT collection, flown to Saudi Arabia
wearing the uniforms of sergeants in the Kuwaiti army, and then parceled out to various U.S. Army SIGINT units in the region.
The commander of all U.S. Army intelligence forces in the gulf later wrote of the service provided by these young Kuwaiti
volunteers: “Their performance and contribution was magnificent and immeasur able . . . we couldn’t have done it without ’em.”
15
The net result, however, was that in the opinion of senior military field commanders and intelligence officials who served
in the Persian Gulf, SIGINT and HUMINT did not perform particularly well during Operation Desert Shield/Storm. Instead, photo
reconnaissance satellites, unmanned reconnaissance drones (referred to within the military as unmanned aerial vehicles, or
UAVs), and airborne radar surveillance aircraft all proved to be more important to the successful prosecution of the war.
16
Retrenchment and Debasement
Even before the defeat of Iraq was completed, back at Fort Meade NSA’s director, Admiral William Studeman, had become concerned
that the health of his agency was not good. Declassified documents reveal that the stifling, multilay-ered NSA bureaucracy
had been allowed to grow unchecked during the 1980s because the agency’s nominal watchdogs in the CIA, the Pentagon, and Congress
had paid scant attention to what was going on, allowing the agency to become top-heavy and bloated. A February 1991 House
intelligence committee report found “very limited internal oversight of Agency [NSA] programs,” as well as no supervision
of the agency by either the Defense Department Inspector General’s Office or the congressional watchdog agency, the General
Accountability Office (GAO).
17
A few months later, a report prepared by the Defense Department’s inspector general confirmed, “NSA did not have sufficient
oversight mechanisms to ensure the Agency efficiently accomplished its mission.”
18
An internal NSA study sent to Studeman before Iraq’s surrender noted, “The Agency is effective, but it is not efficient .
. . This inefficiency may waste money; it may waste technology; but the task force is convinced that it is surely wasting
people.” The agency’s vast bureaucracy was strangling it. The report’s key conclusion was this: “The Agency is in inchoate
crisis, and if there is a single alarm to sound in this report, it is that the National Security Agency needs major fundamental
change and needs it soon.”
19
This came as a shock at a time when NSA not only was the largest American intelligence agency, but also presented itself as
the best organized, the most efficient, and the producer of the best intelligence available.
20
The agency’s reputation inside the Bush White House and elsewhere in Washington had never been higher. But NSA was, in reality,
a deeply troubled organization, suffering from a malaise that was very much of its own making.
21
Shortly after the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent demise of the Soviet Union, the rationale for maintaining
a massive Cold War intelligence community was seen as questionable, and beginning in 1990, the Bush administration and Congress
sharply cut the national intelligence budget. In late 1990, Studeman, faced with a shrinking bud get, was forced to order
substantial staff cuts, which were implemented shortly after the end of Desert Storm.
22
The agency began to retire hundreds of its employees, many of whom had decades of experience and represented an irreplaceable
institutional memory. One former NSA official who took early retirement in 1992 recalled one of his colleagues telling him
with great sadness at his retirement party, “The good old days are gone forever.”
23
NSA’s rapidly shrinking budget and workforce meant that reforming its bureaucracy was
not
the agency’s top priority. In a 1994 study, an army intelligence officer noted, “Intelligence analysts must now consider an
array of 160 nations and many other independent groups as separate entities without the simplicity of the East-West division.”
24
In order to use its stretched resources to deliver intelligence product to its customers, NSA’s two top priorities became
(a) improving the quality of SIGINT support to the U.S. military and (b) maintaining NSA’s access to the communications of
its growing global target base.
25
But owing to bureaucratic bungling, mismanagement, and faulty leadership, over the next eight years not only did NSA fail
to effect any meaningful reforms to its management and financial practices, but it also failed to address the dramatic changes
then taking place in global telecommunications technology. The agency’s morale plummeted and its mission suffered. NSA’s director
of operations, James Taylor, wrote in a memo, “The mission should drive the budget process. In spite of our best efforts through
the 1990s, the opposite has most often been the case. Our changes to deal with this have never gotten to the root of the problem.
We have merely dressed up the problem in new clothes.”
26
Making matters worse, NSA simply did not have the ability to effectively cover the plethora of newly created nations holding
nuclear weapons, such as Belarus, the Ukraine, and Kazakhstan.
27
Many of the so-called rogue nation states, such as Libya, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and North Korea, were already closing off SIGINT
access by shifting from radio circuits to buried landlines and fiber-optic cables.
28