The Secret Sentry (38 page)

Then on March 18, 2003, only a few days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq was to begin, the Iraqi government suddenly switched
off all telephone service across Iraq, and the use of satellite and mobile phones was specifically banned by the Iraqi Ministry
of the Interior, even by foreign reporters based in Baghdad. This closed off the last low-level sources of SIGINT that were
then available to NSA about what was going on inside Iraq.
⁶⁹

Conclusions

The performance of the U.S. intelligence community prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was a complete and unmitigated
disaster at all levels. The distinguished British defense correspondent and military historian Max Has -tings described the
Iraqi WMD intelligence fiasco as “the greatest failure of western intelligence in modern times.”
⁷⁰

NSA fared better than the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community in the subsequent congressional investigations,
but only because so much of the criticism of the agency’s perfor mance was kept secret, including the fact that the fiber-optic
network in Iraq had made it impossible for NSA to perform its mission. This was a chilling reminder that changes in telecommunications
technology were making it increasingly difficult for NSA to do its job.
⁷¹

CHAPTER 14

The Dark Victory

NSA and the Invasion of Iraq:

March–April 2003

Rejoice! We conquer!

—PHIDIPPIDES, GREEK MESSENGER AFTER BATTLE OF MARATHON

The March–April 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, designated Operation Iraqi Freedom, is a case study of NSA’s massive SIGINT
collection system mostly performing well, but not completely. But as will be seen in this chapter, the agency’s long-standing
problem of not being able to quickly and efficiently process, analyze, and disseminate the intelligence that it collected
showed up repeatedly in the lead-up to and during the invasion itself. And unfortunately, much of the intelligence NSA produced
never made its way to the frontline army and marine field commanders who needed it the most.

NSA’S Iraqi Surge Begins

On Tuesday, February 11, 2003, NSA director Michael Hayden issued a secret directive called a Director’s Intent to all NSA
components, warning that war with Iraq was near. “I intend to conduct a SIGINT and Information Assurance operation for the
Iraq campaign that will meet the combatant commanders’ objectives of shock, speed and awe while also providing policy makers
information that is actionable and timely. Success will be measured by our ability to limit the conflict geographically, secure
regime change in Iraq, and dismantle Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.”
¹

Within hours, the agency’s sixty thousand military and civilian personnel began implementing long-standing NSA war plans to
provide SIGINT support to General Tommy Franks’s CENTCOM for the upcoming invasion of Iraq.
²
NSA then sent out classified “war warning” messages to its listening posts covering Iraq, ordering them to immediately ramp
up their SIGINT collection efforts.
³
An Iraq Operational Cell was created within the National Security Operations Center (NSOC) in order to manage NSA’s SIGINT
support for Operation Iraqi Freedom, and from this unit finished intelligence was disseminated in electronic form to cleared
intelligence consumers in Washington and the Persian Gulf.
⁴
In addition, Brigadier General Richard Zahner, NSA’s associate deputy director of operations for military support, flew down
to CENTCOM headquarters in Florida to coordinate NSA’s SIGINT support for General Franks’s combat troops.
⁵

Hundreds of military reserve and National Guard SIGINT operators and analysts were recalled to active duty. By the beginning
of March 2003, 98 percent of all army reserves and 45 percent of all National Guard intelligence units were on active duty
either in the United States or in the Persian Gulf. Beginning in January 2003, and continuing right up to the invasion, nearly
five hundred army reserve and National Guard personnel, including dozens of Arabic linguists, began arriving by airplane and
train at Fort Gordon’s Regional SIGINT Operations Center (GRSOC) to reinforce its SIGINT collection and analytic capabilities.
⁶

GRSOC’s primary task was to thoroughly map the locations and track the activities of Saddam Hussein’s seventy-thousand-man
Republican Guard. Consisting of six divisions equipped with nine hundred Russian-made T-62 and T-72 tanks, the Republican
Guard was nominally headed by Hussein’s thirty-six-year-old son, Qusay, although its actual military commander was its chief
of staff, Lieutenant General Sayf al-Din Fulayyih Hassan Taha al-Rawi, a staunch Hussein loyalist and competent field commander
who had been severely wounded in the 1980s while leading a counterattack against Iranian forces.
⁷

NSA wanted GRSOC to monitor 24-7 all radio and satellite telephone traffic coming in and out of the headquarters of the Second
Republican Guard Corps at Salman Pak, south of Baghdad, which was commanded by one of the Republican Guard’s best field commanders,
Lieutenant General Raad Majid al-Hamdani, who was responsible for protecting the southern approaches to Baghdad. Al-Hamdani’s
corps controlled the Medina Division, at As Suwayrah, thirty-five miles southeast of Baghdad; the Al-Nida Division, at Baquba,
thirty-five miles northeast of Baghdad; the Baghdad Division, at Al Kut, one hundred miles southeast of Baghdad; and the Third
Special Forces Brigade, at the Al-Rasheed military airfield on the southern outskirts of Baghdad.
⁸

NSA’s Bad Aibling Station, in southern Germany, would provide SIGINT coverage of the activities of the ten Iraqi combat divisions
deployed in northern Iraq. This coverage was deemed essential because CENTCOM planned for the U.S. Army’s Fourth Infantry
Division to land in Turkey and invade northern Iraq. But the plan was discarded when the Turkish government refused to allow
this.
⁹

However, NSA’s most urgent SIGINT assignment was finding and tracking Iraqi ballistic missile units, which the Iraqis supposedly
could use to deliver chemical or biological weapons. NSA simply couldn’t come up with intercepts reliably associated with
these units.
¹⁰

The U.S. Air Force war planners wanted every detail about the offensive operations of the Iraqi air force’s MiG fighters.
NSA, however, picked up such limited traffic from enemy airfields that it informed U.S. Air Force war planners that the Iraqi
air force’s estimated 325 combat aircraft were not flying at all. No U.S. Air Force or co alition aircraft were lost or even
damaged in action by Iraqi MiG fighters.

Ever since Operation Desert Shield/Storm in 1990–1991, NSA had closely monitored the Iraqi air defense forces. This coverage
was now essential if the first air strikes inside Iraq were to be successful. SIGINT satellites scooped up all micro wave
relay traffic throughout Iraq. U-2 and RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft equipped with sensitive SIGINT equipment constantly
orbited over northern Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, intercepting the communications between Iraqi SAM and antiaircraft gun battery
commanders. Right up to the invasion, intercept operators at Fort Gordon and Bad Aibling Station successfully monitored Iraqi
radar operators tracking allied aircraft flying training or reconnaissance missions along the Iraqi borders, and NSA intercepted
and analyzed the computer-to-computer data traffic between the Iraqi air defense operations center in Baghdad and its subordinate
sector operations centers at Taji, Kirkuk, H-3, and Talil air bases. The Iraqi air defense traffic showed that Iraqi radar
operators were paying close attention to U.S. Air Force flight activity over Kuwait and Turkey.
¹¹

NSA was also responsible for helping the CIA and the FBI identify Iraqi agents operating in the United States and abroad who
were tasked with launching terrorist attacks on American targets. The name given to this effort was Operation Imminent Horizon.
Based in part on material gathered by NSA, on March 5 two diplomats at Iraq’s U.N. mission were declared personae non gratae
and given forty-eight hours to leave the country.
¹²

But Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was not the only target that came under closer scrutiny by NSA and its foreign partners after General
Hayden signed his war directive. In January 2003, NSA was tasked by the White House to monitor the communications of a surprisingly
large number of international organizations, all of whom were key players standing in the way of the Bush administration’s
strenuous efforts to convince the world community to join the U.S. and Britain and its so-called Coalition of the Willing
in an invasion of Iraq.

NSA and Britain’s GCHQ began intercepting all of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s telephone calls and e-mails, and a special
eavesdropping device was surreptitiously planted inside Annan’s office suite on the thirty-eighth floor of the U.N. headquarters
building in New York City; it recorded all of the private conversations held in his office. The U.S. and British governments
were both concerned that Annan was personally opposed to the United Nations’ approving a resolution calling for war against
Iraq.
¹³
At the same time, NSA and GCHQ mounted a joint “surge operation” to intensively monitor the communications traffic of governments
with seats on the U.N. Security Council in order to determine whether they would vote for the resolution. Included were Chile,
Pakistan, Angola, Guinea, Cameroon, and Bulgaria, all of whom were then being intensively lobbied to vote with the United
States and Britain. A GCHQ linguist named Katherine Gun, who was shocked at what the United States and Britain were up to,
confided the details to the British newspaper the
Observer
, which broke the story on March 2. A leak investigation ensued, and Gun was subsequently fired from her job after she was
arrested for violating the Official Secrets Act.
¹⁴

As of January, NSA was also intercepting the communications traffic (calls, e-mails, cables, etc.) of the United Nations’
chief weapons inspector, Dr. Hans Blix, and his deputies. According to Bob Woodward of the
Washington Post
, President Bush was convinced that the Swedish diplomat was saying one thing in public and quite another privately in the
intercepted UNMOVIC message traffic that Bush, as he interpreted it, was getting from NSA.
¹⁵
NSA was also monitoring the telephone calls and e-mails of Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the United Nations’
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), because of the White House’s intense dislike of his agency’s policies with regard
to Iraq, which almost always ran contrary to what the Bush administration wanted.
¹⁶

CENTCOM Prepares

On January 19, 2003, six days after General Hayden ordered NSA to war alert status, General Franks and 350 members of his
staff flew to Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar, which was to serve as CENTCOM’s forward headquarters for the invasion. Accompanying
them was a small team of NSA liaison officials and communicators who became known as the CENTCOM Cryptologic Services Group.

In early March, as the final preparations for the invasion of Iraq were being made, small teams of U.S. Army, Marine Corps,
and British SIGINT intercept personnel were secretly deployed, with the help of the Kuwaiti border police, to the Mutla Ridge,
the heights that run along the full length of the Kuwaiti border with Iraq, to monitor the activities of the Iraqi army. One
marine radio intercept team from the First Radio Battalion was moved up to border post 11 on the Shatt al-Arab waterway to
listen to radio traffic coming from Iraqi forces deployed across the way in the port city of Umm Qasr.
¹⁷

One of NSA’s highest priorities was to look for any defensive preparations by the Iraqi Regular Army and the Republican Guard
in southern Iraq. In January and February, SIGINT indicated that Iraqi forces were making surprisingly few preparations for
war, despite the fact that the imminent invasion was front-page news in the United States and Western Europe. Radio intercepts
revealed that the Iraqis were not moving any combat units, preparing defensive positions, making logistical preparations,
or holding any training exercises. Radio traffic volume remained constant but very light, and the content of the low-level
housekeeping radio traffic that NSA could access was amazingly routine.
¹⁸

Through the end of January, no movements by Iraqi Republican Guard units deployed south of Baghdad were detected in SIGINT.
It was not until late February that SIGINT began to note the Iraqi army and the Republican Guard hastily redeploying some
of their forces. In mid-February, two weak Regular Army infantry brigades were moved to guard Umm Qasr and the massive petroleum
production center of Rumailah. Then in late February, SIGINT and satellite reconnaissance detected two Republican Guard divisions—the
Adnan Division and the Nebuchadnezzar Division— being hastily moved from their home bases in Mosul and Kirkuk, in northern
Iraq, southward toward Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit.
¹⁹

Then an eerie stillness took over the airwaves as the Iraqi military went to near-complete radio silence, which in military
parlance is called emission control (EMCON).
²⁰
Even the Iraqi observation posts situated along the border with Kuwait reduced their radio traffic to almost nil. On Tuesday,
March 18, only hours before the U.S. invasion was to begin, the Iraqi government switched off all telephone service across
the country.
²¹

The War Begins with a Bust

At about three p.m. EST on Wednesday, March 19, 2003, the CIA received a FLASH-precedence intelligence message from an agent
asset inside Iraq known as Rockstar containing the reported location of Saddam Hussein. CIA director George Tenet immediately
informed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, as well as the White House. An hour later, when
Rumsfeld and Tenet arrived at the White House for an emergency meeting with President Bush and his senior national security
advisers, Tenet stated that Hussein was meeting with his senior commanders at an isolated house in southern Baghdad called
the Dora Farms and would remain there for at least several hours. At seven twelve p.m., Bush signed the order to bomb the
house and kill Hussein.
²²

A little more than two hours later, at five thirty-three a.m. Baghdad time, March 20, two U.S. Air Force F-117 stealth fighters
dropped four two-thousand-pound JDAM “bunker buster” bombs on the Dora Farms complex.

Jubilation broke out throughout the U.S. intelligence community when a few sketchy intercepts of Iraqi civil defense radio
traffic indicated that some high-ranking Iraqi government official had been killed. But it turned out that there was no bunker
at the Dora Farms, and Saddam Hussein had not been anywhere near the place when the bombs were dropped.
²³

At the exact same moment that the F-117s released their bombs on the Dora Farms, the first of forty-five Tomahawk cruise missiles
fired from six U.S. Navy warships in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea began hitting high-priority Iraqi government buildings
and military command posts in and around Baghdad, such as the Ministry of Defense building, the headquarters of the Iraqi
Republican Guard, and the compound in east Baghdad that housed the Iraqi intelligence service.