Authors: Matthew M. Aid
There have also been some significant changes in tactics that have made SIGINT a more effective tool for field commanders
in Iraq. For example, small mobile teams of military SIGINT collectors carrying the newly arrived SIGINT gear now routinely
accompany army and marine “door kickers” on missions throughout Iraq. The dangerous job of these teams is to locate the nearby
hiding places of Iraqi insurgent fighters so that the patrols they are with can find the bad guys as they talk on their phones.
Navy SIGINT teams called Joint Expeditionary SIGINT Terminal Response Units (JESTRs) are assigned to the army brigades in
Baghdad tasked with working “the streets to find, fix and finish insurgents.”
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Another example of a recent positive development has been the successful use of navy SIGINT operators by the elite Navy SEAL
team in Iraq, which is permanently based at Camp Dublin, outside Baghdad. The team has its own dedicated Tactical Cryptologic
Support team of SIGINT operators, whose job it is to accompany SEAL team members on their combat missions inside Baghdad,
protecting them by scanning known enemy frequencies for insurgent threats as well as locating insurgent cell phone emitters
so that they can be attacked by the navy special operators.
74
But the work is highly dangerous. On July 6, 2007, one of these navy SIGINT intercept operators, Petty Officer First Class
Steven Daugherty, was killed when an improvised explosion device (IED) exploded under his Humvee during an extraction mission
inside Sadr City, the sprawling Shi’ite slum in east Baghdad. Also killed in the blast were two other members of SEAL Team
Two.
75
After General Petraeus took command of U.S. forces in Iraq, the army and marines started to use SIGINT in innovative ways
to locate Iraqi insurgent IED teams before they could detonate their weapons. Since May 2003, insurgents have launched over
eighty-one thousand IED attacks on U.S. and allied forces, killing or wounding thousands of U.S. troops. The U.S. military’s
efforts to combat the use of IEDs have not been particularly successful; as one senior CENTCOM officer put it, “Hell, we’re
getting our ass kicked.”
76
From the beginning, Iraqi insurgent IED teams have used spotters equipped with walkie-talkies or cell phones to warn bomb
teams when an American convoy is approaching the hidden location of an IED. In order to try to pick up these spotter transmissions,
American military convoys in Iraq and patrols in Afghanistan include a Stryker armored vehicle or Humvee with a SIGINT intercept
operator who scans the airwaves searching for transmissions from insurgent IED teams targeting the convoy. Since 2005, there
have been a growing number of instances where these SIGINT operators, who are sometimes referred to as “convoy riders,” have
been able to provide advance warning that their convoy is about to be hit by an IED strike.
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And as time has gone by and American military commanders have increased their understanding of how the insurgents deploy and
use their roadside bombs, SIGINT has become increasingly effective in spotting those emplacing the bombs. Beginning in the
summer of 2007, the U.S. Army began using convoys as lures to flush out Iraqi insurgent IED teams so that they could be detected
and located by SIGINT sensors.
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The results on the battlefield spoke volumes about how valuable the much-improved SIGINT collection and processing effort
was to the overall success of the surge. According to one source, SIGINT reporting increased by 200 percent between February
2007 and May 2008, leading to the capture or killing of 600 “high-value” insurgent commanders and the capture of 2,500 Iraqi
insurgents and foreign fighters.
79
Between October 2007 and April 2008, one NSA SIGINT Terminal Guidance Unit was credited with generating intelligence that
led to the capture or killing of 300 insurgents and a 25 percent drop in IED attacks inside Iraq.
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What God Hath Wrought
While the security situation in Iraq has improved markedly over the past year and a half, in Afghanistan the resurgent Taliban
has made an impressive comeback.
Going into 2007, U.S. and NATO intelligence analysts admitted that the Taliban controlled most of four key provinces in southern
Afghanistan— Helmand, Kandahar, Uruzgan, and Zabul—and that U.S. and NATO forces in the region were losing ground against
the ten thousand to fifteen thousand well-armed guerrillas they were facing. The increased number and intensity of Taliban
attacks in Afghanistan dismayed many senior officials in the U.S. intelligence community. CIA director Michael Hayden admitted
that the Taliban “has become more aggressive than in years past” and is attempting “to stymie NATO’s efforts in southern Afghanistan.”
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The major SIGINT problem in Afghanistan is that apart from satellite phones, the Taliban primarily uses ICOM walkie-talkies.
NSA’s SIGINT collection resources were long ago overshadowed by low-tech tactical radio intercept gear, such as handheld radio
scanners wielded by uncleared Afghan interpreters working for the U.S. Army and detecting enemy surveillance or imminent ambushes
of U.S. and NATO forces.
82
SIGINT faces daunting challenges because the resurgent Taliban has gone on the offensive throughout the country. The struggle
in 2007 to create a secure environment in Helmand Province pitted British forces backed by paratroopers from the U.S. Eighty-second
Airborne Division against an enemy force that had reached a high not seen since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
83
Daily attacks on British and Afghan army positions in the Sangin Valley became the norm, and British patrols into the valley
routinely made contact with the Taliban shortly after leaving their increasingly isolated firebases. By early summer, the
Taliban forces were inching closer to British defensive positions.
In June, U.S. Air Force F-15E fighter-bombers were called in to hit Taliban firing positions around the town of Sangin itself
“after intercepting communications chatter revealing their [the Taliban’s] position.”
84
In early July, a journalist who accompanied British troops assaulting a Taliban stronghold north of San-gin reported that
when the troops were attacked by a large enemy force, the unit’s translators “constantly scanned radios, listening in to Taliban
conversation, and not an hour went by without the promise of an attack. ‘The British are walking—get ready,’ one intercept
said.”
85
Still, thanks in part to SIGINT, the Taliban has suffered severe losses. In May 2007, British commandos killed the Taliban’s
senior military commander, Mullah Dadullah, a successful operation directly attributable to a systematic effort by British
and American SIGINT collectors to track his movements in Hel-mand Province by monitoring his satellite phone calls and those
of his brother Mansour, also a senior Taliban field commander.
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But the security situation in Helmand continued to deteriorate as the Taliban became increasingly aggressive in its attacks
on understrength British forces, which were largely unable to hold the ground they took from the Taliban. In early December,
British and Afghan forces launched an offensive and recaptured the strategically important town of Musa Qa’leh, which had
been held by the Taliban since February, but it remained to be seen if it could be held.
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The same thing has been happening virtually everywhere else in southern Afghanistan. The Chora District, in Uruzgan Province,
for example, is a longtime Taliban stronghold that has consistently defied the best efforts of the Dutch military to reduce
it. Intelligence sources, using a combination of HUMINT and SIGINT, confirm that Chora, like many of the surrounding districts,
is for all intents and purposes a Taliban base area and sanctuary, with SIGINT confirming that there was a sizable contingent
of foreign fighters, mostly Pakistanis, operating in the area. But SIGINT has also confirmed that most of the Taliban guerrillas
in the area are now local villagers who remain militarily active all year round instead of retreating to Pakistan before the
onset of winter, as the Taliban has done in the past.
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American SIGINT resources have been used to provide the Dutch with air strikes and surveillance, using radio chatter to pinpoint
Taliban positions identified by the intercepts. One U.S. Air Force poststrike report notes, “Insurgent communications chatter
ceased after the attack.”
89
The military situation in neighboring Kandahar Province, garrisoned by twenty-five hundred Canadian troops, also deteriorated
sharply in 2007. By September, the Taliban had retaken all the districts southwest of the city of Kandahar that British and
Canadian forces had captured at great cost a year earlier. The inability of the numerically weaker Canadian and Afghan forces
to hold on to the territory that they are responsible for led the commander of Canadian forces in Kandahar Province, Brigadier
General Guy Laroche, to tell reporters that despite efforts to push out the Taliban, “everything we have done in that regard
is not a waste of time, but close to it, I would say.”
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SIGINT has also confirmed that the Taliban has expanded its efforts into other, previously quiet provinces, such as Kunar,
in the mountainous northeastern region of Afghanistan. SIGINT has revealed that the Taliban is able to respond rapidly to
U.S. and NATO offensives there. During one operation, SIGINT showed that as soon as helicopters deposited U.S. troops on the
floor of the Korengal Valley, the Taliban knew they were there and began tracking them. Reporter Sebastian Junger, who accompanied
the paratroopers as they moved into the village of Aliabad, recounted, “The platoon radioman has just received word that Taliban
gunners are watching us and are about to open fire.
Signals intelligence back at the company headquarters has been listening in on the Taliban field radios. They say the Taliban
are waiting for us to leave the village before they shoot.”
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In early November 2007, the Taliban invaded Herat and Farah, in western Afghanistan, both previously quiet provinces that
abut the Iranian border. In a mere ten days, Taliban forces captured three districts in Farah without any resistance from
the local Afghan police. In neighboring Herat, a series of high-profile attacks on Afghan government forces and police stations
signaled that the province had become “active.”
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A sure sign that the military situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated significantly since the beginning of 2007 is the fact
that Taliban guerrilla teams are now operating in the provinces surrounding Kabul.
93
Intercepts reveal a dramatic increase in the volume of known or suspected Taliban radio and satellite phone traffic emanating
from Ghazni and Wardak Provinces, south of Kabul, and even from within the capital itself since the spring of 2007.
94
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SIGINT, together with other intelligence sources, shows that the Taliban guerrilla forces are becoming larger, stronger, and
more aggressive on the battlefield. Intercepts have shown that despite heavy losses among their senior leadership, the Taliban
guerrilla teams inside Afghanistan are now led by a new generation of battle-hardened field commanders who have demonstrated
unprecedented tenacity and resilience.
The Taliban now possesses a large and robust communications system connecting senior Taliban commanders in northern Pakistan
with their guerrilla forces inside Afghanistan. SIGINT indicates that this system has also been used to coordinate the movement
of increasing volumes of supplies and equipment from Pakistan into Afghanistan. SIGINT has also provided ample evidence that
the Taliban has largely negated the U.S. Army’s advantage in superior mobility by carefully monitoring the activities taking
place at U.S. and NATO bases in southern Afghanistan. At one isolated American firebase in Zabul Province, intercept operators
noted that as soon as a patrol left the base’s front gate, there was a spike in Taliban walkie-talkie traffic. “The Americans
have just left. They’re coming this way. We will need more reinforcements if they approach any closer,” one intercepted Taliban
radio transmission said.
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An American soldier serving in Zabul Province wrote a letter home in July 2007 that gives a sense of the problem: “We cannot
go anywhere without the [Taliban] being aware of our movements . . . Their early warning is through the villagers who either
by cell phone, satellite phone or ICOM radio inform [Taliban] forces of our movements and the make-up of our convoy.”
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More than 5,300 people died in Afghanistan in 2007 as a result of increased Taliban attacks, making it the deadliest year
since the U.S. invasion of the country in the fall of 2001.
97
The casualty toll for American troops in Afghanistan in 2007 hit 101 dead, a new record surpassing the 93 American troops
killed there in 2005. Reports indicate that 87 American troops were killed there in 2006.
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Today, the outlook in Afghanistan is grim. In February 2008, Mike Mc-Connell, now the director of national intelligence, told
Congress that contrary to the rosier prognosis coming out of the Pentagon, the Taliban now controlled 10 percent of the country,
including most of the Pashtun heartland in southern Afghanistan. Lieutenant General David Barno, who commanded U.S. forces
in Afghanistan for twenty-eight months from 2003 to 2005, admitted that the military situation there had deteriorated markedly
in recent times, writing in an internal U.S. Army journal that recent developments “in all likelihood do not augur well for
the future of our policy goals in Afghanistan.”
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Crisis in the Ranks The Current Status of the National Security Agency
Secret services are the only real measure of a
nation’s political health, the only real
expression of its subconscious.
—JOHN LE CARRE, TINKAR, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY
The Arrival of Keith Alexander
In April 2005, Lieutenant General Mike Hayden stepped down as director of NSA to become the first deputy director of national
intelligence. Then, a year later, he became the director of the CIA. Meanwhile, on August 1, 2005, a new director of NSA arrived
at Fort Meade. He was fifty-three-year-old Lieutenant General Keith Alexander, who before coming to NSA had been the U.S.
Army’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence since 2003.
1
A career army intelligence officer, Alexander was born and raised in Syracuse, New York. He graduated from West Point in 1974,
then spent the next twenty years holding a series of increasingly important army intelligence posts. Alexander served as the
director of intelligence of CENTCOM at MacDill Air Force Base, in Florida, under General Tommy Franks from 1998 to 2001, directing
all intelligence operations relating to the invasion of Afghanistan. He was then promoted to be commander of the U.S. Army
Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Belvoir, in Virginia, a position he held from 2001 to 2003.
2
Explosion
On December 16, 2005, the lead article in the
New York Times
, by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, was titled “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts.” The article instantly became
a national sensation, revealing the broad outlines of a secret eavesdropping program run by NSA to find al Qaeda operatives,
but not many of the specifics. The most explosive aspect of the article was the revelation that for four years NSA had monitored
the communications of Americans without obtaining warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which
are ordinarily required in order to conduct any form of surveillance inside the United States.
3
The article produced a firestorm of controversy, further poisoning the already rancorous political environment in Washington,
in which the White House and the Republicans, who controlled Congress, were pitted against the Democratic minority. The revelations
were particularly embarrassing to CIA director George Tenet and former NSA director Hayden, who had, in a joint appearance
five years earlier before the House intelligence committee, stated in unequivocal terms that NSA did not engage in spying
on U.S. citizens. Tenet had told the committee, “We do not collect against US persons unless they are agents of a foreign
power . . . We do not target their conversations for collection in the United States unless a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act (FISA) warrant has been obtained . . . And we do not target their conversations for collection overseas unless Executive
Order 12333 has been followed and the Attorney General has personally approved collection.” Hayden had described earlier news
reports that NSA was engaged in monitoring the communications of U.S. citizens as an “urban myth,” and had assured the committee
that NSA would assiduously abide by the legal strictures on such activities as contained in 1978’s FISA. A little more than
a year later, all of these promises would be secretly broken in the aftermath of 9/11
4
What We Know
Since that December 2005
New York Times
article, further information about the nature and extent of the NSA domestic surveillance program has been slow in coming.
It would appear that there are between ten and twelve programs being run by NSA dealing directly in some fashion with the
agency’s warrantless SIGINT efforts, including at least a half-dozen strictly compartmentalized SIGINT collection, processing,
analytic, and reporting projects handling different operational aspects of the problem. For example, there is a special unit
located within NSA’s Data Acquisition Directorate that is responsible for collecting the vast number of overseas e-mails,
personal messaging communications, wire transfers, airplane reservations, and credit card transactions that transit through
the United States every day because they are carried over lines owned by American telecommunications companies or Internet
service providers. In addition to the five or six compartmented “core” collection and analytic programs, there are another
five or six “support” or “rear-end” programs performing research, development, engineering, computer support, and security
functions in support of the “front-end” operational units. All of these program units are kept strictly segregated from the
NSA SIGINT Directorate’s other foreign intelligence collection efforts.
5
The only one of these NSA programs that the Bush administration has publicly acknowledged is the warrantless eavesdropping
program, which the White House labeled in 2005 as the Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP). All other aspects of NSA’s SIGINT
collection work that touch on the domestic front have remained unacknowledged. For example, the White House has refused to
acknowledge NSA’s parallel data-mining program, code-named Stellar Wind, which sifts through vast amounts of electronic data
secretly provided by America’s largest telecommunications companies and Internet service providers, looking for signs of terrorist
activity at home and abroad.
Intense and unwavering secrecy has been the hallmark of these programs since their inception, and even the number of people
at NSA headquarters who know the details of the operations has deliberately been kept to a minimum for security reasons. Each
of these programs operates from inside its own special “red seal” work center at Fort Meade, meaning that those NSA employees
cleared for these specific programs must pass one at a time through a booth containing a retinal or iris scanner and other
biometric sensors before they can get inside their operations center.
Interviews with over a dozen former and current U.S. government officials reveal that the number of people within the U.S.
government and intelligence community who knew anything about the NSA programs prior to their disclosure by the
New York Times
was very small. The men in the White House who managed the NSA effort, Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief legal counsel,
David Addington, strictly regulated who within the U.S. government could have access to information about the eavesdropping
programs, restricting clearance to just a select few senior government officials in the White House and the Justice Department,
all of whom were deemed to be “loyal” by Cheney’s office, and as such, unlikely to question the programs’ legality.
6
A book by a former senior Justice Department official, Jack Goldsmith, and interviews conducted for this book reveal that
a large number of senior officials inside the U.S. government with a “need to know” were deliberately excluded by Cheney’s
office from having access to information concerning the NSA eavesdropping programs. With the exception of four senior officials,
all Justice Department employees were barred from access to details concerning the programs by order of Cheney’s office, including
Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson and the Justice Department’s Civil and Criminal Divisions.
7
Even the attorney general of the United States himself experienced great difficulty getting essential information about the
programs from Cheney’s office. Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was one of the few U.S. government officials cleared for
access to the programs by the White House, complained in 2004 that “he was barred from obtaining the advice he needed on the
program by the strict compartmentalization rules of the WH [White House].”
8
Ashcroft was not alone. Goldsmith noted, “I too faced resistance from the White House in getting the clearance for the lawyers
I needed to analyze the program.”
9
Within the U.S. intelligence community, virtually no one was granted access to information about the eavesdropping programs,
such as the legal briefs written by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Justice Department lawyer John Yoo that justified
the program. At the top of the list of people who were
not
permitted to see the Gonzales and Yoo legal briefs were the lawyers in NSA’s Office of General Counsel responsible for ensuring
that the eavesdropping programs conformed with the law. Goldsmith said, “Before I arrived in O.L.C. [the Justice Department’s
Office of Legal Counsel], not even NSA lawyers were allowed to see the Justice Department’s legal analysis of what NSA was
doing.” Other senior NSA officials responsible for ensuring the probity of NSA’s domestic eavesdropping programs were also
denied access to the Gonzales and Yoo legal briefs. In late 2003, two years after the programs began, NSA’s inspector general
asked for permission to see the Justice Department legal brief authorizing the program, but his request was denied by David
Addington.
10
But of greater importance is that former NSA director Hayden, in trying to defend the legality of the program, has publicly
stated that three of NSA’s top lawyers assured him in late 2001 that the agency’s domestic eavesdropping programs were legal.
One has to wonder how NSA’s Office of General Counsel could possibly have arrived at this conclusion if the agency’s lawyers
could not see the documents that served as the legal underpinnings for the programs. Past and present NSA officials interviewed
for this book, while refusing to comment specifically on the legality of the agency’s domestic eavesdropping programs, confirmed
that key NSA operational personnel were never permitted to see these documents, a fact that gave a number of senior NSA officials
more than a little cause for concern.
11.
One of the most controversial aspects of the NSA program has been the nagging question of how many people have had their telephone
calls and e-mails monitored by NSA since the program commenced after 9/11. The
New York
Times’
December 2005 article indicated that the answer was “hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States.” According
to anonymous government officials quoted by the reporters, NSA “eavesdrops without warrants on up to 500 people in the United
States at any given time . . . Overseas, about 5,000 to 7,000 people suspected of terrorist ties are monitored at one time.”
12
A
Washington Post
article, citing “two knowledgeable sources,” claimed that the number of Americans monitored by NSA was as high as five thousand
people between 2001 and early 2006.
13
But U.S. government officials, including Hayden, denied that the number of people being monitored by the agency was anywhere
near this large. In an August 2007 interview with the
El Paso Times
, the director of national intelligence, Admiral Mike McConnell, said that the number of NSA eavesdropping targets inside
the United States was “100 or less. And then the foreign side, it’s in the thousands.”
14
Regardless of the number of American citizens actually monitored since the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program began seven
years ago, a number of former NSA officials have expressed concern that the number of targets inside the United States reportedly
being monitored appears to be overly large when compared with the actual threat, given that there have been no terrorist attacks
in the United States since 9/11, nor any high-profile arrests of al Qaeda “sleeper cells” or operatives. These officials then
wonder how so many individuals in the United States could conceivably have been under active surveillance by NSA over the
past seven years with virtually no arrests or convictions to show for all the effort.
15
There is as yet no evidence that the White House used NSA to target the communications of Americans for political purposes.
But there are some worrisome signs that the agency’s SIGINT reporting may have been misused by some administration officials.
In April 2005, a political controversy erupted in Washington when it was learned that the Bush administration’s nominee to
be the ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, had requested from NSA transcripts of intercepted conversations involving
or pertaining to other U.S. government officials while he was a senior official at the State Department. NSA admitted that
it had made copies of these transcripts, including the names of the American officials involved, available to Bolton.
16
A few weeks later, the magazine
Newsweek
revealed that since January 2004 NSA had received between three thousand and thirty-five hundred requests for transcripts
of intercepted communications involving American citizens from various U.S. government departments, four hundred of which
came from the State Department. NSA complied with all of these requests. The article indicated that the names of as many as
ten thousand Americans were contained in the intercept transcripts turned over to the various U.S. government agencies that
had requested them.
17
It was later learned that Bolton, who became the interim ambassador to the United Nations, had personally originated ten requests
since January 2004 for unredacted NSA intercept transcripts that mentioned the names of U.S. government officials or American
citizens.
18
Which raises the obvious question of whether the NSA warrantless eavesdropping programs have actually accomplished anything
for the billions of dollars spent on them. In justifying the need for the warrantless eavesdropping programs, President Bush,
former NSA director Hayden, and other senior administration officials repeatedly stressed that the program had delivered critically
important intelligence, but naturally they have provided no details. All Hayden admitted is that the program “has been successful
in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States.”
19
By far the strongest defense of the program has come from former vice president Cheney, who in December 2005, while on a visit
to Pakistan, told a reporter from CNN that it “has saved thousands of lives.”
20