Authors: Matthew M. Aid
Interviews with intelligence officials in Washington suggest that since 9/11 NSA has improved somewhat its sometimes rocky
relations with its consumers in Washington and elsewhere around the globe. In the spring of 2001, the position of deputy director
for customer relations was created within the agency’s SIGINT Directorate to facilitate better communications between NSA
and its customers. The first head of this office was Brigadier General Richard Zahner of the U.S. Army.
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But despite this change, unhappiness has remained. NSA officials contend that since 2001, the ever-increasing number of its
customers in Washington has levied conflicting requirements on the agency, whose resolution has necessitated years of often
contentious negotiations. Interviews with intelligence officials reveal that there are still widespread complaints about NSA’s
inability or unwillingness to share information with other government agencies. In particular, FBI officials complain about
the lack of cooperation that they have received from NSA since 9/11. The single largest barrier to the free flow of intelligence
appears to be the compartmentalized nature of NSA itself, which has prevented an integrated approach to customer relations
between NSA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community.
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Problem Areas
Despite the massive budget increases and unfettered operational discretion granted to the agency by the Bush administration
since 9/11, General Alexander’s NSA remains a deeply troubled organization bedeviled by a host of problems, some of its own
making, which pose long-term threats to the agency’s viability as the most powerful component of the U.S. intelligence community.
The agency is still spending billions of dollars trying to catch up with the ever-changing and-growing global telecommunications
market, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. New communications devices, such as the BlackBerry; personal
pagers and digital assistants; and, most recently, Skype, the online service that allows people to make low-cost telephone
calls through their computers, are all making NSA’s job increasingly difficult. Technological changes are taking place so
rapidly that even the most stalwart agency defender admits that NSA will have to continue spending ever-increasing sums to
try to keep pace. In addition, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have forced NSA to spend billions of dollars rebuilding its
ability to intercept and locate low-tech walkie-talkie and tactical radio signals, something the agency tried to rid itself
of during the late 1990s because NSA officials believed that these were “legacy” skills that would no longer be needed in
the twenty-first century.
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NSA’s constellation of SIGINT satellites in orbit over the earth is in trouble, largely because of foul-ups by program managers
at the NRO during the mid-1990s. Faulty satellite designs, constantly changing collection requirements, launch delays, and
a few spectacular spacecraft failures have hobbled attempts to put into space a new generation of SIGINT satellites capable
of monitoring the kinds of unconventional targets that NSA must now confront. The result has been that over the past decade
the agency’s SIGINT satellites have not proved to be particularly effective in monitoring insurgent communications traffic
in either Iraq or Afghanistan, nor have they been of much use in trying to track down al Qaeda terrorists. Moreover, the enormous
amount of time and money needed to redesign and launch the new generation of SIGINT satellites needed to monitor the growing
number of cell phone and other personal communications devices is prohibitive.
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And despite massive investments in new and costly SIGINT collection technologies since 9/11, NSA is still experiencing a difficult
time gaining access to the communications of many of its principal global targets, such as Iran and North Korea, who are increasingly
using buried fiber-optic cables to handle important internal communications traffic in lieu of radio. The agency is also finding
it increasingly difficult to locate the communications of al Qaeda and other international terrorist organizations, who in
recent years have made NSA’s job maddeningly difficult by almost completely ceasing to use telephones and radios.
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A 2005 report to President Bush urged NSA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community to take more risks, stating, “Regaining
signals intelligence access must be a top priority. The collection agencies are working hard to restore some of the access
that they have lost; and they’ve had some successes. And again, many of these recent steps in the right direction are the
result of innovative examples of cross-agency cooperation . . . Success on this front will require greater willingness to
accept financial costs, political risks, and even human casualties.”
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This has meant that NSA has had to work, albeit very reluctantly, more closely with its age-old archnemesis, the CIA, in an
effort to regain access to these “hard” targets. What outside observers of SIGINT often fail to realize is that in the last
fifty years SIGINT has become increasingly dependent on HUMINT for much of its success, leading to what can best be described
as a symbiotic relationship between these two intelligence disciplines. Former CIA director John Deutch wrote in the magazine
Foreign Policy
, “Cooperation between human and technical intelligence, especially communications intelligence, makes both stronger. Human
sources . . . can provide access to valuable signals intelligence . . . Communications intercepts can validate information
provided by a human source.”
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A few of these extremely risky operations have broken to the surface. In January 1999, the
Boston Globe
and the
Washington Post
revealed that NSA and the CIA had helped to create a covert SIGINT system to aid U.N. weapons inspectors in locating and destroying
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. This clandestine SIGINT collection program began in February 1996 and consisted of commercially
available very high frequency (VHF) intercept receivers provided by the CIA being secretly placed inside the U.N. Special
Commission (UNSCOM) headquarters at Al-Thawra, in the suburbs of Baghdad. In addition, sophisticated radio scanners hidden
inside backpacks were used by the U.N. inspection teams when they operated in the field. This system remained in place until
the U.N. weapons inspectors were forced out of Iraq in December 1998.
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In October 2001, Chinese security officials discovered twenty-seven high-tech listening devices planted throughout a brand-new
Boeing 767 that was to serve as the Chinese president’s personal aircraft. The security officials even found bugs in the airplane’s
bathroom and in the headboard of the president’s bed. Although the bugging operation was a diplomatic embarrassment, it showed
the lengths that the CIA and NSA were willing to go to in order to listen to what the Chinese leader was saying.
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But as each of the previous chapters has made clear, historically NSA’s Achilles’ heel has not been its ability to collect
material from around the world. Rather, what has hurt the agency the most has been its inability to process, analyze, and
report on the material that it collects. The agency continues to collect far more than it can possibly analyze, and it analyzes
more than it actually reports to its customers. In January 2007, NSA director Alexander admitted to Congress that the agency
was still experiencing great difficulty coping with the ever-increasing backlog of unprocessed intercepts that were piling
up at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, many of which were intercepts of foreign terrorist message traffic.
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Some agency insiders now believe that NSA is only able to report on about 1 percent of the data that it collects, and it is
getting harder every day to find within this 1 percent meaningful intelligence. Senior Defense and State Department officials
refer to this problem as the “gold to garbage ratio,” which holds that it is becoming increasingly difficult and more expensive
for NSA to find nuggets of useful intelligence in the ever-growing pile of garbage that it has to plow through. This has raised
some questions in the minds of U.S. government officials as to whether all the money being spent on NSA’s SIGINT program is
a worthwhile investment. Former State Department official Herbert Levin noted, “NSA can point to things they have obtained
that have been useful, but whether they’re worth the billions that are spent, is a genuine question in my mind.”
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The Thin Red Line
Today, NSA and the U.S. military’s SIGINT units find themselves spread perilously thin. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
coupled with the never-ending “global war on terror,” continue to eat up the vast majority of NSA’s SIGINT collection and
processing resources, forcing the agency to give short shrift to many important intelligence targets, such as the former Soviet
Union, China, North Korea, Bosnia, and the national narcotics interdiction program. The draining away of resources from North
Korea, for example, has been a cause of great concern since 9/11 because the United States admittedly has almost no spies
operating there, and from a SIGINT perspective North Korea is an extremely tough target to monitor.
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The same thing has happened in En gland since 9/11. The British Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee in its June
2003 annual report warned that the shift of precious intelligence collection resources from other targets to counterterrorism
was creating a dangerous situation, stating, “These reductions are causing intelligence gaps to develop, which may mean over
time unacceptable risks will arise in terms of safeguarding national security and in the prevention and detecting of Serious
Organised Crime.”
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NSA has been forced to continue to strip personnel from a number of offices within its SIGINT Directorate at Fort Meade in
order to keep its coun-terterrorism operations going, as well as maintain U.S. and overseas listening posts at full strength.
The result has been that the number of complaints from NSA’s customers, especially CIA and State Department officials, has
risen dramatically in the past several years as more “legacy” targets not connected to the war on terrorism or the insurgencies
in Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered for lack of attention and resources.
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Sources note that NSA’s inability to dedicate sufficient resources to monitoring narcotics trafficking in the western hemisphere
has forced the small SIGINT organization within the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to largely take over this responsibility.
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The increasingly important role of the DEA, the CIA, and the military services in the SIGINT field has led, in turn, to the
diminishment of NSA’s control over the national SIGINT effort. The result has been that NSA has lost somewhat the all-important
“centrality of command” that it once enjoyed.
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Because of the stress and strain caused by trying to fight three wars simultaneously, there are now persistent and pervasive
personnel shortages at NSA and in the U.S. military SIGINT organizations in virtually every critical specialty. In particular,
the agency and the U.S. military have experienced significant problems recruiting and retaining linguists who are fluent enough
in the exotic languages spoken in Iraq and Afghanistan. Attempts by NSA in 2001– 2002 to hire first-generation immigrants
living in the United States who speak Pashto, Urdu, and Dari, the main languages spoken in Afghanistan, immediately ran into
roadblocks imposed by the omnipresent security officials, who forbade their use. An American intelligence officer was quoted
as saying, “NSA cannot get anyone through the background check and vetting process . . . They have created an unachievably
highstandard for hiring.”
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The U.S. military’s SIGINT units are in even worse shape. The result of declining reenlistment rates and deteriorating morale
has been pervasive personnel shortages throughout the military SIGINT components along with a commensurate decline in unit
readiness levels.
Interviews with current and former U.S. military intelligence officials confirm that the U.S. military’s SIGINT system, like
the U.S. military as a whole, is deep in crisis. Resources everywhere are stretched to the limit. Interviews confirm that
the number-one problem facing the military SIGINT system is personnel, or lack thereof. Over the past six years, frequent
and lengthy deployments in Iraq and/or Afghanistan, coupled with the military’s extremely unpopular “stop-loss” policy of
arbitrarily extending terms of service, including those of many SIGINT specialists, such as Arabic linguists, have for all
intents and purposes exhausted the military’s corps of SIGINT personnel. As a result, attrition rates among military SIGINT
personnel are high and getting worse, with some SIGINT units reporting that more than 50 percent of their first-term recruits
are not reenlisting because of the severe hardships associated with repeated tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a result,
hundreds of veteran noncommissioned officers and enlisted SIGINT intercept technicians and linguists have chosen to leave
the service because of the strain that frequent deployments are having on their families and their own mental health. Interviews
with over a dozen currently serving military SIGINT operators reveal that there is one common thread running through their
complaints about current conditions—an all-consuming desire for a sense of normalcy in their lives.
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There have also been pervasive equipment shortages to contend with, brought on by the intensive demands of fighting three
wars simultaneously. These shortages have meant that SIGINT collection equipment has to be kept in Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving
very little for troops to train on upon their return to the United States from their overseas tours of duty. As a result,
training and readiness levels of military SIGINT units based in the United States have declined steadily over the past six
years. Army and Marine Corps intelligence commanders have confirmed that the equipment in the military’s SIGINT units is worn
out from nonstop usage in the harsh and unforgiving field environments of Iraq and Afghanistan and is in urgent need of refurbishment
or replacement. Moreover, replacement equipment purchases have not kept pace with field losses. Shortages of highly skilled
maintenance personnel and spare parts have led to frequent equipment outages at inopportune moments in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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For example, widespread computer problems meant that the army SIGINT platoon assigned to Forward Operating Base Loyalty in
east Baghdad spent the entire month of February 2006 “performing duties not related to their specialty.”
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