The Secret Sentry (7 page)

CHAPTER 4

The Inventory of Ignorance

SIGINT During the Eisenhower Administration:

1953–1961

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

—DESIDERIUS ERASMUS

The Unhappy Inheritance

Dwight Eisenhower was sworn in as the thirty-fourth president of the United States on Tuesday, January 20, 1953. As supreme
allied commander in Europe and a top customer for Ultra decrypts during World War II, he understood more about the value of
intelligence (and its limitations) than any president since Ulysses S. Grant. But nothing could have prepared Eisenhower for
what he confronted when he took office.

Five weeks after his inauguration, on March 4, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin suddenly died. Eisenhower was not happy that
the first news that he got of Stalin’s death came from Associated Press and United Press International wire service reports
from Moscow. Like the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, NSA had provided no indication whatsoever that Stalin was ill.
In fact, in the month before Stalin’s death NSA had sent to the White House decrypted messages from the Argentinean and Indian
ambassadors in Moscow detailing their private audiences with the Russian dictator, which tended to suggest to the intelligence
analysts that the Russian dictator’s health was good. In the chaotic days after Stalin’s death, the only SIGINT that NSA could
provide the White House with were decrypted tele grams concerning the reactions of Western leaders and a number of foreign
Communist Party chiefs to the death of Stalin. All in all, it was not a very impressive per formance.
¹

Concern inside Washington about NSA’s per formance mounted when on June 16, rioting broke out in East Berlin as thousands
of civilian protesters took to the streets en masse to register their pent-up anger at the continued occupation of their country
by the Russians. Within twenty-four hours, the rioting had spread to virtually every other city in East Germany. NSA’s performance
during the early stages of the Berlin Crisis was viewed in Washington as disappointing because most of the early intelligence
reaching the White House about what was transpiring in East Berlin came from the CIA’s Berlin station and from wire service
news reports, with very little coming from NSA.
²

Trying to Peer Behind the Iron Curtain

Regrettably, the reason SIGINT provided no warning was because Soviet high-grade ciphers remained “an unrevealed mystery.”
^{3: p. 367.}
Despite the commitment of massive numbers of personnel and equally massive amounts of equipment to this critically important
target, there is little discernible evidence that any progress was made in this area. And as the years passed and the Russian
ciphers continued to elude NSA’s ability to solve them, the pressure on the agency inexorably mounted to do whatever it took
for a breakthrough. A Top Secret report sent to Eisenhower in May 1955 recommended, “This is of such great importance that
monetary considerations should be waived and an effort at least equal to the Manhattan Project should be exerted at once.”
But Frank Rowlett, who was now the head of the CIA’s own SIGINT organization, Staff D, was not impressed with the increasingly
urgent recommendations coming out of the multitude of blue-ribbon panels, study groups, review panels, and committees created
during the 1950s to find a solution to NSA’s code-breaking problems, telling an interviewer decades later, “Most of the people
on these panels would not have known a Russian cipher if it hit them on the head . . . Rule by committee is a terrible way
to run a spy agency.”
⁴

NSA’s SIGINT effort against mainland China was even more frustrating than the Russian problem. Unlike the attack on the Russian
ciphers, which received unlimited attention and resources, the NSA cryptanalytic attack on Chinese codes and ciphers was hampered
by perpetual shortages of manpower and equipment. The result was that virtually no progress was being made in solving any
of the high-grade Chinese cipher systems and NSA had to be content with exploiting low-level Chinese plaintext radio traffic
and traffic analysis for information about what was going on inside China. And as if this situation was not bad enough already,
after the signing of the July 1953 armistice agreement in Korea, NSA lost most of its access to Chinese and North Korean military
communications when these forces switched from radio to landlines. A February 1954 report to the NSC conceded the result:
that relatively little was known about what was going on inside China. And a recently declassified CIA report bluntly states,
“The picture for the major target area in Asia, i.e. Communist China, is very dark.”
⁵

1956—The Year of Crisis

As NSA was in the process of moving from Arlington Hall to its new headquarters at Fort Meade, in Maryland, in the fall of
1956, NSA was struck nearly simultaneously by three international crises that stretched the agency’s resources to the limit.

The first was the violent worker riots that took place in the Polish city of Poznan in late June 1956. The riots were crushed
by Polish troops using live ammunition, and at least fifty civilians were killed. The events precipitated a political crisis
within the hard-line Polish government. When the Polish Communist Party met in Warsaw on October 19, it elected a progressive-minded
reformer named Wladyslaw Gomulka, who had just been released from prison for having been a “counterrevolutionary,” as Poland’s
new leader. NSA immediately picked up indications that the Russians were preparing to use military force against Poland. The
crisis was defused on October 24, when Gomulka reaffirmed Poland’s political and military ties with the USSR, leading the
Russians to order their troops to return to their barracks.
⁶

On the afternoon of October 23, the day before Gomulka ended the Polish crisis, peaceful anti-Soviet demonstrations in downtown
Budapest escalated into a full-blown armed insurrection against the Soviet-backed, hard-line communist Hungarian government.
Hungary immediately called for Soviet military assistance in putting down the riots, which by the end of the day had spread
from Budapest to a number of other major Hungarian cities. Within hours of the rioting’s breaking out in Budapest, the twenty-seven
thousand Russian troops based inside Hungary began to move. Early on the morning of October 24, intercept operators at the
U.S. Army listening post at Bad Aibling Station, in West Germany, began noting all four Russian combat divisions based in
Hungary rapidly converging on Budapest. At ten twenty-eight a.m., the Bad Aibling listening post intercepted an order passed
in the clear from the commander of the Russian Second Guards Mechanized Division authorizing his troops to use their tank
cannons and heavy artillery to “disperse the rioters” in Budapest. It marked the beginning of a bloody day of street fighting
between Russian troops and Hungarian civilians throughout the city. By the end of the day 24, radio intercepts reaching NSA
had revealed that selected Soviet Long Range Air Force bomber units in the western USSR had been placed on a heightened state
of alert, as had selected Russian ground, air, and naval forces stationed in Eastern Eu rope, especially in East Germany.
⁷

By October 27, SIGINT had confirmed that there were now four full-strength Russian combat divisions totaling forty thousand
troops deployed in and around virtually all major Hungarian cities, with especially high numbers in Budapest. SIGINT showed
that the Russian Second Guards Mechanized Division and the Thirty-second Mechanized Division had borne the brunt of the fighting
up until that point in downtown Budapest, with the intercepts reflecting heavy personnel and equipment losses among those
troops as well as severe ammunition shortages in some units. Intercepts also showed that large numbers of seriously wounded
Russian military personnel were being airlifted from the Budapest-Tokol airport to the city of L’vov in the USSR. The problem
for Russia was that the Hungarian rioters still controlled large portions of Budapest and other major Hungarian cities.
⁸

Then two days later, on the morning of October 29, Israeli forces attacked Egyptian forces based in the Sinai Peninsula and
the Gaza Strip. Tensions in the Middle East had been building since June, when Egypt forced the British to remove the last
of their forces from the Suez Canal, which had been nationalized. Since early October, NSA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence
community had been intensively tracking the buildup of Israeli forces along the border with Egypt, as well as a comparable
buildup of French and British forces on Cyprus. By October 27, all signs pointed to an imminent Israeli attack on Egypt. A
report was sent out by the CIA that afternoon stating, “The likelihood has increased of major Israeli reprisals, probably
against Egypt, in the near future.” The next day, SIGINT reports coming out of NSA confirmed that Israel was about to attack
Egypt, with fragmentary SIGINT reports indicating that British forces based on Cyprus appeared ready to strike Egypt as well.
Later that afternoon, NSA reported to the White House that it had monitored a massive jump in diplomatic communications traffic
passing between Tel Aviv and Paris. This led CIA analysts to conclude, correctly as it turned out, that “France [might] be
planning [military] actions in conjunction with Israel against Egypt.”
⁹

The following morning, October 29, the deputy director of the CIA’s Office of Current Intelligence, Knight McMahan, was about
to brief Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson at his hotel in Boston. According to McMahan’s recollection, the
previous day “the Watch Committee was reviewing newly available intelligence confirming that Israel, with British and French
support, was completing its mobilization and would attack Egypt.
Because
the evidence came from intercepted communications, this sensitive information
was not included in the written briefing materials prepared for Stevenson
.” Instead, McMahan intended to handle this breaking story orally. But before McMahan could utter a word, one of Stevenson’s
aides rushed into the room to announce that according to wire service reports, Israeli troops had launched their offensive
against Egyptian forces in the Sinai.
¹⁰
A furious Eisenhower, reacting to the invasion, called British prime minister Anthony Eden and asked his old friend if he
had gone out of his mind.

Six days later, on November 4, while the fighting in the Sinai was still raging, Soviet military forces in Hungary moved to
crush once and for all the uprising in Budapest and other cities. Two days before the Soviets moved, SIGINT showed that they
were up to something. Beginning on the evening of November 2, SIGINT detected massive Soviet troop movements inside Hungary,
as well as troop reinforcements crossing into the country from the western USSR. Clearly, the Soviet military was preparing
to attack. On the morning of November 4, Soviet troops attacked Budapest and other Hungarian cities that had risen up in revolt.
By eight a.m., Soviet troops had captured the Hungarian parliament building in downtown Budapest and had arrested virtually
the entire Hungarian government and parliament, including the newly elected reformist prime minister Imre Nagy. The battle
for Budapest was over even before it started. An estimated twenty-five thousand Hungarians were killed in the uprising. Again,
Soviet casualty figures are unknown, but were probably heavy.
¹¹
(There is an ongoing debate about the extent of the CIA’s role in encouraging the uprising. In any event, Eisenhower decided
not to intervene in Hungary, disavowed any involvement in or approval of the Suez invasion, and effectively forced Israel,
France, and Britain to put an end to it.)

On the afternoon of November 4, NSA declared an alert and placed all its assets in a heightened state of readiness. The alert,
which was designated Yankee, was prompted by a series of bombastic threats issued by senior Soviet leaders threatening to
intervene militarily in the Middle East, as well as some fragmentary intelligence indicating that Soviet military forces in
Eastern Europe and the western USSR had dramatically increased their readiness levels. There was also some intelligence indicating
that between two and four Soviet attack submarines had been sent into the Mediterranean. But SIGINT confirmed that Soviet
military forces, such as their crack airborne troops, had not been placed on alert, and there were no indications of Soviet
forces being redeployed in preparation for intervention in the Middle East conflict. A declassified NSA history notes, “Timely
reporting over a period of months could have left no doubt within the [Eisenhower] administration that Soviet diplomacy consisted
of posturing. They were not going to go down to the Middle East to bail out anyone. Forces just weren’t moving.”
¹²

The output that NSA produced during these crises indicates that the agency performed creditably. In the weeks leading up to
the 1956 Arab-Israeli War, SIGINT proved to be a critically important source of intelligence indicating that war was imminent.
A declassified 1957 CIA postmortem evaluation of U.S. intelligence per formance prior to the Israeli-British-French attack
on Egypt notes that “the Watch Committee, in October 1956, provided several days of advance warning of the imminent possibility
of Israeli-Egyptian hostilities and 24 hours’ specific warning of Israel’s intention to attack Egypt with French and (initially)
tacit British support.”
¹³
During the Soviet military intervention in Hungary, an NSA history notes, SIGINT “provided fairly complete indicators concerning
Soviet military unit movements throughout the crisis.” The NSA history also makes clear that SIGINT was the only reliable
intelligence source available to the U.S. intelligence community on Soviet military movements and activities in Hungary.
¹⁴