The Secret Sentry (9 page)

NSA began diverting collection resources from other targets in order to cover Cuba. By April 1962, the number of NSA radio
intercept positions dedicated to copying Cuban radio traffic had increased from thirteen to thirty-five, and the number of
intelligence analysts and reporters working on the Cuban mission at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade had risen to eighty-three
personnel. The number of aerial SIGINT collection flights around Cuba was dramatically increased, and in February 1962 the
USS
Oxford
made another visit to the international waters off Havana to monitor Cuban communications traffic. The presence of the
Oxford
, with its 116 U.S. Navy SIGINT operators, outside Havana harbor so infuriated the Cuban government that on February 22, 1962,
Fidel Castro publicly charged that the
Oxford
had violated Cuban territorial waters, and he handed out to journalists grainy photos of the antenna-studded ship, which could
be seen clearly as it cruised nearby.
²³

NSA’s SIGINT production on Cuba quickly dwarfed the reporting coming from all other agencies. During the six-month period
from April 1962 to October 1962, NSA provided fifty-seven hundred reports on what was going on inside Cuba.
²⁴
Intercepts in April and May confirmed that the Cubans were receiving new Soviet-made radars, part of the rapid construction
of a modern air defense system. In June, NSA reported that MiG-21 fighters, the most modern Soviet-made jets, were in Cuba.
At the same time, American radio intercept operators in southern Florida caught Russians talking in heavily accented Spanish
on Cuban air force radio frequencies, teaching Cuban pilots and ground controllers fighter interception tactics. By July 1962,
SIGINT showed that the Cuban MiG fighters were now routinely conducting ground-controlled intercept (GCI) air defense exercises,
and on two occasions NSA intercept operators in southern Florida detected Cuban MiG fighters intercepting intruding aircraft,
probably CIA resupply planes, clear evidence that the Cuban air force was fast becoming combat ready.
²⁵

By mid-July 1962, Secretary McNamara had become quite concerned about these capabilities, as well as about intelligence reports
indicating the presence of Soviet military advisers on the island. NSA concurred and once again requested permission from
the Pentagon to divert collection resources from other targets in order to augment its SIGINT coverage of Cuba. In his response,
on July 16, McNamara ordered NSA to dramatically increase its coverage as “a matter of the highest urgency.”
²⁶

NSA had one hugely important asset, which allowed it to listen in on what was happening inside Cuba—it could tap right into
the Cuban national telephone system. This was possible because the American telecommunications giant RCA International had
built the system in 1957, and it used a vulnerable micro wave relay system rather than invulnerable landlines to carry virtually
all telephone traffic between Havana and all major towns and cities in Cuba.
²⁷

Miffed by the seizure of its Cuban holdings by Castro’s government in 1959, RCA willingly provided the CIA and NSA with the
schematics of the Cuban communications system as well as details about the operating parame ters of the equipment. But in
1960, the Soviets began to replace the American-made equipment with Russian communications and cryptographic equipment as
part of their military aid program to Cuba. NSA estimated that it would take the Cuban government about two years to phase
out the American equipment and replace it with the Russian equipment, by which time, it was believed, the lack of spare parts
and poor maintenance would take its toll on the latter, forcing the Cubans to continue to use the American-built communications
network for the foreseeable future. They were right.
²⁸

To intercept the Cuban telephone traffic, NSA needed to park a ship equipped with special intercept equipment off the Cuban
coast. So on July 19, 1962, the USS
Oxford
was diverted from a scheduled cruise around Latin America and ordered to proceed at flank speed to undertake another intelligence-gathering
cruise around Cuba.
²⁹
The
Oxford
arrived off the northern coast of Cuba on July 21 and began to cruise at a leisurely five knots within its assigned operations
area in international waters twelve miles off Havana and the port of Mariel, monitoring Cuban communications traffic and radar
emissions. The
Oxford
’s most productive target was the easily intercepted message traffic sent over the Cuban microwave telephone network.
³⁰

On July 31, a Cuban navy patrol boat circled the
Oxford
while crewmen photographed the ship. Electronic intelligence (ELINT) operators aboard the
Oxford
nervous ly watched as the Cubans used their shore-based surveillance radars to continuously track the ship’s movements and
no doubt associated its position relative to the sites of contemporaneous CIA Operation Mongoose commando raids along the
Cuban coastline. On August 30, Cuban newspapers prominently reported on the presence of the
Oxford
off the Cuban coast. Observersstanding on the Malecón seawall around Havana harbor could, once again, clearly see the spy
ship as it slowly cruised back and forth just outside Cuban territorial waters.
³¹

Change in Command

After its disastrous experience with Admiral Laurence Frost, the Pentagon selected a fifty-two-year-old U.S. Air Force communications
officer with little intelligence experience named Lieutenant General Gordon Blake to head up NSA. But his past experience
might well have sold him on the importance of SIGINT. On the morning of December 7, 1941, Blake was serving as the base operations
officer at Hickham Field, in Hawaii, when the Japa nese attacked Pearl Harbor. He was awarded the Silver Star for gallantry
for his actions during the attack. After World War II, Blake held a series of command positions on the air staff in Washington,
where he helped plan the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line radar network across Alaska and Canada. In 1961, he was named commander
of the Continental Air Defense Command, attaining the rank of lieutenant general on October 1, 1961, and he remained there
until being named NSA director on July 1, 1962.
³²

It was a precarious time for NSA. The agency was still battered by the bad feelings generated by Frost’s contentious relationship
with Robert McNamara’s Pentagon. Frost and Blake had been friends since World War II, which helped ease the transition somewhat,
but Blake later confessed that he “felt badly about coming in over [Frost’s] prostrate form.”
³³

Blake was to serve as the director of NSA for three years, until May 31, 1965. His impact on the agency, though little publicized,
was important and far-reaching. He was at the helm during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and he managed the agency during
a period of dramatic expansion brought on by the war in Vietnam. NSA’s personnel numbers and bud get figures reached record
highs under his command, and he was instrumental in getting funding for an intensified research and development program needed
to develop new SIGINT collection and computerized processing systems. Personable and easygoing, Blake went out of his way
to try to forge closer links between NSA and the Pentagon, developing a close working relationship with Frost’s archnemesis,
Assistant Secretary of Defense John Rubel, and his successor (and a future secretary of state during the Carter administration),
Cyrus Vance. Blake also restored a more harmonious relationship with the CIA and patched up NSA’s virtually non existent relationship
with the National Reconnaissance Office, which Frost had left in tatters because of a fight over NSA’s lack of control over
SIGINT satellite collection. By the time Blake departed, NSA had eclipsed all other agencies comprising the U.S. intelligence
community, with SIGINT becoming the “predominant source” used by American intelligence analysts and policy makers.
³⁴
But the outcome of the struggle for control of future increasingly sensitive SIGINT satellites and amazingly high-resolution
reconnaissance satellites would be crucial to NSA’s maintaining intelligence primacy.

Monitoring the Russian Surge

It was not until the first in a new flow of Soviet cargo and passenger ships headed for Cuba in mid-July 1962 that NSA intelligence
analysts concluded that something unusual was happening. NSA routinely intercepted all Soviet naval and commercial shipping
radio traffic in the North Atlantic in conjunction with GCHQ in Britain and the Canadian SIGINT agency, the Communications
Branch of the National Research Council (CBNRC). As a result, virtually everything that the U.S. intelligence community knew
about Soviet shipments of men, weapons, and material to Cuba came from SIGINT. The importance of this NSA coverage to the
CIA was so high that, as a report prepared by the CIA notes, “SIGINT provided information on daily positions, tonnages, destinations,
and cargoes, as well as Soviet attempts to deny or falsify this information. On sailings from the Baltic, SIGINT often provided
the initial information.”
³⁵

The first indication that something untoward was occurring resulted from the analysis of the manifests for these ships, which
NSA was routinely intercepting. Beginning on July 15, fully laden Soviet cargo ships began sailing for Cuba from Russian ports
in the Black Sea. As they passed through the Dar-danelles strait, the captains of these merchant ships gave false declarations
to Turkish authorities in Istanbul as to their destinations and the cargoes they were carry ing. They also lied about the
cargoes’ weight, which was well below what the ships were capable of carry ing. NSA analysts at Fort Meade quickly figured
out that the false declarations indicated that the ships were secretly carry ing military cargoes.
³⁶

Declassified intelligence reports show that in July 1962, NSA detected twenty-one Russian merchant ships docking in Cuba,
including four passenger ships, which was a single-month record for Soviet ships docking in Cuba. Among the passenger ships
detected by NSA as soon as they left Russian ports were the
Maria Ulyanova
and the
Latvia
, which brought key staff components of the Soviet Group of Forces to Cuba. In August, NSA detected thirty-seven Soviet merchant
ships, eleven tankers, and six passenger ships docking in Cuba. Little intelligence was available about what exactly the Russians
were shipping there until mid-August, when imagery analysts at ONI identified crates for Komar missile patrol boats sitting
on the deck of a Soviet merchant ship on its way to Cuba. In September, forty-six Soviet merchant ships were detected docking
in Cuba by SIGINT, along with thirteen tankers and four passenger ships.
³⁷

These ships secretly carried thousands of Russian air defense troops and construction workers to Cuba. Despite attempts to
disguise the newly arrived Russian troops in Cuba as civilian “agricultural technicians,” refugees and defectors who found
their way to Miami told their CIA interrogators that these “agricultural technicians” were young, wore matching civilian clothing,
had military haircuts, marched in formation, and carried themselves like soldiers. In late July, the Russian military construction
personnel had begun building launch sites for six SA-2 Guideline surface-to-air missile (SAM) regiments, whose 144 missile
launchers were to be deployed throughout Cuba. The first SA-2 SAM sites were concentrated in the San Cristóbal area, in western
Cuba. By the end of August, construction on the first SA-2 SAM site had been completed.
³⁸

Recently declassified documents reveal that despite the preponderance of evidence from SIGINT that these Soviet cargo ships
were carrying weapons to Cuba, the Pentagon and its intelligence arm, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), refused to accept
this interpretation of the intelligence material. DIA’s performance during the Cuban Missile Crisis was, according to the
CIA, disgraceful. For instance, DIA blocked an attempt by the CIA to insert an item in the August 3, 1962, edition of the
Central Intelligence Bulletin
noting that “an unusual number of suspected arms carriers were enroute to Cuba.” A watered-down version of this report was
carried the next day, but in the month that followed, DIA blocked four more attempts by CIA analysts to publish reports that
the Russians were shipping weapons to Cuba, with DIA analysts taking the following position: “The high volume of shipping
probably reflects planned increases in trade between the USSR and Cuba.” As late as the end of August, the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Maxwell Taylor, was telling President Kennedy that the surge in Soviet shipping traffic to
Cuba “reflected an increased flow of economic aid” rather than weapons. DIA did not acknowledge that the Soviets were sending
large quantities of weapons until September 6, a week after a U-2 reconnaissance mission confirmed that Russian-made SA-2
SAMs were operational in Cuba.
³⁹

On August 20, 1962, CIA director John McCone wrote a memorandum to President Kennedy reporting that a significant and worrisome
surge in the number of Soviet merchant ships docking in Cuba had been detected and that an accumulation of human intelligence
(HUMINT) reports strongly indicated that a contingent of about five thousand Russian troops was now in Cuba. The memo incorporated
intelligence that had been received from the French intelligence service’s chief of station in Washington, Thyraud de Vosjoli,
who had just returned from a visit to Havana. According to de Vosjoli, between four thousand and six thousand Soviet military
personnel had arrived in Cuba since July 1, 1962, although no Russian military units per se were included in this group.
⁴⁰

Intelligence information regarding the shipments was passed to the Special Group at a meeting at the State Department on August
21, and President Kennedy was briefed at the White House the following day. Confirmation of these reports by U-2 aerial reconnaissance
was immediately ordered.
⁴¹
On August 23, NSA reported that nineteen Soviet freighters or passenger ships were then en route to Cuba, most of which appeared
to be carry ing weapons.
⁴²
The next day, the CIA issued another intelligence report based on HUMINT, noting that on August 5–6 large numbers of Soviet
personnel and equipment had arrived at the Cuban ports of Trinidad and Casilda, and that the Soviet personnel and equipment
had departed from the ports in large convoys in the direction of the town of Sancti Spíritus.
⁴³