29 November 1999. Thanks to The New Yorker and SH.
Source: Hardcopy The New Yorker, December 6, 1999, pp. 58-76.
_____
ANNALS OF NATIONAL SECURITY
___________________
THE INTELLIGENCE GAP
How the digital age left our spies out in the cold.
BY SEYMOUR M. HERSH
THE National Security Agency, whose Cold War research into code breaking and
electronic eavesdropping spurred the American computer revolution, has
become a victim of the high-tech world it helped to create. Through
mismanagement, arrogance, and fear of the unknown, the senior military and
civilian bureaucrats who work at the agency's headquarters, in suburban Fort
Meade, Maryland, have failed to prepare fully for today's high-volume flow
of E-mail and fibre-optic transmissions -- even as nations throughout
Europe, Asia, and the Third World have begun exchanging diplomatic and
national-security messages encrypted in unbreakable digital code.
The N.S.A.'s failures don't make the headlines. In May, 1998, India's first
round of nuclear tests, which took place in Pokharan, southwest of New
Delhi, caught Washington by surprise, and provoked criticism of the Central
Intelligence Agency from the press and from Congress. But it was the N.S.A.,
in the days and weeks before the detonations, that did not detect signs of
increased activity or increased communications at Pokharan. "It's a tough
problem," one nuclear-intelligence expert told me, because India's
nuclear-weapons establishment now sends encrypted digital messages by
satellite, using small dishes that bounce signals beyond the stratosphere
through a system known as VSAT ("very small aperture terminal") -- a two-way
version of the system widely used for DirecTV.
Similarly, the North Koreans, with the help of funds from the United
Nations, according to one United States intelligence official, have bought
encrypted cell phones from Europe, high-speed switching gear from Britain,
and up-to-date dialling service from America -- a system that the N.S.A.
cannot readily read. The official said of the North Koreans,"All their
military stuff went off ether into fibre" -- from high-frequency radio
transmission to fibre-optic cable lines, which transmit a vast volume of
digital data as a stream of light. A former high-level Defense Department
official told me, "It's a worldwide problem. You could wire up all of Africa
for less than two billion dollars." This former official, like most of the
two dozen signals-intelligence (SIGINT) experts interviewed for this
account, agreed to speak only after being assured of anonymity. A 1951
federal law prohibits any discussion or publication of communications
intelligence.
The decline of the N.S.A. is widely known in Washington's national-security
community. "The dirty little secret is that fibre optics and encryption are
kicking Fort Meade in the nuts," a recently retired senior officer in the
C.I.A.'s Directorate of Operations told me. "It's over. Everywhere I went in
the Third World, I wanted to have someone named Ahmed, a backhoe driver, on
the payroll. And I wanted to know where the fibre-optic cable was hidden. In
a crisis, I wanted Ahmed to go and break up the cable, and force them up in
the air" -- that is, force communications to be broadcast by radio signals.
The number of daily satellite-telephone calls in the Arab world, many of
which are encrypted, is in the millions, creating severe difficulties for
eavesdroppers. The mobile-telephone system used by Saddam Hussein at the
height of Iraq's dispute last year with a United Nations arms-control
inspection team operated on more than nine hundred channels. Each channel
was separately encrypted, with multiple keys, and Saddam's conversations
bounced from channel to channel with each call. A U.N. intelligence team
eventually gained access to the telephone system's technical manuals and
other data, and was able to record the encrypted conversations, but without
these materials it could not have made sense of the intercepts. The
code-makers are leaving the code-breakers far behind.
IN its heyday, during the Cold War, the N.S.A. had nearly ninety-five
thousand employees, more than half of them military, monitoring
communications from hundreds of sites around the world. It played a dominant
role in American intelligence gathering behind the Iron Curtain and
elsewhere, producing by the end of the nineteen-sixties more than a thousand
intelligence reports a day. The N.S.A.'s intercepts were the government's
most reliable and important sources of intelligence on the Soviet Union --
far outstripping the intelligence collected by the C.I.A. and its agents
abroad. In Western Europe, N.S.A. linguists and Army G.I.s sat in unmarked
vans monitoring the daily conversations of Soviet tank units on the other
side of the Berlin Wall. In the Pacific, Air Force radiomen and N.S.A.
technicians, in specially configured Boeing 707s, flew huge figure eights
over the ocean, copying Morse-code transmissions from North Korea and the
Soviet Far East. In the Mediterranean, Navy signalmen worked hectic shifts
with their N.S.A. colleagues, eavesdropping on government communications in
the Middle East. Many of the most sophisticated Soviet codes were broken,
including the diplomatic traffic to Moscow from its Embassy in Washington.
By the time President Nixon was in office, the agency was listening to
telephone conversations of Soviet leaders as they were driven in limousines
to and from the Kremlin. In the upper reaches of the United States
government, access to the agency's daily top-secret "take" was a sign of
importance and success. Henry A. Kissinger, Nixon's national-security
adviser, went as far as to order the agency to scan the diplomatic traffic
from Washington, isolate references to him, and deliver the cables to his
office, without any further distribution inside the government. Many of his
successors have received the same service.
These successes were the payoff for years of painstaking technical research.
In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the N.S.A.'s engineers, working closely
with the American computer industry, coordinated and financed much of the
early work in telecommunications, underwriting research on semiconductors,
high-speed circuitry, and transistorized computers. With its research into
microelectronics, the agency also helped to develop the early guidance
systems for intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles. And the agency's
team of mathematicians -- aided by outside advisers, many of whom were
tenured at places such as Harvard, Dartmouth, and Princeton -- steadily tore
through the Soviet cipher systems.
By the mid-seventies, as the world began routinely communicating by
microwave, the agency maintained its edge with innovative use of satellite
intelligence, and its mathematicians and computer experts were sometimes
able to thwart the Russians' attempts to scramble their signals. Even
undersea and underground coaxial cables -- the most secure means then of
relaying telephone conversations and electronic communications -- could be
intercepted. Books and newspaper articles have described the penetration of
Soviet cables at sea by N.S.A. units aboard Navy submarines as some of the
most daring intelligence operations of the Cold War.
The collapse of Communism, in 1989, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, in
1991, led to a revised mission for the N.S.A., with more focus on
international terrorism and drug dealing -- both highly elusive targets. The
agency's budget was cut back. In the early nineties, as more nations turned
to fibre optics, the N.S.A. shut down twenty of its forty-two radio
listening posts around the world. (In some cases, equipment was left behind
to be monitored remotely.) The agency's overseas military personnel have
been reduced by half.
The N.S.A.'s status within the government has also been diminished. Last
year, Richard Lardner, a reporter for the Washington newsletter Inside the
Pentagon, revealed that the agency had been "reined in" and would no longer
be authorized to report directly to the Secretary of Defense. The N.S.A. was
ordered instead to report through an Assistant Secretary. In recent years,
according to a congressional study, the N.S.A.'s contribution to the
President's daily intelligence brief -- a secret summary prepared at the
C.I.A. every morning for the White House -- has fallen by nearly twenty per
cent. The N.S.A. was being jarred by the difficulties of tracking terrorism,
and by the rapid spread of unbreakable codes. The agency also discovered
that it had few advocates in the White House and among those officials at
the Office of Management and Budget who control the flow of money to the
top-secret world. The agency was not allowed to keep the funds it had saved
by reducing manpower and drastically cutting overseas stations.
The N.S.A. is also getting very little help from its colleagues in the
American intelligence community. One legislative aide told me that George
Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence, who has nominal responsibility
for all intelligence gathering, had expressed alarm upon taking office about
the N.S.A.'s weakness, and told congressmen of his desire to rescue the
agency from what appeared to be a "precipitous calamity." But, the aide
added," he didn't do it."
The N.S.A.'s strongest supporters -- the members and staffs of the Senate
and House intelligence committees -- are also its most vocal critics. The
agency is now facing the most caustic congressional scrutiny in its history,
amid much pessimism that it can right itself without major changes in its
management. Staff members of the intelligence-oversight committees
traditionally prefer not to be quoted by name, but John Millis, a former
C.I.A. officer who is staff director of the House intelligence committee,
openly discussed the N.S.A.'s problems in the fall of 1998 at a luncheon
meeting with a group of retired C.I.A. officers. "Signals intelligence is in
a crisis," Millis told his former colleagues, who reprinted the speech in a
newsletter . "We have been living in the
glory days of SIGINT over the last fifty years, since World War II." He went
on, "Technology has been the friend of the N.S.A., but in the last four or
five years technology has moved from being the friend to being the enemy."
Millis also made it clear that any significant increase in the agency's
budget was made more difficult by the fact that"there is no management of
the intelligence community. There is no one in a position to make the
tradeoffs within the intelligence community that will make a coherent,
efficient organization that will function as a whole. So we end up doing it
on Capitol Hill. And I've got to tell you, if you are depending on Capitol
Hill to do something as important as this, you're in trouble."
SENATOR ROBERT KERREY, of Nebraska, the ranking Democrat on the Senate's
intelligence committee, told me that there was little he could add to
Millis's assessment, because most information dealing with the agency and
its work is highly classified. Kerrey also pointed out that secrecy "does
not equal security," and can be self-defeating. For example, the agency is
in desperate need of more money to get started on information-retrieval
programs for the Internet which should have been under way years ago. "But I
can't tell you how much they need," Kerrey said, "and I can't tell you how
much they have. The public doesn't know about the N.S.A., or what it is.
There are no editorials in the New York Times, no advocates. Does the public
know that the nation might be more secure if more was invested? Out of
sight, out of mind."
Last July, during a little-noticed Senate colloquy
on an intelligence-spending bill,
Kerrey hinted at the N.S.A.'s problems. "The signals are becoming more
complex and difficult to process," he said. "And they are becoming more and
more encrypted." Because of the sophistication of current encryption systems
for E-mail and other communications," he said, "we will find our people on
the intelligence side coming back and saying, 'Look, I know something bad
happened . . . I couldn't make sense of the signal. We intercept, and all we
get is a buzz and background noise. We cannot interpret. We can't convert
it.' "
Kerrey says that his concern was heightened by a report on the N.S.A. that
was filed last year by an unusual study group that he and Senator Richard C.
Shelby, Republican of Alabama and the committee's chairman, had put
together. Secret congressional studies are routine, but the Senate team,
known as the Technical Advisory Group, included a number of prominent
outsiders -- men who were in charge of re search and technology for major
American high-tech corporations, such as George Spix, of Microsoft, Bran
Ferren, of the Walt Disney Company, and a nuclear-weapons physicist, Dr.
Lowell Wood, of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The outsiders
were given full clearance and access to many of the most sensitive areas at
the Fort Meade headquarters. Their conclusions were devastating. "We told
them that unless you totally change your intelligence-collection systems you
will go deaf," one involved official told me. "You've got ten years."
The advisory group put much of the blame for the agency's problems on the
stagnation and rigidity of the senior civilian management. "The N.S.A.'s
party line to Congress is 'We're fine. We don't need to change,' " the
official told me. "It's like a real Communist organization. Free thought is
not encouraged" among the managers. Referring to the senior bureaucracy, the
official said that the agency would "have to fire almost everyone." This
official and others singled out Barbara A. McNamara, the current N.S.A.
deputy director, as someone especially resistant to change. "She's leading a
cohort of thirty-year veterans who go back to radio" -- a reference to
high-frequency radio transmissions -- "and think nothing is needed," the
official said. In secret testimony this fall before Congress, he added,
McNamara talked about "how good the N.S.A. is -- how it caught this and that
drug guy. They got a whole bunch of horseshit from Barbara."
In subsequent interviews, many former N.S.A. managers endorsed the advisory
group's findings. One former official described the civilian leadership as
"a self-licking ice-cream cone," with little tolerance for dissent or
information it did not wish to hear. "If you didn't support their position,
you weren't considered a team player," this person told me. "You couldn't go
into a meeting, put your best ideas on the table, have it out, get the best
idea, and then go have a beer." McNamara's authority stems from her
longevity: the admirals and generals who serve the agency director remain on
the job for an average of three years before retiring or going on to other
military assignments. The agency's top civilians have worked together, in
many cases, for nearly thirty years, and inevitably share the same insular
points of view. Another recently retired official told me that the N.S.A.
has become a dynastic bureaucracy, in which the fathers have made room for
their sons, with the wives and mothers of favored employees hired as
mid-level staff in the human-resources office. "The place is full of
warlords and fiefdoms," the former official said. "Now we're getting to the
grandchildren." Such insider hiring has led to the quip, which I heard from
a number of officials, that the N.S.A. functions as a "Glen Burnie W.P.A.
project." Glen Burnie is a nearby suburb, and home to many N.S.A. employees.
Questions also were raised during my interviews about the effectiveness of
many of the senior military officers who are routinely assigned to the
N.S.A. for two-, three-, or four-year tours of duty. Some perform
brilliantly, but far too many find themselves put in charge of units for
which they are unqualified, and end up relying extensively on their civilian
staffs. "We call them the summer help," a former manager told me, adding
that the smart ones generally seek to get reassigned as soon as possible.
The Technical Advisory Group urged that the agency immediately begin a major
reorganization, and start planning for the recruitment of several thousand
skilled computer scientists. One of their missions would be to devise
software and write information-retrieval programs that would enable the
agency to make sense of the data routinely sucked up by satellite and other
interception devices. The vast majority of telephone calls, E-mails, and
faxes are not encrypted -- almost all are sent as plain text -- but the
N.S.A. has been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the intercepted data,
much of which is irrelevant. "They're still collecting a lot of digital,"
one of the agency's consultants told me,"and can't do anything with it." The
consultant added that agency managers recently estimated that Fort Meade had
three years' worth of storage capacity for intercepted Internet traffic.
"They filled it in eleven months," he said.
"The bottom line is they've got to retool," the advisory-group official
said. "It will take a lot of money and effort -- like starting the N.S.A.
again." Far from being able to retool, the agency has suffered a severe
brain drain in recent years, losing mid-career managers to the high pay and
upward mobility of private industry. One former senior official described
the process as self-defeating: the agency's recognized need for more outside
contact with, and stimulation by, the computer world is offset by the fact
that its budding young experts "meet new people and then get hired away by
them."
THE N.S.A.'s current alienation from the computer gurus in industry and
academia might not have occurred if two Californians with a fascination for
the mathematics of cryptoanalysis hadn't decided to compare notes more than
two decades ago. A 1951 law gave the government the right to classify as
secret any invention considered potentially harmful to national security,
but in November, 1976, Whitfield Diffie, a computer scientist, and Martin E.
Hellman, a Stanford University electrical engineer, published a
revolutionary technical paper on what has become known as public key
cryptography Before their work, an encrypted message could be understood
only if the sender and receiver had the same key, or decoder, to turn the
scrambled letters into readable text. The beauty of the Diffie-Hellman
breakthrough was its simplicity: the message would have two keys -- one
could be registered in a public directory (today it might be on the
Internet) and the other would be known only to the intended recipient. One
key would be used to encipher the message and the other to decipher it. A
senior N.S.A. official has described the Diffie-Hellman concept as a series
of computations that are easy to do but hard to reverse, like breaking a
window.
To the agency's dismay, the world now had access to a sophisticated level of
cryptography that had not been previously fully understood even by N.S.A.
analysts. In 1978, when George I. Davida, a computer scientist at the
University of Wisconsin, tried to patent an encryption device he had
invented, the N.S.A. invoked the 1951 secrecy law. Davida took his case to
the media, and the agency, prodded by attorneys in the Carter
Administration, eventually backed down, but the message was clear -- the
agency would do all it could to prevent public access to encryption
techniques.
By the early nineties, the telephone system had been deregulated, the
computer market was booming, and the Internet was beginning its ride, but
the N.S.A.'s policy remained static: encryption was defined as a a weapons
system whose export was controlled by the government. The debate over
encryption was now a public controversy, with the government arrayed against
privacy advocates, academics, and a computer industry that was bemoaning the
annual loss of billions of dollars to foreign manufacturers whose computers
included high-powered encryption.
In 1993, law-enforcement officials further infuriated the computer industry
by beginning a criminal investigation of Philip R. Zimmermann, a software
engineer then living in Boulder, Colorado. Zimmermann's crime was being a
free-spirited hacker; he cobbled together a cryptography program called
P.G.P. -- for Pretty Good Privacy -- and gave it away. P.G.P. was the
agency's nightmare -- it offered the average computer user a nontechnical
and nonthreatening entry into easy, daily use of cryptography. P.G.P. soon
found its way to the Internet, and it quickly spread around the world --
making Zimmermann, in the government's view, an exporter of munitions. A
grand jury inquiry began. The computer industry rallied around Zimmermann,
and after three years the case was dropped. Zimmermann eventually explained
to a Senate committee, "I wrote P.G.P. from information in the open
literature.... This technology belongs to everybody." By the
mid-nineteen-nineties, the Software Publishers Association was telling
journalists that the number of cryptographic products being sold by foreign
companies had reached three hundred and forty.
President Clinton and his senior advisers, under pressure from the
law-enforcement and national-security communities, tried to compromise on
the issue. The export of encryption for computers could go forward, the
government said, if the industry agreed to install a government-approved
encryption chip, known as the Clipper Chip, that could be directly accessed
by law-enforcement officers. Under another proposal, American computer
manufacturers would have been permitted to export new encryption products if
a spare set of decoding keys were accessible to the government. The
proposals, known as key recovery or key escrow, were assailed by privacy
proponents, who demanded to know whether the Clinton Administration would
have dared to advocate that citizens be required to give the keys to their
house or safety-deposit box to a third person.
The cultural divide between Fort Meade and Silicon Valley was widening. The
agency's senior managers were unable to comprehend what every programmer and
researcher in academia and industry intuitively understood: encryption could
not be stopped. The managers had ample warning. In 1991, a secret study
predicted that the use of encryption would grow exponentially -- a
prediction largely ignored by the agency's senior management. A former
N.S.A. director recalled that in the early nineties he had had a series of
conversations with the civilian managers, urging them not to insist on their
version of key recovery. "I couldn't believe their proposals," he said,
adding that he had warned the managers that, given the public's attitude
toward privacy, key recovery "could not work if the government held the key.
They were so arrogant. They knew all there was to know."
"Export control is a legitimate concern to the agency," one former senior
official told me, but the issue made the top managers "paralyzed and afraid
to move into the future." He and many colleagues had argued for a two-prong
approach -- continuing to do all that was possible to maintain export
controls while also planning for a fully encrypted world. The agency's long
fight against encryption delayed its widespread use by many years, but the
agency's senior managers spent those years "holding on to what we have
today" instead of seeking ways to lessen encryption's impact. The official
lamented, "We were squandering time" while continuing to make more enemies
inside the computer industry.
Today, the encryption fight is all but over. The Commerce Department is
scheduled to issue new export regulations on December 15th that, many
experts believe, will permit American computer companies to include advanced
cryptography, with fewer restrictions, on equipment sold worldwide. "We've
won," Phil Zimmermann told me, jubilantly. "And they tried to put me in
prison! Now we can export strong crypto and they can't stop us. We can do
whatever we wish."
N.S.A.'s short-term solution to the encryption dilemma has been to urge the
C.I.A. to go back to the world of dirty tricks and surreptitious entry.
According to a 1996 congressional staff study, the next century will require
a clandestine agency that "breaks into or otherwise gains access to the
contents of secured facilities, safes and computers" and "steals,
compromises and influences foreign cryptographic capabilities so as to make
them exploitable" by the N.S.A.
Such information theoretically could help Washington policymakers disrupt
future terrorist activity, intercept illicit shipments of nuclear arms, or
uncover acts of espionage against American defense corporations.
Unfortunately, several C.I.A. officers I spoke with found the proposal too
ambitious. One retired case officer told me that while he was on a
clandestine assignment years ago in the Third World, "I was designated to
get a certain black box. I worked on it for three and a half years, and I
got nowhere. If I had worked on it for ten years, and with a true stroke of
luck, I might have gotten within ten feet of it." Another retired operations
officer, similarly skeptical of the C.I.A.'s chances of obtaining
cryptological intelligence, told me that sometimes the clandestine
operatives in the field have to report back, "This is too hard. "
Many Americans, of course, are deeply distrustful of the N.S.A. -- a view
reflected in recent Hollywood movies like "Enemy of the State" and "Mercury
Rising." The traditional American belief in privacy and constitutional
protection is at odds with a superspy agency capable of monitoring
unencrypted telephone conversations and E-mail exchanges anywhere in the
world. Abuses have occurred. In the nineteen-seventies, the Senate
intelligence committee revealed that the agency had systematically violated
the law by surveilling American citizens, including more than twelve hundred
anti-war and civil-rights activists. The revelations led to a public outcry
and to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which made monitoring
of American targets illegal without a warrant from a special federal court.
(The court rarely turns down such requests from the government.) The act,
and a supporting executive order, set rules for the handling of intercepts
or other intelligence involving Americans who were overheard or picked up in
the course of legitimate foreign surveillance.
The N.S.A.'s bitter fight over encryption, with its tell-all computer chips
and key-recovery proposals, has renewed long-standing fears that one of the
agency's satellite-data collection programs, code-named ECHELON, is
routinely collecting and analyzing unencrypted telephone conversations and
Internet chatter around the world. ECHELON was launched, in the
mid-nineteen-seventies, to spy on Soviet satellite communications.
"Imagine," the BBC exclaimed last month -- one of hundreds of such reports
in the past ten years -- "a global spying network that can eavesdrop on
every single phone call, fax, or E-mail, anywhere on the planet. It sounds
like science fiction, but it's true." The agency does routinely collect vast
amounts of digital data, and it is capable of targeting an individual
telephone line or computer terminal in many places around the world. But
active and retired N.S.A. officials have repeatedly told me that the agency
does not yet have the software to make sense out of more than a tiny
fraction of the huge array of random communications that are collected. If
the agency were able to filter through the traffic, the officials noted,
international terrorists like Osama bin Laden would not be able to remain in
hiding.
The fact is that ECHELON, far from being one of the N.S.A.'s secret weapons,
as some believe, is viewed as a fiscal black hole by the Senate and House
intelligence committees. John Millis, in his private talk to the retired
C.I.A agents, complained that the United States was spending "incredible
amounts of money" on satellite collection. "It threatens to overwhelm the
intelligence budget." Using satellites to sweep up communications
indiscriminately, he said, "doesn't make a lot of sense.... You shouldn't be
spending one more dollar than we do to try and intercept communications from
space." Millis's point was that the data collected from satellites, like the
data collected from the Internet, cannot be sorted or analyzed in any
meaningful way.
THE agency's critics, in and out of the government, told me that they see a
glimmer of hope for the N.S.A. in the appointment, last May, of Lieutenant
General Michael Hayden as its new director. Hayden, who joined the Air Force
after earning a master's degree in American history at Duquesne University,
in Pittsburgh, has been praised for his intelligence and open-mindedness.
"Hayden gets it," one intelligence-committee aide told me. "But he's
parachuted in there, and faced with a deputy director whose job is to foil
what the director wants to do. There's no question that it's the hardest job
in the intelligence community. He's got to manage a multibillion-dollar
corporation that has a blue-collar mentality."
-- **** (@ .), December 07, 1999
(CONTINUED)
General Hayden's initial goal will be to convince Congress and the
White
House that he can do what his predecessors did not -- develop a
specific
management plan and a budget for analyzing intelligence from the
Internet
and other digital sources. "We've criticized the N.S.A. for not having
a
well-coordinated strategy," one legislative aide told me, "but we're
not in
a position to tell them where to go." The issues, of course, are
highly
technical, and it's not clear that more money -- even billions of
dollars --
will get the job done. The amount of data flowing through the Internet
is
growing exponentially, and skilled computer scientists are at a
premium. The
agency's war against encryption has left a legacy of bitterness
throughout
the computer industry, and today's technical advances are taking place
not
at Fort Meade but on university campuses and in corporation
laboratories
across America. Those computer whizzes who might have been attracted
to
high-level government work are instead being attracted by the far
higher pay
scales offered by private industry.
There also is little evidence that President Clinton and his
national-security team view the agency's signals-intelligence plight
as
significant. This year's classified Defense Department budget request
included a boost of nearly two hundred million dollars for the agency,
with
the funds ear-marked for long-range research into signals
intelligence. The
money never made it through the White House's Office of Management and
Budget, however. "George Tenet didn't support it," a former
congressional
aide explained. A similar secret request, for four hundred million
dollars
or more to modify the Jimmy Carter, a Seawolf-class nuclear submarine,
for
top-secret agency intelligence work, was approved -- evidence that the
White
House believes that more covert operations will solve the nation's
coming
intelligence problems.
Hayden also will have to contend with those, in and out of the
government,
who remain dubious about the N.S.A. One firm skeptic is the encryption
expert Whitfield Diffie, who is now at Sun Microsystems. Diffie, a
leading
advocate of computer privacy, was quick to suggest that the current
alarm in
the N.S.A. may be a self-interested ruse. When I brought up the
N.S.A.'s
problems with new technology, he replied, "What bothers me is that you
are
saying what the agency wants us to believe -- they used to be great,
but
these days they have trouble reading the newspaper, the Internet is
too
complicated for them, there is so much traffic and they can't find
what they
want. It may be true, but it is what they have been 'saying' for
years. It's
convenient for N.S.A. to have its targets believe it is in trouble.
That
doesn't mean it isn't in trouble, but it is a reason to view what
spooky
inside informants say with skepticism."
Shortly after his appointment, Hayden assembled a group of highly
regarded
mid-level managers and gave them free rein to evaluate the agency. He
also
began a series of meetings, outside Fort Meade, to get independent
advice.
The evaluations were consistently "brutal," according to one official,
in
terms of the ongoing management problems. On November 15th, Hayden
announced
to the N.S.A. workforce that he was beginning what he called One
Hundred
Days of Change. The next day, he made his move against the
establishment. He
dissolved the agency's leadership structure, despite a bitter protest
from
Barbara McNamara, and announced the formation of a five-member
executive
group, under his leadership, which would be responsible for
decision-making.
LAST month, General Hayden agreed to speak to me, at his unpretentious
top-floor offices at Ops 2, the N.S.A. headquarters building. He is an
affable spymaster, who laughs easily, offers no slogans, and promises
no
quick fixes for the agency's problems. He seemed to understand that
his new
troops -- computer gurus and mathematicians -- are unlike any others
he had
commanded before.
When I brought up the agency's long-standing war against the export of
encryption, Hayden quickly dismissed it as yesterday's lost battle. He
also
took issue with those who criticized Barbara McNamara and other
civilian
managers for their failure to anticipate the communications upheaval.
"Barbara McNamara has been a good deputy to me," he said. "But I make
the
decisions."
Hayden emphasized that the personnel problems are far less significant
than
the technological ones: "The issue is not people but external changes.
For
the N.S.A., technology is a two-edged sword. If technology in the
outside
world races away from us -- at breakneck speed -- our mission is more
difficult. It can be our enemy."
When I asked Hayden about the agency's capability for unwarranted
spying on
private citizens -- in the unlikely event, of course, that the agency
could
somehow get the funding, the computer scientists, and the knowledge to
begin
making sense out of the Internet -- his response was heated. "I'm a
kid from
Pittsburgh with two sons and a daughter who are closet libertarians,"
he
said. "I am not interested in doing anything that threatens the
American
people, and threatens the future of this agency. I can't emphasize
enough to
you how careful we are. We have to be so careful -- to make sure that
America is never distrustful of the power and security we can
provide."
General Hayden made no effort to minimize his agency's plight. During
the
Cold War, he said, the N.S.A. was "technologically more adept than our
adversary. Now it's harder to predict where America!s interests will
need to
be in the future." His goal in the near future, he added, speaking
carefully, is to determine which of the agency's past practices are
applicable to today's high-tech world -- "and which of them may be
counterproductive."
"A lot of the choices are Sophie's choices," he said. "The trade-off
is
between modernizations (recruiting computer scientists and beginning
long-range programs to tackle the Internet) "and readiness" -- that
is,
meeting the hectic operational needs of the Defense Department and the
White
House for immediate intelligence. "We have a high ops tempo," he
added, "but
choices have to be made." In other words, he made clear, some ongoing
N.S.A.
intelligence-collection programs will have to be curtailed, or
eliminated,
so that funds are available for futuristic research.
"In its forty-year struggle against Soviet Communism," Hayden noted,
"the
N.S.A. was thorough, stable, and focussed." Then he asked "What's
changed?"
and he answered, "All of that."
) The New Yorker 1999
-- **** (@ .), December 07, 1999.