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| <nettime> seymour hersh on the NSA |
<http://cryptome.org/nsa-hersh.htm>
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."
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
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