April 29, 2001

Bugging the World

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An investigative reporter traces the history of America's most secretive spy agency.

By JOSEPH FINDER

BODY OF SECRETS Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency From the Cold War Through the Dawn of a New Century. By James Bamford. 721 pp. New York: Doubleday. $29.95.

arly in 1964 the United States Embassy in Moscow discovered to its horror that it was infested with Soviet bugs. For a dozen years or so the Kremlin had been able to eavesdrop on every conversation and to learn about every top-secret cable sent between Moscow and Washington.

Stunned, the State Department ordered a full damage assessment. Its findings, contained in a document declassified just this year, were even more astonishing: this grave compromise, the worst intelligence breach in the entire cold war, hadn't made any difference. Not only had it not altered Soviet behavior to our detriment, but it might even have accomplished something positive by reassuring the Soviets that we really weren't planning to attack them.

Here we are almost four decades later, the cold war over 10 years ago, and you'd think such spy business would have gone the way of the fallout shelter and Ipana toothpaste. Yet our two gravest diplomatic crises of the last year were both precipitated by matters of espionage. When the veteran F.B.I. agent Robert Hanssen was arrested in February and charged with spying for Russia, the circumstances seemed jarringly anachronistic: dead drops of top-secret documents under a wooden footbridge in a park, white tape marks on signs, payments made in cash and diamonds -- everything, it appeared, but spools of microfilm concealed in hollowed-out pumpkins. But there was nothing dated about the secrets Hanssen is accused of selling to the Russians, which concerned the newest and most sophisticated methods of technical surveillance developed by the National Security Agency. And the Navy EP-3E Aries II spy plane that collided with a Chinese fighter jet near Hainan island a few weeks ago was, it turns out, engaged in electronic surveillance on behalf of the same National Security Agency.

The mysterious organization that connects these two incidents is the largest, best-financed and arguably most important spy agency in the world -- and the least known. Created in 1952 in a top-secret presidential order issued by Harry Truman, the N.S.A. (its very existence so highly classified that Washington insiders long quipped that its initials stood for ''No Such Agency'' or ''Never Say Anything'') was cloaked in secrecy until the 1982 publication of James Bamford's landmark account, ''The Puzzle Palace.'' His book, by far the most comprehensive and authoritative account of the agency, quickly became a classic.

Now Bamford, an investigative journalist and a former producer with ABC News, brings us ''Body of Secrets,'' an examination of the National Security Agency from its founding to the present. And he has done it again. Far more than an update of his first book, ''Body of Secrets'' is every bit as impressive an achievement. Not only is this the definitive book on America's most secret agency, but it is also an extraordinary work of investigative journalism, a galvanizing narrative brimming with heretofore undisclosed details.

The N.S.A. is the Vatican of what the spy trade calls Sigint (for signals intelligence), information obtained from intercepting, and often decrypting, voice or electronic communications. It has, accordingly, long been disdainful of the C.I.A., its rival in the intelligence community, for its reliance on old-fashioned cloak-and-dagger, spy-versus-spy techniques, including human intelligence, or Humint. (''The C.I.A. is good at stealing a memo off a prime minister's desk,'' scoffed one former N.S.A. director, ''but they're not much good at anything else.'')

Sigint tends to be much more highly esteemed than Humint among our spy-watchers. Some of America's greatest wartime victories were the result of signals intelligence. By breaking Japan's ciphers during World War II, the United States was able to learn in advance of Japan's plans to invade Midway Island -- and thus to inflict heavy losses on the Japanese Navy and shorten the war. Britain's success in cracking Germany's Enigma cipher machine enabled the Allies to detect the location of German U-boats and thus achieve a victory in the Battle of the Atlantic.

But once the war ended and Washington turned its attention to the Soviet Union, it found that all the Kremlin's cipher systems were unreadable. The Sigint war suddenly became more important than ever. Throughout the 1950's, in a highly risky series of sorties, the N.S.A. sent reconnaissance bombers and other spy aircraft into Soviet airspace to record radar signals and ferret out holes in the Soviet Union's air defenses. The Soviets did not hesitate to shoot the planes out of the sky; some 200 Americans lost their lives.

When the Soviets shot down an American U-2 reconnaissance plane in 1960, Bamford has found, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was so determined to conceal his role in the fiasco -- he had actually micromanaged the program from the Oval Office'' -- that he explicitly ordered his cabinet officers to lie under oath to Congress about his involvement. This was a clear case of suborning perjury that, had it been discovered, might well have led to Eisenhower's impeachment.

Intelligence, of course, is only as good as the uses to which it is put, and politics often trumps facts. During the war in Vietnam, the N.S.A.'s careful estimates, which indicated that the number of enemy troops was far greater than the Defense Department wanted to admit, were much more accurate than those of any other American intelligence agency. Yet the Pentagon -- in particular, Gen. William C. Westmoreland's command in Vietnam -- was bent on convincing both high-level policy makers in Washington and the American public that the war was eminently winnable. So it chose to ignore the N.S.A.'s data.

Where ''Body of Secrets'' is weakest, I think, is in its account of the most horrific incident in the N.S.A.'s history, the assault on the spy ship Liberty a few miles off the Sinai peninsula during the 1967 Middle East war. On orders from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the N.S.A. had sent the Liberty into the war zone to collect intelligence on the presence of Soviet troops and weapons in Egypt. On the afternoon of June 8, 1967, the Liberty was attacked by Israeli forces; 34 Americans were killed, 171 wounded. Was it, as Israel maintained, a ''tragic accident''? Or was it, as conspiracy theorists and some of the ship's survivors insist, a coldblooded and deliberate action by the Israelis in order to eliminate evidence of damaging information the Liberty had intercepted?

Rather too credulously, Bamford sides with the conspiracy theorists. He argues that the Israelis were attempting to cover up a gruesome mass murder by Israeli soldiers of some 400 Egyptian P.O.W.'s at the Sinai town of El Arish. Israel, Bamford claims, acted because it was convinced that the N.S.A. ship was recording intelligence on this massacre. ''Israeli soldiers were butchering civilians and bound prisoners by the hundreds,'' he writes, ''a fact that the entire Israeli Army leadership knew about and condoned.'' He charges, too, that the White House and Congress ''covered up'' the facts of the attack. But is it really possible that such an explosive secret could have been kept under wraps for so long by the Johnson administration, the United States Congress and all of the famously fractious Israeli Army leadership?

And what serious evidence is there that a massacre of 400 Egyptians really took place? Bamford's own proof seems rather slender. He cites, for instance, the eyewitness testimony of an Israeli journalist, Gabi Bron. Bamford writes: ''Bron saw about 150 Egyptian P.O.W.'s sitting on the ground, crowded together with their hands held at the backs of their necks. 'The Egyptian prisoners of war were ordered to dig pits and then army police shot them to death,' Bron said.'' The implication here is that 150 Egyptians were slaughtered. Yet the journalist's full account actually states, ''I saw five prisoners killed this way'' -- a brutal war crime if true, yes, but of quite a different magnitude.

It hardly seems plausible that Israel would deliberately attack an American ship, killing dozens of American sailors, risking a confrontation with a superpower and its only ally -- in short, perpetrating one massacre in order to cover up another. Perhaps Bamford's analysis has been skewed by his palpable distaste for the Israeli state: ''Throughout its history, Israel has hidden its abominable human rights record behind pious religious claims,'' he writes. ''Critics are regularly silenced with outrageous charges of anti-Semitism.'' And: ''No one in the weak-kneed House and Senate wanted to offend powerful pro-Israel groups and lose their fat campaign contributions.''

By the end of the Vietnam War, the N.S.A.'s staff had exploded to 95,000, five times that of the C.I.A. It had its own army, navy and air force, listening posts around the world, a fleet of satellites in space and seemingly unlimited financing. Yet its darkest, most closely held secret, Bamford reports, was that for decades, since the agency's birth, it had been unable to crack a single major Soviet cipher. Not until 1979 was the N.S.A. finally able to decrypt Russian voice communications and eavesdrop on the conversations of Soviet leaders talking in their limousines.

The N.S.A. had no such difficulty keeping Americans under surveillance, a blatant violation of its charter. From its earliest days it had been illegally spying on United States citizens, Bamford notes, monitoring all telegrams sent to and from the United States under the auspices of a program code-named Shamrock. In 1967, the N.S.A. began watching numerous Americans (including such dire threats to national security as Joan Baez and Jane Fonda). Although such domestic surveillance has been terminated, Bamford writes, the N.S.A. is now engaged in a huge global eavesdropping operation, linking a network of spy satellites from the United States, Britain and New Zealand through a software package called Echelon. This program attempts to filter all of the world's signals traffic using lists of names and key words, in order to identify terrorist threats, illegal arms deals, narcotics trafficking and the like. Unsurprisingly, Echelon has given rise to all sorts of paranoid fantasies, convincing people around the world that their every phone conversation, fax or e-mail message is being monitored by an all-powerful spy agency in the sky. Bamford, no apologist for the N.S.A., believes this isn't so. He details the many hoops through which the agency must jump to get permission to pursue an American citizen, a process that leaves a wide array of bureaucratic trails.

Moreover, even if the N.S.A. had the resources, and the desire, to listen in on everyone's phone conversations and to read everyone's e-mail, it is rapidly losing the ability to do so. This is the N.S.A.'s final dirty little secret: the explosion of digital communications, powerful encryption software and buried fiber-optic cable has made the agency's job nearly impossible. Military communications no longer bounce off microwave towers and spill into the ether, ripe for the picking, but instead zip along the filaments of fiber-optic cables. Drug traffickers now use encrypted digital cell phones. When India stunned the world by carrying out nuclear tests in May 1998 in defiance of a longstanding moratorium, the N.S.A. (and thus Washington) was caught unawares, one of the most remarkable intelligence failures of the past decades. The reason: India's defense establishment had begun using digital encryption that defeated the N.S.A.'s attempts to listen in. As more than one N.S.A. critic has pointed out, technology, once the N.S.A.'s friend, has now become its enemy.

So the agency has begun to rely more and more on a covert N.S.A./C.I.A. unit called the Special Collection Service, which specializes in black-bag jobs, planting bugs in computer networks, bribing code clerks. It's the ultimate irony that the agency, which was founded on the premise that the age of the human spy was over, and which never attempted to hide its contempt for the C.I.A., must now turn for its salvation to the good old-fashioned cloak and dagger.

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Joseph Finder writes frequently about intelligence. His most recent novel is ''High Crimes.''

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