http://www.msnbc.com/news/575733.asp May 19 � �The CRITIC arrived at the National Security Operations Center in the early evening. Short for Critical Intelligence, it is the spy world's highest priority message, used only to report an event of critical importance to the nation. WATCH OFFICERS in the dimly lit room were stunned. One of their EP-3E reconnaissance planes�packed bulkhead to bulkhead with highly secret eavesdropping gear and cipher equipment�was in deep trouble and preparing to crash land on a military airfield in China�the very country on which it was spying. Seconds after the message arrived, notification went out to the president and other senior officials throughout Washington. The emergency landing of the EP-3E on Hainan Island, followed by the detention of the 24 crewmembers, suddenly focused world attention on an activity normally kept under a heavy cloak. � � � �The National Security Operation Center�known as NSOC and pronounced N-sock-sits at the epicenter of America�s vast, worldwide electronic espionage network, a network controlled by the ultrasecret National Security Agency. The emergency landing of the EP-3E on Hainan Island, followed by the detention of the 24 crewmembers, suddenly focused world attention on an activity normally kept under a heavy cloak. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, NSA is eavesdropping on the world. But the capture of the spy plane and its priceless cargo of highly classified equipment and documents�which may give the Chinese clues to avoid future eavesdropping�is just the latest blow to an agency some say may be beginning to go deaf. � � � � SECRET CITY � � � � Twenty-five miles north of the nation�s capitol, near the sleepy Maryland hamlet of Annapolis Junction, a mysterious, restricted exit ramp leads off from the southbound lane of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. It quickly disappears behind tall earthen berms and a wall of trees. What lies beyond the forest is a strange and secret city, one surrounded by a labyrinth of barbed wire fences, motion detectors, hydraulic anti-tank devices, thick cement barriers, and massive, closely-place boulders. Should a threat be detected, the �men-in-black�-commandos in black paramilitary uniforms, special headgear, and brandishing Colt 9mm submachine guns, mobilize. Telephoto surveillance cameras peer down from odd-shaped buildings, armed police patrol the boundaries, and bright yellow signs warn against taking any photographs or making so much as a note or a simple sketch of the metropolis, under the penalties of the Internal Security Act. For nearly half a century, the NSA has quietly monitored Russian military commanders barking orders to tank battalions, tapped into Iraqi diplomatic messages, and snatched faxes between Iranian defense officials and suspected terrorists. � � � �The secret city is home to the National Security Agency, the nation�s largest and most hidden spy agency. For nearly half a century, the NSA has quietly monitored Russian military commanders barking orders to tank battalions, tapped into Iraqi diplomatic messages, and snatched faxes between Iranian defense officials and suspected terrorists. Millions of intercepted conversations per hour flow into the agency�s acres of supercomputers�more numbercrunchers than anywhere else on earth. Using what is known as �brute force,� the codebreaking machines pound streams of encrypted data with a quadrillion�1,000,000,000,000,000�possible solutions in the time it takes to wink. Within NSA�s secret city, time is measured in femtoseconds, one million-billionth of a second. � � � � But on Jan. 24, 2000, a Monday evening, the secret city suddenly went quiet. NSA�s brain, overworked, had a sudden seizure, a blackout. Its ears continued to hear�pulling in millions of messages an hour�but its electronic mind could no longer think. Three miles away in his stately brick home, NSA Director Michael Hayden, a three-star Air Force Gen., had just finished his dinner and was watching television when his secure STU-3 phone rang. The entire system has crashed, he was told. � � � � AGING SUPERCOMPUTERS � � � �The extraordinary crash of �Black Monday� reinforced the fears of many that NSA had finally hit the technological wall. The agency, whose predecessors had played a major role in ending World War II by breaking both the high level German and Japanese codes, could no longer cut it. Fiber-optic cables, with their thin glass strands, were too difficult to tap; the spread of encryption throughout the world was outpacing the agency�s aging supercomputers; and the switch to digital communications, with packets of signals going every which way, had become too complex to intercept. As a result, the agency completely missed such critical events as the Indian nuclear test, the terrorist bombing of the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the attack on the USS Cole. Once NSA officials would show off their prowess to highly cleared visitors by playing intercepts of wanted terrorist Osama bin Laden talking over his satellite phone to his mother. Now NSA officials claim they can no ! longer hear him since he switched to encryption. �We don�t know where he is,� complained one senior official. � � � � Former NSA deputy director Barbara McNamara outlined in stark numbers another of NSA�s key problems today�too much communication. �Forty years ago there were five thousand stand-alone computers, no fax machines, and not one cellular phone.... In 1999 there were over 420 million computers, most of them networked. There were roughly 14 million fax machines and 468 million cell phones and those numbers continue to grow. The telecommunications industry is investing a trillion dollars to encircle the world in millions of miles of high bandwidth fiber-optic cable.� In addition, the Internet currently doubles in size every 100 days. � � � � To help solve the problem, Gen. Hayden commissioned two teams-one from inside the agency and one from the outside-and ordered them to perform the bureaucratic equivalent of exploratory surgery. They both came back with the virtually the same diagnosis�if NSA was going to survive into the 21st Century, it would have to quickly evolve from a moribund, Cold War heirloom into a model of corporate efficiency. Outside professionals were brought in�once considered unthinkable in such a secret organization�to manage the agency�s sloppy bookkeeping, expensive acquisitions, and a dozen other operations. Resources are slowly improving and the agency had made enormous efforts to hire cyber-savy college graduates, even holding a job fair at the agency, another first. Competing with the corporate world for talent is difficult because of the need for new employees to sign elaborate secrecy agreements, undergo distasteful polygraph exams, and snoopy background investigations. The se! curity procedures are far more stringent than at the FBI, where an alleged mole was recently caught. In fact, as a result of the spy arrest, security may get even tighter. The entire philosophy of how to conduct worldwide eavesdropping in the age of the Internet and digital data had to be rethought. � � � �The entire philosophy of how to conduct worldwide eavesdropping in the age of the Internet and digital data had to be rethought. The solution was to scrap many of the old methods�using massive antenna farms to collect outdated high frequency communications, for example. Ironically, many also would have preferred to eliminate or greatly reduce the ancient, expensive EP-3P patrols, another relic of the Cold War, but the Navy objected. Instead, greater research would go into tapping fiber optic cables, reverse engineering the Internet, analyzing the warehouses of information already collected, and pushing far ahead in developing ever faster and unique methods of number crunching, such as quantum computing, a key to codebreaking. � � � � NOT ENOUGH ANALYSTS � � � �As a result of many of these changes, while the agency�s hearing may not be as fine-tuned as officials would like, NSA is hardly going deaf. In a highly secret discussion with senior agency engineers, a top NSA official confirmed that the spy agency had managed to tap into all forms of modern communications�including fiber-optic cables�and that the main problem was finding enough analysts to listen to it all. �The projections that we made five, six, eight years ago,� said the official, Terry Thompson, �about the increasing volumes of collection and what that�s going to mean for our analysts have all come true, thanks in large part to the work that you all and others have done. We�re much further ahead now in terms of being able to access and collect [Internet] network data, fiber-optics, cellular data, all the different modalities of communications that we are targeting, and that results in a lot of output for our analysts.� � � � � Thompson, an NSA deputy director until last year when he was put in charge of the agency�s inauguration transition team, also explained one of the ways NSA taps into the Internet. They do it, he said, by hiring people away from the key U.S. companies involved in developing critical components for the network, such as Cisco Systems. With their help, the agency �reverse engineers� the components�dissecting them like a biology student peeling the skin off a frog-looking for weak spots and vulnerabilities that they can then exploit. �Virtually all Internet traffic travels across the system of one company: Cisco Systems,� says a Cisco television ad. � � � � Another problem facing NSA is the growing switch by telecommunications companies from easy to intercept satellite communications to difficult undersea cables, which are faster and allow for more circuits. But NSA long ago solved that problem also. Special submarines were built to plant sophisticated bugging equipment on the cables. It is a technique that has been used against Russian and other undersea networks for years. � � � � LISTENING TO VLADIVOSTOK � � � �In 1975 the USS Halibut, a specially designed nuclear submarine, sailed into the Sea of Okhotsk, a body of water nearly surrounded by Russia in the Far East. Like a moon-lander, she slowly settled down on the mucky bottom, black clouds of silt rising in the total darkness. In order to sit on the floor of the sea for weeks at a time, the Halibut was equipped with unique sledlike skis to keep the round bottom from rolling. On board was a specially selected NSA team. Their mission was to tap into one of Russia�s most sensitive undersea communications cables, running from the Kamchatka Peninsula, home of some of Russia�s most sensitive submarine and missile testing facilities, to Vladivostok, headquarters of the Soviet Pacific Fleet. � � � � Divers pulled the tap, like a long jumper cable, from a compartment on the side of the sub and attached it to Soviet cable at a repeater box-used to amplify the signal. Despite a near disaster, an emergency that nearly forced the captain to quickly surface leaving the divers to die at the cable, the operation proved beyond the expectation of anyone at NSA. � � � � �We could tune in to any of the channels and listen to them,� said team leader John Arnold. �It had all kinds of stuff-you name it, it was there.� Flowing through the cables and onto NSA�s tape recorders were the voices of Soviet military commanders discussing military and naval operations and data transfers between commands. Some was in the clear and some was encrypted. �We turned in probably seven-hundred recordings, broadband recordings� said Arnold. �NSA was elated. They had never seen such good recordings-and such significant material. It was a gold mine for them.... The stuff was so good that NSA wanted more as soon as they could get it.� � � � �To tap into today�s sophisticated undersea cables, the Navy is constructing the most advanced spy submarine ever built, the USS Jimmy Carter. Due to be completed in 2004, it will be able to place pod-like taps on fiber-optic cables for the first time. Hiding the taps from the Russians, however, has become much more difficult since an NSA employee, Ronald Pelton, passed on to them many of the details of the earlier cable tap operation. � � � � Although the world is shifting underneath NSA as a result of enormous growth and changes in the world�s telecommunications systems, given the right resources�and no more disasters like the Navy�s EP-3E loss�the hypersecret agency will likely be able to continue to hear a pin drop in the Kremlin. � � � � ------------------------------------------------------------------------ James Bamford is the author of �Body of Secrets� (Doubleday), an inside look at the National Security Agency from the Cold War to present � � � � � � � � � � � ʩ 2001 Newsweek, Inc. � � � �
