[iwar] [fc:Never.tell.an.enemy.that.you.can.read.his.messages,]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-04 07:08:32


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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2001 07:08:32 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: [iwar] [fc:Never.tell.an.enemy.that.you.can.read.his.messages,]
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THURSDAY OCTOBER 04 2001    
Counsel of war  
BY CHRISTOPHER ANDREW   
    
Never tell an enemy that you can read his messages, or untold lives may
be lost.  That maxim applies to tackling Osama bin Laden just as it did
to fighting Hitler
    
At a time when the British intelligence community faces its greatest
challenge since the Cold War, this week also sees a major commemoration
of the greatest achievement in British intelligence history: the success
of the Bletchley Park codebreakers in cracking the German Enigma and
other enemy ciphers.  The “Ultra” intelligence derived from this
success shortened the Second World War, probably by at least a year. 
The film Enigma, based on Robert Harris’s bestselling novel about
Bletchley Park, is now on general release.  A new book, Action This Day,
published in aid of the Bletchley Park Trust, brings together for the
first time the recollections of Bletchley veterans and the work of
intelligence historians.  Both Enigma and Action This Day underscore one
simple lesson that remains of crucial importance in the current
intelligence war against Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network. 

The genius of the codebreakers and the skill of those who intercepted
enemy communications during the Second World War would have been to no
avail if their secret had not been kept.  If the Nazi high command had
discovered that Enigma had been broken, as they very nearly did, their
cipher systems would have changed and there would have been no Ultra. 
The cost of that discovery would have been measured in, at the very
least, hundreds of thousands of lives.  One of the most memorable
sequences in Enigma intercuts footage of codebreakers in a Bletchley
Nissen hut struggling to break the U-boat version of the Enigma cipher
with film of a convoy in the North Atlantic, carrying crucial war
supplies, which is about to be intercepted by a U-boat wolf-pack.  But
for Bletchley’s success in breaking that Enigma variation at the end
of 1942, the Battle of the North Atlantic, the longest drawn-out battle
in the history of naval warfare, might well have ended in victory for
the U-boats.  The extraordinary intelligence produced by Bletchley Park
was probably the best-kept secret in modern British history.  The 10,000
men and women who worked there were, in Churchill’s phrase, “the
geese who laid the golden eggs and never cackled”.  Not until the
Ultra secret was declassified in the mid-1970s did Bletchley veterans
begin to cackle.  A student in my Cambridge college at the time told me
how, during the holiday, he and his family had watched the first BBC
documentary on Bletchley which showed wartime Wrens (members of the
Women’s Royal Naval Service) operating the “Bombes” used to break
Enigma.  At the end of the programme, his mother turned to the rest of
the family and told them “that’s where I worked.  That’s what I
did”.  Until then, neither her husband nor her children had known that
she had been a wartime codebreaker.  The most extraordinary thing about
this extraordinary story is that, so far as the codebreakers were
concerned, it was not unusual. 

Shortly before the publication in 1979 of the first volume of the
official history of wartime intelligence by Sir Harry Hinsley, the
distinguished historian, Hinsley addressed a reunion of Bletchley Park
veterans and their spouses.  Afterwards, the husbands of several former
Wrens approached Hinsley (himself a Bletchley veteran) and said “my
wife never breathed a word to me”.  For the mostly youthful wartime
recruits to Bletchley Park, “indoctrination” into the “Ultra”
secret was an experience that had few, if any, previous parallels in
British history.  Until their recruitment to Bletchley, hardly any were
even aware that Britain had a signals intelligence (Sigint) agency that
broke other countries’ codes.  Yet suddenly they found themselves,
during Britain’s “finest hour”, in possession of a secret the
revelation of which might do irreparable damage to the war effort.  No
wonder that some, perhaps many, suffered from nightmares in which they
unwittingly gave away the secret.  Some of those nightmares must have
been revived recently by the publicity given to the intelligence
offensive against bin Laden by the US Sigint agency, NSA, and its
British ally, GCHQ (the successor to Bletchley Park).  A few years ago
an official in the Clinton Administration appears to have revealed that,
during a visit to NSA, he had heard highly classified recordings of
satellite telephone conversations between bin Laden and his mother. 

The story of those conversations has since been published worldwide.  It
has also been reported widely that when a US warship in the Indian Ocean
launched Tomahawk missiles against bin Laden’s Afghan terrorist base
in retaliation for the bombing of American Embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania in 1998, the missiles were locked on to the signal from his
satellite phone.  The damage done by such revelations does not compare
with the horrendous consequences that would have resulted from the
wartime revelation of the Ultra secret.  But it represents an appalling
intelligence “own goal”.  Unsurprisingly, bin Laden no longer uses
his satellite phone, and tracking him down has become much more
difficult.  The lesson, obvious to all who worked at Bletchley Park, is
to stop telling bin Laden anything about the intelligence operations
against him. 

Sadly, there is no sign that the lesson has been learnt.  Stories
continue to be published about the interception of “every phone call,
fax, Internet and microwave transmission in or out of Afghanistan by the
joint UK-US Echelon surveillance system to try to locate bin Laden and
his closest lieutenants .  .  .  using a voice-recognition scanner”. 
There also continue to be leaks about the monitoring of mobile telephone
conversations among the al-Qaeda network.  According to one US senator,
NSA intercepted a call from one member of the network to another after
the terrorist attacks on September 11, which announced exultantly “we
have hit the targets”.  Having seen his words reported in the press,
both the terrorist and his associates will doubtless be more cautious in
future.  In order to provide incontrovertible proof to Nato and other
allies of bin Laden’s responsibility for the September 11 attacks, it
is necessary to provide them with classified information, some of it
probably drawn from the interception of al-Qaeda communications. 

But the case for giving publicity to our ability to listen in to Osama
bin Laden and his network rests on one of two desperately threadbare
arguments: either that the terrorists pay no attention to what the
Western media reveal about intelligence surveillance of them; or that it
does not matter if they do.  In fact they do pay attention, and it does
matter.  Although al-Qaeda’s ideology is simplistic, it seems to have
access to sophisticated IT.  One of the newest items of intelligence
jargon is what some experts call “Hackint” — intelligence obtained
from the penetration of information systems.  According to a US
presidential commission, the global population with the computer skills
required for Hackint operations and other forms of cyber-attack against
important Western targets has grown from a few thousand 20 years ago to
about 19 million today.  It would be naive to assume that none of them
works for al-Qaeda.  Among the most worrying disclosures in the
immediate aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the
Pentagon was evidence that the terrorists had discovered the White House
security codewords in use on September 11.  Two days later, President
Bush’s press secretary, Ari Fleischer, told journalists that, at the
time of the attacks, a threat against the President and Air Force One
had been telephoned to the White House by a caller using the codewords. 
As a result, Bush’s security advisers told him to stay away from the
White House for much of the day and flew him to Louisiana and Nebraska
before they judged it safe for him to return to Washington.  Since then
the story has become confused.  Although reaffirmed last week by a
senior official in the Bush Administration, it was contradicted by CBS,
which claimed that the telephone call “never happened” and that
White House staffers had “apparently misunderstood comments made by
their security detail”.  Whatever the truth of Fleischer’s statement
that White House codes were penetrated, it should act as a warning that
al-Qaeda has computer hackers as well as suicide bombers.  The less that
is said in public about GCHQ and NSA operations against bin Laden and
al-Qaeda, the more likely they are to succeed.  Past experience suggests
that this simple lesson will not be learnt easily.  Churchill is now
remembered rightly as the chief protector of the Ultra secret.  What is
usually forgotten, however, is that he learnt the importance of Sigint
security the hard way after committing a series of intelligence gaffes. 
During the 1920s Churchill was one of those who compromised Britain’s
most important intelligence source — the Sigint derived from breaking
Soviet codes.  The “perfidy and treachery” in intercepted Soviet
diplomatic telegrams was, he declared, so outrageous that their contents
should be made public whatever the consequences. 

Then, as now, some of the worst Sigint indiscretions concerned
Afghanistan.  The breaches of security were on a scale which far
exceeded recent revelations about bin Laden’s telephone calls.  In May
1923 the Cabinet authorised the Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, to quote
decrypted Soviet telegrams from Moscow to the Soviet envoy in Kabul,
Fyodor Raskolnikov, in a diplomatic note protesting at Soviet
“subversion” on the North-West Frontier.  Not content with quoting
from Soviet decrypts, Curzon taunted Moscow publicly with the fact that
its telegrams to and from Kabul had been intercepted and decrypted by
British codebreakers: “The Russian Commissariat for Foreign Affairs
will no doubt recognise the following communication, dated February 21,
1923, which they received from Mr Raskolnikov .  .  .  The Commissariat
for Foreign Affairs will also doubtless recognise a communication
received by them from Kabul, dated November 8, 1922 .  .  .  Nor will
they have forgotten a communication, dated March 16, 1923, from Mr
Karakhan, the Assistant Commissary for Foreign Affairs, to Mr
Raskolnikov .  .  .  After a series of such monumental breaches of
Sigint security, in 1927 Moscow introduced the virtually unbreakable
“one-time pad” cipher system.  The head of Britain’s interwar
Sigint agency, A.G.  Denniston, wrote bitterly that the result of the
Government’s revelations about the breaking of Soviet codes had been
“to compromise our work beyond question”.  For the next 20 years
British cryptanalysts were able to decrypt almost no high-grade Soviet
communications.  The lessons of 1927, which led to the loss of
Britain’s most valuable interwar intelligence source, were crucial to
the later protection of the Ultra secret.  No politician took those
lessons more to heart than Winston Churchill.  After he became Prime
Minister in 1940, he allowed only half a dozen of his 36 ministers to
share the secret of the cryptanalysts’ “golden eggs”.  The Special
Liaison Units set up to pass Ultra to commanders in the field were, at
the time, the most sophisticated system ever devised to protect the
secrecy of wartime intelligence. 

The profound change in Churchill’s attitude to Sigint security is
shown in the contrast between his books on the world wars.  In his
memoirs of the First World War he had written lyrically of the
importance of Sigint; in his memoirs of the Second World War there is no
mention of Ultra.  Churchill was wrong to conclude that the Ultra secret
should never be revealed.  Its disclosure in the mid-1970s did no
observable damage to national security.  The role of Sigint in
20th-century British history was far too important for it to be erased
permanently from the historical record.  Intelligence historians are
right to complain that Whitehall is too slow to release the Sigint
archive.  Second World War decrypts began to reach the Public Record
Office 30 years afterwards.  Though it is now 50 years since the Korean
War, however, its Sigint records are still classified.  While
Whitehall’s determination to protect the secrecy of 50-year-old Sigint
successes is difficult to defend, however, its concern with recent and
current Sigint security is wholly justified. 

The beginning of the Falklands conflict provides a cautionary example of
the damage that can be done by breaches of Sigint security just as our
forces are preparing to engage an enemy several thousand miles from
home.  On the eve of the departure of the British task force for the
South Atlantic in 1982, the Labour MP, Ted Rowlands, revealed to the
Commons that, when he had been Minister of State at the Foreign Office
only a few years earlier, GCHQ “had been reading (Argentinian)
telegrams for many years”.  “Argentina, in terms of intelligence,”
Rowlands declared, was “an open book”.  After his Commons speech, it
was so no longer.  Argentina changed its codes and Britain’s ability
to read its diplomatic and some of its service traffic was lost at the
very moment when it was needed most.  One of those most closely
concerned with intelligence during the Falklands conflict remembers
Rowlands’s gaffe as “incredibly damaging”: “He got a real
rocket, but the damage was done.  At the time it seemed possible that
the damage might be catastrophic.  We suddenly lost the ability to
locate two Argentinian submarines which we feared might threaten the
task force.”

There is a clear and present danger that revelations about the Sigint
offensive against international terrorism may do similar damage.  The
time has come to relearn the lessons of Bletchley Park and the Ultra
secret.  Christopher Andrew’s most recent book (with Vasili Mitrokhin)
is The Mitrokhin Archive (Penguin, £9.99).  He is also a contributor to
the new volume published in aid of the Bletchley Park Trust, Action This
Day, edited by Michael Smith and Ralph Erskine (Bantam Press, £25). 

GOVERNMENTS' HEARING AIDS Listening satellites: Menwith Hill, In
Yorkshire, the world's largest electronic surveillance field station,
controls a network of listening satellites, most of which are now
directed at the Middle East.  In fixed orbits 40,000km above the Earth,
satellites employ listening dishes more than 50 metres across.  These
can intercept and relay low-powered radio signals, including those from
mobile phones.  They can also discriminate between individual operators
and radio equipment.  Echelon: After the Second World War, intelligence
agencies from the US, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand
developed the Echelon listening network.  The system collects
information through radio antennae, satellites and sniffer devices that
collect Internet communications from data packets.  The system also
recognises certain key words or phrases from a “dictionary” provided
by the Americans.  Messages containing key words are intercepted by
intelligence officers.  All information comes to GCHQ in Cheltenham. 

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