Re: [iwar] [fc:The.biggest.intelligence.agency.ought.to.know.better]

From: e.r. (fastflyer28@yahoo.com)
Date: 2002-06-02 21:14:53
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 10 point shot for fred!
  Fred Cohen <fc@all.net> wrote: Too Much, Not Enough
The biggest intelligence agency ought to know better

By James Bamford
Sunday, June 2, 2002; Page B01

Amid all the questions about possible intelligence failures at the CIA and
FBI related to Sept. 11, one spy group -- the National Security Agency (NSA)
-- has largely escaped the public spotlight. But a congressional joint
intelligence committee, which will examine those questions in closed
hearings beginning Tuesday, will give particular attention to missed
opportunities at the secretive NSA -- the largest of all such agencies and
the one specifically created to warn America of surprise attack at home.

In one of the greatest ironies of Sept. 11, the NSA, which intercepts
massive amounts of signals intelligence from all over the world, did not
know that some of the terrorists had set up shop literally under its nose.
It is now clear that NSA officials passed within feet of the terrorists who
were on their way to blow up the Pentagon. An al Qaeda cell had improbably
chosen to live in Laurel, the Maryland bedroom community just outside the
NSA's gates, while they planned their attack.

For months, theterrorists and the NSA employees exercised in some of the
same local health clubs and shopped in the same grocery stores. Finally, as
the terrorists pulled out of the Valencia Motel on Route 1 on their way to
Dulles Airport and American Flight 77, they crossed paths with many of the
electronic spies who were turning into Fort Meade, home of the NSA, to begin
another day hunting for terrorists.

It would be unfair to expect any agency to thwart every attack. But the
congressional investigation should examine why the agency missed several
chances over the years to crack open the terrorist organization whose latest
attack on U.S. soil killed more than 3,000 people in three states.

Perhaps the greatest missed opportunity had to do with Osama bin Laden
himself. For about two years, until August 1998, NSA was able to eavesdrop
on senior al Qaeda communications by monitoring bin Laden's personal
satellite telephone. This gave the agency enormous insight into his
organization including the makeup of its top leadership, with whom it was in
contact and the nature of its activities. Still, that insight was not enough
to provide warning of several attacks.

Bin Laden began using the phone in 1996 when he moved his headquarters from
Sudan to a remote area of Afghanistan, where communications were
considerably more difficult. It was obtained for bin Laden by an associate
in London, Khalid Fawwaz, who would later be charged with conspiring with
bin Laden to murder U.S. citizens abroad. Fawwaz turned to a student at the
University of Missouri in Columbia to buy the $7,500 phone. Through Fawwaz,
bin Laden had an account for service with the International Maritime
Satellite Organization (Inmarsat), which is used largely by ships at sea.

With the help of the British, the NSA monitored bin Laden's communications
via the Inmarsat communications satellite above the Indian Ocean. He and his
key associates made hundreds of calls to people in London, Iran, Saudi
Arabia, Pakistan and Sudan. Bin Laden's phone number, 873682505331, turned
up in the phone lists and date planners of terrorists in Egypt and Kenya.
That number, which no longer reaches bin Laden, was even used, according to
investigators, to disseminate his February 1998 fatwa that declared American
civilians should be killed. From 1996 through 1998,Fawwaz ordered more than
2,000 minutes ofairtime for bin Laden's phone.

Bin Laden and his top lieutenants used the phone to orchestrate the bombings
of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998. Yet, despite NSA's
eavesdropping, the embassies received no warning from the intelligence
agencies about the bombings.

Given NSA's enormous budget, its worldwide eavesdropping capabilities, and
its access to al Qaeda communications, why were these and later attacks able
to succeed? One obstacle was bin Laden's careful use of communications
security. Having spent a decade fighting the Russians, he knew enough to be
careful of what he said over an unencrypted satellite phone. Thus while the
NSA has many tapes of bin Laden's conversations, including many with his
mother, it apparently had none in which he discussed specific terrorist
activities.

Organized into cells, al Qaeda keeps its communications to a minimum and
thuspresents a far more difficult target for the NSA than did the talkative
(and more hierarchically organized) Russians.

More recently, the NSA could have obtained a special warrant to eavesdrop on
the communications that the Sept. 11 hijackers sent from and within the
United States -- including the e-mails they sent from libraries and Internet
cafes. To do this, however, it would have had to know their names. It did
not.

Another missed opportunity lies in the failure to make maximum use of NSA's
Intelink, the spy world's fastest, most efficient way to exchange
information such as CIA analysis, overhead imagery and NSA intercepts.

Had it been fully used, Intelink might have been a way to stopthe Sept. 11
attacks, but even then it would have been a long shot. If all of the FBI
memos pointing to Middle Eastern men taking flight lessons had been
uploaded, for example, the FBI agents in Minnesota looking into the actions
of Zacarias Moussaoui could have found the earlier memos simply by entering
keywords such as "flight school" and "Middle East" or "Arab" or "bin Laden."
The NSA should encourage the FBI to make available all its terrorism-related
field reports on Intelink; it should urge all of the agencies to put up
their field reports, not simply their finished analysis.

Created after World War II primarily to prevent another surprise attack like
the one at Pearl Harbor, NSA hasgrown to become the largest and most costly
of all the intelligence agencies. The $7 billion we pay each year for the
NSA and related operations ($4 billion for the NSA plus another $3 billion
for its satellites, which are built and launched by the National
Reconnaissance Office) is more than double that of the CIA.

NSA's challenges are sizable. For decades, it simply monitored the Soviet
Union, a giant country with fixed naval, military and air bases easily
targeted by the agency's thousands of signals intelligence specialists and
Russian linguists. Today, however, the agency must respond to requests and
priorities from the White House, FBI, CIA, State Department and Pentagon to
locate a small number of suspected terrorists constantly in motion around
the globe.

Just one of the NSA's large listening posts (there are more than a dozen),
picks up more than 2 million communications an hour -- phone calls, e-mail,
faxes. Its smaller posts contribute to the flood of intercepts, but the
challenge is sifting through an enormous and growing electronic haystack in
search of a nearly invisible needle. In 1997, for example, worldwide
telephone service alone amounted to some 82 billion minutes.

"There's simply too much out there, and it's too hard to understand," said
Michael V. Hayden, the NSA's director and an Air Force lieutenant general,
two years ago.

Straining to keep up, the NSA's entire computer system crashed for four days
in 2000. "NSA is in great peril," concluded an internal review of the agency
less than a year earlier. "We have run out of time." The review board
warned: "Absent profound change at NSA, the nation will lose a powerful
weapon in its arsenal."

In addition to the sheer volume of communications, people have changed the
way they communicate. Within the agency it is often said that technology,
once the friend of the NSA, has become its enemy. Gone are the days when the
agency would simply build giant dish-shaped antennas to collect millions of
phone calls transmitted by satellites. Today many of those communications
travel over buried (and therefore hard to tap) fiber-optic cables. And the
cellular phone revolution has wrapped the world in a web of complex, hard to
analyze digital signals.

But of all the problems, lack of trained linguists is probably NSA's
greatest. Last September, the number of linguists fluent in the primary
languages of Afghanistan -- Pashto and Dari -- could be counted on one hand
with fingers left over, a senior intelligence official told me. The problem
is not new: When U.S. troops went into Haiti in 1994, for example, the NSA
had only one Haitian Creole linguist. There are more than 6,500 languages
spoken around the world, according to Renee Meyer, the agency's top
linguist. The NSA has trained linguists in about 115 of them.

One way to lessen the chance of future attack by al Qaeda or similar groups
would be to create a sort of national linguistic reserve force along the
lines of the military reserve. Over several years, the agency could scour
the country looking for native speakers in hundreds of languages who would
be willing to join the linguistic reserve. After passing strict security
clearance procedures, they would receive training and then attend monthly
drills and two weeks of active duty in the summer. Most would probably never
be needed, and the cost to keep them on standby would be minimal. Others
could be called to active duty if a crisis broke out in a linguistically
unusual part of the world. Thus, if Congo were to explode into war again,
the NSA would have a ready force of trained, fluent and security-cleared
Lingala linguists to call on. If hostilities were to break out along the
Burmese-Thai border, the NSA could call on its reserve of Keren, Burmese and
Thai linguists, who would have been recruited over several years.

Finally, there is the problem of the NSA's overemphasis on expensive
collection technology at the expense of trained analysts. This predates the
war on terror by more than a decade: Since 1990, the NSA has cut personnel
by about a third. As John Millis, the former staff director of the House
Select Committee on Intelligence, said two years ago, "We don't come near to
processing, analyzing, and disseminating the intelligence we collect right
now. We're totally out of balance."

As the congressional investigation will no doubt conclude, the pattern of
intelligence failures is likely to continue -- unless the NSA is given the
resources and takes the steps necessary to overcome many of these
shortcomings.

James Bamford, author of "Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret
National Security Agency" (Anchor/Doubleday), is a distinguished visiting
professor at the University of California at Berkeley's Goldman School of
Public Policy.

� 2002 The Washington Post Company


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