By January 1968 NSA had placed Vietnam under a massive electronic microscope. Sigint specialists even scanned every North Vietnamese newspaper for pictures of communications equipment. Hardly a signal could escape capture by one of the agency's antennas, whether in a mud-covered jeep slogging through the Mekong Delta or in the belly of a Blackbird flying sixteen miles over Hanoi at three times the speed of sound. Yet the signals were useless without adequate analysis, and analysis was useless if military commanders ignored it.
A few years earlier the Joint Chiefs of Staff had calmly approved committing acts of terrorism against Americans in order to trick them into supporting a war they wanted against Cuba. Now that they finally had a war, the senior military leadership once again resorted to deceit -- this time to keep that war going. Somehow they had to convince the public that they were winning when they were really losing.
"If SD and SSD [both were Vietcong Self Defense forces-militia] are included in the overall enemy strength, the figure will total 420,000 to 431,000," General Creighton Abrams, the deputy US. commander in Vietnam, secretly 'cabled the chairman of the JCS in August 1967. "This is in sharp contrast to the current overall strength figure of about 299,000 given to the press here.... We have been projecting an image of success over the recent months..... Now, when we release the figure of 420,000-431,000, the newsmen will ... [draw] an erroneous and gloomy conclusion as to the meaning of the increase.... In our view the strength figures for the SD and SSD should be omitted entirely from the enemy strength figures in the forthcoming NIE [CIA National Intelligence Estimate]."
As intercept operators trolled for enemy communications, the results flowed back to NSA, where analysts deciphered, translated, and traffic-analyzed the massive amounts of data. Reports then went to the CIA and other consumers, including General Westmoreland's headquarters, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV). Westmoreland's staff included NSA's Sigint reports in the command's highly classified publications, including the Weekly Intelligence Estimate Updates and the Daily Intelligence Summaries, both read by Westmoreland. Nevertheless, MACV refused to include any" NSA data in its order-of-battle summaries, claiming that the information was too highly classified.
There may have been another reason. NSA's Sigint was making it increasingly clear that enemy strength was far greater than the military commanders in Vietnam and the Pentagon were letting on, either publicly or in secret. CIA Director Richard Helms saw the difference between the estimates and told his top Vietnam adviser, George Carver, that "the Vietnam numbers game" would be played "with ever increasing heat and political overtones" during the year. To help resolve the problem, he asked analysts from the CIA, NSA, and the Defense Intelligence Agency to travel to Saigon and meet with General Westmoreland's staff to resolve the differences in numbers.
The meeting took place in Saigon in September at the U.S. embassy. Over a conference table strewn with intercepts and secret reports, the Washington analysts attempted to make their case, but it was useless. Rather than rely on NSA's Sigint for enemy strength figures, the military instead relied on questionable prisoner interrogations. "MACV used mainly Confidential-level documents and prisoner interrogation reports," said a recent CIA study, "and, in contrast with CIA's practice, did not generally use data derived from intercepted enemy radio signals, or Sigint."
George Carver, the lead CIA analyst at the meeting, expressed his anger in an "eyes-only" cable to Helms, characterizing the mission as "frustratingly unproductive since MACV stonewalling, obviously under orders," Despite the evidence, he said, Westmoreland's officers refused to accept any estimates of enemy forces larger than 298,000, and "the inescapable conclusion" must be drawn that Westmoreland "has given instructions tantamount to direct order that VC strength total will not exceed 300,000 ceiling." He added that he was planning to see Westmoreland the next day and would "endeavor to loosen this strait-jacket. Unless I can, we are wasting our time."
In the end, the military refused to budge. Westmoreland's top military intelligence officer, Major General Phillip Davidson, told Carver to buzz off. "I was frequently and sometimes tendentiously interrupted by Davidson," Carver cabled Helms, "[who] angrily accused me of impugning his integrity," and who stated that the figures MACV had tabled were its "final offer, not subject to discussion. We should take or leave it." Eventually, caving in to the pressure, Carver and the CIA took it, greatly angering many of the other analysts.
***
In November 1967, NSA began reporting that two North Vietnamese Army divisions and three regiments were heading toward South Vietnam. Follow-up reports continued over the next several months until the units arrived in South Vietnam, or in staging areas in the DMZ and Laos, in late 1967 and early 1968.
Other reports began coming in January 1968 that a major attack was in the works. William E. Rowe, with the ASA's 856th Radio Research Detachment near Saigon, picked up intelligence that two Vietcong regiments were planning to overrun the U.S. compound at Long Binh, Bien Hoa Air Base, and several other locations around the Saigon area. In addition to passing the information to NSA, the Sigint detachment "also told MACV headquarters personnel about reports of the planned attack on the Bien Hoa Air Base and several sites in Saigon such as the MACV headquarters building, the U.S. Embassy, the relay station, the radio station and the Phu Tho racetrack," said Rowe. "MACV headquarters personnel sloughed off the information. They ignored intelligence reports indicating the Vietcong were assembling in tunnels, caves, and foxholes."
On January 17, NSA issued the first in a series of intelligence bulletins reviewing recent Sigint from Vietnam. It was likely, said the report, that NVA units were preparing to attack cities in Kontum, Pleiku, and Darlac provinces. Other attacks were being planned against the coastal provinces of Quang Nam, Quang Tin, Quang Ngai, and Bin Dihn. Still other intercepts indicated that Hue would be attacked. NSA reported that Sigint had also picked: up indications of increased enemy presence near Saigon.
Despite all these reports, the mood within Westmoreland's headquarters was upbeat, like the bridge on the Titanic. Although he was being warned that there were icebergs ahead, Westmoreland knew his massive ship was unsinkable. According to a recent CIA analysis, "A 'we are winning' consensus pretty much permeated the Saigon-Washington command circuit; intelligence reports and analyses that deviated from it tended to be discounted."
Off the coast of North Korea, the USS Pueblo was attacked on January 23, suddenly turning attention from the growing threat of a North Vietnamese invasion to the possibility of North Korean invasion. Many in the Johnson administration saw a connection. "It would seem to us that there is a relationship," said Westmoreland. Johnson and McNamara agreed. Nevertheless, there has never been any indication that the two events were in any way linked.
Incredibly, despite the fact that NSA's Sigint warnings on Vietnam were becoming more and more alarming, the USS Oxford, NSA's premiere spy ship, was given permission to leave its station. On January 23, as North Korea captured the Pueblo and North Vietnam was on the verge of a major offensive, the Oxford sailed to Bangkok for a week of R&R. It was an enormous gaffe.
The following day, NSA reaffirmed an earlier report that attacks against cities were imminent in northern and central South Vietnam. On January 25, NSA issued another alert, "Coordinated Vietnamese Communist Offensive Evidenced." The Sigint report gave clear evidence that a major attack was about to take place, citing an "almost unprecedented volume of urgent messages.... passing among major [enemy] commands." The analysis went on to predict imminent coordinated attacks throughout all of South Vietnam, especially in the northern half of the country. Tet, the Vietnamese lunar New Year, was only five days off.
Richard McCarthy also noticed unusual activity in the days before Tet. He was on a direction-finding patrol near the Cambodian border in his small RU-6A Beaver. Nearby was a large rubber plantation, Lac Ninh. "Evening missions were usually very quiet," he said. "The Americans were all lagging [sic] into their night defensive positions, and the VC were preparing for their night activities. This night was no exception. There was a large component of the 1st Infantry Division lagging in on the golf course at Loc Ninh, and I could see the smoke from white phosphorus, as smaller units around the area were setting in their final protective fires.
"Suddenly I started picking up a familiar sound. I quickly identified the target as the reconnaissance element of the VC division that controlled the area. This was very unusual, because this guy usually didn't come on the scene until the last phases of planning an attack! When we finished the fix, we knew that we had something big. The target was located 300 yards outside of the American perimeter at Loc Ninh. We tried to contact the [ASA unit] at Loc Ninh, but they had shut down for the night. I elected to return to base and report that fix, instead of flying the full four hours that we were scheduled to fly." McCarthy later learned that his alert had thwarted one of the rehearsal attacks for the coming offensive.
On January 30, Westmoreland finally saw the iceberg dead ahead. He had just been handed several warnings, based on Sigint, from the commander of the U.S. forces in the region around Saigon. The commander, Major General Frederick C. Weyand, had become convinced, by intercepts, traffic analysis, and .DF indications he had just received, that a major offensive was about to take place. Westmoreland immediately canceled a previous Tet cease-fire he had issued and ordered that "effective immediately all forces will resume intensive operations, and troops will be placed on maximum alert." "These precautionary moves," said a recent CIA analysis, "doubtless saved Saigon and the U.S. presence there from disaster."
That night Dave Parks noticed something very unusual. "At twelve midnight, the enemy went on total radio silence," he said. "It was just as if someone had switched off a light -- 'Nil More Heard' on any frequency. Now, that spooked the hell out of me. I had never experienced anything like it. Military units go on radio silence for only one reason: they're up to something. In this case they were on the move to their assigned targets." One of his colleagues, serving a second tour in Vietnam, told Parks, "If anything is going to happen it will happen at three A.M. -- we may as well go and get some sleep." "He was dead on," said Parks, "we got the hell rocketed out of us at precisely three A.M. ... What we didn't expect was the scale and intensity of the attacks."
About the same hour, the 856th Radio Research Detachment at Long Binh, which weeks earlier had attempted to warn Westmoreland of the coming attack, came under bombardment. "They had been hiding n tunnels and foxholes in the area for about two weeks, awaiting orders from Hanoi," said William E. Rowe. "For the next two and a half hours the Vietcong initiated probing attacks against our bunker line and other positions along our perimeter.... Most of my buddies were in the operations building setting satchel charges and incendiary grenades to all the filing cabinets, equipment (radios and receivers), maps and reports -- everything that should not fall into the hands of the enemy."
It was a ferocious attack. "Each time they attacked," said Rowe, "some would get hung up in the wire. Each time they attacked, we went crazy, yelling expletives as we went out to meet them, firing and firing each time they approached. A mound of enemy dead was forming in front of the concertina, body upon body. The frontal attacks lasted for another two hours. After each advance, we would pace up and down the bunker line, nervously anticipating the next attack. After each attack, the mound of enemy dead got bigger and bigger."
As the fighting continued, Rowe's unit began running out of ammunition. "Those not swearing loudly were praying, preparing for close-in fighting. We knew if we did not get more ammunition, it would be a one-on-one struggle for each of us." The Sigint soldiers were ordered to hold their fire until the last instant, to preserve ammo. "When we could wait no longer," said Rowe, "we started to run toward the wire to meet them head on." A short while later, six helicopter gunships carne to the rescue. Nevertheless, the ferocious battle went on for days. By the time it was over, enemy soldiers were stacked five deep around the listening post. "The plows pushed about four hundred dead Vietcong into a low drainage area to the right and in front of our bunker line."
Gary Bright, a stocky, sandy-haired Army warrant officer, woke to the ring of the phone beside his bed in Saigon's Prince Hotel. It was 2:30 A.M. "They've hit the embassy and palace. The airfield is under attack," said the excited voice. "I'm going to blow the switch." The call was from a sergeant at NSA's newly installed Automatic Secure Voice Switch at the MACV compound on Tan Son Nhut Air Base. The switch was the key link for highly secret phone calls between Saigon and Washington, and the sergeant was afraid that the facility and all its crypto equipment would soon be captured. Bright, in charge of the switch, told the soldier to get ready for a destruct order but not to pull the plug before he arrived.
Bright quickly threw on his tan uniform, grabbed his glasses, and ran down three flights of stairs to his jeep. "As we got in I armed my grease gun -- a .45-caliber submachine gun -- and watched the street," he said. Bright and his partner sped down Plantation Road, the main traffic artery, toward the MACV compound. As they rounded the traffic circle near the French racetrack they passed another jeep with its lights on. Seconds later Bright heard a loud explosion and turned around to see the second jeep demolished and in flames. Then he started taking fire from the top of the racetrack wall, bullets crashing into his vehicle. Bright swiveled around and opened fire with his submachine gun, knocking some of the Vietcong shooters off the wall.
Upon reaching the secure switch, Bright began to prepare for emergency destruction. Later a call came in from the U.S. embassy. "The VC were on the first floor," Bright said. The caller was shouting, worried that enemy forces would soon capture the sensitive communications and crypto equipment. To make matters worse, the embassy had no destruct devices and Bright was asked to bring some over. "I got on the phone and told them that it was impossible to get out, much less get downtown to them," Bright recalled. "I told them the best thing to do was to shoot the equipment and smash the boards as much as possible if emergency destruction became necessary."
At the time of the attack, the Oxford's crew was living it up in Bangkok. The ship would not sail back until February 1, a day after the start of the biggest offensive of the war.
Battles were taking place simultaneously throughout South Vietnam, from Hue in the north to Saigon in the south. By the time the acrid cloud of gunsmoke began to dissipate, on February 13, 4,000 American troops had been killed along with 5,000 South Vietnamese and 58,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. Although the United States eventually turned back the Tet offensive, the American public now realized what price was being-paid for a war without end.
The sale winner to come out of Tet was NSA. Of all the intelligence agencies, it was the only any to come up with the right warning at the right time. That the intelligence was not acted on much sooner was the fault of Westmoreland and the generals and politicians in Saigon and Washington who refused to pay attention to anything that might detract from their upbeat version of the war and their fantasy numbers. "The National Security Agency stood alone in providing the kind of warnings the U.S. Intelligence Community was designed to provide," concluded a 1998 CIA review of the war, which gave only mediocre reviews to the agency's own intelligence. "Communications intelligence often afforded a better reading of the enemy's strength and intentions (and was better heeded by command elements) than did agent reports, prisoner interrogations, captured documents, or the analytic conclusions derived from them. But in Washington the Sigint alerts apparently made little impression on senior intelligence officers and policymakers."
Finally, the CIA study concluded, "Senior intelligence and policymaking officers and military leaders erred on two principal scores: for haying let concern for possible political embarrassment derail objective assessments of the enemy order of battle, and for ignoring NSA's alerts and Saigon Station's warnings that did not accord with their previous evaluations of probable enemy strategy."
Pleased with his agency's performance, Director Marshall S. Carter, on May 8, 1968, sent a telegram to former president Harry S. Truman on his eighty-fourth birthday. "The National Security Agency extends its heartiest congratulations and warm wishes," he wrote. "You will recall establishing the National Security Agency in 1952 and we will continue to strive to accomplish the objectives you laid down for us at that time."
Back in Washington, Lyndon Johnson was being compared in the press to General George Custer at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. About a month after the heavy fighting ended, he announced he would no longer be a candidate in the upcoming presidential election. In Vietnam, American troops suddenly began to realize they might be fighting a losing war.
Some soldiers who physically survived Tet nevertheless died inside. Following one fight, an injured American soldier and two wounded Vietcong were brought to an aid station at a firebase named Stephanie. After attempting, unsuccessfully, to save the U.S. soldier, an Army medic went off to have a beer while leaving the two Vietcong, a father and his young son, to bleed to death.
Nearby was Dave Parks, working his PRD-1 direction finder. "Nothing had been done to attend to their wounds," he said. "The younger one, despite having several chest wounds and his left leg shot nearly in two below the knee, was alert; we looked into one another's eyes as I paused briefly to look them over. There was fear in the eyes, and pain. The older fellow was pretty far gone. His eyes were glazed over and half closed.... Without help they were not going to live. Even my untrained eye could see that."
Parks returned to his direction finder, expecting that the medic would treat the men. But a short while later he looked back and saw they had never been attended to. "I got up and went over to them, expecting to find them dead," he said. "The older fellow was dead now, his eyes filmed over but still open in death. The young one was alive but not nearly as alert as before; his dark eyes briefly locked into mine when I approached. I felt the need to do something for him; it looked as if the medic had forgotten these two."
Returning to his DF site, Parks grabbed a canteen to give the young Vietcong some water, but first thought he would check with the medic to see if water was the right thing to give him. "I wondered why nothing was being done ... ," said Parks. "I found the medic inside the bunker drinking a warm beer and asked him what would be done with the VC, adding that one looked as if he was already dead. 'Fuck those gooks,' he swore at me, voice rising. 'Leave them the fuck alone, they can just hurry up and die 'cause I'm not touchin' those filthy bastards!'" Confused by the medic's reaction, Parks returned to the injured boy. "The sergeant had done a good job of intimidating me into doing nothing," he said, "but 1 was still left with the feeling that 1 should try something.
"Looking down on the VC," Parks continued, "it dawned on me that the medic knew full well their situation. He was allowing them to die; it was his payment to the dead American. I spent a moment or two looking at the young Vc. His eyes seemed duller now, and the flies were all over his wounds. I knelt beside him and brushed at the flies to no real effect. 'Screw him,' I thought, thinking of the medic. I pulled the stretcher into the shade. I ripped a square off of the old fellow's shirt and wet it from my canteen. I wiped the teenager's forehead, upper chest, and arms."
Parks attempted to get the help of a nearby Army captain. "'Sir, one of the VC that came in with that kid is still alive. He looks like he's going to die if something isn't done. The sergeant says he won't touch him.' The captain looked at me, looked over toward the aid station, and back at me. He said, 'If I were you, Specialist, I'd keep my goddamned nose out of it. The sergeant is in charge over there, and you just might need his services someday. Let him run the aid station any damned way he sees fit!'
"Not the answer I had expected. The subtext of the man's statement was clear enough, though. The good captain just might need the sergeant's services someday, too, and he wasn't about to screw with that. Defeated, I returned to my war, and my area of responsibility in it. By sundown the young VC was dead.
"I have lived with that day's events for thirty-plus years now, I am positive I will live with them for the rest of my life.... The Vietcong teenager is my personal guilt. I should have moved heaven and earth to do more for him, but I failed him."
Following the Tet offensive, the war, like the young Vietcong, slowly began to die. The next year, NSA pulled its Sigint ships from Vietnam and then scrapped the whole fleet. "My opinion of 1969 on Oxford thirty years later," said Richard E. Kerr, Jr., "[is that] we proved to the NSG [Naval Security Group] Command and the CNO [Chief of Naval Operations] that operations like this at sea ... were obsolete. You cannot combine large numbers of NSG personnel with uncleared officers and crew. All the ships ... were too slow, too old, and had no business being in tense situations.... Events of the Liberty and Pueblo (1967 and 1968) had already placed this type of platform in jeopardy. Vietnam was over in 1968 and the [Sigint] fleet was dead in 1969."
By then, largely as a result of the war in Vietnam, NSA's cryptologic community had grown to a whopping 95,000 people, almost five times the size of the CIA. In Southeast Asia alone, NSA had over 10,000 analysts and intercept operators. In addition, the agency's budget had grown so large that even Carter called it "monstrous." To emphasize the point, one day the director called into his office an employee from the NSA printing division who happened to moonlight as a jockey at nearby Laurel racetrack. The man stood about four feet six. Carter had the jockey get behind a pushcart, on which the budget documents were piled high, and called in the NSA photographer to snap the picture. The photo, according to Carter, was worth a thousand explanations, especially since "you couldn't tell whether [the jockey] was four feet six or six feet four."
On the last day of July 1969, Carter retired after presiding over the bloodiest four years in the agency's history. In a letter to a friend, he had harsh words for the middle-level civilians at the Pentagon who, he complained, were trying to micromanage NSA through control of his budget. He called them "bureaucrats at the termite level." Carter had also become anathema to many on the Joint Chiefs of Staff for his independence, for example in the matter of Vietcong numbers.
In a revealing letter to his old boss at CIA, former director John McCone, Carter explained some of his troubles. "I am not winning," he said, "(nor am I trying to win) any popularity contests with the military establishment nor those civilian levels in the Pentagon who have a testicular grip on my acquisition of resources. For all my years of service, I have called the shots exactly as I have seen them. I am hopeful that the new administration [Nixon's] will try to overcome some of this and leave the authority where the responsibility is. The usurpation of authority at lower staff levels without concomitant acceptance of responsibility is the main problem that somehow must be overcome by the new administration. I tell you this in complete privacy after almost four years in this job. I would not wish to be repeated or quoted in any arena."
***
Picked to become the sixth NSA director was Vice Admiral Noel Gayler, a handsome, salt-and-pepper-haired naval aviator. Born on Christmas Day, 1914, in Birmingham, Alabama, Gayler graduated from the Naval Academy and spent the better part of his career as a fighter pilot.
In many respects, Gayler's background was the exact opposite of Carter's, which may have been the reason he was chosen. Whereas Carter had been influenced by civilian attitudes during tours at the State Department and the CIA, Gayler's background was virtually untouched by civilian influence. Also, his lack of prior intelligence experience may have been seen as an advantage by those who felt Carter had tried to turn NSA into another CIA. Finally, unlike Carter, who knew he was on his final tour and therefore could not be intimidated very easily, Gayler was young enough to have at least one more assignment ahead of him, which could earn him a fourth star. He could be expected, then, to toe the line when it came to military versus civilian decisions.
If those were the reasons behind Gayler's selection, it seems that, at least initially, the planners must have been disappointed. Within two years, the Army was complaining that Gayler, like Carter, had traitorously turned his back on the military and was making NSA more civilian than ever. In October 1971 the chief of the Army Security Agency, Major General Charles J. Denholm, told his tale of woe at a classified briefing for the Army vice chief of staff.
"At the end of World War II," Denholm told General Bruce Palmer, Jr., "NSA was about 99 percent military. Now at NSA within the top two thousand spaces, you will find that there are perhaps five percent military.... There are about thirteen military men among the three services out of about 275 supergrades [a supergrade is the civilian equivalent of an Army general] that are running the show. So the military has gradually disappeared from the higher echelons at NSA." Denholm concluded, in the not-for-NSA's-ears briefing, "I fear that in about five years there probably will be no more military at NSA. All the key NSA slots are disappearing."
By the early 1970s, with the war in Vietnam winding down, the war within NSA for control of the dwindling budget heated up. The question was whether the civilians or the military would be in charge of the vault. In what one former NSA official termed a "declaration of war," a strategy paper was submitted to Director Gayler, arguing that that person should be a civilian.
The paper was co-written by Milton S. Zaslow, then the assistant deputy director for operations and the second most powerful civilian in the agency. It argued that because the civilian leadership at NSA represent continuity, civilians were in a better position to determine the needs of the Sigint community. Said the former NSA official quoted above: "The strategy paper was written saying, 'We're the ones who know all about this stuff, we'll control it and we'll tell you what you can have, and we'll see that you get the support you need when you need it.'"
But the military side argued that since it operated the listening posts, the aircraft, and the submarines, it should have final authority over the budget.
Eventually Gayler had to make the choice -- and the decision went to the military. In the view of one of the civilians: "He wasn't a ballplayer until the end. From what I saw, he [GaylerJ was really good for NSA, up until the end, and then I think he sold out; he went along with the military." Whatever his motive, Gayler's move was handsomely rewarded by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. On August 24, 1972, after three years as America's chief electronic spymaster, he was promoted to full admiral and awarded one of the choicest assignments in the military: Commander-in-Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC), based in Hawaii. Gayler's ascent to four-star rank and promotion to bigger and better things marked a turning point in the history of the NSA. Before Gayler, the NSA directorship was generally acknowledged to be a final resting place, a dead-end job from which there was no return. Beginning with Gayler, however, NSA frequently became a springboard to four-star rank and major military assignments.
Gayler's successor was Lieutenant General Samuel C. Phillips, an Air Force officer who, while seconded to NASA, directed the Apollo space program from its infancy through the lunar landing in 1969.
***
By the time Phillips arrived at NSA, in August 1972, American fighter pilots in Vietnam were being shot down in ever increasing numbers. Earlier, NSA had succeeded in intercepting a weak beacon transponder signal transmitted from a small spiral antenna on the tail of the Soviet SA-2 surface-to-air missile. This antenna transmitted the SA-2's navigational data back to the launch site. "It came on thirty seconds after the missile's launch," said one former NSA official, "so that the launch site can track the missile and steer it close enough to where its own homing system will lock on to the target and go in for the final kill."
Once such a signal had been captured and dissected by NSA, however, technicians were able to secretly jam the signal, sending the missiles off course and saving the lives of hundreds of pilots. But in 1972 the North Vietnamese realized something was very wrong and called in the Soviets to help correct the problem. Shortly thereafter the frequencies were changed and the SA-2 missiles once again began hitting their mark.
Despite months of effort, intercept operators were not able to recapture the faint signal. Then, in late 1972, someone at NSA headquarters recalled a pet project by a Navy cryptologic officer. Using spare, off-the-shelf equipment, he had put together a unique signal acquisition system. Within twenty-four hours, the officer, John Arnold, was sent off to Southeast Asia with his experimental machine and assigned to the USS Long Beach Arnold's machine worked better than anyone could have anticipated. Once again, they were able to intercept the elusive SA-2 signal, and the hit-kill ratio switched back to America's favor. "They dumped more than a million dollars in other systems and platforms trying to find the answer and they couldn't," said Arnold.
By 1972, NSA also began "remoting" some of its more hazardous operations. Rather than having intercept operators sit in front of row after row of receivers, spinning dials to find enemy voices, now the agency could do much of its eavesdropping by computer.
Codenamed Explorer, the system involved preprogrammed computers and receivers that would quickly scan for targeted and unusual frequencies carrying voice and coded communications. Once located, they would be uplinked to an aircraft or satellite and then, through a series of relays, downlinked to NSA or some other safe location away from the fighting. There, translators, codebreakers, computers, and traffic analysts could dissect the signals. A similar system, codenamed Guardrail, was established in Europe. In Guardrail, an aircraft was used as a relay to move Sigint from the front lines to analysts in the rear.
Explorer was particularly useful in unusually dangerous areas -- for example, just south of the DMZ. To capture those communications, the system was set up on several remote firebases located on high and isolated hills. One was Firebase Sarge and another was known as A-4. Although Explorer was highly automated, several people were nevertheless needed to maintain the equipment and keep it from being vandalized, a very hazardous job given the locations.
The firebases just south of the DMZ were the most isolated and dangerous listening posts in the world. There, intercept operators were close enough to the dragon to count its teeth. Occasionally they would also feel its sting. A-4 sat on the top of a steep mountain near Con Thien. "From A-4 you could see the middle of the DMZ, it was that close," said an intercept operator stationed there. "It was the furthest northernmost outpost the Americans held in Vietnam. The DMZ looked like rolling hills; a no-man's-land with a river through it and scrub brush and that was about it for miles; There was no fence. The river separated it and over the river was a bridge and the NVA flew a big flag over it with a red star and you could see it through binoculars. We used to watch them infiltrate, you could watch them come across. At the time there were no other Americans there."
Working in a tiny underground bunker, the handful of intercept operators pinpointed enemy infiltrators, artillery units moving toward the border, and mobile surface-to-air missiles through voice and coded intercepts. "In A-4 we were in a bunker underground," said the intercept operator. "They had the codes broken, they could pick up the firing designators. When the North Vietnamese got on the radio to open up the guns or the rocket attack, they would use designators. And the Americans knew the designators, so we would know when we were about to get shelled and we would go back underground so we didn't get blown up."
The concrete bunker was about ten feet underground and held only about five to seven intercept operators. Five worked the intercept equipment while the other two slept. They would take turns and they were all volunteers. Nearby was another bunker containing the NSA Explorer remote intercept equipment.
In early 1972, the intercept operators at A-4 began getting indications of something larger than the usual infiltration or harassment taking place across the border. "We thought there was going to be an invasion, and nobody was really listening," said one intercept operator who was there at the time. "That was January, February, beginning of March 1972. There was just too much buildup of activity above the DMZ for it not to happen. We were reporting that to the higher- ups. But in my personal opinion, it fell on deaf ears because at that time there weren't any Americans except for the intelligence people and then the few American advisers who were up there."
Further to the west, at Firebase Sarge, indications of a major attack were also becoming more numerous. There, the only Sigint personnel were two Army specialists, Bruce Crosby, Jr., and Gary Westcott, assigned to maintain the Explorer equipment contained in a bunker. The only other American was Marine Major Walter Boomer, who was an adviser to South Vietnamese forces assigned to the firebase. Earlier in March, Boomer had warned General Giai, the commanding general of the South Vietnamese Army's 3rd Division, of his deep concern about the steady increase in enemy activity in the area. He told Giai that he felt that something significant was going to take place soon. The general listened but said there was little he could do.
To the south, at Cam Lo, a secret American facility monitored the DMZ through ground-surveillance devices planted throughout the zone. During most of March, the number of trucks detected crossing the DMZ had tripled, and the monitors recorded both wheeled and tracked vehicle traffic, a worrisome sign. By the end of the month, the monitors were recording heavy traffic even during daylight hours, something that had never happened before.
The bad news came on Good Friday, March 30, 1972. Just before noon on Firebase Sarge, Major Boomer passed on to his headquarters some disturbing news. "Shortly after daylight the NVA began to shell us here at Sarge," he said. "The NVA's fire is as accurate and as heavy as we have ever experienced up here. We're all okay now, but there is probably a big battle coming our way.... It looks like this could be their big push."
It was Tet all over again. The North Vietnamese Army had launched their largest offensive in four years, and U.S. and South Vietnamese forces were just as unprepared as they had been the last time. In fact, the U.S. military command in Saigon, 350 miles south, refused to believe a major attack was in progress even after it had begun. Over 30,000 well- armed soldiers supported by more than 400 armored fighting vehicles, tanks, mobile missile launchers, and long-range cannons poured over the DMZ. Crossing the Ben Hai River, they knifed into the South's Quang Tri Province and turned the lonely firebases, like islands in the sky, into shooting galleries.
Up on Firebase Sarge, as the earth rolled from the violent assault, Boomer ordered Westcott and Crosby to remain in the NSA Explorer bunker and keep in radio contact with him and also with the listening post at A-4. Explorer was housed in an aluminum hut that also contained eight pieces of NSA crypto equipment. Around the hut was a bunker made of several rows of sandbags and a steel roof covered with another five feet of additional sandbags. For ventilation there was a window on one side.
Below Sarge, Soviet 130mm guns, the size of telephone poles, let loose with boulderlike shells. The rattle of small-arms fire followed and then the heavy crump of 122mm rockets raining down. Suddenly both A-4 and Boomer lost contact with Westcott and Crosby. Shortly after noon, a rocket scored a direct hit, crashing through the window in the NSA Explorer bunker. The two intercept operators were killed instantly and the bunker became a crematorium, burning for days. More than a decade after the first Sigint soldier died in Vietnam, two of the last were killed.
With A-4 also under heavy assault, the intercept operators were ordered to begin destroying Explorer and the rest of the crypto equipment and files. Above each of the sensitive devices were thermite plates for quick destruction. The plates were electrically activated and were wired together to a switch on the outside of the hut. Each thermite plate -- about a foot wide and an inch thick -- was designed to burn at the solarlike temperature of 35,000 degrees Fahrenheit. "The hut would burn for a couple of days before all the metal essentially turned to ash," said one of the soldiers who' installed the destruction devices. "Once the thermites reached full temperature and the hut started burning no one" could possibly survive and in the end there would be nothing left, absolutely nothing." Within a day of what became known as the Easter Offensive, there was no evidence that NSA had ever been at A-4, just ashes. The war was over and the United States had lost.
On January 27, 1973, the United States and Vietnam signed a cease-fire agreement. At 7:45 A.M., fifteen minutes before the cease-fire took effect, the USS Turner Joy, which had helped launch America's misguided adventure, sailed off the Cam Lo-Cua Viet River outlet and senselessly fired off the last salvo of the war.
***
Six months later, after barely a year in office, Samuel Phillips left NSA to head up the Air Force Space and Missile Organization. The man chosen to finish out his assignment was Lieutenant General Lew Allen, Jr. Tall and professorial- looking, with rimless glasses and a few wisps of fine dark hair across his crown, Allen, an expert in space reconnaissance, arrived at NSA following an assignment of only five and a half months with the CIA.
The new director arrived in time to watch events in Vietnam rapidly deteriorate. By 1975 American troops were out of the country and the Communist forces in the north were pushing south in an effort to finally consolidate the nation and their power. Their secret goal was to capture Saigon by May 19, the birthday of Ho Chi Minh, who had died in 1969, at the age of seventy-nine.
By April the endgame was near. At four o'clock on the morning of April 29, Saigon woke to the sound of distant thunder: heavy artillery fire on the outskirts of the city. Residents broke out in panic. Any hope that the U.S. Embassy staff and remaining Americans would be able to conduct a somewhat dignified departure by aircraft was dashed when explosions tore apart the runways at Tan Son Nhut Air Base. The only thing left was Operation Frequent Wind, the emergency evacuation by helicopter.
Two hours after the NVA arrived in the outskirts of Saigon, at 6:10 A.M., NSNs national cryptologic representative there signed off for the last time. "Have just received word to evacuate," he wrote in his Secret/Comint Channels Only message, "exclusive" for Lew Allen. "Am now destroying remaining classified material. Will cease transmissions immediately after this message. We're tired but otherwise all right. Looks like the battle for Saigon is on for real. I commend to you my people who deserve the best NSA can give them for what they have been through, but essentially for what they have achieved." Four days earlier, NSA's operations chief in Saigon, Ralph Adams, had been ordered out. "I took the last fixed-wing aircraft out of Saigon," he recalled. "Don't ever want to do that again. I watched an entire nation just crumble. It was scary as hell."
In the sullen heat, the repeated sounds of "White Christmas" over the military radio station was surreal, as it was supposed to be. It was the signal for the last Americans to quickly get to their designated removal points. The U.S. embassy suddenly became a scene out of Dante. Mobs of Vietnamese, including many who had cooperated with the United States and had been promised evacuation, stormed the walls and pushed against the gate. A conga line of helicopters took turns landing on the embassy's roof, their blades barely slowing. Americans and Vietnamese relatives and helpers ducked low and climbed on board to be whisked away to an American naval flotilla in the South China Sea. Other choppers, flown by escaping South Vietnamese pilots, made one-way flights to the flattops and were then pushed into the sea; like dead insects, to make room for more rescue aircraft.
Largely deaf as to what was going on fifty miles away in Saigon, the commander of the flotilla asked NSA to lend him an ear. A short time later an intercept operator tuned in on the embassy's communications and continuously recounted events, minute by minute, to the flotilla. With the beginning of Operation Comout, NSA, the ultimate voyeur, secretly began eavesdropping on the final agonizing gasps of the Vietnam War.
At 7:11 P.M. the NSA intercept operator reported:
THEY CANNOT GET THE AMBASSADOR OUT DUE TO A FIRE ON TOP OF THE EMBASSY. CINCPAC [Commander-in-Chief, Pacific] REPORTED THEY CANNOT CONTINUE THE EVACUATION PAST 2300 [11,00 P.M.] LOCAL AND IT IS IMPERATIVE TO GET ALL OF THE AMERICANS OUT.
Ambassador Graham Martin sat in his third-floor office, his face ashen as his diplomatic post crumbled around him. Henry Boudreau, an embassy counselor, walked in and was taken aback. "I saw the ambassador briefly and was startled at how hoarse he was, how barely able to speak. The pneumonia had all but wiped him out."
Earlier that morning his black, bulletproof Chevrolet limousine had carried him to the US. compound, still in a state of disbelief. For weeks, as the North Vietnamese Army closed in on Saigon, Martin had refused to accept the inevitable. He believed that a face-saving exit was still possible. "Goddamnit, Graham!" shouted a frustrated Washington official in Saigon to help with the evacuation. "Don't you realize what's happening?" Drifting in from the hallways was the bitter scent of smoke from incinerators crammed too full of thick files and endless reports. By now, desperate Vietnamese were camped in every part of the embassy, their life's belongings held in torn paper bags. Children with puffy cheeks and frightened eyes clung tightly to their mothers' long ao dais.
NSA: 7:13 PM
NO AMBASSADOR [present]. THERE ARE STILL MANY U.S. PERSONNEL AT THE EMBASSY.
Martin had insisted that Americans not be given preferential treatment over Vietnamese in the evacuation, but this rule, like most, was ignored as U.S. officials pushed to the head of the line.
NSA: 11:28 PM
THE AMBASSADOR WILL NOT, RPT NOT LEAVE UNTIL THERE ARE NO MORE PERSONNEL TO BE EVACUATED. HE STATES THAT ALL PERSONNEL WITHIN THE COMPOUND ARE EVACUEES.
The roof of the embassy was a horror. The scream of helicopter blades drowned out voices, the gale-force prop blast scattered straw hats and precious satchels into the dark night, and flashing red under-lights and blinding spot beams disoriented the few lucky enough to have made it that far.
In Washington it was 11:28 A.M., half a day earlier. Senior officials, including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, were becoming impatient. A news conference had been scheduled to advise the press on the smooth and skillful evacuation.
NSA: 2:07 AM, APRIL 30
A PRESIDENTIAL MSG IS BEING PASSED AT THIS TIME. THE GIST OF THE MESSAGE ... WAS THAT THE AMBASSADOR WAS TO EVACUATE NO MORE REFUGEES AND WAS TO GET ON THE LAST CHOPPER HIMSELF.
Given an absolute deadline of 3:45 A.M., Martin pleaded for six more choppers as embassy communications personnel smashed the crypto gear with sledgehammers. Three miles away, fighting had broken out at Tan Son Nhut Air Base. The muffled sounds of cannon fire and the flash of rockets seemed a distant fireworks display.
NSA, 3:43 AM
LADY ACE 09 [the helicopter for the ambassador] IS NOT TO PICK UP ANY PAX [passengers] UNTIL HE HAS AGAIN RELAYED THE PRESIDENTIAL ORDER TO THE AMBASSADOR. THE ORDER IS THAT THERE ARE ONLY 20 ACFT [aircraft] REMAINING AND ONLY AMERICANS ARE TO BE EVACUATED.
Martin missed the deadline and was pressing for still more choppers for both Vietnamese and Americans. But now Washington and Pacific Command in Hawaii were ordering that no more Vietnamese be allowed on the aircraft. At the same time the Communists were almost on the embassy's doorstep.
NSA, 3:51 AM
LADY ACE 09 IS ON THE ROOF WITH INSTRUCTIONS ONLY TO PICK UP AMERICANS.
NSA, 3:52AM
THERE HAS BEEN AN SA-7 [surface-to-air missile] LAUNCH 1 MILE EAST OF TAN SON NHUT.
As hundreds of Vietnamese still covered the embassy grounds, recalled Frank Snepp, a CIA official who remained to the end, a Marine major marched into Martin's office and made an announcement at the top of his voice. "President Ford has directed that the ambassador leave by the next chopper from the roof!" the Marine said. Martin, his face pasty white and his eyes swollen from exhaustion, lifted his suitcase. "Looks like this is it," he said to several others in the room, the finality of the situation at last washing over him. On the roof, Kenneth Moorefield," the ambassador's aide, escorted Martin through the muggy darkness to the door of Lady Ace. "As I lifted him through the door of the helicopter," Moorefield recalled, "he seemed ... frail, so terribly frail."
NSA, 3:58AM
LADY ACE 09 IS TIGER TIGER TIGER. THAT IS TO SAY HE HAS THE AMBASSADOR OUT.
The assurances given Martin that six more choppers would be sent for the remaining Vietnamese were a lie. The White House ordered that only the remaining Americans would be evacuated.
NSA, 4:09AM
THERE ARE 200 AMERICANS LEFT TO EVAC. BRING UR [your] PERSONNEL UP THROUGH TH [the] BUILDING. DO NOT LET THEM (THE SOUTH VIETS) FOLLOW TOO CLOSELY. USE MACE IF NECESSARY BUT DO NOT FIRE ON THEM.
As choppers swooped in and picked up the final Americans, the gunfire began getting closer.
NSA: 4:42 AM
NUMEROUS FIRE FIGHTS ALL AROUND THE BUILDING.
NSA: 5:03 AM
AAA [anti-aircraft artillery] EMPLACEMENT ABOUT SIX BLOCKS WEST OF EMBASSY HAS BEEN CONFIRMED.
NSA: 5:25 AM
ALL OF THE REMAINING AMERICAN PERSONNEL ARE ON THE ROOF AT THIS TIME AND VIETNAMESE ARE IN THE BUILDING.
NSA: 5:48 AM
SOUTH VIETNAMESE HAD BROKEN INTO THE EMBASSY BUT WERE JUST RUMMAGING AROUND AND NO HOSTILE ACTS WERE NOTED.
NSA: 6:18 AM
LADY ACE IS ON THE ROOF. HE STATES THAT HE WILL LOAD 25 PAX AND THAT THIS WILL LEAVE 45 REMAINING HENCE THEY NEED MORE CHOPPERS.
NSA: 6:51 AM
SWIFT 22 IS OUTBOUND WITH 11 PAX ON BOARD INCLUDING THE LZ [landing zone] COMMANDER. ALL THE AMERICANS ARE OUT REPEAT OUT.
Within a few hours, Saigon had been taken over and renamed Ho Chi Minh City. But while the departing embassy employees left only ashes and smashed crypto equipment for the incoming Communists, NSA had left the NVA a prize beyond their wildest dreams. According to NSA documents obtained for Body of Secrets, among the booty discovered by the North Vietnamese was an entire warehouse overflowing with NSA's most important cryptographic machines and other supersensitive code and cipher materials, all in pristine condition -- and all no doubt shared with the Russians and possibly also the Chinese. Still not admitted by NSA, this was the largest compromise of highly secret coding equipment and materials in U.S. history.
In early 1975, as it began looking more and more as if South Vietnam would fall, NSA became very worried about the sensitive crypto machines it had supplied to the South Vietnamese government.
In 1970, the NSA had decided to provide the South Vietnamese military with hundreds of the agency's most important crypto devices, the KY-8 and the NESTOR voice encryption machines. NSA officials provided strict warnings not to examine the equipment's workings. Nevertheless, officials later believed that the South Vietnamese did open and examine some of the machines. By late 1974 and early 1975, with the military situation not looking good, the agency decided to try to get the machines back from the South Vietnamese government to prevent them from falling into the hands of the enemy. "Delicate political moves were made to keep from offending the RVN [Republic of Vietnam] general staff," said one official involved.
By January and February 1975, according to the official, "it was determined that the situation was becoming critical." Stepped-up efforts were made to remove the machines to the South Vietnamese National Cryptographic Depot (known as Don Vi' 600) at Tan Son Nhut Air Base. The depot was located next to the U.S. Armed Forces Courier Service station, which was to transport the crypto machines back to NSA.
But things went terribly wrong. "In the last three weeks of the existence of the Republic of Vietnam," wrote the official, "some 700 pieces of ADONIS and NESTOR [encryption] equipment had been gathered and prepared for shipment to CONUS [Continental U.S.]. Unfortunately, none of this equipment was shipped or destroyed. None of the facility or its contents were destroyed. It was estimated that enough keying material and codes were abandoned for 12 months full operation of the on-line, off-line, and low-level codes in country."
It was a compromise of enormous magnitude. Officials may have felt that although the Russians no doubt obtained the crypto machines from the Vietnamese, they still needed the keylists and key cards. What the United States would not know for another decade was that John Walker was secretly selling current keying materials to the USSR. Even if NSA decided to make some changes to the machine, Walker would get a copy and simply hand it over to the Russians. NSA has kept the embarrassing loss of the crypto 'materials secret for decades.