2: THE NEW RECRUIT
In late February 1986 I drove up to Maryland and booked myself into a hotel in Laurel, where I would stay until I found a one-bedroom apartment called Foxfire. Heavy snow covered the city, and driving safely on ice took some practice. I had arrived a few days before I was scheduled to begin orientation and I spent the time learning my way around town and finding my way to work.
The only people I knew in Maryland were my cousin Ken and his wife Marjorie, who lived with their children in nearby Chevy Chase. Ken was in the news business and later became a vice-president of CNN. Marjorie would become the commissioner of the New York Commission for the United Nations, Consular Corps and Protocol. She is also the sister of the current governor of New York, Michael Bloomberg,[1] thought to be a possible future presidential candidate. I spent many weekends with Ken and his family as they helped me settle into my new life.
On my first day at NSA headquarters I received my green Top Secret picture badge, which allowed me access to any building in the NSA complex. After completing some routine HR paperwork I joined an orientation class with about thirty new employees—a mixed bunch of engineers, secretaries, linguists and administrative personnel. Two agency trainers provided an overview of the history of the NSA, the work performed by the agency and examples of espionage cases involving the NSA, including that of Ronald Pelton,[2] an NSA employee recently arrested for spying for the Soviet Union.
‘You don’t want to end up like Ronald Pelton,’ our instructor told us.
The NSA is responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign signals intelligence and communications, and we were shown some of the ways the agency accomplished this task. Many foreign signals are encrypted and require a specific mathematical key to decrypt the information. Finding the key is the art of cryptanalysis (code-breaking, in layman’s terms). The NSA is also responsible for protecting United States Government communications and information systems. The practice of hiding information is called cryptography, used with familiar devices such as ATMs and credit cards.
The NSA-administered National Cryptologic School (NCS) is responsible for providing training to employees in subjects such as cryptanalysis, cryptography, mathematics, non-technical subjects, and the various signals intelligence (SIGINT) disciplines.
The NSA primarily analyses and reports on communications signals (COMINT), electronic signals such as radars (ELINT), and ██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████. In addition to these specific weapons, there are many additional types of weapons that are telemetered as they advance through their testing and evaluation phases. This last category of telemetry signals analysis was designated ‘foreign instrumentation signals intelligence’ (FISINT). The NSA does its work only by electronic eavesdropping and doesn’t have field agents overseas. Gathering intelligence from a human source, through covert and overt collection techniques, and open-source data from foreign media, is the CIA’s role. But it is the NSA that is the heart and soul of the greatest electronic signals collection and analysis operation in the world, with representatives in diverse geographic locations such as South Korea, Japan, Britain, and Australia.[3] Its budget reportedly dwarfs that of the CIA. The orientation class shed much light on how the NSA operated, and now that I had my security clearance I was able to hear and read about much of the classified work this enormous agency performed.
While I was in orientation class an event that would have particular personal significance occurred. I was looking around the room at my colleagues and noticed one particular young lady occasionally looking at me when I glanced at her. I spoke with her later and we seemed to have much in common. She told me she was from the nearby town of Glen Burnie and would be managing contracts between the agency and contractors. I later found out that the NSA didn’t restrict dating among agency employees since we had all passed the rigorous security clearance screening process. We began dating in March, and having a local girlfriend meant that I immediately developed a new circle of friends and a busy social life. Settling into my new life became easy, and after a whirlwind romance, we married nineteen months later.
The technical members of my class, of which I was one, spent the rest of our orientation learning about ‘traffic analysis’—deducing information from patterns in communications such as how often communication occurs between stations, who speaks to whom, and changing of the transmission frequency (for example, from 200 MHz to 205 MHz). We also performed basic decryption of sample messages to determine whether we had certain aptitudes that the agency could utilise.
When orientation was over I was assigned to the Office of ELINT, designated W2. The agency is broken down into alpha-numeric designators; for example, the Russian division was designated ‘A’, with various offices concerned with specific Russian issues designated by a number that followed ‘A’, such as A1, A14, A2, and so on. My office was several kilometres from NSA headquarters and was home to the NSAC facility, entrance to which required an additional metal security badge.
My branch, W22, worked with known ELINT signals—those signals whose function and country of origin had been identified. A separate office, W34, analysed newly intercepted or unidentified signals, and once they had established the function and country of origin of a new signal it was passed to W22. In W22, I received several additional compartmented security clearances, including some ‘very restricted knowledge’ (VRK) clearances that would allow me access to the radar signal data I needed to perform some of my work. One of these compartmented levels was the SCI clearance needed to access and utilise intelligence obtained from highly classified sources. This level is coveted by contractors who perform the government’s most highly classified work and, as a result, they often ‘poach’ many government workers who have this clearance, often luring them with the offer of a higher salary.
At this time President Reagan had already begun his effort to hire engineers into the intelligence agencies by making salaries more competitive with the private sector (most engineering, physics and mathematics graduates went into private enterprise). His strategy worked, so when I arrived in W22, I was surrounded by a cadre of young engineers who were assigned a variety of radar signals, primarily those signals that originated from the communist bloc.
Each analyst was assigned signals related to a specific type of radar. This could be airborne surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), land-based radars (such as early warning and air traffic control) or overthe-horizon (OTH) radar signals. The job was to analyse and report any new signal parameters their radars displayed. The military wanted to know whenever a radar’s capability to detect targets had improved so that enhanced countermeasures could be developed and implemented to defeat the threat posed by an associated weapon system. As an analyst in W22, I would assess the performance of various radars and report new signal parameters.
The agency also had a large number of military and retired military personnel working side by side with the civilians. Their expertise and experience were highly valued by those of us who entered the unfamiliar world of radars and ELINT. With training from seasoned analysts, the new recruits quickly learned how to identify and report new signal parameters, and I was able to master the techniques quickly and was soon training new analysts.