Intel Wars Page 7
The CIA was only one of twenty-one different government agencies or military commands engaged in conducting clandestine human intelligence. Virtually every major U.S. military overseas command had its own clandestine human intelligence gathering units, which operated largely independent of the CIA. For example, the Joint Special Operations Command based out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, was operating small agent networks in support of its highly classified commando operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Even the electronic eavesdroppers at the National Security Agency (NSA) had their own secret HUMINT collection teams called Target Exploitation (TAREX) detachments, which interrogated prisoners and examined captured codes, communications equipment, and documents to try to help NSA’s codebreakers solve enemy code and cipher systems, or conversely, protect U.S. communications and codes from being broken and exploited by the other side.
The CIA’s military counterpart, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), was the intelligence arm of the Department of Defense, producing intelligence reporting for the secretary of defense’s office, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and senior U.S. military commanders around the world. Long considered by intelligence insiders as the “lightweight” of the intelligence community because of the historically poor quality of the material that it produced, the DIA had grown dramatically since 9/11 from 7,500 military and civilian personnel to over 16,500 in 2009, reflecting a surge in the importance of military intelligence.
Even before 9/11, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had become a veritable powerhouse inside the U.S. intelligence community, investigating potential terrorist threats at home and abroad, as well as its more usual work of monitoring the activities of foreign intelligence agencies and their operatives in the United States and investigating violations of federal criminal and civil statutes. Since 9/11, the bureau has continued to grow in both size and power. With 33,925 employees, including 13,492 special agents who did the investigative work, by 2009 the FBI had become one of the largest intelligence agencies in the world, operating fifty-six field offices and four hundred resident agency offices throughout the United States. There were also a couple of hundred FBI agents assigned to more than sixty “Legal Attaché” offices in U.S. embassies overseas who not only liaised with their foreign counterparts but also actively collected intelligence on a wide range of foreign terrorist and organized crime groups, such as the Pakistani Taliban and the Russian mafia.
The FBI even had its own air force. As of 2009, the FBI’s Aviation and Surveillance Branch, headed by Special Agent James F. “Jim” Yacone, was flying 132 surveillance aircraft and helicopters from more than two dozen medium-sized regional airports throughout the United States, making the FBI’s fleet larger than most European air forces. According to Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) records, all of the FBI’s aircraft are owned by six Delaware front companies, while the bureau’s fleet of helicopters is owned by another dummy corporation in Manassas, Virginia.
From its modern headquarters complex a few miles south of Dulles International Airport in Chantilly, Virginia, since 1961 the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) has designed, built, and operated all of the American reconnaissance satellites that are currently in orbit over the earth. Although its headquarters staff is, by Washington standards, very small and compact, with only 3,000 government employees, NRO has by far the largest budget of any agency in the intelligence community and a reputation for wasteful spending to go with it.
Unlike its larger cousins, the CIA and NSA, the NRO does not produce any intelligence information itself. Rather, according to declassified NRO documents, all of the vast amount of photo and radar imagery and intercepted signals collected by its spy satellites are beamed down to earth in near realtime to a series of heavily guarded NRO facilities called mission ground stations located at Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado; Las Cruces, New Mexico; and Fort Belvoir, Virginia, in the United States; and RAF Menwith Hill Station in England and the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap outside Alice Springs, Australia. The data is then forwarded to the other branches of the U.S. intelligence community responsible for analysis.
One of the agencies responsible for analyzing NRO’s satellite data is the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), whose headquarters is located in a complex of buildings on Sangamore Road in Bethesda, Maryland, across from a shopping mall. The principal mission of NGA’s 16,000 employees is to review and analyze all of the imagery that NRO’s satellites generate, as well as make thousands of detailed maps of the entire globe for use by the U.S. government and military.
During every Washington Nationals home game, tens of thousands of baseball fans unknowingly walk right by one of NGA’s most sensitive facilities. Located on the corner of M and 1st streets in southeast Washington, D.C., is a multistory, windowless structure called Building 213, which houses the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), where all imagery taken by American photo reconnaissance satellites is processed, analyzed, and reported on. By the end of September 2011, NPIC and all other NGA facilities in suburban Maryland and Virginia, as well as the District of Columbia, will have moved to a new headquarters complex currently under construction at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.
As it was during the Cold War, satellite imagery remains an important source for the U.S. intelligence community. For example, in 2009 the Ukrainian government denied that it had shipped T-72 medium tanks to Sudan in violation of U.S. economic sanctions that barred the shipment of weapons to the regime in Khartoum. At a meeting with their Ukrainian counterparts, State Department officials pulled out sanitized satellite photos showing the T-72 tanks being offloaded at the port of Mombasa in Kenya from a Ukrainian merchant ship, then loaded onto rail flatcars, and finally being delivered to a military garrison in southern Sudan. According to a leaked State Department cable summarizing the meeting, the production of the satellite photos led to “a commotion on the Ukrainian side” of the negotiating table.
However, the U.S. intelligence community’s heavy reliance on these spy satellites to see what was taking place deep inside hostile territory has over time eroded as America’s enemies learned how to hide their most sensitive military facilities from the cameras on the satellites. Countries like Iran and North Korea, for example, had become quite adept at burying their sensitive nuclear weapons and ballistic missile production facilities underground, thereby denying the satellites access to what was going on inside the plants.
With more than 60,000 military and civilian employees eavesdropping on all forms of electronic communications around the world, the National Security Agency was the nation’s largest and most powerful intelligence agency. Like the rest of the intelligence community, NSA had completely reengineered itself since 9/11, when the agency was so fraught with problems that its deputy director for operations at the time, Richard Taylor, admitted that “NSA was a shambles.” SIGINT had been in rapid decline throughout the 1990s because new telecommunications technologies, like fiber-optic cables and cellular telephones, were being introduced faster than NSA’s ability to design and field equipment to monitor them. According to General Montgomery Meigs, during the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo in the late 1990s, the ability of the NSA to intercept enemy radio traffic became increasingly difficult because in 1998 the Bosnian Serbs moved their most sensitive communications to a secure fiber-optic cable system that NSA could not intercept, and in Kosovo in 1999 the Yugoslav military used cell phones to direct their military operations, which NSA was not equipped at the time to monitor.
By 2009, though, NSA had changed dramatically. The agency still had about a dozen large listening posts in the United States and overseas, like the massive intercept site at Menwith Hill in northern England, which today sucks up thousands of radio messages and telephone calls every day from throughout the Middle East and Near East, including Israel and Iran.* But the majority of NSA’s SIGINT effort remained focused on Iraq, Afghanistan, and the surrounding area. At Balad Air Base in Iraq, and Bagram and Kandahar airfields in Afg
hanistan, SIGINT aircraft took off around the clock to monitor insurgent radio and cell phone communications. On the ground there were dozens of small but very secretive SIGINT units manned by military personnel running around the countryside with oblique names like Joint Expeditionary SIGINT Terminal Response Unit, Cryptologic Support Teams, SIGINT Terminal Guidance Units, and Signal Survey Teams.
In the American zone in southeastern Afghanistan there were almost a dozen tiny military SIGINT units called Low-Level Voice Intercept (LLVI) Teams, made up of four linguists who were trained to listen to the walkie-talkie chatter of Taliban fighters. In a 2010 interview at his home in Texas, an army SIGINT intercept operator just returned from a one-year tour of duty in Afghanistan recalled that his classified technical training was straightforward. “I just had to learn all the words and phrases used by the Taliban for ‘IED,’ ‘bomb,’ ‘gun,’ ‘open fire,’ and ‘kill the infidels,’” he said. The work of these LLVI teams was extremely dangerous because, in some cases, the enemy fighters they were listening to were hiding only a few hundred yards away, requiring that the intercept operators perform their missions while firing on the enemy they were monitoring at the same time.
With eighty-seven offices in sixty-three countries around the world, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) ran a surprisingly large and diverse series of clandestine intelligence collection programs in places like Mexico, Colombia, and Afghanistan. The DEA station in Afghanistan was running networks of informants in Helmand and Kandahar provinces trying to uncover links between the Taliban guerrillas and Afghan narcotics kingpins, all independent of the CIA’s intelligence-gathering efforts. The DEA even had its own sophisticated SIGINT collection system for listening to the telephone calls of narco-traffickers, including a state-of-the-art cell phone intercept system called Matador. In 2009, the president of Panama, Ricardo Alberto Martinelli, threatened to expel the entire DEA station unless the Americans agreed to his demand that they use Matador to tap the phones of his domestic political opponents.
The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) small Office of Intelligence and Analysis in Washington was not a collection agency. Rather, it acted as a central clearinghouse for intelligence information about potential terrorist threats to the United States.* DHS’s intelligence organization was deeply troubled. General Patrick M. Hughes recalled that when he took over the organization in November 2003, it consisted of only “27 people, no capability—a total mess.” By April 2004, things were somewhat better, but not much. According to Hughes, the DHS intelligence database had “nothing in it,” and DHS officials could not be given the best intelligence available to the U.S. intelligence community because the department was not yet authorized to receive SIGINT from NSA. As will be seen in chapter 6, by 2009 the DHS intelligence organization had made significant strides in rectifying these and a host of other problems, but it was still not fully functional.
The U.S. State Department itself has become increasingly active as an intelligence collector since 9/11. Since Barack Obama became president in 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has ordered her diplomats to step up their intelligence collection efforts by laying hands on any kind of personal information about the foreign government officials that they come into contact with, such as business cards; telephone, cell phone, pager, and fax numbers; e-mail addresses; credit card numbers; and even frequent flyer miles accounts.
Unlike Denny Blair’s alphabet soup of sixteen national spy agencies, which focus primarily on strategic geopolitical issues of interest to the president and his cabinet members, the Pentagon’s 100,000 soldier-spies focus almost exclusively on the kind of arcane intelligence information that only soldiers are typically interested in, such as the organizational structure and deployment of enemy military forces opposing them, how many ships the opposing fleet has, how large their air defense radar network is, how many fighter interceptor aircraft they have and where their bases are located, how much fuel is stored in enemy supply depots, and so on.
Since 9/11 the Pentagon’s intelligence community—if it could be called such, because it is not a truly cohesive entity—has sprawled into a massive, labyrinthine, and chaotic polyglot of hundreds of individual commands, staffs, and intelligence collection units deployed in the United States and around the world.
As of 2009, the U.S. Army had a staggering 54,000 men and women doing intelligence work at home and abroad, twice as many people as the CIA. Almost half of these personnel, more than 19,000 men and women, were assigned as collectors and analysts with army corps, division, brigade, and battalion intelligence staffs, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The U.S. Navy’s intelligence organization, the Office of Naval Intelligence, was much smaller than army intelligence but was performing some very dangerous missions. The navy was running several dozen top secret submarine reconnaissance missions, code-named Aquador, off the coasts of a number of hostile countries. Some missions covertly monitored Iranian naval activities in the Gulf of Hormuz to ensure the safety of international shipping through these vital sea lanes. Other missions involved tracking foreign merchant shipping believed to have been involved in transporting nuclear weapons and ballistic missile technology. For instance, one naval intelligence officer recalled a series of submarine reconnaissance missions conducted a few years back that surreptitiously tracked the movements of North Korean merchant ships the analysts in Washington believed were carrying ballistic missiles and support equipment, from their home ports to Syria and Iran.
Thanks to massive infusions of cash after 9/11, the size and scope of the U.S. Air Force’s intelligence mission had rebounded dramatically since the end of the Cold War. Air Force RC-135 and U-2 reconnaissance aircraft still were producing vast amounts of intelligence information about the military activities of countries such as Syria, Iran, and North Korea.
The air force also controlled a small intelligence organization called the Air Force Technical Applications Center (AFTAC) located at Patrick Air Force Base, Florida, which was responsible for detecting foreign nuclear weapons tests. During the Cold War, AFTAC’s activities were among the least sensitive in the U.S. intelligence community, but that changed immediately after 9/11, when the air force decided that AFTAC deserved the same degree of secrecy as the CIA and NSA. Between 2001 and 2006, a team of defense contractors belonging to the Raytheon Company working for the air force reclassified over eight thousand documents relating to AFTAC’s work held by the National Archives. Among the mundane items that were reclassified were dozens of twenty- and thirty-year-old unclassified State Department press releases about Soviet and Chinese nuclear weapons tests, which the air force security personnel thought revealed the ability of the U.S. intelligence community to monitor foreign nuclear weapons tests, even if the material was fifty years old and available online.
Since 9/11, the U.S. Coast Guard had built up a robust intelligence mission. All of the Coast Guard cutters operating in the Caribbean and Pacific carried small teams of SIGINT operators, who tracked the movements of ships and planes suspected of being used by narcotics traffickers to move cocaine from Latin America to the United States.
But it was the unmanned reconnaissance drone that had become the superstar of the U.S. military intelligence effort by the time Barack Obama became president. In a span of only seven years, the drone had replaced manned aircraft like the U-2 spy plane as the sensor of choice for reconnaissance in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the CIA, the drone had become the weapon of choice for killing insurgents and terrorists around the world.
The growth of the military’s drone fleet since 9/11 had been nothing short of spectacular. In 2002, the military had only 167 drones. By 2009, there were more than 6,000 of the unmanned aircraft flying missions around the world, 2,000 in Iraq and Afghanistan alone. The CIA had its own much smaller and more secretive unit of six Reaper drones that operated from Shamsi and Tarbela airbases in Pakistan, which the agency used to attack al Qaeda and Taliban targets in their sanctuaries i
n the northern part of the country. Later in 2009, the CIA was forced to move the drones to Jalalabad airfield in southeastern Afghanistan after the London Times revealed on February 19 the locations of the airbases in Pakistan from which the drones were flying.
The darling of the American news media, the drones are technological marvels. Powered by little more than a souped-up snowmobile engine, the air force’s 118 Predator drones can hit targets with the two Hellfire missiles each carries with pinpoint accuracy from an altitude of 25,000 feet—the equivalent of pitching a strike at Yankee Stadium from a commercial airliner flying high overhead. Its successor, the Reaper, is twice as fast and can fly twice as high, and is far more lethal, carrying six times more bombs and missiles than the Predator.
Then there are the air force’s thirteen huge and very secretive RQ-4 Global Hawk strategic reconnaissance drones, whose wings are twenty-one feet longer than a Boeing 737 airliner. Operating from forward operating sites at Sigonella Air Base on the island of Sicily, Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates, and Andersen Air Force Base on the Pacific island of Guam, the Global Hawk can take detailed photographs of an entire continent in a single twenty-eight-hour mission. For example, the Global Hawk drones in Sicily, which are housed in a massive new hanger on the east side of Sigonella Air Base, can photograph all of western Iran, the entire Middle East, and the entire North African coastline in a single mission. But air force officials confirm that the Global Hawk drones still suffer from mechanical problems and frequent equipment failures, as has been the case during the ongoing crisis in Libya.