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.