The tone of the answering machine message was routine, like a reminder for a dental appointment. But there was also an undercurrent of urgency. “Please call me back,” the voice said. “It’s important.”

What worried me was who was calling: a senior attorney with the Justice Department’s secretive Office of Intelligence Policy and Review. By the time I hung up the payphone at a little coffee shop in Cambridge, Mass., and wandered back to my table, strewn with yellow legal pads and dog-eared documents, I had guessed what he was after: my copy of the Justice Department’s top-secret criminal file on the National Security Agency. Only two copies of the original were ever made. Now I had to find a way to get it out of the country—fast.

It was July 8, 1981, a broiling Wednesday in Harvard Square, and I was in a quiet corner of the Algiers Coffee House on Brattle Street. A cool, souk-like basement room, with the piney aroma of frankincense, it made for a perfect hideout to sort through documents, jot down notes, and pore over stacks of newspapers while sipping bottomless cups of Arabic coffee and espresso the color of dark chocolate.

For several years I had been working on my first book, The Puzzle Palace, which provided the first in-depth look at the National Security Agency. The deeper I dug, the more troubled I became. Not only did the classified file from the Justice Department accuse the NSA of systematically breaking the law by eavesdropping on American citizens, it concluded that it was impossible to prosecute those running the agency because of the enormous secrecy that enveloped it. Worse, the file made clear that the NSA itself was effectively beyond the law—allowed to bypass statutes passed by Congress and follow its own super-classified charter, what the agency called a “top-secret birth certificate” drawn up by the White House decades earlier.

Knowing the potential for such an unregulated agency to go rogue, I went on to write two more books about the NSA, Body of Secrets, in 2001, and The Shadow Factory, in 2008. My goal was to draw attention to the dangers the agency posed if it is not closely watched and controlled—dangers that would be laid bare in stark detail by Edward Snowden years later.

“You Want to Hear Something Interesting?”

The idea of writing a book about the NSA had occurred to me several years earlier. During the war in Vietnam, I spent three years in the Navy at Pacific Fleet Headquarters in Hawaii. It was a nice venue a long way from the bloody battlefields, where the only dangers were rogue surfboards on Waikiki Beach and bar fights on Hotel Street. Assigned to an NSA unit, I experienced the war vicariously: One of my jobs every morning was reading a foot-high stack of overnight messages from the war zone, mostly NSA reports classified top secret and higher, and passing them on to whichever project officer had responsibility to simply read or take action.

Later, in law school and running low on cash, I decided to rejoin the Naval Reserve to help pay for living expenses. The Navy was very accommodating, allowing me to pick not only when I wanted to do my two weeks of active duty, but also where. So I decided to request two weeks in October 1974, which coincided with a school break. And for location I chose Puerto Rico—a nice warm island far from chilly Boston. Although I had NSA clearances, I had never worked at an actual NSA intercept site. Nevertheless, the Navy decided to send me down to Sabana Seca, one of the agency’s key listening posts, which focused on Cuba, the Caribbean, and Central and South America.

Like most listening posts at the time, Sabana Seca consisted of a gigantic circular antenna about half a mile wide and a hundred or so feet high, an odd structure that closely resembled its nickname—the “elephant cage.” Known as a Wullenweber antenna, it was used not only to intercept communications, but also to assist in triangulating where the transmissions were coming from. At the center of the elephant cage was the operations building, a windowless, two-story, gray cement Rubik’s cube. Inside were tall racks of receivers with blinking lights, big black dials, oval-shaped gauges, and silver toggle switches facing rows of earphone-clad men and women in blue Navy-issue dungarees.

Unfamiliar with the technology and unable to speak more than rudimentary Spanish, I spent my two weeks pushing a few papers and staying out of the way, hoping to avoid work as much as possible. But one day an intercept operator with whom I had downed a few beers at the base club the night before spotted me and waved me over. “You want to hear something interesting?” he said as he took off his earphones. I thanked him but explained I didn’t speak Spanish. “No, no,” he said, “It’s English.” So I put on the earphones and listened in to what appeared to be several Americans carrying on a conversation. I only heard a few snippets, not enough to get a sense of the topic, but I was surprised. “Interesting,” I said. “You get many Americans speaking?” He said they did on certain channels they were assigned to target. I thanked him, said something about getting another beer later that night, and wandered off to watch some other intercept operators pulling in long reams of blue teletype paper covered in Spanish.

It was only when I was back in Boston, where I had a part-time job as a student prosecutor with the Suffolk County district attorney’s office, that the conversation came back to me. I was working on a case in which the topic of a wiretap came up, and there was a long discussion about procedures for a warrant. I suddenly wondered what legal authority the intercept operators at Sabana Seca had to target American conversations. I did a little research in the law library, but could find nothing that gave the military any powers for warrantless eavesdropping on Americans.

A few weeks later, just before Christmas, The New York Times broke a series of stories by Seymour Hersh outlining Operation Chaos, the program by which the FBI, CIA, and other intelligence agencies targeted U.S. citizens involved in anti-war protests. The articles caused widespread public outrage, followed by a high-profile congressional investigation led by Senator Frank Church. I felt certain that whatever it was I saw—and heard—in Sabana Seca would soon be discovered.

But during the summer of 1975, as reports began leaking out from the Church Committee, I was surprised to learn that the NSA was claiming that it had shut down all of its questionable operations a year and a half earlier. Surprised because I knew the eavesdropping on Americans had continued at least into the prior fall, and may have still been going on. After thinking for a day or so about the potential consequences of blowing the whistle on the NSA—I was still in the Naval Reserve, still attending drills one weekend a month, and still sworn to secrecy with an active NSA clearance—I nevertheless decided to call the Church Committee.

It was July 1, and at first the staffer with whom I spoke sounded skeptical—someone calling out of the blue and accusing the NSA of lying. But after I mentioned my work at Sabana Seca, he asked how soon I could come down to Washington to testify. At 8:40 the next morning, I boarded American Airlines Flight 605 and took seat 13A—an unlucky number, I thought. It would be the first of numerous trips. The committee agreed to keep my name confidential and allowed me to testify in executive session in Sen. Church’s private office. Soon after, committee staffers flew down to Sabana Seca for a surprise inspection. Surprise, indeed. They were shocked to discover the program had never been shut down, despite the NSA’s claims.

Sebana Seca “elephant cage” site, 1994

“Just Because the Information Has Been Published Doesn’t Mean it Should No Longer Be Classified”

The discovery that the NSA had been lying to the Church Committee shocked me. But it also gave me the idea to write the first book about the agency. As more and more revelations came out about the NSA’s widespread, illegal eavesdropping activities, I found myself filled with questions. Where did the agency come from? What did it do? How did it operate? Who was watching it? In the summer of 1979, after a year of research, I submitted a proposal to Houghton Mifflin for The Puzzle Palace, and within a few months was awarded a book contract. It was the start of wild ride, taking on an agency so secret that even New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley told me, at the time, that he had never heard of it.

The discovery that the NSA had been lying to the Church Committee shocked me. But it also gave me the idea to write the first book about the agency.

I soon learned that there was one major advantage to being first: The NSA had grown so confident that no one would ever dare to write about it that it had let its guard down. I would occasionally drive up to the agency, park in the executive parking lot, walk in the front door to the lobby, get some coffee and have a seat. All around me were employees from the CIA and foreign intelligence agencies, all waiting to be processed for their NSA visitor’s badge. As I read my paper and sipped my coffee, I quietly listened to them chat away about signals intelligence operations, new listening posts, cooperative agreements, and a host of other topics. No one ever asked who I was or why I was there. In the parking lot, I copied the license plate numbers of the dozen cars parked closest to the front entrance, then ran the numbers at the registry of motor vehicles. The result was a Who’s Who of the NSA’s leadership, as well as the liaison officers from America’s so-called Five Eyes surveillance partners: England, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

By the summer of 1981, I had also won several significant legal battles with the agency. As a result of an out-of-court settlement, the NSA was forced to give me a tour of the agency, detail the entire structure of its internal organization to me, and provide me interviews with senior officials. Even though the agency was virtually immune from the Freedom of Information Act, I managed to find a loophole that allowed me access to more than 6,000 pages of internal documents. I even worked out an agreement whereby they would provide me with an office in the agency for a week to go through the 6,000 pages. But then the NSA got its revenge—when they handed me the 6,000 pages, they were all out of order, as if they had been shuffled like a new deck of cards. Nothing in the Freedom of Information Act, it turns out, requires collation. The hostility became so intense that the director, Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, accused me of using a “hostage approach” in my battle to force the agency to give me documents and interviews.

But the NSA knew nothing about one of my biggest finds, which took place on the campus of the Virginia Military Institute. Nicknamed “the West Point of the South,” VMI housed the papers of William F. Friedman, a founder of both the NSA and of American cryptology. The NSA’s own auditorium is named after him. Yet Friedman had soured on the agency by the time he retired, and deliberately left his papers to a research library at VMI to get them as far away from the NSA as possible.

After Friedman’s death, and without his permission, agency officials traveled to the library, pulled out hundreds of his personal letters, and ordered them locked away in a secure vault. When I discovered what the NSA had done, I persuaded the library’s archivist to give me access to the letters, all of which were unclassified. Many were embarrassingly critical of the agency, describing its enormous paranoia and obsession with secrecy. Others contained clues to a secret trips that Friedman had made to Switzerland, where he helped the agency gain backdoor access into encryption systems that a Swiss company was selling to foreign countries.

Many were embarrassingly critical of the agency, describing its enormous paranoia and obsession with secrecy.

I also discovered that a former NSA director, Lt. Gen. Marshall Carter, had left his papers – including reams of unclassified documents from his NSA office – to the same research library at VMI. They included personal, handwritten correspondence from Carter’s British counterpart about listening posts, cooperative agreements, and other sensitive topics. Later, Carter gave me a long and detailed interview about the NSA. The agency knew nothing about either the documents or the interview.

Following the publication of my book, the NSA raided the research library, stamped many of the Friedman documents secret, and ordered them put back into the vault. “Just because information has been published,” NSA director Lincoln Faurer explained to The New York Times, “doesn’t mean it should no longer be classified.” Faurer also flew to Colorado, where Gen. Carter was living in retirement, met with him at the NSA listening post at Buckley Air Force Base, and threatened him with prosecution if he ever gave another interview or allowed anyone else access to his papers.

(This photo is Ft. Meade Campus, 1966

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/10/02/the-nsa-and-me/

https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=Photo%2C+Ft.+Meade+Campus%2C+2014&ei=UTF-8&fr=moz35