The Secret Sentry (12 page)

Throughout Washington, there was heightened concern about the possibility of an armed incident taking place involving an American
reconnaissance aircraft. On August 26 and 30, U-2 reconnaissance aircraft had accidentally penetrated Soviet airspace, the
latter incident resulting in Russian MiGs scrambling to intercept the errant American plans. Then on September 8, a U-2 had
been shot down by a Chinese SAM while over the mainland. Its Chinese Nationalist pilot was killed.
⁹⁶

On the afternoon of October 27, everyone’s worst fears came true. At twelve noon, intercepts of Cuban radio traffic confirmed
that a Soviet SA-2 SAM unit near Banes had shot down a U.S. Air Force U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. The U-2’s pilot, Major
Rudolf Anderson Jr., had been killed instantly. At six p.m., the Joint Chiefs of Staff were told, “Intercept says the Cubans
have recovered body and wreckage of the U-2.”
⁹⁷
In April 1964, an analysis of traffic on that day suggested that the SAM site that brought down Anderson’s aircraft might
have been manned by trigger-happy Cubans. But no definitive conclusion was ever reached.
⁹⁸

However, SIGINT confirmed that within hours of Anderson’s U-2 being shot down, the Soviets took over the entire Cuban air
defense system lock, stock, and barrel. From that evening onward, only Russian-language commands, codes, call signs, and operating
procedures were used on the air defense radio links.

Intercepts also showed that within forty-eight hours Russian air defense troops physically took over all of the SA-2 SAM sites
in Cuba. The same thing happened to the Cuban air force, whose voices overnight disappeared from the airwaves and were replaced
by those of Russian pilots flying more advanced MiG-21 fighters.
⁹⁹

On Sunday, October 28, fresh U-2 reconnaissance imagery showed that all twenty-four medium-range ballistic missile launchers
in Cuba were now fully operational. And on the same day, NSA intercepted a number of messages from the Cuban Ministry of Armed
Forces addressed to all Cuban air defense and antiaircraft units, reminding them to continue to obey an edict from October
23 “not to open fire unless attacked.” NSA also intercepted a radio transmission made by the head of the Las Villas province
militia ordering that “close surveillance be maintained over militiamen and severe measures be taken with those who demonstrate
lack of loyalty towards the present regime.” On the other side of the Atlantic, intercepted radio traffic showed that Soviet
forces in East Germany remained in a state of “precautionary defensive readiness.” Intelligence from NSA’s Soviet Submarine
Division at Fort Meade showed that the number of Soviet attack submarines at sea was higher than normal, but none were detected
leaving Soviet home waters and heading for Cuba.
^{100.CIA, memorandum,}

Meanwhile, the Cubans struck back. On the night of October 28, saboteurs blew up four electrical substations in western Venezuela
that were owned by the American oil company Creole Corporation, resulting in the temporary loss of one sixth of Venezuela’s
daily oil production of three million barrels. The previous afternoon, an NSA listening post had intercepted a radio transmission
from a clandestine transmitter located somewhere near Havana ordering a number of unknown addressees in South America to destroy
“any kind of Yankee property.” The same directive was also broadcast on October 28 and 30. CIA analysts soberly concluded,
“Further attempts at sabotage elsewhere in Latin America can be expected.” They were right. On October 29 in Santiago, Chile,
a bomb that was meant to blow up the U.S. embassy exploded prematurely, killing the bomb maker.
¹⁰¹

Conclusions

The bomb blasts marked, at least from NSA’s perspective, the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Despite the agency’s many important
contributions, it is now clear that the crisis was in fact anything but an intelligence success story. Because NSA was unable
to read high-level Soviet cipher systems, it was not able to give an advance warning of Soviet intentions before the first
Soviet merchant ships carrying the missiles headed for Cuba. According to a former NSA intelligence analyst, the agency failed
to detect the disappearance, in internal Soviet communications traffic, of the Fifty-first Rocket Division before it appeared
in Cuba in October 1962. Moreover, NSA failed to detect the disappearance of five complete medium-range and intermediate-range
missile regiments from their peacetime home bases inside the Soviet Union before they too were detected inside Cuba in October.
The agency intercepted only one low-level Russian message that vaguely suggested that the Russians were thinking of deploying
missiles to Cuba.
^102.

But most important of all, SIGINT did not pick up any indication whatsoever that the Russian ballistic missiles were in Cuba
before they were detected by the CIA’s U-2 spy planes. A recently declassified NSA history concludes that the Cuban Missile
Crisis “marked the most significant failure of SIGINT to warn national leaders since World War II.”
¹⁰³

CHAPTER 6

Errors of Fact and Judgment

SIGINT and the Gulf of Tonkin Incidents

Behold, how great a matter a little fire

kindleth.

—JAMES 3:5

The 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Crisis is an important episode in the history of both NSA and the entire U.S. intelligence community
because it demonstrated all too clearly two critical points that were to rear their ugly head again forty years later in the
2003 Iraqi weapons of mass destruction scandal. The first was that under intense political pressure, intelligence collectors
and analysts will more often than not choose as a matter of political expediency
not
to send information to the White House that they know will piss off the president of the United States. The second was that
intelligence information, if put in the wrong hands, can all too easily be misused or misinterpreted if a system of analytic
checks and balances are not in place and rigidly enforced.
¹

OPLAN 34A

Between 1958 and 1962, the CIA had sent a number of agents into North Vietnam. The first agents were assigned just to collect
intelligence. Then, starting in 1960, teams of South Vietnamese agents trained by the CIA were infiltrated into North Vietnam
to conduct sabotage as well as collect intelligence. With very few exceptions, these agent insertion operations were complete
failures. The North Vietnamese security services captured the agents almost as soon as they arrived. Between 1961 and 1968,
the CIA and the Defense Department lost 112 agents who were parachuted into North Vietnam, as well as a number of the C-54,
C-123, and C-130 transport aircraft used to drop them. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s typically understated comment
on the agent drop program was “Nothing came of any of it.”
²

After this dismal performance, in July 1962 the management of all covert operations against North Vietnam was transferred
from the CIA to the Defense Department. On January 1, 1963, control of the conduct of covert action operations inside North
Vietnam was given to the U.S. Army’s super-secret clandestine intelligence unit in Vietnam, the Military Assistance Command
Vietnam Studies and Observation Group (MACVSOG). Pursuant to a Top Secret operations plan designated OPLAN 34-63, put together
by the staff of the Commander in Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC), in Hawaii, U.S.-backed raids against the North Vietnamese coastline
by South Vietnamese commandos commenced in the fall of 1963. But the results produced by these raids were disappointing, and
in December 1963 MACVSOG went back to the drawing board and devised a new plan, OPLAN 34A, which included an even greater
level of South Vietnamese participation and U.S. Navy support. In January 1964, the U.S. Navy set up a secret base in Da Nang
to train South Vietnam -ese military personnel to conduct maritime commando raids against the North Vietnamese coastline with
two PT boats provided by MACVSOG.
³

Incredibly, virtually no one in NSA’s Office of Asian Nations (B2), which was responsible for monitoring developments in North
Vietnam, was cleared for access to details of OPLAN 34A, including its head, Milton Zaslow. Years later, Zaslow would tell
a group of NSA historians, “None of us had been cleared for 34A, and we did not know that there were actions underway.”
⁴

But a few officials within NSA knew about OPLAN 34A and were tasked with secretly providing SIGINT support for the MACVSOG
commando raids under the name Project Kit Kat. Inside South Vietnam, some 130 army, navy, and air force SIGINT operators were
engaged full-time in monitoring North Vietnamese communications as part of Kit Kat, including a highly secretive unit at Tan
Son Nhut Air Base, outside Saigon, called the Special Support Group, whose job was to feed SIGINT reporting concerning North
Vietnamese reactions to the OPLAN 34A raids to MACVSOG headquarters in Saigon.
⁵

In Washington a fierce debate was raging within the U.S. intelligence community about whether to release to the public information,
including SIGINT, “demonstrating to the world the extent of control exercised by Hanoi over the Viet Cong in SVN [South Vietnam]
and Pathet Lao forces in Laos.” The available intelligence showed that Hanoi was supplying and equipping the guerrillas both
by sea and by the Ho Chi Minh Trail. But the U.S. intelligence community refused to even consider releasing any SIGINT, warning,
“Should it become public knowledge that we are successfully exploiting North Vietnamese communications, not only the Vietnamese
but the [Chinese] can be expected to take additional security measures.”
⁶

Back in Southeast Asia, the second round of MACVSOG commando raids on the North Vietnamese coast was proving to be no more
successful than the first round. During the spring of 1964, North Vietnamese security forces inflicted severe losses on the
OPLAN 34A maritime commando forces and bagged the few remaining agents left in North Vietnam. Testifying in a closed session
before the House Armed Services Committee, CIA director John McCone admitted that there had been “many disappointments with
these operations with a number of teams rolled up” and that sabotage efforts had “not been too significant.”
⁷

In fact, as a declassified NSA history reveals, these commando raids had only served to piss the North Vietnamese off and
“raised Hanoi’s determination to meet them head on.” The volume of North Vietnamesenaval radio traffic went through the roof
every time there was a commando raid, with the intercepts indicating a determination by the North Vietnamese to annihilate
the attackers. But the pressure from Washington for quick results meant that the intelligence warnings of North Vietnamese
resolve were ignored, and new, larger, and more aggressive commando raids were immediately planned for the summer. Looking
back at these events, it is clear that both sides were charging rapidly toward an inevitable clash that would lead to war.
⁸

In Harm’s Way

On July 3, 1964, the new commander of U.S. forces in South Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, cabled Washington with his
intelligence requirements in support of OPLAN 34A. Westmoreland urgently requested more intelligence collection regarding
North Vietnamese coastal defense and naval forces, which had been plaguing the American-led 34A Special Operations Forces.
Westmore-land also required details concerning North Vietnamese coastal radars that could detect and track the 34A patrol
and speed boats operating along the North Vietnamese coast. In particu lar, intelligence coverage was requested for those
areas in North Vietnam scheduled as targets for OPLAN 34A commando raids in July, specifically the area around the city of
Vinh and the islands of Hon Me, Hon Nieu, and Hon Matt, further up the coast.
⁹

The principal means available in the Far East at the time to gather this kind of intelligence was to use U.S. Navy destroyers
carrying a SIGINT detachment and special radio intercept gear to slowly cruise off the enemy’s coastline ferreting out secrets.
These secret destroyer reconnaissance patrols were known by the code name Desoto.
¹⁰
The first of these Desoto destroyer reconnaissance patrols was conducted off the coast of China in April 1962. By July 1964,
the Navy had conducted sixteen Desoto patrols without serious incident, all but two of which were focused on the Soviet and
Chinese coastlines.
¹¹

Responding to Westmoreland’s request, on July 10, Admiral Ulysses S.G. Sharp Jr., the newly appointed commander of CINCPAC
in Hawaii, approved a destroyer reconnaissance patrol of the North Vietnamese coast and forwarded the request to the 303 Committee,
the secret committee in Washington that then supervised all sensitive covert and clandestine intelligence activities conducted
by the U.S. intelligence community. After a perfunctory review, the 303 Committee approved the patrol on July 15 and a host
of other sensitive reconnaissance operations proposed for initiation in August, with the Desoto patrol getting under way no
later than July 31, to determine the nature and extent of North Vietnam’s naval patrol activity along its coastline.
¹²

On July 18, CINCPAC selected the destroyer USS
Maddox
(DD-731), then in port at Keelung, to conduct the August Desoto patrol off North Vietnam. The twenty-two-hundred-ton
Maddox
was a World War II–vintage Alan M. Sumner– class destroyer built in Bath, Maine, and commissioned on June 2, 1944. She served
with distinction during World War II in the Pacific, taking a hit from a Japa nese kamikaze on January 21, 1945, which kept
her out of action for two months. She served in support of U.N. forces during the Korean War and continued operating in various
parts of the Pacific until 1974. She carried a crew of 336 officers and enlisted men, and her main armament were six twin-mounted
five-inch guns and four twin-mounted three-inch antiaircraft guns mounted on raised platforms behind the rear smokestack,
which had been added in the mid-1950s in place of her original complement of forty-millimeter and twenty-millimeter AA guns.
The
Maddox
was chosen for the mission because her old torpedo tubes, which had taken up the entire 0-1 deck between the two smokestacks,
had been removed in the 1950s and replaced by two antisubmarine “hedgehogs” located on either side of the bridge. This meant
that the entire torpedo deck was free for modules that housed electronic surveillance equipment and the military and NSA personnel
who operated them, in what was known as a SIGINT COMVAN.
¹³

The primary mission of the
Maddox
was to collect intelligence on North Vietnamesenaval forces, monitor North Vietnamese coastal radar stations, and try to ascertain
whether junks based in North Vietnam were helping infiltrate supplies and equipment into South Vietnam. Only four officers
on board were cleared for access to SIGINT: the task force commander, Captain John Herrick; the ship’s captain, Captain Herbert
Ogier Jr.; Herrick’s flag lieutenant; and Ogier’s executive officer. All four officers were briefed in general terms about
the OPLAN 34A commando operations then taking place against North Vietnam, but they were deliberately not told about the forthcoming
34A raids that would coincide with their mission. As with the
John R. Craig
’s patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin four months earlier, CINCPAC ordered that the destroyer come no closer than eight miles from
the North Vietnamese coastline, but the
Maddox
was permitted to come within four miles of islands off the coast, which as it turned out were key targets of the forthcoming
raids.
¹⁴

Captain Norman Klar, the commander of the U.S. Navy SIGINT unit in Taiwan— Naval Security Group Activity, Taipei— gave Captains
Herrick and Ogier, as well as their staff officers, a pre-mission intelligence briefing on the North Vietnamese order of battle.
At the end of the briefing, Ogier asked Klar only one question: “Will my ship be attacked?” This, according to Klar’s memoirs,
written years later, was his response: “I said ‘No.’ You are not the first DESOTO patrol in the Gulf. There has been absolutely
no hostile action taken by the Vietnamese in the past, and I believe that will continue.” Klar went on to admit that his assessment
turned out to be horribly incorrect, saying, “Talk about being wrong!”
¹⁵

The “business end” of the
Maddox
’s secret intelligence mission arrived on July 24, when a massive shipyard crane lifted a ten-ton SIGINT COMVAN off the deck
of the destroyer USS
George K. MacKenzie
, which had just returned to Keelung from an intelligence collection mission off the Soviet coastline, and placed it on the
torpedo deck of the
Maddox
between the ship’s two smokestacks. The
Maddox
’s crew, who had watched with undisguised interest as the heavily guarded van was lowered onto their ship, were ordered not
to enter the restricted area around the COMVAN or to ask any questions about what it was there for. Inside the air-conditioned
gray van were three radio intercept positions and a communications position linking the van with NSA and local listening posts.
Several intercept antennae were mounted on the roof of the van, while other antennae were hastily strung between the van and
the
Maddox
’s smokestacks. Accompanying the COMVAN was a fifteen-man detachment of navy and marine intercept operators under the command
of a twenty-eight-year-old Texan named Lieutenant Gerrell “Gary” Moore, a Chinese linguist whose regular billet was assistant
operations officer at the U.S. Navy listening post in Taiwan at Shu Lin Kou Air Station, west of Taipei. Their job was to
warn the
Maddox
of any danger to the ship and to collect SIGINT concerning North Vietnamesenaval activity of interest to theater of operations
and national intelligence consumers.
¹⁶

At eight in the morning on July 28, the
Maddox
departed from Keelung. For three days it steamed southward along the southern Chinese coast and around the Chinese island
of Hainan in the Gulf of Tonkin. The embarked Naval Security Group personnel used the time to check their equipment and monitor
Chinese radio traffic and radar emissions from the east coast of Hainan as the
Maddox
headed for “Yankee Station,” off the coast of North Vietnam.
¹⁷

Unbeknownst to the men on the
Maddox
, shortly before midnight on the evening of July 30, four South Vietnamese “Nasty”-class patrol boats working for MACVSOG
attacked North Vietnamese coastal defense positions on Hon Me and Hon Nieu Islands.
¹⁸
Although the damage inflicted by the patrol boats was slight, the North Vietnamese reacted violently to the attack, with SIGINT
showing that the four patrol craft were pursued for a time by as many as four North Vietnamese Swatow-class patrol vessels.
The captain of the North Vietnamese Swatow vessel T-142 later radioed that the boats had been unable to catch the South Vietnamese
craft, had ceased the pursuit, and were returning to base. This encrypted message, sent in Morse code, was intercepted by
the U.S. Navy listening post at San Miguel in the Philippines, decrypted, translated, and sent via teletype to NSA headquarters
at Fort Meade.
¹⁹