The Wizards of Langley (46 page)

In August 1993, James Hirsch, faced with budgetary and personnel downsizing, effectively reversed one of his and Evan Hineman’s changes, when he established the Office of Technical Collection (OTC). OTC absorbed, in their entirety, the Office of SIGINT Operations and the Office of Special Projects. It also took charge of some of the projects that were assigned to the Office of Technical Service, including some of its clandestine imaging activities.
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Since the OSP-managed activities had largely been the responsibility of OSO until the special projects office was established in 1987, in one sense the clock had been turned back.

The merger returned responsibility to a single office for the CHESTNUT sites, the Special Collection Service operations, and emplaced sensors—and once again assigned one office responsibility for both SIGINT and MASINT collection. But as its name implied, OTC gave the two activities more equal standing. Indeed, the first head of OTC was Peter Daniher, who had headed OSP and was chosen over OSO head Joseph B. Castillo Jr. to run the new office.
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Daniher had served in the intelligence directorate’s Office of Scientific and Weapons Research (established in 1980 by merging OSI and OWI) and had ambitions to be the Deputy Director for Intelligence. When it became clear to him that he was unlikely to achieve that position, he shifted his focus to the DS&T and became director of the special projects office in October 1989 when Gary W. Goodrich moved up to become Hirsch’s deputy.
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Hirsch had a number of reasons for establishing OTC in addition to resource pressures. The seemingly disparate activities had some significant common aspects. The data they produced could all be processed using digital techniques, and Hirsch believed it was important that any
advances be shared. Developing access to sites to place sensor equipment, whether clandestine SIGINT, clandestine imaging, or clandestine MASINT, involved common problems and challenges. There was also commonality in development and testing. In Hirsch’s view, there was no good, logical way to divide the activities perfectly, and that what was important was proper development and testing, irrespective of whether the system was electronic, optical, or chemical.
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In late 1992, President Bush authorized Operation Restore Hope—the deployment of 25,000 U.S. troops to Somalia to ensure that U.N. food, medicine, and other supplies were delivered to those in the war-torn country in need of such assistance. By May 1993, the supplies were reaching their targets, famine was receding, and the nation was relatively peaceful. Most U.S. troops were withdrawn, and Somalia was turned over to a U.N. peacekeeping force.
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Then, in a move supported by the Clinton administration, the U.N. mandate was expanded to include the rehabilitation of Somali political institutions as well as the nation’s economy. The action infuriated Gen. Mohammed Farah Aideed, a warlord whose Somali National Alliance (SNA) had become the primary power in Mogadishu, the Somali capital. In early June, Pakistani peacekeepers were ambushed and killed after inspecting Aideed’s radio transmission center. Not long after, the U.N. senior representative in Somalia, Adm. Jonathan Howe, issued an arrest warrant for Aideed and offered a $25,000 reward for his capture.
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The next month, the situation took a turn for the worse, when a U.S. component of the peacekeeping force, the Army’s 10th Mountain Division, killed between twenty and fifty Aideed aides and operatives in an attack on the SNA’s command center. The attack not only failed to achieve its objective of eliminating Aideed and the SNA as an obstacle to the U.N. mission but also led the warlord to declare war on the U.N. forces.
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Finding and capturing Aideed became a top priority for the CIA in Somalia. Trying to locate the warlord through intercepted radio traffic proved impossible in Mogadishu’s “pre-electronic state.”
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In early October 1993, an article in the
Washington Post
recounted how intelligence problems, including a lack of intelligence exchange between the nations involved in the peacekeeping effort, hampered the search for the elusive warlord.
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One problem not mentioned was the fatal flaw of a CIA asset, which possibly prevented his case officer from using him to plant a homing beacon on Aideed. OTS had implanted such a beacon in an ivory-handled walking stick. The asset, a minor warlord, was to give the stick to Aideed as a symbol of friendship. As long as Aideed carried the stick with him, the CIA would be able to find him.
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But in late August, before the CIA’s man could deliver the stick to Aideed, he played Russian roulette once too often. By late September, with pressure building to produce a success for the Clinton administration, the deceased warlord’s case officer was told that another troublemaker might be captured. The potential target was Osman Ato, a wealthy businessman, arms importer, and Aideed financial supporter. Another CIA contact was willing to deliver Ato for the right amount of money.
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Cane in hand, the contact was soon climbing into a car that would take him to Ato. Helicopters tracked the car, using the stick’s beacon, on its winding ride through north Mogadishu. When the car stopped for gas, an operative on the ground reported that Ato was in the car. Commandos from the Delta Force, which had arrived in late August expecting to capture Aideed, were launched in pursuit of their new target.
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Minutes later, a helicopter descended, and a sniper leaned out and placed three shots into the car’s engine block. As the car came to a stop, the commandos slid down ropes dangling from Blackhawk helicopters, surrounded the car, and put Ato in handcuffs. An hour later, Delta’s commander, Maj. Gen. Walter F. Garrison, had a big grin on his face and was telling CIA officer Garrett Jones that “I like this cane.”
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On October 11, 1994, James Woolsey, the Clinton administration’s first DCI, appeared at a Capitol Hill briefing. He was not there to discuss terrorism, arms proliferation, drug trafficking, or the threat from rogue states. At the request of Susan Blumenthal, the deputy assistant secretary for women’s health at the Department of Health and Human Services, he was attending a briefing on breast cancer. He was not there as an observer but as the most senior representative of a CIA effort to make some of its technologies available to fight the disease. Woolsey told the audience that “what we are trying to do is to use the tools developed to protect the lives of 250,000,000 Americans [to] help save the lives of a substantial share of the 46,000 women who die annually of breast cancer.”
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Earlier in the year, Blumenthal had written to other government agencies inquiring whether they had technologies that might contribute to President Clinton’s initiative to fight breast cancer. In July, ORD invited the National Information Display Laboratory (NIDL), an organization sponsored by the intelligence community to help bring advanced commercial and consumer technologies into the government, to prepare a background paper for Blu-menthal. The paper described some of the advanced image-processing techniques that might be applied to the field of mammography.
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The Defense Intelligence Agency digitized some sample mammography for NIDL experimentation, which proved sufficiently interesting that Blumenthal and a committee of medical experts visited the laboratory in September 1994. The image-processing technique demonstrated to the group led Blumenthal to invite the laboratory to participate in the Capitol Hill symposium. For that meeting, NIDL, with the assistance of the Community Management Staff and ORD, set up several demonstrations of advanced, but unclassified, image-processing techniques that were applicable to medical procedures.
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The techniques included using experimental high-definition television and head-mounted displays to examine digital images, pattern recognition tools, and a three-dimensional system for detecting lesions in magnetic resonance breast scans. The briefing also included a demonstration of serial change detection—the subtraction of the images in one photo from a later photo to identify new objects—applied to serial mammo-grams.
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Such a system had been developed to enable NPIC to identify new missile sites or other new military developments at a target area.

The following spring, Adm. William O. Studeman, who had become acting director upon Woolsey’s resignation, announced that the CIA, NRO, and Community Management Staff would contribute $375,000 to continue research into application of such techniques to breast cancer detection.*

In spring 1995, U.S. officials met the flag-draped coffin of Gary C. Durrell at Maryland’s Andrews Air Force Base. Durrell, a forty-four-year-old father of two, had died shortly before in Pakistan, the victim of terrorist gunfire. His death was another reminder that, for some, working for the Directorate of Science and Technology could be just as dangerous as working for the Directorate of Operations; Durrell had been in Pakistan as part of the Special Collection Service’s Karachi element.
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The SCS had continued to pay significant intelligence dividends during the Hineman and Hirsch years. SCS elements could be found in embassies in Moscow, Beijing, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Tel Aviv, Tegucigalpa, and another forty capitals. In Tegucigalpa, the SCS element monitored the police and military as well as the terrorist activities of some of the forces opposing the government. The Tel Aviv outpost intercepted Israeli military and national police communications—allowing the State Department to be informed about, among other things, police activities directed at the Palestinians.
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Undoubtedly, during the abortive attempt to oust Mikhail Gor-bachev in August 1991, the Moscow embassy listening post intercepted whatever communications of the coup plotters, including the KGB chairman and Minister of Defense, could be snatched from the airwaves.
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Other SCS missions involved a closer approach to the target. An SCS operation might involve eavesdropping from a van outside the window of a foreign ministry official—which might make it possible for an analyst to read every message being written in the official’s office at the time it was being written. Another project allegedly involved capturing pigeons that roosted outside the Soviet embassy in Washington and attaching small microphones to them. After returning to their perch outside an open office window, they produced “incredibly good results,” according to a former Canadian intelligence officer.
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One operation involved bugging the Chinese ambassador to Washington, who frequently talked about sensitive matters while sitting on a bench in the embassy compound. SCS technicians developed a fiberglass “twig,” which contained a listening device. It was tossed into the compound near the bench. SCS bugging operations also involved crystal objects, mugs, porcelain roses, dried floral arrangements, a small totem pole, as well as an icon of the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus painted on a one-inch-thick piece of wood. All were planted in offices or offered to diplomats as gifts.
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One SCS officer arrived in Kabul toward the end of 1984 and spent several hours a day pretending to be a diplomat, meeting with Afghanis who wanted to travel to the United States, visiting the Foreign Ministry, and attending receptions. But he spent most of his time, usually in
twelve-hour stretches, in a windowless suite of three small rooms protected by an electronic lock. One room was a lounge; another served as a storage area for the eavesdropping equipment. In the third room, electronic devices were piled up to the ceiling—creating a wall of knobs, buttons, tape recorders, and glowing oscilloscopes. Relying on a massive guide labeled TEXTA (for Technical Extracts from Traffic Analysis), the eavesdroppers could find what frequencies their targets employed.
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The SCS officer monitored Afghan troops as well as the military airport tower, noting on three-by-five index cards aircraft types, arrival and departure times, and destinations. A copy of each teletype message sent by an Afghan government official appeared on a printer in the room. The SCS element in Kabul was able to provide coverage across the country. Included was a grisly intercept reporting that the Afghan resistance had peeled off the skin of a captured Soviet soldier while he was still alive. According to a former Reagan administration Middle East expert, “They were plugged in on Afghanistan. . . . We were soaking up everything.”
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In Pakistan, Gary Durrell and his SCS colleagues were undoubtedly soaking up as much information as they could. Durrell was a native of Alliance, Ohio. As a member of the Air Force Security Service, the Air Force component of NSA, he worked at eavesdropping sites in Texas and Italy. In 1977, he joined NSA, and spent the next eight years in England at the RAF Chicksands eavesdropping site—which intercepted both Soviet and West European communications. In 1987, he “resigned” from NSA, ostensibly to join the State Department. In fact, he joined the SCS, which by then had moved into its new headquarters in Beltsville, Maryland. The sign outside those headquarters indicated the site housed the State Department’s “Communications Systems Support Group.”
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Before heading overseas, Durrell trained at a site in Maryland that had the appearance of a high-tech company. At the “Maryland field site,” as it is referred to in unclassified documents, Durrell and his fellow trainees were instructed on the use of sophisticated listening equipment, some of the equipment no bigger than a briefcase and some stacked like the stereo equipment one might find in a living room. They were trained to do their eavesdropping from locked rooms inside embassies and consulates.
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