the Anglo-American code breakers discovered that they now faced two new and seemingly insurmountable obstacles that threatened to keep them deaf, dumb, and blind for years. First, there was far less high-level Soviet government and military radio traffic than prior to Black Friday because the Russians had switched much of their military communication to telegraph lines or buried cables, which was a simple and effective way of keeping this traffic away from the American and British radio intercept operators. Moreover, the high-level Russian radio traffic that could still be intercepted was proving to be nearly impossible to crack because of the new cipher machines and unbreakable cipher systems that were introduced on all key radio circuits. The Russians also implemented tough communications security practices and procedures and draconian rules and regulations governing the encryption of radio communications traffic, and radio security discipline was suddenly rigorously and ruthlessly enforced. Facing potential death sentences for failing to comply with the new regulations, Russian radio operators suddenly began making fewer mistakes in the encoding and decoding of messages, and operator chatter disappeared almost completely from the airwaves. It was also at about this time that the Russian military and key Soviet government ministries began encrypting their telephone calls using a newly developed voice-scrambling device called Vhe Che (“High Frequency”), which further degraded the ability of the Anglo-American SIGINT personnel to access even low-level Soviet communications. It would eventually be discovered that the Russians had made their massive shift because William Weisband, a forty-year-old Russian linguist with ASA, had told the KGB everything that he knew about ASA’s Russian code-breaking efforts at Arlington Hall. (For reasons of security, Weisband was not put on trial for espionage.)
Decades later, at a Central Intelligence Agency conference on Venona, Meredith Gardner, an intensely private and taciturn man, did not vent his feelings about Weisband, even though he had done grave damage to Gardner’s work on Venona. But Gardner’s boss, Frank Rowlett, was not so shy in an interview before his death, calling Weisband “the traitor that got away.”
Unfortunately, internecine warfare within the upper echelons of the U.S. intelligence community at the time got in the way of putting stronger security safeguards into effect— despite the damage that a middle-level employee like Weisband had done to America’s SIGINT effort. Four years later, a 1952 review found that “very little had been done” to implement the 1948 recommendations for strengthening security practices within the U.S. cryptologic community.
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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.
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In Saigon, Ambassador Graham Martin refused to believe the SIGINT reporting that detailed the massive North Vietnamese military buildup taking place all around the city. He steadfastly disregarded the portents, even after the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, and most of his ministers resigned and fled the country. An NSA history notes that Martin “believed that the SIGINT was NVA deception” and repeatedly refused to allow NSA’s station chief, Tom Glenn, to evacuate his forty-three-man staff and their twenty-two dependents from Saigon. Glenn also wanted to evacuate as many of the South Vietnamese SIGINT staff as possible, as they had worked side by side with NSA for so many years, but this request was also refused. NSA director Lieutenant General Lew Allen Jr., who had taken over the position in August 1973, pleaded with CIA director William Colby for permission to evacuate the NSA station from Saigon, but even this plea was to no avail because Martin did not want to show any sign that the U.S. government thought Saigon would fall. So Glenn disobeyed Martin’s direct order and surreptitiously put most of his staff and all of their dependents onto jammed commercial airlines leaving Saigon. There was nothing he could do for the hundreds of South Vietnamese officers and staff members who remained at their posts in Saigon listening to the North Vietnamese close in on the capital.
By April 24, 1975, even the CIA admitted the end was near. Colby delivered the bad news to President Gerald Ford, telling him that “the fate of the Republic of Vietnam is sealed, and Saigon faces imminent military collapse.”
Even when enemy troops and tanks overran the major South Vietnamese military base at Bien Hoa, outside Saigon, on April 26, Martin still refused to accept that Saigon was doomed. On April 28, Glenn met with the ambassador carry ing a message from Allen ordering Glenn to pack up his equipment and evacuate his remaining staff immediately. Martin refused to allow this. The following morning, the military airfield at Tan Son Nhut fell, cutting off the last air link to the outside.
A massive evacuation operation to remove the last Americans and their South Vietnamese allies from Saigon began on April 29. Navy helicop ters from the aircraft carrier USS Hancock, cruising offshore, began shuttling back and forth, carrying seven thousand Americans and South Vietnamese to safety. U.S. Air Force U-2 and RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft were orbiting off the coast monitoring North Vietnamese radio traffic to detect any threat to the evacuation. In the confusion, Glenn discovered that no one had made any arrangements to evacuate his remaining staff, so the U.S. military attaché arranged for cars to pick up Glenn and his people at their compound outside Saigon and transport them to the embassy. That night, Glenn and his colleagues boarded a U.S. Navy helicopter for the short ride to one of the navy ships off the coast.
But the thousands of South Vietnamese SIGINT officers and intercept operators, including their chief, General Pham Van Nhon, never got out. The North Vietnamese captured the entire twenty-seven-hundred-man organization intact as well as all their equipment. An NSA history notes, “Many of the South Vietnamese SIGINTers undoubtedly perished; others wound up in reeducation camps. In later years a few began trickling into the United States under the orderly departure program. Their story is yet untold.” By any measure, it was an inglorious end to NSA’s fifteen-year involvement in the Vietnam War, one that still haunts agency veterans to this day.
More (#3) from The Secret Sentry:
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Even when enemy troops and tanks overran the major South Vietnamese military base at Bien Hoa, outside Saigon, on April 26, Martin still refused to accept that Saigon was doomed. On April 28, Glenn met with the ambassador carry ing a message from Allen ordering Glenn to pack up his equipment and evacuate his remaining staff immediately. Martin refused to allow this. The following morning, the military airfield at Tan Son Nhut fell, cutting off the last air link to the outside.