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[infowar.de] Coded warnings became clear only in light of Sept. 11 attacks
Infowar.de, http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~bendrath/liste.html
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http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/custom/attack/bal-te.nsa21jun21.story
Coded warnings became clear only in light of Sept. 11 attacks
Experts defend NSA for failure to interpret 2 key al-Qaida intercepts
By Scott Shane and Ariel Sabar
Sun Staff
June 21, 2002
In an ideal intelligence world, two messages intercepted by the National
Security Agency Sept. 10 would have permitted the analysts at Fort Meade
to uncover
plans for the attacks of Sept. 11.
But experts say the likely truth is the opposite: Only the Sept. 11
attacks allowed the analysts to find and make sense of the messages,
which NSA translated Sept.
12.
That's because the torrent of communications that pours into NSA's
global eavesdropping network is far too great to translate and analyze -
even if the agency were
not suffering from a severe shortage of qualified linguists.
"The Information Age has overwhelmed us," said former New Hampshire Sen.
Warren B. Rudman, former chairman of the Senate intelligence committee
and the
President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. If NSA was unable to
warn of the attacks, it's "not for lack of trying," Rudman said.
Even when messages sent within the al-Qaida terrorist network are
snagged and read in timely fashion, their deliberately ambiguous wording
makes them tough to
interpret, intelligence experts said. The Sept. 10 messages - "the match
begins tomorrow" and "tomorrow is zero [hour]" - are typical of the sort
that bedevil NSA
analysts.
"It puts the intelligence analyst in the impossible situation of telling
a real threat from some guy talking nonsense in a cafe in Kandahar,"
said Matthew M. Aid, an
intelligence historian writing a book on NSA. Depending on the context,
the messages might as easily have referred to a soccer match or a
long-awaited birth as to
an act of terror, he said.
Citing security concerns, Vice President Dick Cheney complained
yesterday to lawmakers about the leak of the intercepts, which were
discussed in closed
committee hearings on the intelligence agencies' conduct before Sept.
11.
At President Bush's direction, Cheney called Sen. Bob Graham, chairman
of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Rep. Porter J. Goss, chairman
of the House
Intelligence Committee, "to express the president's concerns about this
inappropriate disclosure," said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.
Fleischer called the leak "alarmingly specific."
"The information that is being provided to these committees is
extraordinarily sensitive," Fleischer said. "Public disclosure of that
information can damage our ability
to protect the country. So the president does feel very strongly about
it."
In response, Graham and Goss asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to
investigate the leak of classified information.
"We are entrusted to keep secrets, so when I hear there is a leak that
may have come from our committees, it's a matter of great concern," said
Goss, a Florida
Republican and former CIA officer.
Fleischer said a 1998 leak revealing that U.S. intelligence agencies
were intercepting Osama bin Laden's satellite phone conversations led
the Saudi terrorist to stop
using that phone. If terrorists learn of U.S. eavesdropping
capabilities, "they're going to change their methods," he said.
In recent years, however, the government has done little to hide the
fact that it eavesdrops on known terrorists.
Last year, federal prosecutors in the trial of four men charged in the
bombing of U.S. embassies in East Africa repeatedly cited NSA and FBI
eavesdropping on the
plotters. The intercepted messages were critical to convicting the men -
but they had been too vague to stop the attacks in the first place.
The intelligence committees' inquiry wrapped up the third week of
closed-door hearings Wednesday. The appearance this week of NSA's
director, Lt. Gen.
Michael V. Hayden, led to the first official scrutiny of the
eavesdropping agency's work prior to Sept. 11.
With more than 20,000 people at the main campus off the
Baltimore-Washington Parkway and several thousand more at listening
posts around the world, NSA is
the nation's largest spy agency. Graham said this week that it produces
about 75 percent of all the intelligence collected by the government.
But until now, the agency had escaped the kind of criticism prompted by
the FBI's failure to act on agents' concerns about suspicious foreigners
enrolled in flight
schools and the CIA's failure to follow up on the arrival in the United
States of two of the Sept. 11 hijackers.
Yesterday, no experts were willing to conclude that NSA's Sept. 10
intercepts represented the same degree of failure. Though the
Arabic-language messages
originated in Afghanistan, nothing is publicly known about who the
speakers were.
"It seems to me to be much ado about not very much," said Loch K.
Johnson, an intelligence expert at the University of Georgia.
"Translating this stuff in two days is
really not too shabby."
Jeffrey T. Richelson, an authority on U.S. intelligence and researcher
at the National Security Archive in Washington, agreed.
"From everything I've seen, it seems to me that far more of the problem
lies with the FBI, where there was some kind of concrete information"
about flight schools,
he said.
Steven Aftergood, intelligence policy analyst at the Federation of
American Scientists, said the intercepts actually suggest NSA is
managing to track terrorists despite
the challenges posed by the global communications explosion.
"To tell the truth, I was impressed that they were able to identify
these particular messages out of the daily avalanche of traffic,"
Aftergood said. "What this tells me is
that they still have something going for them. This is not a totally
obsolescent agency."
Former NSA employees said yesterday that the agency monitors a large and
constantly changing list of telephone numbers and e-mail addresses used
by al-Qaida
operatives. Each item on the watch list is given a priority ranking,
based on whether it has been used by leaders of the terror network or
lesser figures.
Conversations on the targeted telephones, picked up by NSA's fleet of
eavesdropping satellites, are automatically recorded and sent to the
computer terminals of
relevant translators and analysts.
But finding the right phone numbers and computers is a daunting task in
an era of ballooning communications. There are about 800 million cell
phones in use
worldwide, and about 500 million people have e-mail access on the
Internet, according to industry estimates.
The NSA's charter "is to collect and cast the widest possible net on the
widest variety of communications, and that can literally be millions of
data points at any given
time," said Anil Phull, a former NSA official now at the Yankee Group, a
technology research firm in Boston. "And so to find that top 1 percent
of 1 percent of
relevant information that needs to be further analyzed and acted upon -
that's a classic needle in the haystack problem."
NSA's counter-terrorist efforts also are crippled by a severe shortage
of linguists. The agency's Web site advertises openings for speakers of
Dari, Arabic, Urdu,
Swahili and Greek, among other languages.
Near-native fluency is often required to understand the nuances of a
fuzzy phone intercept, said Aid, the intelligence historian who is a
former Defense Department
linguist.
"The quality of the recording can be very poor. There can be slang or
code words used," Aid said. "It can take four hours to translate a
five-minute conversation."
For the government to take action on the basis of an intercept, the
message and analysis must be passed on to NSA's "customers" at the
Pentagon, the White House,
the CIA and the FBI. But those recipients of NSA intelligence sometimes
complain if they are given every intercept that could conceivably warn
of an attack.
"NSA has often been accused of crying wolf," Aid said.
In 1999, for instance, NSA intercepts warned that bin Laden might be
plotting an attack on U.S. targets in Europe, possibly Albania. Planned
trips there by
Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Defense Secretary William
S. Cohen were canceled, but no attacks occurred.
Staff writer Tom Bowman contributed to this article.
Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun
--
Olivier Minkwitz___________________________________
Dipl. Pol.
HSFK Hessische Stiftung für Friedens- und Konfliktforschung
PRIF Peace Research Institute Frankfurt
Leimenrode 29 60322 Frankfurt a/M Germany
Tel +49 (0)69 9591 0422 Fax +49 (0)69 5584 81
Mobil 0172 3196 006
http://www.hsfk.de pgpKey:0xAD48A592
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