There is nothing surprising about the US intelligence agencies failing to detect and stop the September 11 hijacking attacks. The main role of US intelligence agencies is not defence against threats like terrorism, but advancing US interests elsewhere in the world . . .
The founding conference of the United Nations in April 1945 was a crucial moment in establishment of the post-war world order. Delegates from over fifty countries met in the San Francisco Opera House to pledge to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights. The United Nations would be built upon “the equal rights of nations large and small…. liv[ing] together in peace with one another as good neighbours”.
But the conference was also, secretly, a founding moment for a new era of spying. President Roosevelt, in a seemingly magnanimous gesture, had fought hard to host the conference. In fact, the reason was to allow US intelligence staff to eavesdrop on the other delegates – of nations large and small – as they exchanged messages with their distant capitals about their negotiating positions.
Their coded telegrams were obtained from US telegraph companies, decoded by US Army codebreakers working 24 hours a day and supplied back to the US negotiators to help them achieve their goals in negotiations over the shape of the new international organisation. The secret operation was judged a huge success by the intelligence staff involved.
The United States likewise lobbied hard to have the UN headquarters located on US soil – again with the intention of assisting its eavesdroppers and codebreakers. These electronic spies would later be brought together to form the National Security Agency (NSA), the largest intelligence agency in the world, monitoring the electronic communications of virtually every nation on earth.
The popular perception of intelligence is of superpower games – or, now, pursuing terrorists – variously absurd or dangerous but somewhat detached from most other problems and politics of the world. However, part of the real history of the last 50 years is about how spy capabilities built up to fight the Axis forces, and later Russians, have also been used to maintain American political and economic dominance throughout the world.
This secret history of US foreign policy is well documented in a new book published in May this year: Body of Secrets, anatomy of the ultra-secret National Security Agency, by James Bamford.
Bamford reveals that the NSA has a classified budget of over US$7 billion – double that once military staff and eavesdropping satellites are added. It controls over 60,000 staff, more than most nations’ armed forces. Its Fort Meade headquarters outside Washington DC is like a private city, with 50 high-tech buildings surrounded by security fences and armed guards. It is larger than the better-known CIA and FBI agencies combined.
As more and more of the world’s business has occurred via electronic communications – originally radio and today the Internet – eavesdropping on those communications has become the main form of international spying. Known as “signals intelligence”, this is the NSA’s role – aided by four closely allied agencies in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (the ‘UKUSA’ alliance).
Although sophisticated and powerful, the NSA’s surveillance systems have their limitations, as the world discovered shockingly on September 11 (see box). Just as a high-tech missile defence system would have been useless for countering the attack by commercial airliner, so too are high-tech surveillance systems little use against the low-tech communications of a well-organised terrorist cell.
Bamford’s description of monitoring the 1945 UN conference begins a long history of post-war US signals intelligence. Mostly it has not been about defending the US from external threats. More often it has been a story of intelligence collecting used to support war as a policy instrument and of undermining the ‘fundamental rights’ of other nations to achieve foreign policy goals.
One of the 1940s issues debated by the United Nations, in the well-monitored New York headquarters, was the partition of Palestine – creating what became a key area of instability and political violence in the world since. The US brought massive pressure to bear on countries to support the partition, in particular heavying three small nations, Liberia, Haiti and the Philippines, to change their positions just before the final vote.
US Secretary of Defence James Forrestal wrote in his private diary at the time that the methods used “to bring coercion and duress on other nations bordered closely onto scandal”. The decision planted the seeds of future terrorism, and was a sign of things to come in UN politics. In such ways was the post-war world shaped, at each stage with the intelligence agencies providing an invisible but powerful influence.
The largest and best documented part of the spying history is the Cold War which, according to Bamford, began with US and British intelligence officers racing Russian troops to German codebreaking secrets as the war ended in 1945. The US gained a major – but shortlived – advantage over the Russians. During the 1950s there were provocative and at times rash spy-plane flights over the Soviet Union, not unlike more recent ones over China’s Hainan Island; and by the 1980s the USSR was ringed with NSA-controlled eavesdropping bases, aircraft, ships and submarines.
The Cold War served as a cover for many other intelligence operations against nations and groups opposed by the US Government. In 1961-62 a key target was the small island nation Cuba, whose leader Fidel Castro was exaggerated into being a threat to the American way of life.
After the failure of the US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles in April 1961, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff devised a strangely prescient plan. The covert strategy, uncovered by Bamford, involved staging a “terror campaign” against American citizens, to be blamed on Cuba, to justify an all-out invasion. “The casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation,” a secret report argued. Codenamed Operation Northwood, the plan included hijacked planes and bombs in Miami and Washington. The planning documents called for “developing the international image of the Cuban Government as… an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere.”
The Kennedy administration did not approve Operation Northwood, however a very similar Tonkin Gulf ‘incident’ two years later – long suspected of being a set up – sparked the Vietnam War. British, Australian and New Zealand intelligence staff joined in a huge US intelligence operation in Vietnam, including locating targets to fill the daily quota of B-52 bombing missions. Before and after it were a series of conflicts in the Middle East, Caribbean and Central America.
NSA director, William Studeman, summarised the NSA’s roles in a confidential memo to his staff in April 1992. “The military account is basic to NSA,” he said, and “demands for increased global access are growing. These two business areas ([Support to Military Operations] and global access) will be the two, hopefully strong, legs, on which NSA must stand.”
The NSA history shows a flexible US attitude to terrorism, depending on who conducted the violence. An graphic example of this is the Israeli attack on the NSA spy-ship Liberty during the 1968 Six-Day War.
Israeli forces conducted close surveillance of the Liberty for six hours off the coast of Israel, then launched repeated air and torpedo attacks on the ship until most of the NSA crew was dead or wounded and much of the ship destroyed. Lifeboats were shot at and sunk as soon as they were launched. Israel later claimed the attack was a mistake and – although the NSA had evidence otherwise – the US Government accepted this and never launched an inquiry.
In Body of Secrets, Bamford makes a convincing case that the Israelis were well aware that they were attacking a US spy ship. He concludes that the reason for the attack was to avoid evidence being gathered about military atrocities occurring only about 20km from the ship, in the Egyptian town of El Arish, where Israeli soldiers were in the process of shooting hundreds of civilians and bound prisoners.
The Pentagon ordered a total news ban on the attack, the crew was threatened with jail if they talked about it and President Johnson was reported as saying that ‘he didn’t care if the ship sank, he would not embarrass his allies’.
It was the Vietnam War that turned public support in New Zealand, as elsewhere, against United States foreign policies. It combined, within our region, with public disillusionment at US support for the Suharto and Marcos regimes, and its covert support for the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. The use of war, and selective respect for the rights of other nations, offended people with a “small nation” view of the world. This is the view held in most countries around the world, where international agreement rather than national strength are seen as the basis for stability and security.
But while the New Zealand public wanted a more independent foreign policy, our intelligence agencies continued to serve as an outpost of the US system. For example, although most New Zealanders supported East Timorese independence, our electronic intelligence agency helped Australia monitor the Timorese people – passing the intelligence on to the US and British Governments in a period when they were collaborating with the Indonesian secret services.
This illustrates the unequal relationships within the US intelligence alliance. The New Zealand intelligence officials’ attitude to the US is deferential but, more than that, it is defined by insecurity. They provide what is asked of them and are careful not to be pushy about things they want in return – even if this clashes with the national interests and policies of their own country. They also believe that targeting friends, neighbours and trading partners (which they do) is a small price to pay to retain a special relationship with the most powerful nation of earth. I am sure this is how British and other allied intelligence staff see it too.
I interviewed New Zealand intelligence staff who have handled the thousands of intelligence reports arriving weekly from the NSA. The surveillance targets reflect US Government priorities and concerns. For instance, pouring from the teleprinters in the 1980s were endless intercepted communications from Afghanistan, collected to help the ‘freedom fighters’ – Osama bin Laden among them – fight the Russians.
Other officers collected intelligence in the Pacific according to NSA requirements. No, they were not tracking terrorists. All aspects of the political, economic and military life in our region are targeted: Prime Minister’s offices, Ministers, government departments, police, militaries, opposition politicians and non-government organisations – for every country, comprehensively and continuously. All regional organisations, trade meetings, contentious trade issues and UN agencies in the region are also intensively monitored, all this to contribute to NSA’s desired “global access”.
Often the South Pacific intelligence seems politically innocuous but, when it matters, all that inside knowledge of other nations’ plans, problems and negotiating positions provides a very concrete advantage in political, economic and military contests. For example, one of the intelligence analysts I interviewed told a story that had upset him about surveillance of the island nation Kiribati.
This country has a fragile economy, where the main resource is fish. After years of poaching by US tuna boats, the Kiribati government found a Russian fishing company that would pay for rights to the fisheries. Although the Cold War was thawing, anti-communist alarm bells rang in the spy agencies. New Zealand officers monitored every communication in and out of Kiribati – passing them all to the US, which used them in its ultimately successful diplomatic effort to derail the fishing agreement. A small matter on a global level, but very damaging to this microstate.
The successors of the 1945 San Fransisco eavesdroppers are still helping to shape world events. New Zealand officers spoke of floods of NSA intercepts arriving during GATT negotiations, as US and European officials battled in the 1980s and 1990s. Bamford describes a NSA intercept team flown to Geneva in 1995 to eavesdrop on Japanese officials and Toyota and Nissan executives during US-Japanese car tariff negotiations. Former Canadian intelligence officer Jane Shorten revealed monitoring of the Mexican trade representative during negotiations on the 1992 NAFTA agreement.
The same goes for all crucial UN votes, international controversies, wars and the shoring up or pressuring of foreign governments.
This post-war spying, launched in San Francisco in 56 years ago, could have been used to support the hopes of the UN founders for a new era of human rights. But a lot of the history shows the opposite. Intelligence operations, like military ones, today underpin a world order far from being built upon the 1945 objectives of equal rights of nations, large and small, and saving the world from the scourge of war.
Intelligence operations serve to accentuate inequalities of power. It suits the NSA and its allies to be seen as heroes fighting despots and terrorists. Sometimes they are. But in the real world most of their targets present no threat, or at least are much less powerful than the US, and can be seriously disadvantaged by the surveillance. Some intelligence activities are actually supporting the despots, while others create the conditions from which the terrorism springs.
Why didn’t US intelligence agencies stop the September 11 attacks?
The US has the most powerful intelligence services in the world and so why, people are asking, did they not detect and stop the September 11 attacks? The more accurate question is: why are the intelligence services repeatedly surprised by events like coups, military attacks and acts of terrorist? The answer is that there are many ways that a small, well-organised group can evade surveillance.
Since the main form of spying is electronic surveillance, groups planning surprise actions can simply avoid using telephones and other electronic communications. Thus in each of the Lockerbie, 1993 World Trade Centre and Nairobi bombings the intelligence systems failed.
The same applies to the September 11 attackers. They would have relied on careful, face-to-face planning and used trusted couriers and go-betweens for long-distance communications.
If Osama bin Laden is involved, he is known to be very conscious of communications security. For instance, he avoids easily intercepted and located mobile phones and avoids moving money electronically.
Officials at the NSA headquarters show off to special visitors by allowing them to listen to NSA recordings of bin Laden speaking openly to his mother from Afganistan by satellite phone. But these recordings of infrequent family talks, which he makes no effort to hide, highlight the inadequacy, not the usefulness, of the electronic spy systems. For all his secret business, he relies on low-tech communications that the NSA cannot intercept.
The result, for governments relying heavily on signals intelligence, can be a sense of false security. And putting more resources into the NSA will probably not solve the problem.
Another option for secure communications is encryption, already widely available for e-mail and becoming available for telephone communications. Encryption is the bane of electronic spy agencies.
However, I doubt that the September 11 attackers would have used encrypted e-mail. Even when e-mail is encrypted, intelligence agencies can still track who it is going to and from. Their aim would have been anonymity and untraceability, not just making their messages unreadable.
The other usual surveillance techniques are infiltration of groups by paid agents and video surveillance and bugging of suspects. These forms of surveillance are relatively effective against, for instance, visible protest groups in democratic countries, but much harder against tight, disciplined cells. And you cannot infiltrate and watch groups that you do not know exist, or if you don’t understand the extent of their threat.
It is much easier to piece together a case after it is too late than to make sense of and follow up myriad scattered pieces of information before an unforeseen event. For instance, the FBI is now painfully aware of a CIA surveillance report that reached it on August 23, raising suspicions about two men who 20 days later flew the airliner into the Pentagon Building.
This is the dilemma of trying to stop terrorist attacks. Greatly increasing repressive surveillance, immigration and policing powers may help a bit, but only at huge cost to civil rights and normal functioning of a nation. Even then, the chances are that a well-organised group, acting in a bold and unpredictable way, could still succeed.
As proposals for sweeping new surveillance powers appear in the US, it is worth remembering that most of these things – and indeed military attacks against Afghanistan – were already being planned by the new US administration well before September 11.
The CIA is in the midst of the largest recruitment drive in its history, to rebuild its Clandestine Service. Enormous defence budget increases and aggressive new foreign policies were being planned. The US was already swinging to the right in its international relations. But whether these policies defeat or feed terrorism – which it is now being claimed they are to fight – remains to be seen.
- James Bamford, Body of Secrets, anatomy of the ultra-secret National Security Agency from the Cold War through the dawn of a new century, Doubleday, New York, 2001. All references to Bamford refer to this book.
- Bamford, Ibid, pp. 82-87.
- William O. Studeman, Farewell memo to all employees, 8 April 1992, found at Menwith Hill.
- Bamford, Ibid, p.226.
- Bamford, Ibid, p.410.
- Washington Post, “FBI agents ill-equipped to predict terror attacks”, 24 September 2001.