Facts and Fears Read online

  By the summer of 1959, I was ready to venture out on my own. I graduated from the American School as covaledictorian and enrolled at the University of Maryland in Munich, a small college campus for dependent sons and daughters on the McGraw Kaserne military installation, with enough course offerings for two years of college. My roommate there was a guy named Mike Leonard, who’d been a classmate in Nuremberg. We both wanted to be Army officers and thought Munich gave us the best chance to secure appointments to one of the service academies the following year. It was a great place to be a college student. I drank a lot of beer and, riding the trolley to the clubs and beer sinks in Schwabing, learned enough Gasthaus German to take advantage of what the city had to offer. Mike and I were studying Russian, and that fall we got the bright idea to take the train to Berlin to spend part of our Christmas holiday trying to find Soviet soldiers to talk to, though I honestly don’t know if we were going to try to befriend them, harass them, spy on them, or recruit them. We stayed in West Berlin for a few days, and because it was two years before the Berlin Wall was constructed, we could walk freely into East Berlin. I remember approaching a couple of uniformed Russians on the street and getting about as far as “Hello. How are you?” before they laughed at us.

  At the end of our year in Munich, Mike received an appointment to the US Military Academy in West Point, but I failed to secure my own placement. So, in the summer of 1960, I transferred to the University of Maryland’s main campus in College Park, where I enrolled in the Air Force ROTC program. Because the university is a federal land-grant college, the government required all male students to participate in ROTC during their freshman and sophomore years. Because I actually wanted to become a military officer, I also joined the Cadet Leadership Academy, the program to train cadet officers. I reapplied to all of the service academies, and that fall I finally received an alternate appointment to the US Naval Academy. I took a bus from College Park to Annapolis for the physical exam, the last requirement for admission. To my profound shock, I failed the exam, in the process learning that the vision in my left eye wasn’t within the standards for commissioning as an officer in any of the military services. I was devastated.

  I wrote my parents to let them know my plans for my life would have to change. A few days later, I received a letter back from my dad. A Marine Corps colonel who was a friend and colleague of his could pull some strings to get me into the Marine Corps Platoon Leaders Course (PLC), a commissioning program for which my deficient eye wouldn’t necessarily disqualify me, and on February 2, 1961, I enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve.

  I have vivid memories of the following rather unpleasant summer in Quantico, Virginia. My drill instructors, Gunny Fowler and Sergeant Stiborski, were two tough, squared-away Marines who physically and emotionally scared me. None of us “college boys” had a name other than “maggot.” I spent seemingly endless hours on the drill “grinder”—the expanse of asphalt I thought might melt the soles of my boots. I can still recall the serial number of my vintage M1 rifle—1954622—and silently pleading with it to please—please—do what Sergeant Stiborski kept telling us our weapons were supposed to do. One day Gunny Fowler said he was fed up with our drill and ceremony proficiency and was going to show us how it was supposed to be done. We were all loaded into what, aptly, were called “cattle cars,” small semitrailer trucks with no seats, and driven, standing, to the Marine Barracks at Eighth and I streets in Southeast Washington, to witness a Friday evening Sunset Parade—the ultimate in military pageantry and ceremony.

  I remember the first time the Marines went from the commands of “port arms” to “attention,” and when their three hundred rifles hit the deck in response, there was just a single sharp crack of butt plates on concrete, rather than the flurry of clanks produced when my training platoon in Quantico executed the same drill. Their precision gave me goose bumps—all those rifles, just one sound. Half a century later it’s still thrilling to me, and I still try to attend Sunset Parades at the Marine Barracks at least once each year.

  Our training platoon had started with fifty-two “maggots.” On the final day of the course, we were down to just thirty-five, and we still needed to pass our final grueling physical test to graduate. All thirty-five of us were successful, and ours was the only platoon that didn’t leave someone behind. As we went back to our Quonset hut barracks to shower and change into our clean utility uniforms, Fowler and Stiborski addressed us for the first time as “Marines.” I still feel the tingle of pride from that memory, and despite spending thirty-two years in an Air Force uniform, I continue to have a deep spiritual connection to the Corps. I wanted nothing so much as to be a Marine intelligence officer, but the Marine Corps of the sixties didn’t have a viable path for an intelligence career. So I returned to College Park and Air Force ROTC for my junior year of college in the fall of 1961, and I transferred my enlistment from the Marine Corps to the Air Force Reserve.

  That summer my dad had been reassigned to NSA headquarters in Maryland, and my family had returned to the States. To save money I moved into the basement of their quarters at Fort Meade and commuted to College Park. After a summer with Gunny Fowler and Sergeant Stiborski, I was suddenly a rock star at close-order drill and professional courses, and I quickly moved up the Air Force ROTC cadet ranks.

  But the most momentous life event of my junior year was when my parents became reacquainted with the Terrys, a couple they’d been friends with at Vint Hill Farms Station more than a decade earlier, and my mother pressed me to reintroduce myself to their daughter, Sue, who was then a high school senior. Any recommendation on girls from my mother was an immediate turnoff for me, and my lack of interest was only compounded when I realized who she was and that she no longer had my comic books. But my mother bugged me and bugged me, and finally I agreed to call Sue. I brought her down to the university campus on a Sunday afternoon to show her around. She liked it and immediately decided she was going to apply for the following fall. That was the start of a three-and-a-half-year, stormy, on-again, off-again dating relationship.

  In the summer of 1962 I attended ROTC summer training for rising seniors at Otis Air Force Base in Massachusetts. After the PLC training in Quantico, Otis felt more like a Boy Scout jamboree than military training. I consider that a testament to the PLC program, rather than a slight to Air Force ROTC, and with the Marine Corps experience behind me, the Air Force officer in charge simply wrote in my evaluation that I acted as if I were “already commissioned.” None of the training exercises at Otis was particularly memorable, but one afternoon we were quickly loaded onto buses and driven to the airfield. On the way there we were told that President Kennedy was landing at the base en route to a family vacation at his residence in Hyannis Port, and we were to make him feel welcome when he got off Air Force One. Somehow I ended up with eight or ten other cadets in the front row against the rope as the president shook hands with each of us. When he got to me, I gave him my name, and he asked me what plane I wanted to fly. I told him that I didn’t want to fly; I wanted to be an intelligence officer. He stopped and looked at me, a bit askance. There was just a brief pause, and then he said, “Good. We need more like you,” and moved on. I’m sure the president never gave that little exchange another thought. I’ll never forget it.

  I received my commission to be an Air Force second lieutenant as a distinguished military graduate in June 1963. My academic and military grades had been stellar, and I’d been commandant of the Cadet Leadership Academy for the first semester of my senior year and then cadet wing commander the second semester, which meant that I was able to select the profession of intelligence officer, and I had my pick of first assignment. I selected the Signals Intelligence Officers Course at Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas, the Air Force “SIGINT college of knowledge.” Well west of the Houston/Dallas/San Antonio triangle, San Angelo was four hours from any major city. There was very little to do besides studying signals intelligence, and
most of us couldn’t even do that right away.

  That summer the Air Force didn’t plan well for how to manage sixty brand-new second lieutenants all showing up at Goodfellow at the same time, most of us lacking the security clearance required to take classes. Background investigations require some time, particularly for people who’ve lived overseas, so most of us spent our first few months cycling through busy-work assignments like “assistant Officers’ Club manager.” We played a lot of cards and flag football and drank a lot of beer. Bored, and looking for something professionally useful to do, I found the Air Force major who was in charge of base security and asked if I could ride along with the enlisted air police on their rounds. He looked me over. I was in my Air Force uniform, but still had the starched shirt, shiny shoes, and buzz cut of a Marine. He agreed, and so I spent the next few months working with enlisted security forces.

  Meanwhile, Sue was on the opposite work curve. She’d majored in partying during her freshman year at the University of Maryland and, after deciding that college wasn’t for her, applied for work at NSA. She first worked as an editor of technical publications and then landed a job as a secretary in the Soviet Air division—the gatekeeper and office manager for a group of analysts tasked with keeping tabs on Soviet Air Defense forces, right in the center of some of the most important intelligence work taking place at the time.

  Many of the prominent code crackers of World War II had been women who’d stayed with the agency after the war, and NSA in the 1960s was appreciative of their contributions and more open to having them in leadership positions than the rest of government or corporate America. My dad had worked for several of these women in the 1950s, including Juanita Moody and Ann Caracristi, who in 1980 would shatter the glass ceiling as deputy director of NSA. Hearing him talk about these individuals as smart, capable leaders, without his making a big deal about their gender, made a bigger impression on my views of women than any feminist views my mother ever expressed.

  After about five months, my security clearance finally came through, and I started learning the professional discipline of signals intelligence. I distinctly remember the afternoon of November 22, 1963. After classes all morning, I’d eaten lunch in the base mess hall and climbed into my Corvair convertible for the short drive back to my room in the bachelor officers’ quarters. I turned the radio on and heard the first reports out of Dallas that President Kennedy had been shot. As I drove, the realization of what had happened hit me—the shock, disbelief, and uncertainty. He and the First Lady were so attractive as a couple and had captured the hearts of the American people. And I’d met him just fifteen months earlier. He’d shaken my hand and said we needed more people like me.

  On base, everything stopped. There were no afternoon classes, and we were all glued to our televisions. I felt dissociated from the reality of the moment; not a participant, but just an observer of the world, a feeling I’d have again in September 2001. And also, just as after 9/11, what followed was a combination of uncertainty—that the world had changed forever and we’d have to find a new normal—and of resolution, that the nation would move forward together.

  As my seminar of thirteen lieutenants wrapped up our five-month training course in early 1964, we eagerly looked forward to our assignments. The training had prepared us to be flight commanders for SIGINT units overseas, where we would supervise shifts of airmen conducting collection around the clock. I was ready to pick up the family torch of collecting Soviet communications and doing to them what I’d done to the Philadelphia PD at the age of twelve. But the Air Force, in its infinite wisdom, decided to assign me to what was euphemistically called “the Air Force Special Communications Center” at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio, a highly classified “Third Echelon”–type in-depth processing and analytic organization, much like NSA. It conducted longer-term analysis on the Soviet air forces.

  I was appointed the deputy chief of the Soviet Air Defense Branch, a job title much more impressive than the responsibilities with which I was actually entrusted, but I set out to learn as much as I could about the technical tasks performed by the airmen I was ostensibly supervising. They seemed to appreciate my willingness to have them show me the ropes. After about six months, I was plucked out of that job and moved to what was known in the military as the “orderly room,” which is the hub of military management: inspecting barracks, the mess hall, and the motor pool; administering personnel actions, discipline, and reenlistment ceremonies; and on and on. I served, for example, as a summary court officer in the case of an airman killed in a bar fight, and dealt with his personal effects and settled affairs with his family. The most indelible experience I had was processing the dishonorable discharges of two airmen who were roommates in the barracks, and who had been “outed” (which was not a term used back then) as homosexual. In the day, there was—by regulation—no other recourse. They automatically lost their security clearances and were expelled from the service. At best, homosexuals were given general discharges; some received dishonorable. These two individuals were model airmen: superb Russian linguists, meticulous about their military responsibilities, and devoted to serving their country. I remember thinking what a waste of talent it was, in addition to being a profound injustice, and it viscerally bothered me that I was forced to play a part in their unceremonious dismissals.

  I was very happy to escape back to Fort Meade to visit my parents for the Christmas holidays, with the bonus of meeting up with Sue, whom I hadn’t seen much of that year. We shared so many things: our values, our experiences as military brats, our love of country and appreciation for the intelligence mission. And truthfully, there was a spark between us that transcended any difficulties we’d had in the past. I went to the Hecht Company department store and bought an engagement ring for a hundred and sixty-five dollars. Sue still wears that ring (and still remembers how much it cost). I went back to Texas for a few months as Sue and our mothers made plans for the wedding, and in April 1965 we were married in the post chapel at Fort Meade, and our wedding was big, happy, and attended by many “in the business,” as our families were both well-known in the NSA community. We counted driving back to Texas as our honeymoon, and we moved into a small apartment in San Antonio and began our journey through life together. Sue got a secretarial job with a small NSA detachment that had just formed at Kelly Air Force Base, the distant predecessor of what’s now the huge, and hugely important, NSA-Texas facility at Joint Base San Antonio–Lackland. Once again, she was doing important work in support of intelligence operations while I wasn’t doing much with my recent training and years of preparation. I started taking night classes at St. Mary’s University, working toward a master’s degree, which was a crucial professional accomplishment in the 1960s Air Force.

  Meanwhile, the US presence in Southeast Asia was ramping up. After the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964—an exchange of fire between North Vietnamese patrol boats and a US Navy destroyer conducting signals intelligence operations in which both sides took damage and several North Vietnamese sailors died—Congress authorized military action. In 1965 more than two hundred thousand combat troops were shipped to the theater, and I volunteered for a one-year tour. I arrived at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, outside Saigon, in December 1965 as one of the first hundred Air Force intelligence officers to go to Vietnam on “permanent” one-year orders, under which Tan Son Nhut became my duty station, rather than on ninety-day “temporary” orders, which had loaned officers to the base while administratively they were still attached to a home in the States.

  The Air Force designated me a combat intelligence officer and immediately assigned me to a midshift watch—10:00 P.M. to 8:00 A.M.—in the Indications and Warning Center. For the next four months a sergeant and I spent those ten hours, six days a week (with Sunday off), reading reports coming in from the field and culling them into a “black book” of intelligence that was carried around to each of the Air Force generals in the headquarters facility—a very dis
tant forerunner to the President’s Daily Brief, which I would oversee forty-four years later.

  In those days intelligence was largely historical, telling people what had happened, not what was happening and certainly not forecasting what was going to happen. It wasn’t part of the “find, fix, finish” operations cycle, which didn’t then exist, and “intelligence automation” was pretty much acetate, grease pencil, and two corporals. My work was a tedious manual process, particularly since I only had academic knowledge about signals intelligence operations and knew almost nothing about air combat. I lamented aloud that I barely knew the difference between “flak”—antiaircraft fire—and a “frag”—a fragmentary operations order—or between an F-4 and an F-105. I imagined supergenius men with rows of ribbons and gleaming stars poring over my reports to decide where to attack and where to hold ground, making decisions with potential life-or-death consequences. Without any feedback I pressed ahead, tired and stressed, marking off the days on my calendar until I could rotate home.

  The coup de grâce for my morale was a letter I received from Sue just a few weeks into my tour telling me that she was pregnant. I was despondent at the prospect of missing the birth of our first child. Then Sue’s due date in June came and went, with no word from her. She had sent a telegram, but I never received it, and I hadn’t been able to reach her. Jennifer was two weeks old when an Air Force general commented to Sue that I must be excited and happy to know about the expansion of my family. “Well, if he is,” she replied, “I sure haven’t heard it from him.” The general promptly sent an official message to let me know that I was a father and that everyone was okay.