Facts and Fears Read online

  The only relief for me that year was that, coincidentally, my dad was at Tan Son Nhut as the deputy chief of NSA-Vietnam when I arrived, and our tours coincided for seven months. He was working for Colonel Hank Aplington—the same Marine who’d helped me into the Platoon Leaders Course in 1961. Dad was staying in colonel’s quarters, which were way better than what I would have been able to afford in downtown Saigon, and were much quieter during the daytime, when I finally got to sleep; so I moved in with him. We made it a Sunday tradition, on our mutual day off, to treat ourselves to dinner on the top-floor restaurant of the French-colonial-era Caravelle Hotel. We ate lobster tails with butter and drank martinis while watching as A-1s bombed and strafed the Vietcong across the Saigon River. Combined with the haze I felt from working nights, sleeping days, and being completely disconnected from home, the whole experience felt surreal.

  In 1966, after four months on the mid watch, I was moved to dayshift work as an air defense analyst and assigned a daunting collateral duty. Every Saturday, another lieutenant and I would drive to downtown Saigon to personally brief General William Westmoreland, the senior theater commander for all US forces in Vietnam. I had never met a four-star general before, much less talked to one, but I very quickly found myself with Westmoreland’s undivided attention. After the other lieutenant briefed the entire staff on the numbers—bombs dropped, explosions, secondary explosions, bridges destroyed, roads cut, and the number of enemy killed—the general and I would step into his personal office so that I could give him the highly classified “SIGINT reflections of air strikes” report. If we dropped a bomb and then intercepted a radio transmission of the North Vietnamese talking about being hit, the general wanted to know what they said. Before I left for Saigon each Saturday, we overlaid an acetate-covered map with little “thought bubbles” containing a succinct headline for each intercepted message. During the briefing I would expand upon them from the longer signals intelligence reports.

  At our first few sessions I was too nervous to notice the general’s response to my report, but I was determined to read his reactions, to figure out how to brief him more effectively. Paying closer attention during our third or fourth meeting, I slowly realized that he was just nodding along without really following what I was saying, and that the general in charge of all US operations in Vietnam wasn’t, in fact, a supergenius with a grand, strategic war plan well in hand. And my efforts didn’t seem to make much difference to the fate of the soldiers and Marines fighting and dying in the jungle. That realization was probably the darkest moment of my career and the first time I truly struggled with the question Why do we even do intelligence work?

  After a year at Tan Son Nhut, the Air Force assigned me back to Kelly Air Force Base, to another processing branch, again as deputy branch chief—the same kind of job I’d had before going to Vietnam. Sue and I began to think the Air Force just wasn’t going to work out and planned for me to finish my master’s degree and then join NSA as a civilian. Then one day I got a call from a friend and classmate from Goodfellow, Jack Kochanski. Jack was one of the few officers who’d wanted a stateside job after Goodfellow, and when he’d been told he was going to a SIGINT station in Pakistan, we’d tried to swap assignments. The Air Force didn’t approve of our questioning its wisdom, and so Jack had gone overseas. Two years later, in the spring of 1967, Jack was working at Kelly as the aide to the Air Force Security Service commander, Major General Louis Coira. He had phoned to tell me that he had been accepted for pilot training and to ask if I wanted to interview for his aide job. I agreed, and then asked, “What does an aide do?”

  That call changed my life. General Coira had been a bomber pilot during World War II and brought a self-effacing humility to command. He grasped both the details of our work and the big picture of its significance—precisely what I’d found wanting in General Westmoreland. For the next three years General Coira and I traveled the world, spending about four months of each year overseas, visiting all the Air Force signals intelligence units and observing how they ran as an enterprise. In addition to the typical military-aide duties—keeping the general on schedule, ensuring he had the materials he needed for meetings, coordinating visitors, etc.—General Coira tasked me with writing and editing much of his correspondence, which was a big responsibility for a very junior officer and gave me a new insight into the big issues with which the Air Force Security Service and its leaders dealt. Then, after a few trips together, he asked me to prepare and deliver an update on headquarters issues to each unit we visited.

  The assignment was a catalyst for my career. I felt that I was doing something challenging, interesting, and worthwhile, and I also got to see the scope of the massive signals intelligence effort the United States was conducting. Because of the size of the Soviet Union and China, high-frequency Morse code was the primary way to effectively communicate across such vast distances, so the entire Eurasian landmass was ringed with SIGINT sites, stretching from Japan to Turkey to Britain. Each signals intelligence station employed hundreds of GIs—soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines—copying “dits and dahs” around the clock, day in and day out. Nine stations employed FLR-9 circular-disposed antenna arrays, massive things we called elephant cages, to intercept transmissions and to “direction find” where each signal came from. If two stations picked up the same transmission, we could estimate where it came from by drawing lines on a map from each station and marking where in China or the Soviet Union the lines crossed. Putting the translated content of the communication together with the transmission location gave us very useful intelligence about our adversaries’ capabilities and what was going on inside their borders. Before I traveled the world with General Coira, I never could have imagined just how massive, manpower-intensive, and costly the US effort to collect and understand Soviet secrets really was.

  As the intelligence and combat missions in Southeast Asia increased, the Air Force brought new capabilities to bear. In March 1968, it first deployed the SR-71 Blackbird to Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa, Japan. It was magnificent: a mind-boggling machine that could fly at the edge of space at unbelievable speeds and collect intelligence over huge areas, virtually impervious to all contemporary antiaircraft systems. In the space of twenty minutes it could fly over all of North Vietnam and image everything that was worth imaging and intercept all the signals worth collecting. About five days later we’d get a readout of what it had collected. Of course, by then much of the data it had gathered was already obsolete. In other words, great intelligence—just too late to be useful to the combat forces.

  Intelligence on the Soviets moved even more slowly. After Gary Powers’s U-2 was shot down in May 1960, the United States stopped flights over Soviet airspace and thus lost coverage of Soviet capabilities—particularly on their strategic nuclear weapons. Fortunately, the launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957, had opened another avenue for collection. Before Sputnik, there had been a huge debate about the legal repercussions of satellites crossing national borders. Just how far up did sovereign airspace extend? If we put something in orbit above adversarial nations, what precedent would that set? Sputnik overflew national borders all over the world, sending radio signals intended—literally—to let everyone know the Soviets didn’t care about national borders when it came to space flight.

  In February 1959, the Air Force attempted the launch of its first “overhead” collection capability—Corona. The first launch vehicle never left the pad. In assessing America’s early successes in space photoreconnaissance and just how much they changed the game against the Soviets, people tend to forget that in 1959 and 1960 our first thirteen attempts at Corona failed. Those early space collection pioneers had to answer to Congress and the president, admit to setbacks, and convince them to be patient. I can attest, those sorts of meetings aren’t easy. Having given such briefings many times, as undersecretary of defense and as director of national intelligence, I doubt today’s Congress would have the patience to accep
t multiple failures in the interest of a breakthrough in technology. I suspect that its impatience today is manifested in the constant drumbeat for “acquisition reform,” as though improved bureaucratic processes for developing, building, and fielding new weapon systems, satellites, etc., would make technological progress easy and efficient.

  In 1961, the CIA and Air Force agreed to establish the National Reconnaissance Office—NRO, which joined CIA, NSA, and DIA as a fourth major national intelligence agency. NRO acquired and operated satellites to collect intelligence from orbit, starting with the Corona program. I first saw Corona imagery while working for General Coira in the late 1960s and was amazed at the volume and precision of intelligence it gathered on Soviet strategic facilities. To transport these images, Corona had to launch film canisters back to earth about every six weeks. The skilled crew of a specially configured C-130 transport plane would snag a parachute conveying a canister as it descended. The film would then be processed by the “recce techs,” the imagery analysts in the Air Force reconnaissance technical groups, as well as by the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center—NPIC. The result was an astoundingly complete picture of the way the world had been . . . a few weeks before. As I traveled the world, I found that the speed of intelligence was one of the great frustrations for our professionals deployed in the field.

  In August 1969, General Coira was assigned to Japan as the vice commander of the Fifth Air Force. His deputy, Brigadier General Carl Stapleton, “fleeted up” to commander of the Air Force Security Service on August 1, which was great for me, as General Stapleton also took a personal interest in my career. I mentioned to him that I had finished all the coursework for my master’s degree and only had to complete my thesis. I’d decided to write about how an equal-opportunity policy in off-base housing at Goodfellow Air Force Base—just four hours’ drive from Kelly—had impacted both service members and the local community. The Defense Department had published a regulation requiring property owners who rented to any service members to agree to rent to all service members, regardless of race. If they refused to rent to minorities, they’d be placed on a list of owners from whom all service members were not allowed to rent. I’d dug into the literature on race relations in the United States in the late 1960s and found that while the military services were not exactly shining beacons of hope for racial harmony, Truman’s order to desegregate the military in 1948 had at least forced people to work together, which led to a grudging respect for individual professional contributions, regardless of race. In theory, a regulation like the one regarding housing could extend some of that social change into the local community.

  General Stapleton, who had served as commander of Goodfellow, was intrigued. He set up interviews for me both with base leaders and with city officials, and I discovered that not only was the new DOD policy good for minority service members, particularly black service members who could now find decent places to live, but economically it benefited the city and the property owners who participated. I concluded that the DOD regulation worked and had the intended impact of broadening housing opportunities for minorities. General Stapleton had copies of my thesis placed in the Security Service library and the Air University library at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama.

  Stapleton also recognized that, while my tour as his and General Coira’s aide was a positive catalyst for my career, I needed to move on. I had mentioned on our travels together that I found the airborne signals-collection mission intriguing. We’d visited detachments of EC-47 signals-intelligence planes flying in South Vietnam and Thailand, doing essentially the same missions as the FLR-9 elephant cages while airborne. The airmen in the back of the plane would intercept a transmission, note the direction it had come from, and then intercept another line of bearing a few minutes later. They’d map out where the lines of bearing intercepted and then transmit targeting data on where the enemy transmitter was for attack aircraft or troops on the ground. It wasn’t as high-tech as the SR-71, but it was timely. I’d also seen that, unlike the units in Vietnam, the detachment in Thailand had been manned by airmen solely on ninety-day temporary-duty orders. As a result, they weren’t a cohesive unit, and they needed help. I volunteered to go back to Southeast Asia for a second yearlong tour, as the first “permanent” commander of this detachment.

  Since this assignment would include flight time over hostile territory, I needed extensive training. I attended survival training at Fairchild Air Force Base near Spokane, Washington, in March 1970, which included a lot of being cold, wet, and hungry while hiking and camping in the woods. This culminated in being “captured” and detained in a simulated prisoner-of-war camp, where I was slapped around and thrown against walls, deprived of sleep, blasted with noise, and locked inside a small box that amplified my claustrophobia in a terrible way. (Thankfully this was in the days before Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape training included waterboarding.) We were told that, while the United States followed the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong would use much worse torture techniques on captives than anything we had experienced in training. Decades later, after 9/11, I would remember the moral certitude with which our instructors in 1970 stressed that the United States would never use those techniques except to train our own troops.

  I next attended water survival training at Perrin Air Force Base in Texas, where we were taught how to free ourselves from parachute rigging to avoid drowning and how to conserve energy and survive until we could be rescued. The training included five parasailing jumps, during which we were harnessed into a chute and towed behind a speedboat; upon reaching the requisite height, we disconnected and executed a water landing. Those five jumps were fun. The final exercise, however, was not: We were tossed over the stern of the speedboat in a full harness in complete darkness. I remember tumbling through the water, disoriented about which way was up, struggling with the harness, swallowing water, struggling more, and being certain I was going to drown. But I survived, graduated, and went off to attend a weeklong jungle survival course at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. I felt extremely well prepared for my assignment after enduring these courses, which I never wanted to take again.

  The final training I took before leaving the States was voluntary, and entirely intellectual. EC-47s were weight restricted and had no room for sightseeing visitors, so the only way I could fly on operational missions from Thailand was to perform an aircrew function. I wasn’t a pilot, and since the only function I could qualify for was as an enlisted airborne analyst, I attended an analysis course for warrant and noncommissioned officers at the Army’s Two Rock Ranch Station near Petaluma, California, which also qualified me as a fledgling subject-matter expert on North Vietnamese Army communications practices.

  I arrived at Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai Air Force Base in June 1970. The state of my unit wasn’t pretty. Our “offices” were a series of semitrailers linked together with a plywood hallway that leaked whenever it rained, which was frequently. We had no latrines or running water, and we were the only flying unit with no air-conditioning in our barracks, which was against Air Force regulations for flight-crew rest. Our discipline was terrible. Our first sergeant informed me that we had the distinction of the highest venereal disease rate of any unit on base. I thought that was impressive, considering our guys were only there on ninety-day temporary-duty orders. They weren’t wasting any time before getting infected on “community outreach operations.” I took command, but raising our living conditions, morale, and discipline felt like swimming upstream against stiff currents.

  About six weeks later, an old, seasoned inspector-general colonel from the Security Service regional headquarters in Hawaii arrived. Normally, no one is happy at the prospect of an IG inspection, but I realized that my unit needed help, so I showed him and his team every problem I’d identified and let them see anything else they wanted. Unsurprisingly he judged our unit to be barely mission capable.
About a week later, I got a call informing me that the base wing commander required my presence—immediately. I raced to headquarters, already feeling awkward in my combat fatigues, only to find that standing with the base commander was four-star general Joseph Nazzaro, who was in charge of all US Air Force units across the entire Indo-Asia-Pacific region.

  The general sat and gestured for me to sit next to him. “You’re running an important mission here,” he told me. “What support do you need?” Glancing at the wing commander, I told the four-star that we lacked vehicles, air-conditioning, and running water, but that my temporary duty crew members were making the best of the situation and were executing five flying missions daily. My attempt to put a positive face on the situation felt very hollow. He thanked and dismissed me, and the next day we were issued a couple of jeeps and trucks and were moved into a permanent barracks with air-conditioning. Soon after, I started getting enlisted crew members on permanent change-of-station tours. Over the years, I’ve kept tabs on the members of that unit, and I am very proud that thirteen of its enlisted airmen were eventually promoted to the highest Air Force enlisted grade of chief master sergeant. One became the command noncommissioned officer for all of the Air Force Security Service, a command of about twenty thousand people.

  Unlike the EC-47 units in South Vietnam that were collecting intelligence for tactical strikes or raids in Vietnam, my unit was flying over Laos, and in 1970, the secret war there did not involve conventional US military forces. As an active participant in our missions, I’d taken my turns in the rotation of flight analysts, looking up call signs in a technical aid book, helping manually plot fixes in Laos, and then transmitting them to the ground. That, combined with the interest the four-star general took in our work, confirmed what I’d suspected from early on—we were actually working for the CIA station chief in Vientiane, Laos, who was providing our fixes for Laotian forces that the United States was “secretly” supporting.