NSA: Inside the Puzzle Palace

The National Security Agency is like the Jorge Luis Borges fable of the infinite library in which all of the planet's knowledge and information reside, maddeningly encoded. Into the NSA's heavily guarded, three-story headquarters outside Washington every week the world's secrets flow from U.S. spy ships, surveillance planes, satellites and hundreds of electronic listening posts round the globe. Unlike the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies, the NSA's mission is strictly communications--electronics and cryptology. It is the ultimate bug, the source of most of the nation's foreign intelligence information and, like the CIA, a source of growing controversy.

Compared with the NSA, the CIA is as open as a New Hampshire town meeting. The NSA welcomes its confusion with NASA and the National Security Council. It is the one federal agency that claims--and gets--total exemption from the Freedom of Information Act. When Harry Truman started the NSA under the Defense Department's authority in 1952, only a handful of people even knew of his order.

Four Missions. By one estimate, the NSA spends $1.2 billion a year and employs 25,000 people, compared with the CIA's $750 million and 16,500 workers. At its Fort Meade, Md., headquarters, variously known as "Disneyland" and "the Puzzle Palace," the NSA labors in extraordinary anonymity to monitor communications throughout the world and then decipher the coded messages. In that task it is reputed to employ everything from the world's largest bank of computers to blind people whose acute hearing can pick up signals on tapes that sighted people might miss.

The NSA has come under increasing congressional attention. The troubles began last June when the Rockefeller commission revealed that the NSA had fed 1,100 pages of material on U.S. citizens to the CIA's "Operation Chaos," which was aimed at uncovering foreign influences among U.S. radical groups. Last week despite vigorous White House lobbying against it, the Senate intelligence committee called NSA Director Lew Allen, 50, an Air Force lieutenant general with a doctorate in nuclear physics, to explain some of his agency's operations. It was the first time an NSA chief has ever testified in public about the agency's specific activities.

The committee was most interested in the NSA'S monitoring of international telephone and cable traffic involving American citizens from 1967-1973. Allen testified that the NSA, under "Project Minaret," received "watch lists" of U.S. citizens about whom other agencies such as the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the FBI wanted information. In all, said Allen, the NSA intercepted the international calls or cables of 1,680 American citizens and groups and of 5,925 foreign nationals and groups.

The watch lists covered four basic areas. One was international drug traffic. Another was keeping track of potential presidential assassins. The other two areas were terrorism and possible foreign support for civil disturbances. Cryptically, Allen told the Senators that the watchlist monitoring had prevented "a major terrorist act" in an American city. The episode apparently involved a plan by Arab terrorists to hide explosives in a car parked on a New York City street and detonate them when Israeli Premier Golda Meir, who was visiting the city, passed by.

The monitoring of U.S. dissidents began with Lyndon Johnson's anxiety that foreigners were financing and organizing antiwar groups seeking to drive him from office. The FBI and CIA submitted watch lists. The Defense Intelligence Agency had the NSA monitor the foreign communications of about 20 Americans who were traveling to North Viet Nam.

The legality of the operations is questionable. The committee arranged for Attorney General Edward Levi to appear this week to discuss the matter. Allen admitted that the NSA had obtained no warrants for any of the monitoring and that the agency had never sought a legal opinion on the subject from the Attorney General or the White House. He did point out that Defense Secretary Melvin Laird had known what was going on, as had two Attorneys General, John Mitchell and Richard Kleindienst, before a third, Elliot Richardson, had finally called off the monitoring in 1973, on grounds of dubious legality.

ACLU Suit. The committee was not alone in its attentions to the NSA last week. In Washington's U.S. district court, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a $500 million class-action suit charging the NSA ,and CIA with running a large and illegal spying campaign against antiwar elements in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The suit was brought on behalf of 7,200 individuals and 1,000 groups on which the two agencies supposedly kept files, monitored calls and cables and opened mail. Among the defendants are four communications companies--RCA Global Communications, ITT World Communications, Western Union and American Cable and Radio Corp.--that allegedly cooperated with the agencies by helping them monitor communications. Of course it was the U.S. Government that persuaded the companies years ago to cooperate with the intelligence gathering, and, congressional staff members point out, the companies agreed as a matter of patriotic duty.

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