The spies of the ether or the SIGINT

17/05/21

In any part of the world, when one hears of secret services, one's thoughts instinctively run to CIA (Central Intintelligence Agency) with its 20 agents spread all over the world and an ever-growing budget of around $ 15 billion.

The real American espionage giant, in front of which even the CIA disappears, is the National Security Service or NSA (National Security Agency) which employs about 60 employees and has an estimated budget of over $ 45 billion.

There is little talk of the NSA even in the United States, where only two / three people out of a thousand have vaguely heard of it compared to the more famous CIA; to underline the secrecy of the organization even those who are part of it, jokingly, say that the NSA stands for "Never Say Anything".

Its headquarters are located in Maryland, in the fort "George Gordon Meade" named after the commanding general of the Northern troops who won the battle of Gettysburg against the southerners of the more famous Robert Edward Lee (3 July 1863).

Exceptional security measures protect it externally and internally; there are no fences with electrified metal nets or electronic barriers that even inside separate one area from another. All staff, registered up to third degree relatives, carry a different colored tag indicating the level of secrecy and the areas to which they can access. Of the approximately 60 employees, over 40 work around the world from Okinawa, on the Japanese island of the same name in the Pacific, to Brindisi, from Sabana (Dominican Republic) to Ediral in Scotland.

Their job consists in intercepting communications of all kinds (military, diplomatic, industrial, political ...), breaking the codes with which they are often encrypted, sending the plaintext to Fort Meade; every day over six hundred thousand intercepted conversations arrive at the NSA which, if printed on paper, would be equivalent to 50 tons of messages to be examined!

To give an example, the NSA knew day by day where each senior member of the Soviet Union was and knew the names of all Russian military pilots posted to operational departments in Europe and the Far East, their radio callsigns, the distinctive number written on the side of the aircraft.

The NSA knows the exact location of each nuclear submarine, all the locations in Russia where ICBMs are installed, the location of each unit up to the battalion level, the names of the commanders, the radio frequencies used to connect in operations. ..

The interception and goniometry of electromagnetic emissions allows the NSA to know exactly the entire deployment of the Russian air defense, the techniques of engagement of the interceptor fighters, their intervention times and thus evaluate their operational readiness. Studies have been carried out by the NSA to record the timbre of voice during the radio transmissions of Russian pilots and to be able to recognize them one by one while intertwining the messages of the various radio controllers in flight.

This is only part of the amazing SIGINT activities*/ COMINT* of National Security Agency.

Yet the Americans in the first half of the 900s did not excel in the interception and decryption of encryption codes. All the fault of their Puritanism thanks to which in 1929 an Undersecretary of Defense, Henry L. Stimson, caught by scruples, had established that "Gentlemen do not secretly read other people's correspondence" and therefore had suppressed what was then called the "Black room", a grueling attempt started during the 1st World War to create a Communications Intelligence Service which had been called SIS (Secret Intelligence Service).

It had to arrive at the Pearl Harbor disaster to wake up that old-fashioned puritanism: the episode of that American operator who at 07.03 on 7 December 1941 sees a large amount of aircraft echoes on his radar screen but does not give the The alarm, considering that they are friendly aircraft returning from an exercise, is emblematic of the approximation and confusion that existed in the sector at the time.

It is true that during the planning and carrying out of the attack the Japanese high commands exchanged only written messages, carried by hand, but it is also true that there were a series of incredible and unforgivable negligence of the US personnel.

The Japanese had determined that the surprise attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor should have started exactly when their ambassador in Washington would have delivered a note to the US State Department containing the breakdown of diplomatic relations (07.55 on 7 December). 1941: Pearl Harbor time corresponding to 14.55 Washington).

The message, considering the time needed to decrypt it and to move from the Japanese embassy to the State Department headquarters, was sent from Tokyo exactly 24 hours earlier and was fortunately intercepted by the Americans who, just as fortunately, were in possession of the code. "Purple" to decipher it. Unfortunately, those who should have done it and brought the plaintext to the highest political authorities took too long so that the news reached the right people when it was too late. It is also true that the rupture of diplomatic relations was not the declaration of war but could have served as a pre - alarm preventing the Japanese attack from assuming such disastrous proportions as it actually did.

It was precisely the setback of that huge naval disaster and the observation of the precarious situation in which the entire COMINT sector found itself that pushed the US authorities to a global review of the service; immediately after Pearl Harbor the special branch that dealt with interception, decryption, analysis and evaluation of communications was reactivated within the SIS.

However, when the war was over, President Harry S. Truman (photo) decided to create a centralized agency that would bring together the various military organizations that dealt with the same problem in no particular order, which was given the name of NSA: it was 4 November 1952.

There were no inaugurations either then or after; everything had to be top secret and in no official document the existence of this new body was to be found.

Today we know that the task of this agency is to intercept foreign and national communications of any kind (telephone, telegraphic, data, radar emissions, etc.), to decrypt intercepted encrypted messages, analyze and evaluate the content of traffic for political purposes. , military or industrial. In contrast, the agency must protect the US government's military, diplomatic and civilian communications by taking all necessary steps to prevent a potential adversary from knowing the contents of messages transmitted by US government agencies.

Yet, in that continuous struggle between sword and shield, the Soviets tried to penetrate the NSA from the first years of its birth; was the primary objective of all infiltration attempts and despite the highly equipped security barriers and strict personnel selection criteria, they still managed to break the impenetrability of the very secret temple of the opposing cryptography by identifying, among the highly selected personnel, the usual weak point: the corruptibility of some unfaithful employee.

Jack Edward Dunlap was a Marine sergeant who worked at NSA headquarters and had the seemingly modest task of emptying the paper bins in the various offices (notes, minute letters, classified documents expired, used carbon paper, etc. ) and burn them in a special incinerator. One day, in the course of the lie detector test to which all the employees of the agency were periodically subjected, the experts in charge reported some anomaly in his behavior.

Under observation, it was discovered that Dunlap (who had actually been hooked several months earlier by the Soviet aeronautical attaché in Washington) after having emptied the paper baskets into the special bags that were brought to the incinerator, each evening chose some documents that it seemed important and she sneaked it home. He was then seen periodically meeting with the Soviet air force military attache to whom he handed over a bag full of stolen documents. Subsequent checks revealed that the sergeant owned a luxurious Cadillac, had a habit of betting at horse racing and had to satisfy several expensive whims of his wife.

Realizing that he was being checked and realized that they were about to arrest him, he committed suicide, inside his Cadillac, on July 23, 1963.

Returning to our main line, the interception and decryption of messages is far from easy; the sector of ciphering machines and secret codes is in rapid constant evolution.

Modern coding equipment is all built on the basis of mathematical programs designed for a specific electronic computer. These programs provide such a large number of combinations of numbers and letters of the alphabet that even having thousands of messages coming from the same cipher, it would take a crowd of analysts who would have to work hundreds of years to decrypt a single message encrypted with this system.

And even if the analysts were able to decrypt a message, it is not certain that the discovered system is valid for decrypting the next message, even if generated by the same machine, because the mathematical formulas are designed to make the work of the decryptors more and more difficult.

But not all COMINT material consists of encrypted messages; most of the activities intercepted by the NSA are simple verbal communications transmitted by radio (such as ground-to-air-ground between pilots of military aircraft and various air traffic controllers) or telephone communications transmitted by cable or radio link.

Every day, NSA translators turn recordings in 50 different languages ​​into English; there is no such large translation center in the world.

Before the advent of the computer, when you wanted to decrypt a message, you tried to locate those groups of letters or digits that in the text consistently recur or correspond to standard words, especially in communications between military commands: for example the date-time group, the time zone, clichés type "with reference to ...", "for information ...", "Please send an attachment ..." etc .; in other words, an attempt was made to reconstruct the enemy code starting from ciphered letters that corresponded to words whose meaning was certainly known.

Now all these comparison operations are done autonomously by computers with speeds unimaginable for the human brain; as early as 1976 the NSA was able to introduce an electronic brain into service which was baptized "CRAY-1" (photo): similar to the human brain, the system was divided into two lobes, two super computers which were respectively called "Carillon" and “Loadstone”.

“Carillon” in turn consisted of four huge IBM 3033 computers interconnected and connected to printers capable of typing 22.000 lines per minute; "Loadstone", on the other hand, was able to "process" 320 million words per second by performing up to 200 million calculations per second. To give an idea of ​​the capabilities of this system it can be said that it was able to process the number of words contained in 2500 books of 300 pages each in the time it took a human being to read the title of only one of these books!

Even Russia - and even before the Soviet Union - had and still has an organization similar to the US NSA, certainly inferior from a qualitative point of view but certainly not from a quantitative point of view.

The headquarters of the Russian COMINT organization is located in the Moscow region in a super-secret and super-protected underground site, where millions of conversations and messages arrive daily in all languages, equivalent, if printed, to hundreds of tons of transcripts. With regard, in particular, to wiretapping within Russia, the secret services, having no legal and ethical problems, can freely carry out all those activities that would cause so much scandal in the Western world as in fact has happened and continues to happen.

Instead, the interceptions of communications abroad arrive not only from satellites, from spy planes or from fake COMINT fishing boats, but also from embassies, consulates and other sources; one of these is ITAR-TASS (Informacionnoe Telegrafnoe Agentstvo Rossii ), heir to the Soviet TASS active until 1992 and founded in 1925 as a merger of several Russian and other agencies once part of the Tsarist empire, with offices in a hundred capitals and large cities around the world.

More than once TASS correspondents have been accused of spying. The list of cases from the 90s to today is very long: the most significant fact remains the observation, verified by experts, according to which the number of words in the press releases issued by TASS is infinitely less than the number of words sent to the Moscow office. from various agency correspondents around the globe!

The final consideration is that by now electronic espionage, intelligence aimed at stealing from the competitor as much as possible, it has come to permeate every social stratum in every sector: everything contributes to trying to keep pace, not to lag behind.

We are in the age of invisible planes, satellites that see, hear and photograph everything; wars before the battlefield are already decided in advance on the basis of the availability of technological means.

I conclude by dedicating this article to all those who over the years have served in the8th "Tonale" electronic research battalion (of which I had the honor and privilege of having been commander), the only SIGINT / COMINT unit of our Army, then framed in the Information Center and Electronic Defense in Anzio, now dissolved and whose functions have been partially absorbed by our Information Services; trained and reserved professionals who, in headquarters or in the branches scattered throughout the peninsula and the major islands, have carried out a delicate and, for most, obscure work for years.

That's it for this time. In a next episode we will be able to deal with the effects that the electronic component has had in the main conflicts of the last 30 years and in contemporary events.

Giovanni Sulis (General on leave)

* SIGINT: acronym for SIGnal INTintelligence, is the activity of collecting information through the interception and analysis of electromagnetic signals of any kind. In particular, the branch COMINT deals specifically with communications espionage.

Photo: web / author / Chaddy