DOCID 4019611 TOP SECRET Vol XXI No 4 WINTER 1995 Inside This Issue Interview With Dr David Kahn Page 1 Scripting ATLANTIC RESOLVE An Adventure and a Challenge Page 5 The Nature of Analytic Thought Page 14 and more SbASSIFIEB BY t s eSSM 129 2 9EGbASSIFY 9N 9'1111 11 Agalact'a Bele hasliu'i Reqahed Declassified and Approved for Release by NSA on '10-'10- 20'1 2 pursuant to E O '135 26 vl DR Case # 54778 TOP SEORET DOCID 4019611 CRYPTOLOG Winter 1995 Vol XXI No 4 Published by P05 Operations Directorate Intelligence Staff Publisher William Nolte Editor Graphics 963-3123 --11 963-3123 1 963-3123 Board of Advisors Chairman Computer Systems Cryptanalysis Intelligence Analysis Language Mathematics Signals Collection Telecommunications Member at Large Member at Large Member at Large Classification Officer 963 771 2 1 I I 1 1 I r 963 724 3 o 968 g21l 63 7 67 96371363 963' 5717 296-7847 968-4010 968-4010 961-8214 963-5463 Contents of CRYPTOLOG may not be reproduced or disseminated outside the National Security Agency without the permission of the Publisher Inquiries regarding reproduction and dissemination should be directed to the Editor All opinions expressed in CRYPTOLOG are those of the authors They do not represent the official views of the National Security Agency Central Security Service To submit articles and letters please see last page FOR OFFICIAL USB ONL 51 w' p L 8 6- 3 6 DOCID 4019611 Table of Contents The Nature and Process ofAnalytic Thought U Three V's for SIGINT U b by Hugo Keesing oooo o o 14 I 17 American Translators Association Conference U 20 How I Helped Trigger a Greater Involvement in Vietnam U b L -_----J 26 Book Review U High Seas reprinted from Air War College Newsletter 30 Letters to the Editor U 32 SIGINT Bloopers U 35 FOR OFFICII L USE ONLV ii DOCID 4019611 Dr Louis W Tordella 1911-1996 Deputy Director National Security Agency 1958-1974 As this issue of CRYPTOLOG was going to press we learned of the death of Dr Louis W Tordella In duration alone his tenure as Deputy Director of the National Security Agency stands as a remarkable event in the history of American cryptology But even that understates his role in forging this agency and the cryptologic establishment it centers Simply stated Louis Tordella ranks as one of the leading figures in the creation of the post-World War II American intelligence establishment In its next issue CRYPTOLOG will present a more detailed appreciation of the career of this great and distinguished man W N DOCID 4019611 P L CRYPTOLOG Winter 86-36 1995 Perspective Interview with Dr David Kahn 1995 Resident Scholar at the Center for Cryptologic History U by I V Dr David Kahn is a scholar journalist and author of a number of important books and articles on cryptology including The Codebreakers and Seizing the Enigma D What led to your interest in cryptology in the first place V I read a book when I was a kid and I never grew up The book was by a civil war naval historian named Fletcher Pratt a book with a terrific title Secret and Urgent I saw it in a window of the Great Neck library and was attracted by the terrific dust-jacket letters and numbers coming out of the cosmos I read it and the whole subject of codes and ciphers just hooked me Of course I was at that age 12 or 13 when I think a lot of people get hooked on their hobbies or their interests D What led to the decision to write The Codebreakers V Codes and ciphers and cryptology had been a hobby of mine for many years In 1960 in an episode NSA probably doesn't like to remember two members of the agency Martin and Mitchell defected to the Soviet Vnion It was a front-page story in the New York Times and I thought that this might be a good opportunity to write a piece for the Times on the background of that event telling all about codes and ciphers and the role they'd played in history I wrote it for the Times magazine and the next morning I got calls from three publishers asking me to write a book on codes and ciphers with a little introductory historical chapter V I began researching the history of codes and ciphers and there was a lot of material in scholarly journals and in other places which I found just by following footnotes through journals that were listed in the standard bibliography Suddenly I noticed that I was in the year 1600 and on page 250 of this first chapter Well something had to change So I turned it around and made it a chronological piece and so much hadn't ever been told that the book just kept growing and growing D What was NSA's reaction to the book V Oh NSA hated the book NSA hated the fact that I had obtained information about NSA what it had done and what it was doing some of the effects it had on negotiations and things like that NSA sent out warnings that the book was to come out and nobody was to comment on it That happened in 1967-68 and if you or anybody else at that time had asked me whether I would ever be sitting here and be allowed to enter NSA unescorted only in certain areas because I'm uncleared and be a member of the NSA team everybody would have laughed at you U What does one do as a visiting scholar V I have been dealing with the declassified papers of Herbert Yardley a very colorful and important American cryptologist of 1917-1929 He was the man who founded the American cryptologic establishment an organization called MI-8 Military Intelligence 8 of the General Staff After the end f World War I it was transformed into a joint Army State Department agency technically called the Cipher Bureau but commonly known as the American Black Chamber which is the title of the book that Herbert Yardley wrote after Henry L Stimson thinking that gentlemen do not read each other's mail closed it down V Yardley's documents are mainly technical and administrative and having been a reporter I knew I couldn't just write the story from them I'd have to go beyond them So lately I've been going into the private papers of people Yardley worked with expanding the research into other areas For example Yardley wrote about a missionary cryptographer who knew Japanese and was brought in when the V S was breaking Japanese codes before the Washington Disarmament Conference in 1921-22 This man turned out to be an Episcopalian minister and missionary so I wrote to the archives of the Episcopal Church in Austin Texas and got a couple of articles about this man that I will be able to use when I write the story of the American Black Chamber So that's the kind of stuff I have been doing FOR OFFICIAL USE ONL'i 1 DOCID 4019611 ' 1 r I I- U Winter 1995 And writing away at high speed I might add D As we complete the 50th anniversary commemorations of the end of the Second World War do you find that the role of intelligence in conflict is clearly established V Well certainly in World War II it was pretty clearly established It was begun to be established in World War 1 when radio first came in Radio is key to the importance of cryptanalysis because radio turns over a copy of any message to the enemy There were a number of important cases in World War I One case of communications intelligence which was an administrative and not a cryptanalytic failure was when the Russians failed to distribute cipher systems to their lower echelons very early in the war As a consequence the Germans were able to win the battle of Tannenberg the battle that started Russia on its long slide into ruin and revolution There were many tactical cases of communications intelligence in WWI and of course the Zimmerman telegram which brought the Vnited States into WWI and therefore onto the world stage V Then in WWII we had all those incredible stories that everybody knows about the winning of the Battle of the Atlantic through solution of the German Enigma machine many battles on the Western Front again won by the Allies in part because they knew German plans and so forth and in the Pacific of course we were breaking Japanese codes we won the Battle of Midway we shot down Adm Yamamoto and we sank the Japanese merchant fleet which virtually strangled Japan So yes there's no doubt any more that communications intelligence plays a role There's a very telling proof of this the V S Army at least has now established communications intelligence units within each division and they're not doing that for fun they're doing it because the results are there U You mentioned administrative versus cryptanalytic failures do you find that one more than another has led to breakthroughs during conflict I would say it depends how you define administrative failures I'm thinking particularly of the Enigma messages A lot of those messages were solved because we were able to guess the plaintext of stereotyped enemy messages Nothing To Report and stuff like that Is that an administrative or a cryptographic failure D We now have VENONA do you think we're going to see declassified intelligence play a similar role in the history of the Cold War V That's a terrific question and my answer is I hope so and I think so I don't know how good we were in solving Russian code and I don't think the Russians from what I've heard were very good at solving ours Nevertheless you can read third-party codes pretty well and from this gain information about negotiating positions in SALT and START treaties earlier economic treaties and things like this V We have had for example the revelation at the History Symposium that because we were able to read the messages of our allies particularly the French and many Latin American countries we were able to structure the Vnited Nations pretty much the way we wanted and I'm sure there are many other cases like that There was a story in the New York Times just two weeks ago by Tim Weiner on the front page in which he revealed that we were listening in to Japanese telephone conversations and using this information to win economic battles D As the national security apparatus gets restructured how much does the public have a right to know about that apparatus V It has to be done on a case-by-case basis In some situations it's possible to give a certain amount of information out but in other cases-I knew this intellectually before now I have more of an emotional grasp of it-that if you start giving too much material away about how codes are solved and so on you're going to cut yourself off from your sources Df information and this is more harmful to the country than giving the information out is beneficial to it D Do you think we're where we need to be on openness in intelligence V Yes I think things are coming along better because of openness and I'd love to think that it was because NSA and CIA and DIA and all those other guys suddenly saw the light but that's not the case They're becoming more open because of the fight for budget dollars That's pretty clear D As the history of intelligence becomes more and more accepted as an academic pursuit what do you see as the principal lines of inquiry in the future V I can't say I see any particular individual line I think it's just a general advance on an overall front Many sciences or histories go through several periods one of which is just the gathering of information and I think we are still in this stage There haven't been many FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY 2 DOCID 4019611 CRYPTOLOG Winter theories of intelligence I proposed one a while ago which people seem to think is all right but hasn't gained wide acceptance yet U It's divided into three areas past present and future The past is that intelligence became important with the rise of what I call verbal intelligence Animals can see danger and prey right What they can't do is what people can do namely gain information from words We can overhear a conversation and we know that someone is planning something good or bad for us So it's the rise of communications intelligence that has primarily driven the rise of intelligence If you are just looking at objects on the ground say tanks you can guess that an attack is coming at that point right But if you are reading a message saying We're going to attack you don't have to think about it or guess at it you are told So this gives a much more forward-looking approach than just physical intelligence looking at objects This makes NSA look good That's not why I developed it but it turns out that way that communications intelligence is the real driver of modem intelligence U As for the present one element is that intelligence is much more important in defense than in offense When I was writing Hitler's Spies I was looking for little anecdotes case histories in which intelligence won a battle or something like that And I noticed that I was finding a lot more defensive cases than offensive cases I wondered why this was so so I looked up the definitions of attack and defense in Clausewitz and I found a clue there in defending he says The position or characteristic attitude of defense is to parry a blow Well you cannot parry a blow unless you know it's coming which implies intelligence right U So intelligence is essential to the defense whereas offense Clausewitz says is in and of itself You don't need intelligence in the offense If you're an attacking army you just march in and you don't really need to know where the victims are if you're strong enough Of course this is a black-and-white explanation that oversimplifies it but I like to get it down to the basic level to clarify it and then I can add on qualifications U Another of the common elements of today is the ultimate purpose of intelligence which is simply to optimize resources I'd never really heard it put that way before until one day when I was at St Anthony's College at Oxford I walked in and a guy named Patrick O'Brien an economic historian was standing there with a glass of white wine in his hand He asked me how the 1995 book was coming and said Listen isn't all intelligence just optimizing your resources It was like he hit me in the face it was so clear and so down to the basics that I've adopted it and given him credit U So what about the future There are two problems with the future everybody wants to know everything and this is the goal we strive for but I don't think we'll ever get to that point The other problem in the future is or a perennial problem that we have to get our bosses I mean the intelligence consumers to accept our intelligence U To accept the need for intelligence or to accept what we give them U To accept what intelligence producers say This will work in some cases What I think is the situation is this If someone's beliefs are very strongly held there's not really anything that's ever going to change those beliefs no intelligence is going to do that If on the other hand the beliefs are not central to his personality but only deal with the tactics of say how we deal with the car situation with Japan or something like that then you have a chance of persuading him that the intelligence is useful Take Hitler for example There were often occasions where tactics were involved and he often listened to his intelligence but if you were going to tell him that the United States wasn't run by Jews forget it So how are you going to get around this Well I don't see any way to do it right away You can't put every world leader on the couch which is what would be required But it's also possible that as people become more rational-and I think the world IS becoming more rational in its beliefs for instance people go to psychotherapists because they realize that things can be done better by reason than by emotion U Did you follow the Gates hearings when accusations were made of tailoring inteUigence to meet expectations from higher up U Well obviously you shouldn't do that But listen we know what life is like You're not likely to say unpleasant things to your boss because he decides whether or not you get promoted That's why you need strong characters in intelligence to offer unpalatable truths U Do you find that with people in your line of work is there a tendency to start out with a theory or does that depend on whether they're journalists or academics FOR OFFICIAL USE ONL i 3 DOClD 4019611 CRYFTOLOG Winter 1995 U I don't know I can tell you that I started out with a theory when I was writing Hitler s Spies that the Germans had good intelligence Well I was totally wrong And I was very unhappy about that because it meant that instead of maybe getting a best-seller because I was telling the story of a winner in a certain area I was telling the story of a loser Who wants to read that But those were the facts And by that time I was well into the book I wasn't going to tailor it I couldn't do that and call myself a journalist or a historian I would say that most academics unless again you're dealing with very deep-seated beliefs would say they were wrong and revise U Where do you see your future focus still more cryptologic history going further back or new developments in cryptography U There's an awful lot of new material coming out For example 25 or 30 years ago I wrote the Encyclopedia Americana article on cryptology Now I'm revising it I thought I'd just have to add a few more paragraphs here and there and take a few of the old ones out Well the changes in codes and ciphers and cryptology in general communications security and intelligence are so far-reaching that I have to rewrite the whole thing So there's plenty to do there One of my regrets is that during the time of the data-encryption standard dispute and more recently key escrow and all of those things that I didn't succeed in selling a story to one of the major magazines which I would like to have done U This is probably because in some cases the magazines had their own people working on this so they didn't want Dave Kahn from the outside to do it Not that they had experts on codes and ciphers but they had computer experts and this was kind of a computer story Another reason is that one of the problems with communications intelligence in general and security and the reason that NSA doesn't have a much higher profile is that at the heart of the whole thing what do you have A computer chip What do you see if you see a codebreaker Someone writing on a piece of paper or sitting at a computer keyboard What do you see if you see a spy You see a guy shooting someone a guy skulking around in the shadows That's why there are movies like Die Hard You're never going to see a movie called Think Hard U Do you have an Internet account yourself U No and I'll tell you why Because-this is a word Dave Hatch gave me-it's chronophagous I was talking to Peter Gross who wrote a book called Gentleman Spy just the other day he had called me for some help I asked whether the Internet used up an awful lot of his time and he said it did Maybe that's just temporary and eventually you can go in and get whatever you want but I don't really care so much about computers I want to get on with writing Also people have said to me that if you get on the 'Net Dave and they find out that you're there you'll be inundated with people saying did Enigma win WWII and why didn't we know about Pearl Harbor I write so that I can deal with a lot of people at once instead of with individuals U Whit Diffie one of the researchers whose work was fundamental to the development of the RSA encryption scheme called your book The Codebreakers inspirational Have you followed much of the public key cryptography debate U Not closely but several people have said to me that they have gotten into cryptology because they were hooked by the elegance of the RSA scheme which relies on research by Diffie and Marty Hellman which makes sense to me U Do you think you'll be able to keep up with developments in cryptography U It's a terrible job When I was a kid starting out with this stuff I practically memorized every book on codes and ciphers that came out and every article Now it's impossible to keep up with the flood of articles and even books First of all the books are tremendously expensive and they are coming out-well not as many as the journal articles of course but there's a dozen or so a year maybe more books on codes What I do now is try to limit it to good books on the history of intelligence and or codes current books on the Ames case and so on FOUO I've given a lot of talks since I've been here with Dave Hatch's blessing representing the Center for Cryptologic History and letting people know about history in various elements of the agency I know people have an intellectual awareness that it exists but once they meet a person and know the face that helps spread the word about cryptologic history FOR OFFICb L USF ONL 4 DOClD 4019611 L CRYPTOLOG Winter 86-36 1995 Scripting ATLANTIC RESOLVE An Adventure and a Challenge FOUO b --_ _ FOUO TDY Chance To Excel Now if that isn't an eye-catching subject line for an e-mail I don't know what is I kept on reading and discovered that this particular opportunity included travel which is one of my all-time favorite things to do Specifically a request was being made for my office to provide one body to participate in Exercise ATLANTIC RESOLVE as a SlGINT scripter What exactly that meant I did not know at the time but it sounded intriguing As I am not known to be afraid of trying new things I put my name forward and hoped to hear good news although I wasn't sure whether or not my being a civilian would make my chances for selection greater or less QUQ In a matter of days I was told that I'd been selected and would soon head out to Grafenwoehr Germany where the exercise was to be conducted accompanied by two representatives from G563 NSA's Exercise Shop While I knew next to nothing about what being involved in such an exercise Paris would entail I have to say I was excited about the new opportunity and the challenge of it all FRANCE As friends and co-workers got wind of my impending departure for Graf there was no lack of Unclassified comments and advice given What are you crazy Do you know what you're in for Graf is freezing and covered with snow this time of year And then when the snow melts it's one big mudslide ''You'll be sleeping outside in tents for 15 days with no heat and nowhere to shower I hope you like MRE's because that's all you'll get to eat The shorter the time got until my departure the more freely flowed the comments I don't know if people were trying to scare me or intimidate me into politely backing out of participating but to tell the truth these comments did nothing but make me want to go all the more if for no other reason than to see what it was really like V Although time was running short I quickly began to do some homework What were the objectives of this exercise Who would be involved And probably most important to me what would be my role in all of this I needed to know FOUO I discovered that this exercise was to be the very first ATLANTIC RESOLVE exercise It came about as a replacement for the decades-old REFORGER exercises held in Germany annually VSAREVR U S Army Europe a component of the V S European Command VSEUCOM was to be the sponsoring Command The Intelligence Objectives for ATLANTIC RESOLVE 94 were essentially three o Berlin POLAND GERMANY Bonn o Grafenwoehr o o AUSTRIA o To exercise and validate the USAREVR intelligence architecture o To exercise intelligence collection analysis and reporting across the operational spectrum and o To exercise Joint Combined Task Force JTF CTF intelligence operations l Personnel from five nations V S VK Germany France and the Netherlands and representing all branches of the military 1 U Joint in this context means more than one military service is involved combined means more than one nation FOil OFFICIAL USB ONL 5 DOCID 4019611 nvn 'r''''''''''' I r Winter I '''''''-'I 1995 would participate A JTF J2 Intelligence Directorate was to be established and supported throughout and support from a Joint Analysis Center JAC in England would be exercised as well FOUO As for my role I would be part of a threeperson team the other two being the G563 folks that would work in the Intelligence Control Cell ICC the single point of contact for intelligence exercise control Units manning the ICC were to be primarily exercise facilitators Through a combination of simulated and scripted intelligence the ICC would translate the exercise director's guidance into a fully supportive intelligence environment Along these lines some ICC personnel would input taskings and directions into one of the many computer systems being used in the exercise-the magical simulators of war Others which included our team of three together with a team of four at the JAC in England would script material to cover the kinds of intelligence-related activity that could not be adequately performed in simulation While the team of four in England was co-located with the JAC they were a separate and distinct entity the exercise foursome provided a service while the JAC played the role of customer Still other ICC personnel would serve as liaisons to intelligence players in the training audience primarily at the USEUCOM and component level U With most of my questions answered as fully as they could be in advance I packed my bags and on 24 October departed for Grafenwoehr with my two new partners from G563 fresh off the plane from the States The drive from Stuttgart took several hours but we made it there eventually despite the normal hindrances to driving in Germany construction delays and other staus traffic back-ups that never seem to have any identifiable cause U Once we reached our destination of Grafenwoehr training grounds we had several objectives before we could do anything else First and foremost we needed to try to secure some form of accommodations for ourselves We'd been assured that there were absolutely positively NO commercial accommodations available in any of the towns within an hour's drive of the training grounds as all of those spaces had been booked solid for months We were aware of the tent option but we thought that would be less desirable than just about anything else we might be able to come up with So we set out on what was essentially a scavenger hunt to try to track down a comer of a warm building here or a free slab of cement there U As it turns out we were fortunate beyond belief Once we located the building which housed the SCIF which was to be our place of work for the next 2 weeks we began questioning everyone we could about alternatives to the tents Unbelievably one of the women in the SCIF told me that there just so happened to be one spot available in an adjoining room to the work space Terrific It was an actual roof-covered fully enclosed heated room Of course it did happen to be a tank-repair bay so it was essential that the occupants be careful not to fall into the open pit that ran the full length of the room down the center of the floor But that aside it was more than I could have hoped for based on what I'd been expecting as a result of all the unsolicited forewarning I'd received U Sharing the room with eight other women was not a problem either the tent in which I was expecting to have to live turned out to have 30 women Another great aspect it's all relative was the fact that I had a cot on which to sleep The three of us had brought lovely pea-green Army sleeping bags with us but now I actually had something upon which to place the bag other than the frozen ground U My two male companions were not as fortunate as I when it came to housing although they too were not out in the tents The best we were able to find for them were some unoccupied coil springs on two bunks in a barracks-type room housing 50 men And when I say coil springs that's exactly what they wereno mattress not even a pad covering the springs So the next step in our scavenger hunt was to secure some kind of flat protective material to place on top of the coils As it turns out the giant silver dumpsters at the end of the street provided the perfect fix large empty cardboard boxes which when flattened and stacked on top of each other would serve the purpose for 15 days U Finally we began our search for one particular master sergeant who supposedly had been able to secure three hooded fur-trimmed parkas for us Parkas I guess they weren't kidding when they said it would be cold here Again through some unbelievably fortunate chain of events we were eventually directed to the right room in the right building on the right street in the right section of the training grounds to our three parkas It seemed that despite our exhaustion and hunger everything was as it should be U Our first taste of what this exercise was going to be about began that very same night We found our way to the building that we were told was the home of FOR OFFICIA-L USE ONLV 6 DOClD 4019611 CRVPTOLOG Winter 1995 the ICC-fortunately only a short walk away from the work through as many of the logistical bugs as possible in advance of the real thing and multi-purpose SCIF women's housingltank-repair-bay building We stood there in a kind of zombie-like state as the ICC's day shift personnel gave their pass-down o the warfighting CAX computer-assisted exercise 1-8 November This was the main exercise and brief to the night shift As it turns out personnel had was supposed to run with the fewest glitches of the been there a full week prior to the arrival of the three of three us These folks had been setting up from scratch and getting all aspects computer security admin logistics FDUD With all this as background we discovyou name it ready for STARTEX the actual start of the ered that the role of the three of us in Graf would be that exercise So in a sense I felt behind the eight ball right of information gatherers We would have to attempt to from the start watching and listening to these people gain access to as much information as possible with talk about all kinds of systems and details of which I regard to the OPFOR what they were doing what they knew nothing It was a language all its own with new intended to do in the future and when how they interacronyms and names of people and facilities that might preted the actions of the blue forces etc Then we have been on another planet would pass the information we had obtained to the exercise team of four at the Speaking of another JAC This would be planet the scenario for the exercise done primarily by fax or involved just that Well actually it phone or so we thought wasn't another planet but another at the beginning In island a fictional one called Atlanactuality we ended up tis According to the scenario the securing a computer island was divided into the two through which we could nations of North Titania and South e-mail the information Titania The North Titanian forces to our counterparts were identified as red -the hostile which was infinitely opposing force OPFOR The South more efficient than the Titanians were identified as blue fax or phone could ever the good guys According to the have been exercise concept of operations the North Titanian forces were designed to portray a threat that required an FDUD As for out-of-area joint and combined lD the foursome deployment to fight a low-to-midEngland their job intensity conflict of short duration In would begin at this other words the bad guys were trying point First step for to invade and seize the territory of the them THINK They U Welcome to the women's dorm innocent good guys and bump off all were to try to imagine their forces what type of report the USSS would produce on the activity serialized product report klieglight or Upon our arrival it was clear that despite the fact TACREP if this event were really happening What that the exercise had not yet begun people were workwould that report look like What information could an ing long hard hours on something As it turned out analyst at NSA reasonably expect to see And how what I had thought was going to be one exercise was would it then be reported The key to a good end-prodreally composed of three separate exercises uct was to incorporate all that could realistically be expected to be uncovered by SIGINT in such a war sceo the deployment exercise 19-27 October Durnario given collection capabilities knowledge of a ing this part all preparations were made and details given nation's C3 network etc were finalized regarding how the exercise should flow o SHADOW CANYON MINI-EX 28-29 October This was to involve the same participants in the same roles as in the main exercise its purpose was to fQYQ The products that the exercise foursome at the JAC produced from the information we had gathered was disseminated to exercise players throughout FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY 7 DOCID 4019611 n n n I r Winter I '-''''''''-iii 1995 the theater including the JTF HQ the land component HQ the air component HQ and many others all at Grat as well as the lAC in England and the DCIRF DSAREDR Combat Information Readiness Facility in Augsburg Germany The people at the lAC would then extract items from the products and incorporate them into their daily summaries which would go forward to the high-level decision-makers involved in the exercise With the various types of reports in hand the exercise players could then formulate strategies to be implemented by their forces truthful with all who asked what we intended to do with the information they provided us Some reacted positively to us right from the start while others didn't really cooperate until well into the second phase of the exercise But as they saw that we were indeed doing what we said we would do with their secrets they came to trust us more and more and provided more complete and usable information than they had at the start By the end of the MINI-EX the exercise's intelligence directors were even calling on us quite regularly to insert scenarios into play when they realized that it was actually the only practical way to accomplish their goals FOUO While distribution of a good volume of exercise SIGINT POUO And so began our was our goal at the same time it 1S-day challenge at ATLANTIC was critical that not too much infor U Here in what was RESOLVE I say challenge mation be revealed in the reports It really the only logical because that is exactly what it was the responsibility of all seven was In the course of the 2 weeks work space for us we of us Graf team and lAC exercise we hit one obstacle after another team not to blow the exercise by didn't even have a but we overcame them one by giving away too much or the wrong computer to use one with perseverance The attikind of information We were contude of others particularly sidered part of the white cell we OPFOR members toward us was were part of neither the red opposjust one of the challenges we faced but overcame There ing forces nor the blue good guy forces and as were many other factors that tested our patience such it was incumbent upon us to maintain neutrality as much as possible If too much information or the wrong kind of details were published with regard to the red D For example upon our arrival at Grafenwoehr forces' activities or intentions the blue forces would many of the logistical arrangements for our work spaces immediately have the advantage In the worst case this and the equipment in them were n t as we expected could have such an effect on the decisions made by During the initial planning phase of the exercise it was blue-force players that it could cause the exercise to end decided that there would be an SSO SCIF in a building much sooner than it should have So the responsibility near the ICC building My team was originally supto play fair and remain unbiased lay heavily upon the posed to set up shop in the ICC building not in the SCIF seven of us where we ended up Dpon our arrival we saw that the ICC was already overcrowded and in constant turmoil so the SCIF seemed like a better alternative D While we were aware of the potential for bias on our part the members of the red forces were even more aware of it This was immediately evident to us as we began during those first few days to meet people ask questions and try to put all the pieces together in our minds as to roles and functions of all players While I can't speak for my two coworkers I must say that I personally was regarded with the utmost caution by members of the OPFOR Now who are you And what exactly is your role in this I don't have to give you that kind of information if I don't want to What exactly do you intend to do with the information I provide to you Such questions were only fair I suppose The OPFOR wanted to be sure they didn't provide any information whatsoever to anyone who could conceivably be a spy for the blue side We were always 100% FOUO In addition there was supposed to be a STU-III and fax available for our use in both the SCIF and the ICC What we found when we got there was that the ICC had only an unclassified fax and no STUIII which was unacceptable for our purposes There was one STU-III in the SCIF but it was already in constant use The SCIF did have a fax machine but it was broken At this point we thought we were totally out of luck and would be unable to communicate with the Ito pass them the information they scriptersl would need to write reports But upon claiming some space for ourselves in theSCIF we discovered the presence of two lDISS terminals there These terminals were cleared for SCI and would have been perfect for FOK OFFICIAL USE ONLY 8 P L 86-36 DOCID 4019611 CRYPTOLOG Winter 1995 our use but they belonged to the EUCOM Collection Management Office ECMO 's element and the JAC Liaison Officers' element in the exercise U Unfortunately during the exercise's planning stages there was apparently some miscommunication about the possibility of our use of SCI-cleared computers The information we received indicated that no SCIcleared computers would be available for our use That would have been true if there had been any way we could have worked from within the ICC non-SCIF building But that just wasn't feasible so here in what was really the only logical work space for us we didn't even have a computer to use U In addition to the problems we faced with communications obtaining accurate timely and significant scenario data continued to challenge us throughout the exercise although we did note significant improvement in this area as the exercise progressed and as relations between all other players and our team improved The more they understood about what it was we were there to do the more and the better information they were willing to share with us FDUD For future exercises of this type however it would be best for the SIGINT team to have one of the complete truth terminals These terminals were few and far between and were always in high demand Our lack of training on these terminals didn't help any we always had to seek assistance from someone else who wasn't too busy to FeUe If the truth be help us If we'd told having our own computer had our own we would actually have eliminated could have used it the need for the four-person U There were insistent as the primary team in England If the three of demands to run the exercise at source to keep us us at Graf had had access to our informed on what own JDISS terminal from the the unclassified level This was the base ground start we could have done our simply not possible as for as we truth was at any own SIGINT scripting in addigiven time during were concerned and we beat tion to the information-gatherthe exercise we ing and none of the back-andthe subject to death wouldn't have had forth with England would have to rely on others' been necessary But in the end whims to find out it actually was to everyone's o what we needed to benefit that we did have the know four scripters in England The separation of duties between the two locations allowed the Graf three to FOlJO Another problem there continued to be concentrate fully on information-gathering a task which insistent demands to run the exercise at the unclassified could only be done from Graf This enabled us to prolevel This was simply not possible as far as we were vide the England team with non-stop data with an end concerned and we beat the subject to death Admittedly result of significantly more products being produced the information we were passing along which was subthan would have been if the Graf three had had to persequently being reported was purely fictitious but the form both the collection and production functions reporting methods used clearly revealed how the SIG FOUO During the first few days the ECMO element was kind enough to grant us use of their JDISS terminal on a time-available basis But it was evident quite early on that this would not be a satisfactory way to continue throughout the entire exercise We needed our own terminal Again by some great stroke of luck we were able to make contact with an office back at EUCOM HQ in Stuttgart that had plans to come to Graf later that week and agreed to bring a JDISS terminal for us So despite the frustrations of those first days before week's end we were properly hooked up We didn't expect anything but smooth sailing after that INT reporting business works That alone was enough to merit some level of classification FOUO With these problems behind us we spent our time hunting and gathering The hunting part meant meeting and getting to know the members of the OPFOR from whom we would obtain most of the data from which exercise SIGINT would be produced But it also meant visiting many of the various other elements involved in the exercise One day we visited the SCIF that belonged to the Commander of the Land Component Command Also on our visitation list that day was the Corps Tactical Operations Center Support Element FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY 9 DOCID II t 4019611 1f 'I fj nTrIVL VU Winter 1995 which resided in one of several expandable vans filled with computers Finally we were able to locate the Joint Forces Aircraft Control Center JFACC which served as the Air Component Command The JFACC itself was housed in a huge beer-fest tent while their SCIF was located in a van on the back of a truck outside the tent Both the Ground and the Air Components were located about a half-mile walk from our location in the SSO SCIF ICC building area FeUe All our long hours 12-14 hours per person every day and hard work really paid off in the end The Graf three relayed scenario and control information to the England four in close to 100 information reports feeding them for their product reporting In other statistics the two teams together produced 149 TACREPs and 174 product reports covering ground air missile and naval operations These numbers while not astronomical represented reporting on some significant events in the exercise scenario and certainly provided some important training for the players Even they admitted that this was the case I was proud of our teams and the work we did I felt we made a significant contribution that represented the SIGINT system well FOUO And so after 2 weeks behind concertina wire in a makeshift SCIF working with military members from all services representing five nations the first ATLANTIC RESOLVE came to a close It really was a IDY chance to excel as it had been billed in that first e-mail I learned an immeasurable amount about everything from how various comms systems interact to the writing of TACREPs to how a multi-national operation albeit notional is run I even got a little insight into the enemy mind and how military tactical and strategic thought evolves Would I do it again You bet I would Would I recommend it for others No doubt about it All that is required is a spirit of flexibility willingness and adventure ATLANTIC RESOLVE II here we come P L FOR OWICIAL US ONL 10 86-36 DOCID 4019611 CRYPTOLOG Winter P L 1995 86-36 Hittingihel ---- I NSA's Software Reuse Libraries U I byl U With downsizing and budget constraints in our near future we need to do more and more with less and less How many times have we heard these words and wondered How Reuse although not a new concept may be the answer Code reuse has been going on for over 20 years but it has not been formalized as part of corporate system acquistion and development processes U When applied to software the word reuse means using something again for a purpose other than that for which it was originally intended Reuse is more than simply reusing code The basic phases of any life cycle process are requirements analysis design implementation code test delivery and maintenance Any or all information in those phases can be reused under the rubric of Reuse Engineering which comprises software activities that both utilize existing information and produce readily reusable information With this process we can reduce development time and cost as well as the cost of maintenance while increasing software quality and productivity Pockets of reuse activity exist all over the Agency We need to capitalize on those activities and incorporate reuse into our processes so we can reap its true benefits I FOBO I NSA's Software Reuse Initiative underway in DT's Applied Technology Center for Software Engineering is looking at doing precisely that through a phased approach The first phase entails establishing a corporate-wide reuse repository with easy access and retrieval of software-related assets which eventually will consolidatee all information generated in the software life cycle This repository will be the foundation on which we will build our reuse process What followS is a brief history of our previous reuse repository and where we are today Phase I I VOf JO It was not too long ago when looking for reusable cod was not an easy task One had to go to anonymous fip server to look for possible reusable assets The user had to know which Ito go to and once there where to go and what to look for Then the Common Collection Console effort came along in 1989 when Graphical User P L 86-36 Interfaces GUls were becoming popular and NSA management recognized the need for a common GUI look and feel A small team was formed to try to develop GUI applications that could be reused on several projects The software development community never accepted these GUI applications but several major efforts succeeded in reusin some foundation libraries' L - _ A reuse library was establish as more reusable assets were identified in the first attempt to bring structure to the then ad hoc reuse p r o c e s s P L 8 6- 3 6 I I FOBO The te se library was a centralized repository thatlJsedWeb technology Assets were now centrally located but the user still did not know much a outthe assets in the repository Then teamed ho capitalize and improve on what already had been done and to establish an NSA-wide reuse repository I I found MORE Multimedia FOUO I Oriented Repository Environment as a possible solution to the problem MORE was deTeloped as part of the Repository Based Software Engineering Program RBSE funded by NASA The University of Houston Clear Lake directs RBSE through the Research Institute for Computing and Information Systems RICIS MountainNet Inc of Morgantown WV operates production prototypes The MORE product moved from a software warehouse effort on the WWW to exploring transferring and utilizing repository technology with a directive to commercialize MOREplus Moving to a commercial product would add maintenance and support as well as continued alignment with anticipated WWW improvements FOUO NSA's reuse repository the Software Reuse Center SRC is on line today with the beta version of MOREplus underlying its capabilities MOREplus is a distributed library management tool written in GNU C which interfaces with Web clients and an ORACLE database and can run on SUNs HPs and VAXs MOREpius is installed on the SRC's server and interfaces with various Web clients and an Oracle database There is only one hand-coded HTML page for the inter- FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY 11 DOCID 4019611 n'ln nl r o Winter 1995 face to the user all the rest are generated by MOREplus Metadata information about the assets resides on the ORACLE database Now users can easily look for assets from a centralized location but those assets can reside any where on the network The user also can see information about the asset before retrieving it which saves time when trying to find a candidate for reuse Another benefit is having the assets distributed so that the contributing organizations for those assets maintain and control them These organizations become remote librarians with a Master Librarian overseeing the overall repository activities this alleviates the workload of the Master Librarian and a centralized repository growing out of control U And now more about MOREplus The classification scheme used is based on hierarchical Collections and Classes and can be thought of as a library catalog system Collections are subject- or topic-oriented and classes are type-oriented U From the user perspective users can browse or search for assets from the top down through a hierarchy of Collections or across across Collections through a hierarchy of Classes more finely pinpointing what they are seeking MOREplus also provides the user with a natural language- and pattern-match search The natural-language search explores the entire database of metadata whereas the pattern-match search looks for patterns in specific fields in the database FOR OFFICIAL USB ONL 12 P L 86-36 86-36 DiOC I Ps 36 4 019 611 CRYPTOLOG Winter U From the librarian perspective additional capabilities include administrative and operational functions Administrative functions include such things as add modify and delete to name a few A librarian simply fills in a form and submits it to the ORACLE database Operational functions provide reports about the repository that contain useful measurements on assets users modifications usage acquisition etc as well as acatalog report on all assets in the repository In addition librarians can set up authorized users to access classified ass ets by login and password as well as authorized groups to access proprietary classified collections Even though the SRC itself is accessible by all only authorized users will be able to browse or search for classified assets or entire classified collections U Other features include a What's New function providing information on newly acquired assets context-sensitive help on every page with an index of all help pages help on each field that needs to be filled out by a librarian submitting changing assets to the repository and manuals and tutorials I FOUO K44 the previousl team is the SRC's master librarian and has worked very hard to establish NSA's reuse repository K44 also contributed a valuable additional capability to the MOREplus product itself they introduced TCL Tool Command Language to MountainNet Inc TCL allows the master librarian to easily customize displayed pages and to display a classification label on those pages F O Other functionalities provided by the previous Ireuse library includes User Registration and Contribution to name a few User Registration is currently a voluntary option that allows a user to register with the SRC to be automatically notified of updates to assets of interest The Contribution is a form allowing users who are not remote librarians to contribute valuable assets these assets reside on the SRC's server but the contributor can still maintain them I 1995 determine whether it is successful and to continuously improve our reuse activities MOREplus provides a starting place for us to measure accesses to each asset and accesses to the repository What we lack is asset usage data reflecting the reduction in development time and costs etc U In conclusion the goal of the first phase of our reuse initiative is to familiarize system acquisition and software developers with reuse concepts and its potential Subsequent phases will we hope integrate these opportunities and other reuse methods techniques into our system acquisition and development processes also these processes must be well defined and controlled before reuse engineering can be incorporated into them so that when we build new systems in the future we will look for reusable assets from our repository instead of reinventing the wheeL We will also keep reuse and inclusion in the repository in mind during development A reuse technique termed Domain Engineering will help us do just that Domain Engineering encompasses families of systems and captures the true functionality found amongst those families Productivity will increase as it takes less time and costs less to develop new systems within the same family since common functionality will be reused This frees up skilled developers to concentrate on the truly critical aspects of the new system so they need not be concerned with the more mundane routines used over and over again Software quality and reliability will increase as known and proven assets are reused leading to a reduction in maintenance costs We will in short be able to do more fnd more with less and less We will do it better faster and cheaper Aren t those words everyone would like to hear U To find software-related assets go to the SRC at http www src nsa fOUO We have only just begun Our repository will need a well-thought-out management program that includes a process for acquiring assets COTS GOTS public domain and certification and validation criteria for our assets The Quality Assurance team under is starting to validate existing code assets in the repository and will assess them for quality and maintainability against industry standards Soon users will be able to see the quality or risk associated with an asset before retrieving it We will also need a program to measure reuse activity beginning with the repository to I P L 86-36 FOR OFFICIAL USB ONL 13 DOClD 4019611 UNCLASSIFIED ' 1 ' I r Winter I u vu 1995 The Nature and Process of Analytic Thought by Hugo Keesing Popular culture has been my core preoccupation since stepping off the boat from Holland as a sevenyear-old in the early 50s Popular culture-radio television comic books baseball cards-were the way I learned a new language made friends and came to understand my environment I listened I watched I read and I collected and traded There were new things to be absorbed every day words facts relationships I took them in but I didn't process I never asked myself So what occur to me then to buy sheet music I sensed intuitively that MUSINT was better than OSINT that open sources might not carry the real lyrics This discrepancy has subsequently been confirmed in at least a few instances When I discovered girls a couple of years later my curiosity increased My sources and methods however were unsuited for the new target That problem began to resolve itself when I became aware of MUSINT music intelligence an important but lightly regarded discipline of SIGINT It was only as I became more familiar with the context for MUSINT that I began to understand the importance of the messages themselves Song lyrics were more than words they were the dialogue of 50s 60s courtship Boys didn't talk to girls they asked them if they liked certain songs or what their favorite song of the moment was From this information intent was deduced whether you had enough in common to support a friendship At age 12 an interest in the latest music-because that was of interest to girls-helped me develop skills which are the staple of what communications analysts do today Let's look at a few I learned cryptology From decoding lyrical messages to cryptanalyzing enciphered letter groups such as 00 ee 00 ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang In 1955 when Washington D C radio stations continued to play Perry Como and 10 Stafford I became an expert at capturing identifying and monitoring foreign signals stations such as WKBW in Buffalo WCKY in Cincinnati WLS in Chicago and WOWO in Fort Wayne I learned about the importance of a good antenna the impact of atmospheric conditions on signals clarity about signal-to-noise ratios Late at night I learned to recognize the voice patterns and musical tastes of George Lorenz The Hound Dick Biondi and numerous other DJs This enabled me to identify specific frequencies without having to hear the call letters I learned the importance of communication attributes such as rhythm and beat If the song had a good beat and I could dance to it I wanted to own the record So began my record collection I learned transcription Sometimes the text was clear voice Pat Boone other times it had to be retrieved from garbled transmissions Little Richard As I tried to write down the words of songs it didn't What's all this A wop bop a lu bop a wop bam boom I'm hearing on this thing Maybe I need to fix my equipment U I also gained a deep appreciation for traffic analythe externals of songs who sang them on what label their peak chart position Knowing that my target liked the Platters and Johnny Mathis was promising information about other as yet unknown traits The interest in externals led to collecting information about music first newspaper clippings and record lists then magazines and books I still collect and still make analytic assessments based on musical tastes SIS UNCLASSIFIED 14 DOCID 4019611 UNCLASSIFIED CRYPTOLOG Winter 1995 But most important I was able to satisfy customer requirements with MUSINT At parties where I supplied the records or at dances where I DJ'd I provided an important service My MUSINT-derived knowledge enabled me to suggest or select-I have never been averse to making my own policy decisions the perfect sequence of songs to influence strategic decisions So forty years ago I began acquiring and developing skills knowledge and analytic abilities which have served me in the past and continue to serve me today What was most important is that I have never thought that using this skill set was work- mly fun Which brings me to my topic analytic thought Many of you 1 responded to my e-mail query with answers ranging from a single word to virtual treatises Despite their differences in length you and I are in general agreement on the attributes of and impediments to analytic excellence The vast majority of you identify personal qualities with the former and environmental or organizational qualities with the latter Some of the cognitive attributes you collectively consider assets include Curiosity An open mind Creativity Ability to visualize Broad subject-matter knowledge Common sense Critical thinking skills Mental flexibility This is a good blend of the raw and the refined creativity critical thinking the spontaneous and the structured curiosity ability to visualize the native and the taught common sense broad knowledge In psychological terms your responses suggest that good analysts are produced by heredity as well as environment The corollary debate that I've heard here at NSA is whether analysis is an art or a science Your experience which agrees with mine is that analytic excellence requires both An undisciplined creative mind may fall as far short in solving a complex problem as an inflexible trained mind yet the shortcomings are not the same If the raw material is lacking neither training nor smart tools are going to provide suf1 This article is the text of a recent presentation given to the Communications Analysis Association ficient compensation On the other hand training education computers and other aids can have a salutary effect on a young or not so young mind ready and willing to learn There are also enabling personality traits taken from your experience that have a bearing on analytic excellence You have identified persistence desire and stubbornness to which I would add respectful disdain for arbitrary authority and for orthodoxy What then is the composite of an individual who has all the qualities necessary for analytic excellence Visualize her and ask yourself how well-suited she is for an organization like NSA with its highly structured customer-driven time-sensitive environment A setting in which according to your experience analytic excellence runs the risk of being subordinated to the requirements of Corporate Cultures Policy Correctness For at Over Substance and an assortment of other Management Issues Can analytic excellence possibly flourish in such surrounding My answer is Yes if What I would like to do now is to suggest some ways in which NSA can improve on the raw materials and make the work environment more analyst-friendly While it is up to leadership to address these issues my suggestions may also identify possible roles for the Communications Analysis Association in ensuring the health of the analytic profession Start with the right stuff Do whatever is possible to recruit into the analyst ranks people who are curious creative and not afraid to be different Filling analyst positions primarily through cross-training necessitated by changing missions or down-sizing devalues the Art aspect of analysis just as inadequate tools and training devalue the Science aspect I would also add that the legitimate need for security must never become a vehicle for ensuring orthodoxy Find out what analysts do for fun See whether you can help them link their avocation to their vocation There is a tremendous potential for positive skill transference whether the hobby is music surfing the Internet the stock market sports science fiction the list is endless Once you find out what they do for fun use it as a springboard to teach analytic techniques in ways that are intrinsically interesting to the learner Teaching in this way will require creativity mental flexibility and broad subject-matter knowledge on the part of the instructor In short it will mean teaching through modeling UNCLASSIFIED 15 DOClD 4019611 UNClASSIFIED CnY TOi CG Winter 1995 Provide frequent appropriate opportunities for analyst skiUs ro be refined Formal training and education are two possible ways Rotational assignments mentors and individual directed research are others Consider allowing analysts to meet some part of their professionalization requirements through work which has no obvious link to SIGINT but requires the use of similar analytic tools Reinforce behaviors that keep the raw material vital Encourage analysts to read on the job to browse data bases to spend time in libraries To explore new fields to try and fail Make sure they don't get stale or complacent I don't get discouraged easily but I do when students tell me their work doesn't leave enough time to read An analyst can't afford not to read As a supervisor work from the premise that good analysts are by and large self-managing Give them space and give them support Getting them to stop work should be harder than getting them to start Provide the right level and mix of rools for each analyst Not everyone needs or wants the latest software upgrade I have colleagues who became paralyzed after well-intentioned techies improved their workstations Give frequent feedback and insist on high standards There should be no tolerance for sloppy thinking Analysts must not be permitted cognitive biases untested assumptions or conclusions not properly linked to evidence Similarly they must not be let off the hook with reporting vice analysis In the current language of CIA's Directorate of Intelligence analysis includes facts verified information findings expert knowledge and forecasts Gudgments based on facts and findings and defended by sound and clear argumentation Finally reinforce good writing A poorly written analysis that fails to communicate its finding to the customer represents wasted time and effort What is good writing Succinct precise and incisive are three adjectives that come quickly to mind My pet peeve as an instructor Students' use of the passive voice which hides accountability Can NSA afford to do this for its analysts Jim Devine Deputy Director for Support makes it clear that it must I quote from a 1 November e-mail message Stop using that Infernal passive voice and tell me who's responsiblel If we are going to achieve organizational success in a dynamic climate of challenge and change our people must be more highly trained and educated more flexible and adaptable to change and more willing to take risks to view problems in a creative way and develop innovative solutions Organizationally we must provide an environment that fosters risk-taking innovative thinking and entrepreneurial activity We must prepare our people better to deal with change to take on far more complex technical problems and to achieve their maximum potential Should NSA fail to do so it m y soon be included in Senator Kerrey's recommendation for CIA It should survive Kerrey said recently but it will need the organizational equivalent of a sex-change operation Analysts and their supervisors will have to be in the forefront to keep such surgery unnecessary at NSA Dr Keesing has been assigned to NSA as the Joint Military Intelligence College's VLSiting Professor since September 1993 In this capacity he teaches graduate courses on research and on intelligence analysis He also serves as thesis advisor for some 30 NSA students some of whom have won prestigious awards for their theses A psychologist by training Dr Keesing taught for four years in the University of Maryland's overseas programs with assignments in 10 countries on three continents His elective course in American Studies uses rock music and other forms of popular culture to teach contemporary American history UNClASSIFIED 16 DOCID 4019611 P L ' fOP St3CRE' f lH'fIBRA CRYPTOLOG 86-36 Winter 1995 Three Vs For SIGINT U b I -_ _ trovo Vigilance versatility and vision are three attributes an NSA SIGINT reporter should possess in order to provide valuable intelligence responsive to consumer needs in the post-Cold War era Reporters should have the vigilance to remain abreast of all developments regarding their target whether political economic social or military in nature but specifically when those developments affect u s interests the versatility to prioritize and report on the target from varying angles providing the consumer with key issues up front and in the most concise and understandable format and the vision to be prepared and anticipate changes in the target as global issues constantly evolve and possibly threaten U S or allied interests TOP SECRET U IBIb EO 1 4 c 17 DOCID 4019611 'FOP SECRE'F UP fBR-A EO 1 4 c P L 86-36 Ci iYPTOLOG Winter 1995 P L 86-36 1 4 c U According to an editorial in the Washington Post in November 1994 Russia's nationalist and imperialist tendencies have been viewed by some officials in Washington as sooner or later threatening the fragile states on its periphery and perhaps beyond There are other officials however who feel Russia can be cajoled into joining the ranks of civilized and democratic states or at least the possibility exists to justify maximum efforts toward that end In order to formulate a proper U S policy toward post-Cold War Russia policy-makers will continue to need access into Russia's near abroad P L 86-36 EO 1 4 - c 'FOP SECRET ffitfBR-A 18 DOCID 4019611 CRYPTOLOG Winter 1995 iii U A more detailed version of this article was the winning entry in last year's International Affairs Institute essay contest P L 86-36 EO 1 4 c 1996 selected calendar of events sponsored by NSA academia and professionalassociations Event o 4th IntI Workshop on Modeling Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems San Jose CA o Information and Command and Control Warfare Course GW University o Information Warfare Symposium AFCEA Washington DC o Enemy Eyes The Role of Visualization and Graphical Technology in INFOWAR AFCEA Central Maryland Chapt Technical Seminar Linthicum MD o Conference on Computers Freedom and Privacy '96 Cambridge MA 7th National OPSEC Conference Tyson's Corner VA o Tactical Communications Conference Ft Wayne IN o ICASSP '96 - INti Conference on Speech Acoustics and Signal Processing Atlanta GA Date 1-3 Feb Where to call Email zhang@ringer cs utsa edu 26-29 Feb 800-424-9773 8 Mar 703-631-6238 15 Mar 41 0-544-8418 27-30 Mar Email cfp96@mit edu 16-19 Apr 301-982-0323 30 Apr - 2 May 215-674-0200 6-9 May 404-894-2948 UNCLASSIFIED 'FOP SECRE'F U IBRA 19 DOCID 4019611 P'IIl I to ' '1 ' 1 Winter 1995 American Translators Association Conference U Contributors to this article inCIUdell - ---Jlanda tech-tracklinguist whose jObrequires aD onymity P L V The American Translators Association's ATA 36th Annual Convention was held in Nashville Tennessee from 8 to 12 November 1995 The AlA with its 6 000 members is the country's premier organization for translation and interpretation professionals The conference provided an exceptional opportunity to meet with private-sector counterparts and see first-hand the tools and techniques they use learn different aspects of the craft such as machine translation and interpreter training and look for ways to improve our own work We learned that there are many areas in which the Agency is ahead of the private sector particularly with training and working aids and other areas where we need to improve Those attending from NSA recommend that the DO Technical Health Advisory Board THAB continue to send tech track members to future ATA and similar events Lessons Learned V The presentations at the conference led us to several conclusions D The Agency should take a hard look at how it selects linguists V Almost every ATA member we met got started in the translation field by accident Most were either born overseas and emigrated to the Vnited States were raised in a bilingual home or spent a significant amount of time abroad studying or working ATA members agree that translation is only half linguistic and the rest cultural therefore translators are really cultural mediators Convention workshops consistently stressed that to be good translators must have four qualities A well-rounded education to understand how the world works At least one year and preferably longer in a foreign language country to understand the societal and cultural biases of that language An outstanding understanding of the language into which they are translating An excellent linguistic knowledge of the foreign language V This means that a good translator requires as much background education and experience as do experts in fields like computer science and engineering D The Agency is far ahead of the private sector in translator training and support V The good news is that once we select linguists they can count on significantly more translation-specific training than their commercial counterparts Throughout the conference ATA members lamented the limited number of translator training programs available in the Vnited States Of the thousands of V S colleges and universities as few as 30 offer full translation programs As a result commercial translators move into a field with little or no formal training or experience ATA is beginning to recognize the need for translator self-training but materials are only now being developed V In contrast junior linguist at NSA regularly receive feedback from more experienced folks on translation skills and hands-on training on translation techniques Linguists may join the Agency already possessing some degree of the four critical skills mentioned above but with no translation experience They may spend their first several months working under the close supervision of several accomplished linguists the progress of these months would take years had they been forced to learn on their own V Our linguists also have access to larger amounts of reference materials and working aids than private sector translators This ranges from using online dictionaries and working aids to drawing information from computerized databases to being able to call central reference for help on a particularly difficult question More important Agency linguists can tum to colleagues for help with background and terminology questions Even at the largest commercial translation agencies linguists often work alone without access to this most important human resource In the past ATA members had to rely on their own personal networks to FOR OFFICIAL USE ONL 'l 20 86-36 DOCID 4019611 CRYPTOLOG Winter 1995 Presentations and Workshops help solve translation problems but the Internet revolution is providing many ATA members with a means of asking for assistance from other translators The most popular platform is the Foreign Language Forum FLEFO available on CompuServe but translators may also find the sciJang translation newsgroup on the Internet useful However as one translator at the Conference pointed out not all the advice provided in reply to translators' questions on bulletin boards is accurate-as is so often the case with bulletin boards in general-so one must learn through experience which translators answering queries are authorities in their fields U Public Perception of Translation in the VSA V Lee K Curtis stated that she surveyed several international marketing and sales directors in the United States on the subject of translation She concluded from the survey that ignorance of good translation is prevalent despite the fact that translation is a vital asset to our economy In fact we at NSA are cognizant that our national security often depends on translation when it comes to staving off terrorism U Agency linguists are well compensated by industry standards U Agency linguists earn more than their private sector colleagues The average free-lance translator in the United States can expect to make about $36 000 in 1995 or slightly less than a GS-ll The free-lancer however cannot count on the health insurance retirement vacation and other benefits Agency employees receive This total compensation combined with access to working aids dictionaries and superior training opportunities means that our management recognizes the value of language professionals V In contrast the private sector generally does not value language services and the translation field suffers from an image problem in the Vnited States One reason is that unlike other professional fields there is no national standard for translation accreditation The more significant however is that most V S businesses do not believe translation is worth the extra cost They rely on the high-school-level skill of someone at the company or leave translation tasks to their foreign distributor Other companies simply publish documents and advertising in English only ATA's position is that U S firms are cutting their own throats and its members are working to educate V S companies on the importance of using professional translators to increase sales abroad V Ms Curtis cited the following reactions by businesses in the V S to translation 1 Our distributor takes care of our products 2 We have people in our company who took foreign language classes in school 3 We can't afford translation 4 Why All we want to do is to substitute the English with the foreign text in our computer Ms Curtis gave an example of this An American company published a commercial in the Middle East that ran like this Dirty Clothes - Xabwn Gsil- Clean Clothes Xabwn Gsil detergent but the company didn't take into consideration that people in the Middle East read from right to left 5 We want you to fit the foreign language text into the same amount of space allotted to the English text 6 We don't do business with anyone who does not speak English 7 We have a computer software program that takes care of our business FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY 21 DocrD cRf 6 11 Winter 1995 U Ms Curtis focused on such common misconceptions and shared with the attendants her views regarding How to educate potential clients by showing them what damage improper translation may do to their business U Teaching Translation to Undergraduates U Sonia Colina a translation instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign focused on What Do Errors Reveal She stated that examining and analyzing students' errors reduces subjective evaluation She compared two methods of teaching translation In the traditional teacher-centered classroom the teacher is the performer and corrects students' errors on the spot In the modern student-centered classroom the student is the performer Students are allowed to monitor and analyze their own errors this allows the teacher to look into the students' learning process and proceeds to design a more effective curriculum and or course materials U A Meaning-Based Approach to Teaching Translation U Two instructors from Georgetown University Shuckran Kamal and Jacqueline Murgida ascribed poor translation from Arabic to English to inadequate command of English writing skills Arabic reading comprehension and or sound translation principles plus lack of awareness of the advantages of membership in the major professional organizations of translation and interpretation To remedy this situation they proposed formal training in translation principles on-the-job training and joining organizations like the ATA U For formal training the instructors presented a sample lesson of a program of study in Arabic-English translation They required students to have at least a level-III proficiency in Arabic and to have read Mildred Larson's book Meaning-Based Translation Their program offered an assortment of activities For example they invited guest speakers to lecture on topics relevant to translation in general as well as to ArabicEnglish translation in particular In addition they selected texts from the Arabic and American media for translation provided exercises for students to work individually and in teams composed of native English native Arabic students and challenged the students to edit and revise professional translations One NSA linguist objected that one of the examples commentaries editorials by George WilJ would frustrate the students more than help them improve their skills because of the complexity of Will's thoughts and writing U Medical Terminology Management in a Multilingual Environment U Helen Knight Brenda Rudder and Clove Lynch stressed that our technical environment requires that translators be accurate and consistent in their use of specialized terminology To this end Family Health International FHI a nonprofit organization that conducts medical research developed a multilingual medical terminology database TDB It efficiently stores large quantities of terms and their definitions in different contexts to be retrieved and processed in a variety of ways U FHI's TDB distinguishes between a term and a word A term can be made up of one or more words and has a precise meaning in a specific context Actually this TDB provides specific relevant and concise contexts to illustrate a term This kind of programming can certainly improve translation quality by ensuring the accurate and consistent use of specialized terminology U Machine Translation U Alejandra Koval of AT T Business Translations' presentation discussed machine translation MT --what it is where it is and where it's going Current perception is that MT is stealing work from translators is hard to read and can even be dangerous if used for manuals and instructions But the advantages of high volume consistency and customization are too great to ignore MT will not replace translators it will redefine their role Now and in the future rather than translating a text from scratch translators will do a pretranslation review performing text analysis and dictionary building and will quality control the machine's output in the post-editing and final review stages l Obviously MT is only as good as the dictionary provided for it Some things like polysemous dual-meaning words will always pose problems The key point is that MT does not replace the translator It is a tool to be used by a translator The person using MT will still require all the same translation skills and linguistic knowledge that have always been needed 1 FOUO For infonnation on MT capabilities available at NSA see Machine Translation What Can It Do For Us byl l RYPTOLOG Vol XXI No 3 Fall 1995 P L FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY 22 86-36 DOClD 4019611 CRYPTOLOG Winter 1995 About the ATA U The ATA is the only private-sector entity accrediting translators in the Unfted States As both a professional and a trade organization fts goal is to build recognftion and appreciation for the translation field On the professional side ATA has an accreditation program whereby translators can be tested or evaluated by their peers Once accredited members are listed in the ATA translation services directory However less than one-third of the members are accredited one reason being that the accreditation program is limned to less than a dozen mostly European languages Accredftation tests for Chinese due out in spring 1996 and some other languages are in the works The teshtaker is typically required to translate three of five passages on the test Topics may include a patent and a Ifterary passage and passages on economics finance and technology Graders try to make the examination general in nature so that ft tests one's command of the language rather than knowledge of subject matter U Aspirants must take a practice test before taking the accrecUtationexamination because so many people have failed the latter but no critique is provided for those who fail the practice test Many of those attending a forum on ATA accreditation expressed dissatisfaction with this policy considering the separate fees required to take the practice test and the accreditation examination as well as for ATA membership Furthermore ATA continues to have no accreditation exam for many languages there was a session at the conference entllied 'How to Get Your Language Accredited ATA executives promised to take Into account the concerns of accredftation aspirants atlending the Forum but the matler was unresoived by the end olthe conference It was also pointed out that ATA accredftation naturally is less important to translation agencies and customers than qualfty work completed on time U As a trade organi2ation ATA gives professional translators a forum in which to disseminate information exchange ideas and work together to educate bllSiness on the need for professional qual- U ATA stresses the Importance of using professional translators to Increase sales abroad ity translations in its literature documents and advertising The nature of translation work discussed or advertised at the conference confirms the notion that technical translation comprises a large portion of private-sector translation although awards were given at the conference for oulstanding translation of foreign Ifterary works Translation agencies as one might expect prefer to employ specialists in technical fields but are often compelled to use the services of less technically Inerate individuals who can translate documents in their chosen specialty reasonably well As one translator with an electrical engineering background who specializes in telecommunications pointed out 'In my field one must visualize to which pin a given connection leads adding that well-written translations often mask technical translation errors He conceded that qufte a few translators are able to compensate to a large extent for their lack of formal technical training by extensive reading of technicaltiterature in English on their fields and adVised that a few technical courses at a communfty college could goa long way toward helping aspiring technical translators wfth liberal-arts backgrounds FQR QFFIClAfos BSE QP fosY 23 DOCID 4019611 CRYPTOLOG Winter 1995 U Interpreter Training U Carol Patrie of Gallaudet University in Washington D C discussed interpreter training Her school's approach to interpreter training requires students to be at the master's level and to have the language skills experience maturity and discretion necessary to be a good interpreter The Gallaudet program intended to train students to perform simultaneous interpreting emphasizes a step-by-step process teaching interpreting skills as component parts The general skills portion begins with language competence exercises to access and develop student's ability A speaking ability test is administered to see if students can express themselves in the foreign language Cloze exercises filling in the blanks teach students to finish sentences and logically predict the next sentence or idea Other exercises help students improve how they sound increase understandability develop auditory memory and learn to grasp links between ideas being presented U Usage Labels U Jean Quirion a graduate student at the University of Montreal delivered an excellent paper on usage labels in dictionaries and the impact they have on translation accuracy He noted that dictionary worship meaning accepting an entry without question is common among novice users This is a problem since dictionaries often fail One reason they fail is that general dictionaries are limited to the most common words But the more common reason for failure he believes is that stylistic labels have not kept up with changes in language and society U Usage labels tell us if a word is obsolete or archaic slang or colloquial if it is used only in a specific region or specific to a field such as sports religion or medicine These labels must also match a given culture For example words specific to gender or social class are much more common in European languages including European versions of English and French than in North America U One problem with usage labels is that they still involve a great deal of subjectivity Another is that lexicographers must leave their field of expertise when assigning usage labels An experienced translator must use great care when selecting a general dictionary and should also have access to specialized dictionaries Lexicographers in general should make standardization of labels a valued long-term goal U Translation Techniques U Every presentation in whole or in part recommended translation techniques that make for higher quality work Most of this information is not new for titled technical track professionals At the same time hearing it reinforced the techniques taught at the Agency Here are some examples Cliff Landers a professor of political science at Jersey City State College recommended that non-fiction translation be treated like literary translation His basic premise is that translators need to maintain the information content of the original text but present the information in a literary style typical of an educated native speaker His motto A good translation sounds as though it were written in English Several presentations stressed how translators and interpreters act as mediators between cultures For example in Brazil salaries are usually expressed by the month but in the United States we express them by the year Translations between these two languages cultures must either be explicit about the time period represented or do the math and express the figure the way the target audience is accustomed to thinking about these matters Another presentation encouraged translators to think in terms of semantic units rather than words to increase translation accuracy For e mple in Hungarian one word can accurately represent three or four words in German Conversely it might take three or four English words to convey the meaning of one word of Finnish U The Japanese market for software is enormous FOR OFFICIAL USB ONLY 24 DOCID 4019611 CRYPTOLOG Winter 1995 Tips for Free-Lancers A presentation on how to succeed as a free-lance translator contained a number of valuable tips for increasing one's marketability that could be useful to Agency linguists as well The growing importance of desktop publishing DTP means that a thorough knowledge of DTP programs is an asset Here again Agency linguists have an advantage over their private-sector counterparts in that DTP training is available through NSA's Learning Center Software localization for example translating shuuryoo as the 'done' key instead of giving it a litera translation of end when writing software for Japanese customers is a hot topic for translators into Japanese and European languages the Japanese market for software is enormous and the European Union has required all manuals to be translated into Europe's chief languages thus creating a huge market for translators of European languages New translation tools heretofore only obtainable for European languages are becoming available for Japanese as well for cross-application purposes graphics and text string-extraction tools A downturn in the Japanese economy brought the fortunes of Japanese-toEnglish technical translators to their lowest ebb about 3 years ago Once the nadir was reached however the appreciation of the yen against the dollar ultimately forced Japanese translation agency executives to transfer a considerable portion of their work to the United States and elsewhere where translation costs are lower Here are other translation events which language technical trackers may want to attend The Federation Internationale des Traducteurs World Congress Mr Steve Sachs a free-lance translator from Annapolis Maryland briefed the conference on the Federation Intemationale des Traducteurs FIT World Congress scheduled in Melbourne Australia in February 1996 The FIT is the umbrella organization for over 75 national and regional translation organizations from over 40 countries Associate members include universities and other organizations Funding comes from member dues and through UNESCO Conference activities are much like the ATA convention only on an international scale This conference is held only once every 3 years with the 1999 conference tentatively scheduled for Mons Belgium The Second International Conference on Current Trends in Studies of Translation and Interpreting Dr Kinga KJaudy President of the Translation Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Science issued an open invitation to attend the Second International Conference on Current Trends in Studies of Translation and Interpreting The conference is scheduled for 5 to 7 September 1996 in Budapest and is organized by the Faculty of Humanities at Eotvos Lorand University UNCLASSIFIED FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY 25 I' DOCID 4019611 8ECRET SPOKE CRYPTOLOG Winter P L 1995 86-36 From the History File How I Helped Trigger a Greater American Involvement in Vietnam U b _ _ U In the early 1960's the Military Airlift Command was still using a fleet of lumbering C-121's to ferry servicemen we rarely saw a servicewoman in those days to and from overseas duty stations The C-121 was an ungainly craft that now that I think of it looked a lot like a Klingon Bird of Prey Somewhat slower than the mainstay of the Klingon fleet the C-121 tc ok about three days to make the trip from Southeast Asia to the West Coast of the United States 1 heavier American involvement in Vietnam than had existed when I first arrived in the Philippines P L U Anyhow it was October 1962 and an appallingly voung and fresh-faced 25-year-old Airman First ClasOas dozing aboard one of these Connies as they were sometimes called while the aircraft labored toward San Francisco from Hawaii I had boarded at Clark Field in the Philippines having completed a 21month tour of duty in Southeast Asia and was to be discharged from active duty once I arrived back in the States On the ground stateside Alvin Dark's Giants were about to lose a heartbreaker to Ralph Houk's Yankees in the seventh game of the World Series and America was a lot closer to a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union over the missiles in Cuba than many of us on the other side of the Pacific Ocean had ever realized U As the engines changed pitch and the plane began to drift down through the clouds toward the Bay area-where within days my military career would be brought to a close-my mind wandered back over the last year and a half and some of the weirdness it had witnessed I won't dwell on the run-of-the-mill absurdities that routinely befall your average unaccompanied serviceman but I must tell you that in October 1962 I was still not absolutely certain that I hadn't triggered a I U Interestingly Lt Col John Paul Vann whom Neil Sheehan called the closest the United States came in Vietnam to a Lawrence of Arabia would never have made it to Vietnam in March 1962 ifhe had boarded the C-121 that was scheduled to transport himand 930therofficersandmento Saigon Vann had forgottentohavehispassportrenewedandwaspulledfromline just momentsbefore hewastostepaboardtheplane TheC-121 disappearedoverthePacific allaboardwerelost andVanntook a later flight Sheehan 'sA BrightShiningLie lohnPaul Vann and America in Vietnam is highly recommended reading U The author in Saigon in the spring of 1962 8 CeO It happened like this My primary duty at the 6925th Radio Squadron Mobile at Clark Air Force Base was to analyze and report on the activities of what passed for an air force in North Vietnam--Dr the Democratic Republic of Vietnam DRV as Hanoi liked to be called in those days And what an air force Because the 1954 Geneva Accords on Cessation of Hostilities in Indochina specifically ruled out the introduction of combat aircraft into Vietnam North Vietnam had no tactical aircraft worthy of the name and wouldn't take delivery of their first MiG-l Ts until August 1964 The largest plane they had at the time was the I1yushin-14 11-14 transport-a twin piston-driven 25-passenger light transport which I am reliably told cost so much to operate that there was no way it could be made profitable The 11-14 was one of the early efforts of Sergei Vladimirovich Ilyushin who went to his reward in 1977 The DRV had 14 of these CRATEs as NATO so aptly named them gifted to them by the old Soviet SECRET8POlQ 26 86-36 DOCID 4019611 SECRET SPOKE CRYPTOLOG Winter 1995 Union and the East Germans Four of them were used to fly the two milk-run civil routes south out of Hanoi to Vinh and Dong Hoi and west toward Na San and Dien Bien Phu farm animals that couldn't be stowed in the overhead compartment or stuffed under the seat in front of you couldn't be carried on The other ten 11-14's were sent down by the Soviets especially to be used in the airlift into Laos from the DRV in support of the Communist Pathet Lao They also had about a dozen An-2's singleengine biplanes that look a lot like the crop-duster that chased Cary Grant into a cornfield and then crashed into a fuel truck in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest The An-2 in fact began its career as a crop duster in the USSR in the late 40's and eventually came to be used in such diverse roles as parachute training rescue and ambulance work aerial survey short-haul passenger runs you get the picture The DRV used the plane for all these and more and some weird things happened with their An-2's Like the time that the Pathet Lao didn't get the word that a couple of An-2's would be coming over and landing at their site in Laos The first plane encountered a hail of Pathet Lao machine-gun fire it took a few hits before aborting its approach and heading back to Hanoi The second An-2 observing all of this didn't even attempt a landing We soon noticed the North Vietnamese being a bit more conscientious about disseminating their pre-flight information to the stations who would be directly involved U The DRV often used its biplanes in imaginative ways dropping their bombs by hand through these tubes Some of the blood-spattered navigational material that the Vietnamese pilots were carrying was passed through our officel landl asable to get a first-hand look before sending it on to Fort Meade EO 1 4 c iEURt By far the weirdest event thou h was to occur ears after I left the service This was '- -- ---- - --- ' --- --- - ---- ' the bombing raid carried out by a couple of DRV An-2's against a TACAN transmitter installed by the V S Air Force in 1966 in northeastern Laos The transmitter located atop a mountain known as Phou Phathi was used as a navigational aid by V S aircraft and the North Vietnamese were obviously aware of its importance Sure enough on 12 January 1967 they sent a couple of their An-2's over to try and destroy the transmitter It boggles the mind biplanes strafing launching rockets against and droppinQ bombs on the site And Qet this Their mission failed I An inspection of the wreckage disclosed that the Vietnamese had installed launching tubes in the floor of the An-2's and were apparently L--_ --- _ EO 1 4 c V But my own story mainly involves one of the DRV's Li-2's those scaled-down versions of one of the most reliable planes ever built the C-47 or DC-3 as the commercial version is known The Soviet Vnion obtained manufacturing rights for the DC-3 during the World War II era and built over 2 000 of them designating them Li-2's between 1940 and 1945 The 25 or so Li-2's that the DRV operated during the early 60's had been sent down by the Soviet Union to participate in the Laotian airlift but as with the other planes in their inventory the North Vietnamese used the Li-2's in a variety of roles As we know the Vietnamese were also very big on doing things the simplest way remember the hand-dropped bombs and the thousands of loaded bicycles that were pushed down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and this extended in the early 60's to the numbers and 3 U An excellent and engrossing account of the fall of Lima Site 85 was prepared by James C Linder and published in Studies in Intelligence Vol 38 No 5 1995 SECIHSTSPOKE 27 DOCID 4019611 SECRET SPOKE I'-I IVft 'rI ' II ' - ' r Winter I '-'I 1995 callsigns they assigned to their aircraft So it was then that two of their Li-2's and two An-2's had huge identifying numbers painted on their fuselages numbers 01 through 04 These four planes were used frequently on missions into Laos to provide an air service into the Plaine des Jarres area and the large numbers were probably meant to keep the nearsighted Pathet Lao from firing on them When communicating these planes identified themselves by the large numbers painted on their sides and used the simple intemational Q signals to communicate the nature of their activities Q signals were used to indicate departures arrivals pass-over points estimated times of arrival and the like A lot may not have been made of all ofthis if on the morning after the mysterious departure message had been intercepted and reported an aerial observer in South Vietnam hadn't spotted what he took to be parachute panels on the ground between Saigon and the Cambodian border at a point just minutes flying time from Phnom Penh via Li-2 Putting two and two together U S military intelligence analysts in Saigon concluded that the North Vietnamese Li-2 must have flown from Phnom Penh in the middle of the night crossed the border into South Vietnam and paradropped something to the Viet Cong before returning to Phnom Penh Sometime in the first half of 1962 or it may have been late 1961 Li-2 01 flew from Hanoi down to Phnom Penh capital of Norodom Sihanouk's Cambodia We were monitoring the flight service net that handled the flight and knew when the plane departed Hanoi and landed at Phnom Penh And then things got strange In the middle of the plane's first night in Phnom Penh something like 1 a m the Li-2's communicator used his manual Morse key to send the message using the international Q signal that the plane had taken off from Phnom Penh It looked something like this QTA 0100 This was strange because the DRV's planes did precious little night flying in those days and stranger still because we didn't intercept any more communications from the plane that night or see any other indications on the net of where it had gone or what it might have been up to We also didn't see any confirmation of the plane's landing back at Phnom Penh although we later detected it leaving Phnom Penh and flying back to Hanoi iSEUR1-Well that did it Now the stuff had hit the fan Up to this point North Vietnamese planes had flown no further south in their support of either the Pathet Lao or the Viet Cong than an obscure airfield at Tchepone located in the northern part of the Laotian panhandle just about due south of the North Vietnamese port city of Dong Hoi But now we apparently have that pitiful North Vietnamese Air Force flying its planes almost into Saigon itself in support of the Vc I dutifully reported all of the activity by Li-2 01 including the nighttime departure from Phnom Penh for points unknown also charged with reporting on the activities of the North Vietnamese Air Force independently reached the same conclusion and reported that the Li-2 had left Phnom Penh that night on an undisclosed mission It's essential to my story that I point out here that the North Vietnamese on occasion had used the Q signal QTA to mean The correct time is That precedent plus what I knew then of other proclivities of the North Vietnamese pilots left me with a nagging doubt about what had actually taken place that night Had the plane actually taken off from JIhnom Penh or was the radio operator merely checking communications But why engage in comms checks at 1 a m and why had the Li-2 gone to Phnom Penh in the first place And after all I wasn't the only one to repOrt that the plane had departed in the middle of the night I I 5 eeO Not long after this incident the U S Air Force of which I was a member remember transferred a C-130 into Saigon from where it began staging in an attempt to intercept North Vietnamese air communications related to Hanoi's nighttime air supply efforts on behalf of the Vc As fate would have it I was a Vietnamese linguist and because there was a shortage of such linguists my tour in Southeast Asia was extended by 90 days and I was sent to Saigon involuntarily I must add to help man the missions I was a member of the C-130's back-end crew many nights while the plane made endless orbits over the DMZ separating North and South Vietnam We never intercepted a single word of voice traffic to confirm that the North was flying missions in support of the Vc So Did the Li-2 actually fly that nighttime paradrop mission or was he just transmitting the correct time And were those really parachute panels that the aerial observer spotted the next morning 5 CeO We continued to search for North Vietnamese communications in support of air operations in the south but had found none by the time I left Saigon in October 1962 and the American troop presence in South Vietnam had quadrupled by Christmas Oh yes Shortly before I caught my flight out of Saigon for the Philippines and then home I overheard the following conversation in my tent between a couple of G I 's who as far as I could determine were not cleared for any SECRE'FSPOKE 28 EO 1 4 c P L 86-36 -------------- - -- --- --- - -- DOCID 4019611 SI CRETSPOD CRYPTOLOG Winter fffl 6Y-Dwh6prepa diorllis level of intelligence certainly not codeword G #1 Hey man why is it that the United States is sending all these troops over here G #2 Hey don't you know nothin' It's because of all them II-yooshins that's been droppin' supplies to them Viet Congs i True story 1995 Air Force L 8 6- 3 6 NSA careers by poaching game in the hills of east Tennessee as a teenager graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in international relations and ful R ' 4 c recovering in P054 from a stint as P L --- 6 - 3 6 under Gen Odom He has served the agency in many capacities since entering on duty in 1963 but intends to retire this summer and devote his time and energies to his newly acquired addiction to zydeco and Cajun music I U We direct our readers' attention to the second paragraph which gave us quite a sense of deja vu We couldn't have said it better ourselves From the History File Editorial Comment by Dr Sydney Fairbanks U U So many kind inquiries after the Journal's health have been made of latestimulated apparently by rumors of its early death-that we take the liberty of being rather specific on the subject The number of articles promised has roughly doubled with each successive issue and the mortality from all causes most of them classification difficulties has been less than one in three Because it is extremely difficult to get the average article written independently criticized checked for security discussed rewritten illustrated and typed in final form all within three months we are still operating in an economy of scarcity but the transition to an economy of plenty when the articles that were not ready in time for the last issue are enough to fill the next one may arrive quite soon When it does the Journal will be on an adequately firm footing and we find our progress in that direction gratifyingly rapid U The difficulties attendant on printing the fourth issue have finally been resolved We apologize for the delay and wish to thank our readers for their patience U Please note that this is not as would be expected Volume I Number 4 but Volume II Number 1 The ordinary periodical in our situation has to weigh the reasonableness of having the first numbers appear in January against the inconvenience of mailing out form letters for the next century explaining the break in sequence Because of our limited distribution we hope to escape most of this Nevertheless Readers please note There is NO Volume I Number 4 U It is impractical to list by name all the kind and patient people who have spent hours in advising us informally on specific points but without them there would have been no Journal and we hope they will accept a blanket recognition Reprinted from the NSA Technical Journal Vol II No 1 January 1957 SECRE SPOKE 29 DOCID 4019611 Pt ' ' J r Winter I UNCLASSIFIED u uu 1995 Book Review U High Seas the Naval Passage to an Uncharted World by Adm William A Owens USN pub 1995 Naval Institute Press Annapolis Md Reviewed by Col Richard Szafranski USAF National Military Strategy Chairman Air War College Reprinted with permission from the Air War College Newsletter Vol 20 No 4 Fall 1995 U Perhaps the most vIsIonary and articulate officer serving in uniform today is the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Bill Owens Admiral Owens-along with Mr Andy Marshall the director of the OSD Office of Net Assessment and superintendent of the Revolution in Military Affairs RMA and Dr Alvin Toffler world-renowned author and thinker-also addressed the Air War College Class of 1996 at the beginning of the academic year A big chunk of Admiral Owens' vision is captured in his book High Seas That a serving flag officer has the time to write a book is itself wonderful even acknowledging the help of his assistant Dr Jim Blaker That the book is both useful and good is even better Its 178 pages are a must-read and a quick read U High Seas gives us insight into the present national security environment and the one that Admiral Owens argues is like to emerge over the next several decades Using a straightforward analysis and what's going on here format he describes the things the United States armed forces need to worry about in the near and farther future Major superpower fighting having been averted the primary danger now comes from what Admiral Owens describes as regional predators These are land powers threatening the family of nations by threatening the stability of a region Because they are land powers we need to focus more closely on our ability to influence or defeat these land predators All of our armed forces must attend to the job of supporting land operations Consequently he eloquently explains the need for real naval presence-as distinguished from the virtual presence of air and space forces described in the Air Force's Global Presence-as a requirement for influencing events on land Our own virtual presence was far less well argued and to some much less convincing Admiral Owens asserts that the focus of naval operations for the foreseeable future is not sea control the why of a bank-breaking 600ship Navy but on helping control the land from the littoral The Navy's new vision might be described as from the sea for battlefield support The potential predators he tells us are all reachable from the sea along the littoral He is supported in this observation by the historian John Keegan in The History of Warfare Keegan notes that of the fifteen decisive sea battles in the history of the planet all but two appeared on the littoral In fact Keegan notes that the terrestrial battlespace historically resides along the littoral between the tenth and fifty-fifth degree of latitude in the Northern Hemisphere and stretches from 90 degrees west of Greenwich to 13 degrees east U Because land control and helping deter or defeat regional predators is the new focus of the Navy's operations Admiral Owens argues that the Navy must better understand Air Force and Army operations Without saying it directly he suggests that because the Navy has its own army our United States Marine Corps and its own air force in the form of naval aviation and sea-launched cruise missiles the Navy constitutes a joint and integrated force by definition Thus Naval Expeditionary Task Forces NETFs may be or even are best suited for influencing the land from the littoral The NETFs can do this of course without reliance on overseas bases the Achilles' heel of short- UNCLASSIFIED 30 DOCID 4019611 UNCLASSIFIED CRYPTOLOG Winter legged land-based air power His discussion of strategic bombing campaigns on pp 96-100 is reasonable and he asserts that no single service can do this alone U It is about here that Air Force airmen ought to say Ahoy and reconstruct the logic train car by car regional predators are the threat these are land powers reachable from the littoral the Navy's role is to help win on the land the NETF has joint and unified forces the NETF is self-contained and not reliant on overseas bases and even strategic bombing is a joint activity So what is the niche the value added of a separate Air Force some of our paranoid airmen will wonder One answer of course is very little if we follow the logic train to its unspecified destination This possibility looms more clearly as he describes the Navy's Force 2001 and Force 2021 and the need for real naval presence in four regional areas He suggests that floating mobile bases artificial islands are or could be the power projection bases of the future He concludes that we control our own destiny and asserts We should try to do two things We should design military forces and use the ones we have in ways that do not goad others to challenge us militarily and we should build military forces that are unchallengeable These are the basic assumptions on which I founded most of the discussions in this book The armed forces of the future are a system of systems in Admiral Owens's view and naval forces are a or even the key component in such a system U Is there a hidden agenda here A more appropriate question is Is a general or flag officer worth his or her salt without a hidden agenda Of course not Sun Tzu admonished the general to remain inscrutable 1995 Admiral Owens is pardon the respectful pun a salt worth his salt The hidden agenda my guess is is to infuse our blue water force with post-cold war relevance by using the end of the cold war to reframe its mission as a brown water one but to make this point in such a way that it's as much between the betweens as John Boyd would say as it is between the lines Littoral operations will remain important yet the littoral that counts in the future may be the regions of air and space that surround the planet as much as it is the coastlines of the planet lf the force provider of air and space power is reduced to just another air arm then there is insufficient justification for preserving it What I think Admiral Owens misses as Dr Grant Hammond of the Air War College has pointed out is the structural fallacy of the notions of jointness built around the seamless integration of land sea air and space The reality Hammond asserts is that there really is a seam between the earth and the aerospace and we can neither define it away nor wish it away Someone some force element has to be expert in operating in and controlling the media of air and space The Air Force has no desire to be the Navy and others who are not airmen must trust airmen to be expert about air power just as we must trust sailors to be experts about ships Jointness doesn't mean that you collapse into us It means we do this together but if it's an air or space operation we ought to have the lead U So I recommend that you read this book and read it very carefully I would not buy it but only because it's outrageously expensive for its size If you disagree with this assessment feel free to contact me on the Air War College's new Internet connection at rszafranski@MAXl au af mil UNCLASSIFIED 31 OP SRCRE DOCID 4019611 fflftBRA CtiYPTOLOG Winter 1995 Letters to the Editor U 1 4 c L 86-36 P L 86-36 Re The Future of Cryptanalysis U I Wi QQQll article in the Fall 1995 issue of CRYPTOLOG--at once thoughtful and incisive-led off with an assessment of the state of the art He called 1994 Uthe best year for cryptanalysis since the Second World War U Before his readership got all puffed up with self-importance and began high-fiving everyone within reach however he set the tone for the rest of the article with a caution Wi CeO We turn the clock back to 1979 NSA Director Lt Gen Lew Allen had U The cryptanalytic struggle continues as before only the names change The components of success remain the same and the reasons for failure lack of resources security leaks recur decades running Tom Johnson Center for Cryptologic History 968-6156 32 SECRET DOCID 4019611 CRYPTOLOG Winter Re Foreign Language Testing U U I would like to comment on an article that appeared in the fall 1995 issue of Cryptolog Foreign Language Testing at NSA Time for Change In it the author makes a number of inspired recommendations for improving the way language testing is conducted at NSA However in doing so the author also makes some assumptions about how the work of PQE committees is conducted and I believe that not all of these assumptions are valid U I should point out that I am aware that all PQE committees operate differently and that many take on their own personality based on their leadership and the level of expertise and enthusiasm of their members I was a member of a highly motivated PQE committee that counted among its members experienced linguists with advanced degrees in that field In addition we had 11 very vocal members who loved to argue and convince their fellow committee members of their point of view Very few decisions were made that were not unanimous U With regard to suggestion 1 Use in tests only those texts for which three or more experts independently agree on the level I believe that our committee all 11 of us agreed on their level While all of us took LG-020 Language Levels and Their Application two of our committee members were also full-time language instructors at the NCS On a daily basis they selected texts for classroom use based on their language level and they were quite good at it Therefore we were very confident that the texts we selected for use in our tests were the appropriate level-we had too many checks and balances for this not to be the case U Suggestion 3 Require test designers to socialize at the start of each testing cycle discussing several texts that are in the pertinent foreign language and that have previously been determined to be at the various levels certainly took place in our committee We had not one but two or sometimes three meetings to select an appropriate text discussing a number of samples each time In addition we discussed samples that had been put forth in previous rounds to be sure that we were selecting the best 1995 available text Again the personality of this committee and the committee leader's commitment to let every voice be heard may have played a role in the extent of socializing that our committee undertook U I agree with the author's contention that an analyst's inability to render a text in idiomatic English may sometimes be the reason for failing to pass a PQE However our committee invited every analyst who took a PQE to meet with a member of the committee for a counseling session I believe that our committee members were astute enough to determine whether an analyst was having difficulty understanding the foreign language or rendering it in English and if not then such a counseling session would have revealed such deficiencies During the course of the counseling session the committee member could recommend that the analyst enroll in either another language course or an English writing course as we often did Also when analysts at field locations took PQEs our committee was required to send them a detailed analysis of their exam including areas needing improvement We often recommended in these analyses that analysts seek to improve their English writing skills in addition to their language skills s eeQ I also must comment on the author's assumptions abofit the scoring of translations I maintain that syntactical errors are indeed more costly than lexical errors which is why more points are deducted for this type of error In the example the dog bit the man versus the man bit the dog the nouns are as the author points out in the wrong relationship to the verb However this error becomes much more egregious when an analyst is drafting a SIGINT report and mistakes Ecuador attacks Peru for Peru attacks Ecuador Simply being in the wrong relationship to the verb has rendered these nouns on the complete opposite sides of a war-too costly a mistake to be made by a supposedly certified analyst who passed his PQE U In addition I disagree that mistakes on repeated instances of the same word should be penalized more than once One of the advantages of having a long testing period for PQEs is that analysts thus have an opportunity to go back and HANDLE VIA COMIN'F CHANNELS ONLY SECImT 33 DOC JDTn1Ql9611 o o o - WInter I 1995 reread their translations A careful analyst will note these translation discrepancies and go back and change previous occurrences of the word But a misunderstood word that happens to appear more than once in a text should not be repeatedly penalized U I do appreciate the author's suggestions for improving the PQE system However some aspects of the system are not broken certainly better training for PQE members would help but my experience with a PQE committee introduced me to a whole team of energetic motivated individuals dedicated to improving the quality of certified linguists at NSA '---_ _ 18051 _ _ _ _ _ _ A905 responds U It is heartening to learn that the language PQE committees have so many motivated and capable people who are sincerely trying to follow good test design procedures I agree withl I that not all aspects of the PQE system are broken Her comments however reflect a misunderstanding of some of the points I covered in my paper and I welcome this opportunity to clarify these U The first point she addresses is the selection of texts for use in PQEs She describes a process in which vocal members argue and convince their fellow committee members of their point of view as to text level This is not independent decision-making true independence means that everyone comes to the same conclusion on their own without having to be convinced or cajoled It is unlikely that all members of a given committee will be equally outspoken or equally adept at getting their way thus there is a danger especially on committees smaller than the one she describes that one or two dominant personalities will sway decisions to their viewpoint for good or for ill The unanimity thus gained may lead to a false confidence in the final decision On the other hand when several people arrive at the same conclusion without debate they have a more solid basis for confidence in the outcome U As for diagnosing the causes of poor test performance I would simply point out that not all aspirants avail themselves of the opportunity to receive counseling Moreover it is questionable whether all those who act as counselors 1 are able to make such diagnoses during the counseling session and 2 always attempt to do so It would be much more desirable to have a testing program in which diagnostic information is obtained through the tests themselves U Regarding the scoring of translations l I example of a possible syntactic mistake serves only to demonstrate that this type of error can sometimes be serious I provided examples in my paper of actual mistakes from my test data which show that syntactic errors are sometimes NOT so crucial and that lexical errors sometimes ARE Lest this deteriorate into a my-anecdote-is-better-thanyour-anecdote sort of shouting match let me reiterate that there is no empirical data to support our current translation scoring system and I find no sound basis in current linguistic theory for assuming the absolute primacy of the grammar over the lexicon It is axiomatic to psychometricians that it is irresponsible to base testing decisions on intuition alone the choice of a scoring system is no exception to this These comments also apply to the issue of whether or not to penalize repeated mistakes on the same word U I hope that PQE committee members will continue to work to ensure fairness in language tests at NSA The good in our testing system should not be ignored but neither should we shrink from questioning our current procedures This honest questioning should not be seen as disparaging to anyone now involved in language testing most of whom are as rightly points out energetic motivated individuals dedicated to improving the quality of certified linguists at NSA IL - P L FOR OFFICIAL USB ONL 34 86-36 _ TOP S CRBT UPoIBRA DOCID 4019611 CRYPTOLOG Winter 1995 SIGINT Bloopers U U Having warned against excessive dependence on spell-checkers we find ourselves with a new category that appears to be a variation of the Homonym Pitfall but resulting from not using spell-checkers Writing Wrongs Such as U Negotiations fauItered over the issue Wonder whose faIt it was U Possible Presense of Commandos Noted -is a presense some kind of ESP U One country has charged that U S hypocracy was increasing Let's see would this be government by injection or by Madison Avenue ad-men U This column having condemned the use of diffuse for defuse should probably accept responsibility for confusing one office into producing a brandnew word disfuse instead Officials attempted to disfuse a tension - C F haps we are too severe in our dislike of neologisms but we really must protest against the proliferation of the prefix narco- in reports and collateral relating to drug activity strictly speaking to use narcotics for marijuana and especially cocaine is inaccurate but that's a subject for another column A few Selections From The Narcodictionary l'sq The jailed narcojournalist whose role in the narco-cassette case Are narcocassettes those tapes of music that require a Parental Advisory sticker This gentleman's documentation of rampant narco-corruption led to the embroiling of his nation's president in what has been dubbed the narcodollar scandal It must have been widespread considering the employment of narcosubmarines the mention of these vessels always makes a certain '60s tune run through our heads On another continent narcoviolence was feared when the well-known narcotraffickers metamorphosed into narcoinsurgents But our favorite has to be the dubbing of a now-departed Caribbean-nation junta as narco-putschists U In the But I Ran Spell-Check category n U A country allegedly began to access its chances of joining an international organization Wonder where they keep those chances U Elsewhere a government crackdown served as a lightening rod for international condemnation Lighten up guys or we'll use this rod on you U Another report warned that the security situation was still dangerous and very unpredicatable Ever tried predicating a situation Kids don't try this at home a tangent one office issued a summary of counter narcotics activity using counter narcotics as two words throughout Perhaps these are those narcotics available without a prescription U Of course NSA is not alone State Department bestowed on Emile Jonassaint puppet head of the government proclaimed by the Haitian military the title of Faux President For some reason though Aristide was never referred to as Le President Actuel U A State Dept cable reners to an act of sabotage being against Islamic valves Presumably these valves are not metric U One staff office issued an action memo explaining that Our tact here is to avoid any potential surprises Must have been from the Agency's Tact Force As before thanks to all contributors examples may be sent to P054 in Rm 3E027 Ops 1 or via e-mail to cryplog@p nsa U A field site reported on the deployment of fixed-wind aircraft which apparently defy the laws of physics U We all live in a narcosubmarine TOP S CRET U IBRA 35 DOCID 4019611 CRYPTOLOG Winter 1995 Editorial Policy U Technical articles are preferred over those relating to management shorter over longer under 3 500 words Emphasis should be on improving NSA's technical performance articles should be aimed at explaining developments in one's career field to thos outside it Readers are invited to contribute conference reports and reviews of books articles software and hardware that relate to our missions or to any of our disciplines Editorials are also welcome as is humor Submissions may be published anonymously but the identitiy of the author must be known to the editor Submitting Articles N B If the following instructions are a mystery to you and your local ADP support is no help please feel free to contact the CRYPTOLOG editor on 963-3123s or cryplog@p nsa - Fel JO end a hard copy accompanied by a labelled diskette to the editor at P054 in 3E027 Ops 1 or send a soft copy via e-mail to cryplog@p nsa Guidance For maximum efficiency as far as possible within the limits of your word processor Do not type your article in capital letters Classify all paragraphs Label all diskettes identifying hardware operating system DOS UNIX density and type of word processor used your name organization building and phone number FrameMaker format is preferred ASCII text is also fine 1334 has a conversion service that converts Interleaf WordPerfect OfficeWriter and MS Word into FrameMaker Just attach the document to an E-Mail Compose Window addressed to convert@nsa FOK OFFICIAL USE ONL'l 36 This document is from the holdings of The National Security Archive Suite 701 Gelman Library The George Washington University 2130 H Street NW Washington D C 20037 Phone 202 994-7000 Fax 202 994-7005 nsarchiv@gwu edu