Free Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror by Michael V. Hayden Page B

did.
    But there was an even larger dimension. Shortly before Christmas 2003 an NSA historian developed a case study about another national decision that had been based on flawed intelligence: the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which launched a major US escalation in Southeast Asia. The case seemed to fit our current circumstance. Perhaps too well.
    The historian e-mailed me a concern: although this was an “extraordinarily powerful and richly textured” episode, he began, “because of possible accusations of a ‘cover-up’ of intelligence errors, and what some might see as rough similarities to the current controversy over intelligence reporting related to the issue of WMD in Iraq, we want to make sure you believe it appropriate to use this particular case study this time.”
    I responded the next day. “I don’t see a problem—sounds like a great way to use this historically rich material to address concerns that still exist today.” And so we did.
    On August 2, 1964, North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attackedthe US destroyer
Maddox
in international waters as that ship was supporting raids on the North Vietnamese coast. SIGINT had warned of an attack, and the torpedo boats were repulsed. Score one for SIGINT.
    Then, two nights later, in the midst of Johnson administration warnings to North Vietnam about further action, SIGINT misread North Vietnamese reporting on their continuing recovery operations from the first night as a second attack and issued a CRITIC (a kind of global warning). Subsequent US Navy evasive action and firing at some spurious radar hits were duly noted in North Vietnamese shore-based communications, which were in turn picked up by NSA and errantly catalogued as further evidence that a second attack was under way. President Johnson ordered air attacks against the torpedo boat bases, and Congress delivered the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing the president to take “all necessary steps” to halt Communist aggression in Southeast Asia.
    In the aftermath of the resolution, NSA stuck to its story that a second attack had occurred. It’s unclear if the agency’s subsequent investigation was careless, misguided, or just consciously ignored evidence. But it is clear that the August 4 reporting was wrong.
    Tonkin and Iraq’s WMD were sobering lessons.
     • • • 
    S URPRISINGLY, AS DIRECTOR OF NSA , I received no formal guidance to prepare for war with Iraq. But it didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that we were going to war, so we moved around what we later estimated to be about $400 million to get ready for the conflict. The deputy head of our SIGINT Directorate, a Gulf War veteran, directed the team we set up to prepare for war to read the agency’s history of the first Gulf War. He then conducted what the army calls a “rock drill” to synchronize what various tactical and national SIGINT units would do to support one another.
    Linguists were a perennial challenge, even before the demands of this war. A year earlier, in 2000, with al-Qaeda strengthening and withinformation on their plans sparse, CIA had outfitted an early model of the Predator with electro-optical and infrared cameras to hunt al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The agency was looking for bin Laden, his close associates, training camps, and any evidence of weapons of mass destruction. It was tough getting this under way; a whole infrastructure of people and equipment had to be built to handle the streaming video from the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle).
    Those early missions did not carry SIGINT packages, but that didn’t let NSA entirely off the hook. As weak as Afghan air defenses were, we still didn’t want the political embarrassment of losing a drone, so we could not simply ignore the Taliban’s limited radar coverage and its handful of MiG-21s. Any Afghan detection of the Predator was deemed sufficient to scrub the mission. So we couldn’t fly without monitoring the air defense network, and that required linguists.