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American Morning

Interview with James Bamford

Aired June 20, 2002 - 08:08   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BILL HEMMER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The National Security Agency, the NSA, now getting its turn in the hot seat this week after new revelations now that the agency intercepted two ominous messages the day before the attacks of 9/11. U.S. law makers now looking into those intelligence failures, wanting to know why the NSA did not get around to translating the intercepts until the 12th of September.

From San Francisco, James Bamford, the author of "Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra Secret National Security Agency."

Sir, good to see you. Good morning. Thanks for getting up early with us.

JAMES BAMFORD, AUTHOR, "BODY OF SECRETS": Good morning, Bill.

HEMMER: You have said for some time the NSA has essentially flown beneath the radar, avoiding a lot of scrutiny. Why is that, do you think?

BAMFORD: Well, the agency was formed in total secrecy as opposed to the CIA, which was sort of an open agency when it was formed. It was formed by a public law. NSA was formed by a top secret memorandum and since then it's tried to maintain its anonymity. It's -- the old joke is NSA stood for "no such agency."

HEMMER: You wrote a fascinating piece in the "Washington Post" about two and a half weeks ago. You contend that in Laurel, Maryland, where the NSA is located, that people who actually work there in charge of the nation's security were actually working out in the same gyms as the hijackers of 9/11, shopping at the same grocery stores as the attackers of 9/11. Is that a fact?

BAMFORD: Yes, that's really one of the most tragic ironies. As a matter of fact, on September 11, the morning of September 11, the terrorists who were going to take over the plane to crash into the Pentagon left the Valencia Motel in downtown Laurel, which is the bedroom community for NSA, and basically passed all the -- a lot of the NSA employees going to work, presumably a lot of them to look for terrorists. So they probably came within two or three feet of each other that morning.

HEMMER: Wow. We want to put up on the screen if we have it available right now the story that David Ensor broke out of Washington yesterday, the intercepts that occurred on September 10. I'll read them to you. "The match begins tomorrow. Tomorrow is zero hour." There are a whole lot of variables thrown into this, James. But if you had received this message, what do you do with it? How to you interpret it? Where does it go from here?

BAMFORD: Well, a lot of the key factors are missing. That's -- who sent the message and who received the message and where was it sent from. You have to factor those items into the equation to determine how important it was. If it came from one of Osama bin Laden's top lieutenants, it would be extremely important and you'd want that information translated immediately. If it was somebody further down the chain, then it would have probably less importance.

But within two days the NSA did have it translated and to some degree analyzed. So that's fairly fast for NSA. The problem is when messages take weeks or months to get translated. In this case...

HEMMER: Part of the reason for that delay could be the fact that they get, what, two million hits an hour, essentially? And if that's the case...

BAMFORD: Well...

HEMMER: ... how do you go through and discern and weed out what's legitimate and what's not?

BAMFORD: An average listening post, Bill -- and they probably have more than a dozen around the world -- an average listening post pulls in about two million pieces of communications an hour, and that's phone calls, e-mails, faxes, data transfers, whatever. And they use these super computers to sift through the initial batch, basically, to sort of narrow it down to a level where humans can actually start analyzing it.

But they take in so much information that two years ago in February of 2000 the entire agency crashed. Every single computer in the agency crashed for four days and the agency basically had to shut down its analysis capability for four full days. And that's the problem. There's too much information coming in.

And at some point it's got to be reduced to the level where actual analysts look at it and say this important or this is not important.

HEMMER: That's a great point because in the article you also make the point, and I think you've said this repeatedly, the agency itself and the U.S. government has invested far too long in technology as opposed to human beings. A fair statement to reflect your opinion?

BAMFORD: That's right. The agency has an overwhelming amount of technology. It was largely purchased and set in place to spy on the Soviet Union back in the cold war days. And there was far less attention put on human beings, human analysts. So you've got satellites and technical devices that can collect almost anything anywhere, but have you very few amount of people that can actually analyze it. They actually cut back by a third -- the agency cut back by a third since the end of the cold war till September 11. So you have far more information out there -- cell phones, the e-mail, data transfers -- and a third less people to analyze it.

HEMMER: You know, there's so much information. I can tell you, late December, early January in Kandahar U.S. military investigators picking up all kinds of signals, traffic on cell phones through southern Afghanistan, picking up a lot of the code words. If you remember, the code word "wedding" going back to September 11. And again, it raises the point, how do you discern what is legitimate and true and what is happening within al Qaeda to just mess with our heads?

Quickly here, James, if you were to reorganize and make the NSA more effective, your advice is what?

BAMFORD: Well, the first thing is languages. NSA has had a real problem with languages. When U.S. troops went into Haiti, NSA had a total of one Creole linguist. So they've got to develop a sort of a reserve force of linguists that can handle some of these more exotic languages like Pashtun and Dahri, the languages of Afghanistan, and far more people that can speak Arabic and other languages.

So that's, I think, the most important aspect for NSA right now.

HEMMER: Thank you, James.

James Bamford, author of "Body of Secrets" out there in San Francisco. Good to chat with you, sir.

BAMFORD: Thank you, Bill.

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