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200 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

Central Intelligence Agency, the Treasury Department, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the FBI. With a multibillion-dollar "black budget" hidden from public scrutiny, the NSA's technology directorate invested in state-of-the-art equipment, including supercomputers that could break almost any cipher, antennas mounted on geosynchronous satellites that vacuumed in billions of foreign telephone calls, and other exotic capabilities. It also devised stealthy means of breaking into channels that its adversaries believed were secure. This enterprise required not only an army of technical specialists capable of remotely intercepting even the faintest traces of electromagnetic signals, hacking into computers, and eavesdropping on distant conversations but also special units called "tailored access operations," to plant listening devices in embassies and diplomatic pouches. The NSA also organized elaborate expeditions to give access to or even penetrate physical cables in enemy territory. In 1971, for example, the NSA sent a specially equipped submarine into Russia's Sea of Okhotsk in Asia to tap through Arctic ice. The target was a Russian cable four hundred feet below the surface that connected the Russian naval headquarters in Vladivostok with a missile testing range.

In 1980, President Ronald Reagan gave the NSA a clear mandate to expand its interception of foreign communications. In Executive Order 12333, he told the NSA that "all means, consistent with applicable Federal law and this [Executive] order, and with full consideration of the rights of United States persons, shall be used to obtain reliable intelligence information to protect the United States and its interests." It did not restrict any foreign country, either an adversary or an ally, from its surveillance.

The NSA's target soon became nothing short of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. "We are approaching a time when we will be able to survey almost any point on the earth's surface with some sensor," Admiral Stansfield Turner, the former director of central intelligence, wrote in 1985. "We should soon be able to keep track of most of the activities on the surface of the earth." Bobby Ray Inman, a former director of the NSA and deputy director of the CIA, argued that the "vastness of the [American] intelligence 'take' from the Soviet Union, and the pattern of continuity going back years,

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