HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020323.jpg

171

telephones (SORM 1), emails and other Internet activity (SORM-2), and computer data storage of billing
information (SORM-3). Not only did Russia run a nationwide system of Internet-filtering in 2013, but it
requires their telecommunication companies furnish to it worldwide data.

The NSA also had to deal with many peripheral issues other than the activities of Russia and
China. It was charged with monitoring everything from nuclear proliferation in Iran, Pakistan,
and North Korea, to potential jihadist threats everywhere in the world. The Russian intelligence
service, on the other hand, could put its limited resources to work on redressing the gap with its
main enemy: the United States.

Nevertheless, Putin had to reckon with the reality in 2013 that Russia could not compete with
the NSA in the business of intercepting communications. And if the NSA could listen in on all the
internal activities of its spy agencies and security regime, the ability of Putin to use covert means
to achieve his other global ambitions would be impaired. In the Cold Peace that replaced the
Cold War, Russia had little hope of realizing these ambitions unless it could weaken the NSA’s
iron-tight grip on global communications intelligence. One way to remedy the imbalance between
Russian intelligence and the NSA was via espionage. Here the SVR would be the instrument and
the immediate objective would be to acquire the NSA’s lists of its sources in Russia. If successful,
it would be a game changer.

Such an ambitious penetration of the NSA, to be sure, was a tall order for Russian intelligence.
Most of its moles recruited in the NSA by the KGB, had been code clerks, guards, translators,
and low-level analysts. They provided documents about the NSA’s cipher-breaking, but they
lacked access to these lists of the NSA’s sources and methods

These meager results did not inhibit Russian efforts. Yet, for almost seven decades, ever
since the inception of the NSA in 1952, the Russian Intelligence service had engaged in a covert
war with the NSA. The Russian intelligence service is, as far as is known, the only intelligence
service in the world that ever succeeded in penetrating the NSA. A number of NSA employees
also defected to Moscow. The history of this venerable enterprise is instructive.

The first two defectors in the NSA’s history were William Martin and Bernon Mitchell. They
were mathematicians working on the NSA’s decryption machines who went to Moscow via Cuba
in 1960. The Russian intelligence service, then called the KGB, went to great lengths to publicize
their defections. It even organized a 90-minute long press conference for them on September 6,
1960 at the Hall of Journalists and invited to it all the foreign correspondents in Moscow. Before
television cameras, the defectors proceeded to denounce the NSA’s activities. Martin told how
the NSA breached international laws by spying on Germany, Britain and other NATO allies.
Mitchell, for his part, suggested that the NSA’s practice of breaking international laws could
ignite a nuclear war. Indeed, he justified their joint defection to Russia in heroic whistle-blowing
terms, saying, "We would attempt to crawl to the moon if we thought it would lessen the threat of
an atomic war." The NSA historian assessed little damage had been done since the NSA quickly
could change the codes they compromised. He noted: “The Communist spymasters would

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020323