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CHAPTER TWENTY

The NSA’s Back Door

“You have private for-profit companies doing inherently governmental work like targeted espionage, surveillance, compromising foreign systems. And there’s very little oversight, there’s very little review.”

- Edward Snowden, explaining his access to the NSA in Moscow, 2014

Prior to Snowden’s theft of NSA documents, the single most shattering blow to the confidence of the US intelligence community was the exposure of Aldrich Ames as a long-serving Russian mole in the CIA in 1994. Ames, it will be recalled, had been a high-ranking CIA officer. He had even worked at the CIA’s Counterintelligence Center Analysis Group before he was arrested by the FBI. He had also worked as a mole for Russian intelligence. (His recruitment by the KGB will be further discussed in Chapter twenty-seven.)

In a plea bargain to avoid the death sentence, he admitted that he had successfully burrowed into the CIA for over nine years on behalf of the KGB. His description of his sub rosa activities as a mole was part of the plea bargain. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. This stunning revelation shook the CIA leadership to its core. Up until then, as mentioned earlier, CIA executives steadfastly denied that it was possible that the KGB could sustain a mole in American intelligence. The Ames arrest also led the NSA to reassess its own vulnerability to penetration. Could there be an Ames inside the NSA?

The question was considered by the NSA’s National Threats Operations Center, the same unit from which Edward Snowden later stole a huge trove of secret documents. According to a report in 1996 entitled “Out of Control” (later released by the NSA), the danger of an Ames-type penetration could not be excluded. Even though the “threat officer” who wrote this report was not identified by name, his analysis proved incredibly prescient. He said that the NSA’s drive to enhance its performance by networking its computers would result in the intelligence services, putting “all their classified information ‘eggs’ into one very precarious basket.” The basket was the computer networks run by technicians called: system administrators.” He pointed out that the NSA was becoming increasingly dependent on such networked computer systems, and he predicted that the NSA’s “Aldrich Ames.” As he put it, would be a “system administrator”—which was the position that Edward Snowden held nearly two decades later at Dell when he began stealing secrets.

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