Eavesdropping on the world

GLYN FORD

Body of Secrets by James Bamford; Doubleday; $29.95.

THIS book, subtitled 'How America's NSA and Britain's GCHQ eavesdrop on the World', finally nails the lie that the Echelon spy system does not exist. Nicky Hagar, the investigative journalist, did this earlier in Secret Power (Craig Potton, 1996), but his almost mind-numbingly boring catalogue of detail never got published outside of New Zealand. Here in over 700 pages, the story is retold on a bigger, more colourful and more public canvas.

Echelon is the system that now routinely monitors all telephone, fax and e-mail communications, on the basis of key words in a 'dictionary' and voice recognition technology, that are routed through the world's telecommunications satellites. It is all orchestrated through the U.K.-U.S. agreement of 1947 that set up an Anglo-Saxon collaborative network involving the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to engage in signals intelligence against the Soviet Union.

Initially Echelon was devoted almost entirely to Cold War military intelligence. But as technological opacity transformed itself by leaps and bounds and, more recently, as the Soviet Empire disarticulated into an incoherent group of Third World states, it moved into much broader intelligence gathering against friends as well as foes. It also widened the perceived threat from the purely military to encompass the economic and possibly industrial battlefields between nation-states.

But the book does far more than merely tell the story of Echelon. It is also a gazetteer and history of the National Security Agency (NSA). The NSA is virtually unknown in the U.S., let alone outside, yet it is bigger than the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) combined. Its annual budget is close to $4 billion, and it has 63,000 employees. Just one of its dozens of intelligence collection systems can deal with a million inputs in half an hour. All but 6,500 of these will be automatically filtered out, with 1,000 meeting forwarding criteria. Ten of these are selected by analysts and one report for distribution is produced. Hence, hundreds of reports wash around the U.S. intelligence community daily.

The book also has a series of marvellous vignettes of U.S. foreign policy in action in Cuba, Vietnam, Iran and Afghanistan. The very process of intelligence collection could be hazardous. In 1960, Gary Powers was shot down as he was flying over Soviet territory in his U-2 spy plane. He was lucky, surviving against all odds and to the enormous disappointment of U.S. intelligence. However, at sea there was a sharp political contrast in the reaction to the fate of the two NSA ships, Liberty and Pueblo.

In May 1967, there was a murderous assault by Israeli when USS Liberty was attacked and nearly sunk. Thirty-four U.S. servicemen were killed and 171 wounded in that attempt to stop the U.S. from monitoring the pre-emptive strike against Egypt and the subsequent massacre of captured Egyptian soldiers. The Lyndon Johnson administration and Congress covered up the entire incident. After all, Johnson was planning to run for President the following year and needed the support of pro-Israel voters.

Unfortunately for North Korea nine months later, the vote of the Korean-American community was that much less significant. In January 1968 USS Pueblo was boarded off the North Korean coast by elements of the Korea People's Navy Command. One U.S. serviceman was killed but none was injured. Eleven months later, following a U.S. apology, the crew members were returned to the U.S. Today Pueblo is a floating museum in Pyongyang's Taedong river: the museum's curator, Paek In Ho, was the first man on board in January 1968, and North Korea remains a 'rogue state' that is serving as a scapegoat to justify the National Missile Defence system.

WHAT political lesson do we learn from Body of Secrets? When James Bamford gave evidence to the European Parliament's special committee on Echelon he stated clearly that abuse of the system was possible. He added that it was not happening currently. However, James Woolsey, former Director of the CIA, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the NSA did engage in industrial espionage, but it is was done only to stop European and Japanese companies from bribing their way to contracts at the expense of U.S. companies. Duncan Campbell, the intelligence analyst, claimed that industrial espionage by the NSA leads to loss of contracts worth $10 billion a year by Japanese and European companies to U.S. corporations.

The European Parliament is currently finalising the report of this special committee. The committee's key conclusion is that, whether one chooses to believe Bamford, Woolsey or Campbell, the U.S. must establish an oversight committee to guarantee that the system will not be abused for either commercial advantage or to violate individual rights of privacy in the future. If that does not happen, Europe will have hard choices to make about its future transatlantic relationship.

However, Europe should not get too paranoid. In 1941, the U.S. had broken the ciphers with regard to the bombing of Pearl Harbour, but did not realise the implications until after the event. More recently, the NSA missed the 1998 Indian nuclear test entirely. Given its current track record, it would probably have discovered that review was being written in the course of three or four weeks. Meanwhile James Bamford is probably writing another tome on the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), a $7 billion a year operation whose existence is so secret that it makes the NSA look positively garrulous.

Glyn Ford is a member of the European Parliament from the United Kingdom.