Word: nsa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...NSA seized on this tip as a chance to expand its responsibility for the security of uncoded communications at U.S. embassies, a traditional CIA and State Department domain. "Basically, NSA did an end run around ((director of Central Intelligence William)) Casey," says a senior security official. The NSA went straight to the White House, and persuaded President Reagan to let it replace all U.S. communications equipment in Moscow. In the spring of 1984 Operation Gunman discovered Soviet bugs in 17 embassy typewriters. "NSA's stock rose tremendously after that," recalls a former senior technical security expert...
...NSA official involved in GUNMAN concluded that since some of the typewriter bugs were battery powered, the Soviets must have had a way of getting into secure areas of the embassy to replace these batteries. Remaining in Moscow to figure out how this might be done, this official wrote a report warning that a Soviet Spider-Man was scaling the embassy wall at night, squeezing through a tiny window and making his way to the code room. He also warned that the Soviets had enlarged the flues built into the embassy walls, and that KGB technicians were using them...
...interagency team led by the CIA began shipping suspect equipment back to Washington. Machinery was returned to the U.S., taken apart and painstakingly studied under a program code-named Operation Merit. Most of the equipment went to a CIA facility in Virginia; communications gear was sent first to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Md., then joined the rest of the freight at the CIA warehouse...
...innocuous. The first was a circuit board that had been replaced but not sprayed with a special plastic that "tagged" it as an authorized repair. American officials were afraid the KGB had installed this circuit board to reroute uncoded U.S. message traffic. But the device was tested by NSA experts, who found that it did nothing improper. Security officials later discovered that some State % Department technicians had never been told about the secret tagging program and had not used the spray...
Another smoking gun was found attached to the machine that decoded incoming State Department messages; a suspicious-looking wire led through the shielded side of the box that enclosed the equipment to prevent signals from escaping. "When they found it, the NSA technicians thought they had something really exciting," says a senior expert with a chuckle. It turned out that a communications officer had installed the device; it was a buzzer that alerted him whenever cables came in for processing. The rig was thoroughly tested by the NSA and found harmless...