How Dad Came To Work for NSA
Wherever dad went, when someone asked him what he did, he had immense pride when he said, “I worked for the NSA.”
That was before he turned, and made the biggest mistake in his life. Then, he simply said, “I’m retired”, and quickly changed the subject.
Once I took a field trip to dad’s work. I stood next to computers taller than me, stacked in a large room with thick drawers, and blinking yellow lights. There were guards in the room watching me. I picked my lollipop and walked next to dad while he proudly showed me where he sat.
When he worked for NSA, he was tight lipped about his job. He would never reveal the details to anyone, not even family who pressed him at Christmas. Nearly 40 years later I got dad to talk to me about his job.
I asked him how he went to work for NSA.
“I really enjoyed my job when I was in the Air Force. I was trained in the Russian language, then sent to Pakistan on an assignment. As an intercept operator, I would listen to voices being spoken out of Russia and we would try to decode what was going on based on what was being said. Once, suddenly the information we were getting across the speaker we were monitoring stopped working.
I think they [the Russians] shut down the frequency we were assigned to listen to, the four operators. Nobody would get on the speaker. And, so, the boss came by and said, ‘take a break until I get word back that they seem to be ok.’
Everybody got up, went out to smoke a cigarette, and shoot the breeze. I hung around where I was supposed to be working. Hours later I was just fiddling, searching around, playing with the radio, when I heard this voice all of a sudden come on and it said, ‘Hello Moscow!’
And I jumped! Oh! I hit that button and started recording it! I thought, what was this? They were talking back and forth and I found out the reason they had done this is they were testing something new. They were testing to see if they could get away with changing the frequency. I think they [the Russians] knew we were listening to them. And, they were trying to throw us off a little bit.
So, I tape recorded it, and after about ten minutes of recording or so my boss comes walking by. He sees everyone standing, taking a smoke break, while I am at my radio going like crazy recording, and writing down what’s being said. See, while you are recording you are also writing everything down. He [my boss] looked over my shoulder and saw the various words I was writing down. He goes, ‘Oh!’, [laugh] He gets on the line and he calls somebody and they called somebody, and now we know what’s going on.
He calls everybody back to get recording. When they got settled down and back to normal, my boss calls me in to where the big bosses were. He said, ‘That was a great job. We’re going to give you a chance to do some other things. You showed you’ve got the right kind of initiative to do this.’
From that stage I was moved into another place within Pakistan, into that area where no one without the proper credentials was allowed. It wasn’t super great, but at the time it was a big deal. I finished my time in Pakistan, and then went home to the base in Texas.
I remember that I’m sitting around bored, in Texas, and soon I would get out of The Air Force. I was doing a similar job there to what I was doing in Pakistan, but it still wasn’t super great. I was doing things with the speech, and what is called the sonograph. I was reading sonographs. You know what they are?”
“Not exactly.”
“They’re sounds that are printed on paper. You had to analyze the shift in them, and the colors on the paper, and uh, the things that are printed are colors. If they shift you have to figure out what that means. It’s tough. It’s not high grade intelligence. But, it was higher than just using voice.”
“What could you learn from the shifting colors? Whether they were telling the truth?”
“It’s more of understanding what they’re saying and where. You can learn this. You ever heard of ultra sound? [I nodded yes]. Ok, that’s the same thing. It displays sound. It actually uses the sound to figure out the surroundings. Whereas, with a sonograph you can’t read it as accurately. You have to get an idea of what that sound really means.”
“Are you trying to interpret what they are saying based solely on sound?”
“No. Not so much what’s being said, but that could be part of it too. It could be the things they’re saying. It could be things that are going on [in the background] like guns that could be shooting, whatever noises that make sounds that we put on paper. It’s intelligence gathering. That’s what it’s for. It’s just displaying those sounds.
You know who you’re looking at already. It’s what’s called direction finding, where you find out where it’s coming from. Well, I know, and I figured that NSA had even better ways of doing it. So, I thought, well, let me try, although I had no chance anyway. It would cost me nothing to fire off the question, to ask them if they’re interested.
So, I gave them a call. They sent me an application for a job and I wrote down what I did, with all the highlights of some of the things that had taken place in Pakistan. Then I sent it off, and said, ‘Oh well. That’s nice.’
Nearly a year later I got a letter back from NSA that says we’d like to talk to you. They explained the process about what you’re getting involved in security wise, and what the NSA did in general, and the phases. How you could be cleared after you’ve gone through these various phases. They said if you’d like to do so, come and meet us in the DC area, where NSA is located.
I was like wow, this is neat! I was so excited! I made my way to NSA, found where I was supposed to go and I rolled in. I was placed in the area that was teaching what I had already done in the military. They taught how to monitor and interpret listening devices, sonographs, and stuff like that. The kind of stuff I talked to you about.
I sat down with the class and we went through all the introductions and that stuff. We sat at our desks, and I sat front and center. Is that crazy? I’d ask a question, but what if you do this? [he laughed], or what if you do that?
We soon discovered that I knew more than he [the instructor] did. It turns out that he [the instructor] recognized that. So, he brought me in and had me teaching the classes. That was crazy, but it’s true. I ended up teaching the classes.”
“So, at this point you’re an employee for NSA?”
“At this point I was not quite an employee yet. I was being vetted.”
“By teaching classes?”
“I wasn’t teaching them. The guy was still the teacher. He just hardly ever showed up.”
“Well, you were getting paid? By whom?”
“I was getting paid because I was spending time away from home. It’s as simple as that. It was a minimum wage sort of thing.”
“You were an intern?”
“Yea.”
“So, NSA hired you as an intern to see if you were a fit?”
“Yes. Good. You’ve got the right words, too.”
“How long did that go on?”
Uhhhh [long pause] “I would say not more than 6 months.”
“And, then what happened?”
“Then I was deemed to be a fit. So, I was rolled into an office and given a seat, a chair. It was an office where I had my little desk and they made it clear that there’s another office off to the side where you don’t go in there. That office is for super-secret stuff. You needed an advanced clearance for it.”
“In NSA did you only decipher codes? Or, did you also invent some?”
“That’s a yes and a no. I was involved primarily in the breaking of them. But there was a time when we sat around to discuss the ways things were done to see if we could do anything better. Way back in the day, before it’s common like today, we could sample something a thousand times in the same way we could sample like today. I could hear you speaking. I could hear the words you’re saying while we’re talking, such as the word BOOM! If I broke it down I could hear a thousand parts of that boom.”
“So you thought you should split up the sound?”
“Yea. When they heard that they thought, wow, that’s a good idea.”
“What did that do?”
“It gave you better accuracy. Because of that, ultimately I was assigned to a higher level of work.”
“Did you have any other ideas that would help the NSA do its job better?”
“Yes. If we were to look at a signal differently, we could improve its accuracy. NSA has a time, once a year, where we’d sit down with a small group of people they invited, who would all sit around a table to discuss ways to strengthen the abilities of the NSA to do its job. I got invited to one. I was invited as someone who could bring information that was important to them. And so, that in itself, was a huge jump up, right?
When we did sit we began to talk about how we listened to the Soviets. We would monitor some soviet activity with a, uh, kind of like radars, ya know, but we’d use a satellite. We’d send a signal up to the satellite. Hit the satellite. And, bend it back down, to hit the target. And then we’d get a picture of what’s going on. We could see it.
I said, ’Well, what about if we did this? If we put the signal up, and when we hit the target, instead of coming straight back down, we bounce it off the target, so that when it went down it went off in all different directions around that target?’ They could then see, line of sight is limited.
By doing it this way, when the signal went up, and then it came back down, when we hit the target, then we could see the edge up to 20 miles. We could now look in a whole circle. Maybe even backwards.
And, that idea was like, you know that’s even been approved today, from what I’ve read, when I say I read, from what I see on, uh, streaming, they call it. Streaming is the same thing. You can see.”
“So, how did you change it? You changed it from looking at one specific target to bouncing it out to many targets at once?”
“One at a time.”
“How do you go from bouncing it once to bouncing it everywhere?”
“Yeah. Ok, uh, I just went through that. I’ll go through it again. Here I go. I hit that [target]. It bounces it back up. It comes up instantly. Ok? And it allows me to see this much. [index finger and thumb about 2 inches part] Instantly I come back down and hit that same one, but bounce the signal off the target to see what’s around it.”
“So, a few feet over?”
“Yeah. 20 miles over.”
“They weren’t doing that? They just looked at one tiny target and went straight up?”
“No. They weren’t. They never thought about it. I thought about it. “
“They did it once and stopped?”
“No, well, they kept trying to keep track of the target, and as the target moved they would track it. But, they wouldn’t track what was around the target. And knowing whether somebody else was over there on the other side of the hill, for example, waving at the target. They wouldn’t know that, until they got over to where the target was. And, that was like, it was considered like, Wow! That was a neat idea! That got me promoted into a lot of things.
That’s what actually got me into the project Ivy Bells where we looked at signals underwater. How what, if anything, we could we do to improve that. If it needed improving or protected, anything at all that I had an idea on, so they would make sure that this project stayed good.”
What caused dad to flip his switch? Well, that’s a long story.