Because Keefe wrote Chatter as a private citizen rather than as an insider expert, he had trouble finding cooperative agencies (let’s start with the NSA). The lack of insider information makes the book naïve at times, but nonetheless important in this post-Cold War, terrorist-ridden era. While critics praised the wealth of statistics (the NSA employs more mathematicians than any other organization in the world), they also embraced Keefe’s provocative questions. His big issue: privacy rights versus global security, and the appropriate caretaker of what he calls this "liberty-security matrix." Although Keefe never takes a definitive stand, his layperson’s book calls for important debate on the subject. After all, as he writes, we live in "a world awash in signals."

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Relying on open sources and those claiming inside knowledge about the furtive National Security Agency, the wisely skeptical Keefe often proffers the belief that the more people talk, the less they probably know. Still, he gathers enough information from the periphery--retired intelligence officers, activist opponents of intelligence operations, and scattered espionage scandals--to depict the general functions of the NSA, which consist of cryptography and electronic interception, and its part in the intelligence alliance of the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Generally known though not officially acknowledged, the alliance's interception program, supposedly code-named Echelon, was the subject of breathless media interest in 2000. It sparked an investigation by indignant European parliamentarians, which Keefe recounts, along with his gleanings from Danish reporters about their country's place in Echelon. Critical though open-minded, Keefe was denied the access to the NSA that was granted to author James Bamford (The Puzzle Palace, 1982), but Keefe's book will reach readers interested in intelligence as well as those worried by it. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE was a Marshall Scholar and a 2003 fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. A third-year student at Yale Law School, he has written for The New York Review of Books, The Yale Journal of International Law, Legal Affairs, and Slate. This is his first book.

Deep in a North Yorkshire moor, in a part of England where sheep and cows outnumber residents and crumbling stone walls snake through endless green pastures like stitches on a quilt, a secretive moon base comes suddenly into view. Low, moss-covered walls give way to tall, barb-crowned fences; weathered farmhouses are replaced by dozens of massive white spheres, pock-marked like giant golf balls shimmering in the sun; farmers on tractors disappear, and heavily armed guards in armor-plated vehicles take their place. Welcome to Menwith Hill, the largest eavesdropping base on Earth and America's ear on the world.

What goes in and out of those domes -- used to hide satellite dishes shaped like giant ice cream scoops -- is the subject of Patrick Radden Keefe's first book. At least, that was his hope. Unfortunately, he could find few who would cooperate with him, and the U.S. National Security Agency, which operates the base, refused to respond to his many queries. As the author of two books on the agency, I have found that silence is a reception common to most who dare knock on its door. After all, NSA's initials have long been said to stand for No Such Agency or Never Say Anything.

Nevertheless, Keefe, a third-year law student at Yale, does a wonderful job of exploring the surrounding territory: the role of SIGINT, or signals intelligence (NSA's $5 word for eavesdropping), in the post-Cold War world; the mysterious Echelon system that links the many listening posts belonging to America's English-speaking allies; the agency's obsession with secrecy; the age-old question of human versus technical intelligence collection; and even the people who have written about the agency, including me, who he generously refers to as "the uncontested civilian authority on the agency" and "the foremost chronicler of the NSA."

Keefe also notes, "When Bamford was writing his first book, The Puzzle Palace, in the early 1980s, the agency did everything it could to thwart his efforts along the way, denying him access and even threatening legal action. When he published a follow-up book, Body of Secrets, in 2001, it featured an extensive interview with [NSA Director Lt. Gen. Michael V.] Hayden, and the book party was thrown at Hayden's invitation, at Fort Meade. . . . Bamford, meanwhile, has gone from being the scourge of the NSA to the agency's hagiographer."

But the difference between my two books on NSA was not in my approach to the agency. In the three years I worked on Body of Secrets, I made no deals with the agency, gave them no access to my manuscript, and it ended up winning a top investigative award, just like The Puzzle Palace. Instead, it was the NSA that had changed. As Keefe himself acknowledges, "Hayden presided over a period of openness like none the agency had ever seen."

Keefe's style alternates from breezy to academic. "I am not an investigative journalist, by training or inclination," he writes. He compares his quest to find the secrets of signals intelligence to the obsession of Marlow, Joseph Conrad's narrator in Heart of Darkness, to fill in the unknown "blank spaces on the earth." "In the twenty-first century, we are no longer afforded such alluring cartographic mysteries," Keefe writes, "but I found, as I started probing the world of signals intelligence, that it occupies a similarly uncharted shadow land in our contemporary consciousness."

Among the largest "blank spaces" he tried to fill in was the highly classified Echelon worldwide eavesdropping network. Another was the super-secret UKUSA agreement, which originally created the network and is signed by the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. "The Anglophone network is said to hear absolutely everything," he writes, "yet its existence remains a secret -- unknown in some cases even to the legislative bodies of the countries that run it." At times his quixotic search seemed more like a hunt for the Loch Ness monster or the Abominable Snowman. In a local pub near the massive Menwith Hill listening post, he ran into someone who once worked in the base cafeteria. "From what I hear," the man told him, raising an eyebrow, "it's an alien-testing zone."

More seriously, Keefe raises a number of important issues that need to be addressed as America's spy world simultaneously expands in size and shrinks in visibility, like ripples from a stone tossed in a pond. First and foremost is the role of human intelligence in a time of terrorist threats from abroad and fear-mongering at home.

The most overused cliche in the spy business is that we have too much technical intelligence and not enough human intelligence. In fact, human intelligence has always been largely useless, or even less than useless. From 1985 until at least 1992, most of the dozen or so spies the CIA managed to recruit in Moscow had been compromised by turncoats Aldrich Ames of the CIA and Robert Hanssen of the FBI. Thus, rather than intelligence, it was more likely disinformation the Soviet agents may have, unwittingly, been passing on -- before the Soviets executed them. In the war on terrorism, human intelligence has thus far played an equally dismal role. Under CIA Director George Tenet, neither al Qaeda nor Iraq -- two of America's most important targets -- was ever truly penetrated. The same likely goes for Iran and North Korea.

In contrast, throughout the Cold War technical intelligence provided a constant keyhole through which to watch -- and listen to -- America's most important targets. Signals intelligence told national security policy makers every time a plane lifted into the air from the Soviet Union; the frequencies with which to jam Russian missiles; what pilots were saying to their ground controllers, ship captains to their ports, generals to their missileers and Politburo members to the Kremlin. At the same time, imagery satellites provided a up-close view of Soviet missile silos, shipbuilding, troop movement and other critical items. Following the Cold War, imagery provided the key tip-off that Iraq was about to attack Kuwait in August 1990. And during the war on terrorism, the most useful indications of possible attacks have come from SIGINT intercepts, known colloquially as "chatter." Such signals also led to the capture of key bin Laden deputy Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and others.

But, as Keefe makes clear, SIGINT is a two-edged sword. Although it offers a unique opportunity to detect and deter acts of terrorism, it can also be a dangerous weapon against the privacy of innocent Americans if used against them as a result of weakened legal protections. Inter arma silent leges goes an old Latin expression: "During wartime, laws are silent."

Much to his credit, it is an issue about which Michael V. Hayden warned Congress. "What I really need you to do," he told members of the intelligence committees, "is to talk to your constituents and find out where the American people want the line between security and liberty to be."

In the end, Keefe argues that the vital debate over where to draw that line should not be left just to intelligence officials and Congress. The public, he insists, must educate itself as best it can and weigh in on the decision: "The one conviction I came away with is that if we ignore this issue, put off by the level of secrecy or the technical complexity involved, we do so at our own peril." His concern is reflected in another old Latin phrase, Quis custodiet ipsos custodies: Who is watching the watchers?

Reviewed by James Bamford
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

1

Radomes in the Desert, Radomes on the Moor

The Invisible Architecture of Echelon

You cannot help but note the juxtaposition. Here, away from the world, amid rolling pastures, on a tract of land where the air is redolent of cow dung, lies the most sophisticated eavesdropping station on the planet. England’s North Yorkshire moors are, after all, cow country. Leaving the elegant Victorian spa town of Harrogate, my taxi winds west through eight miles of verdant countryside. Just outside the city, the traffic thins, and what cars we pass seem to go much slower than they need to—a deliberate, agrarian pace. Fields are set off by a network of hedges beneath a panoramic, cloudless sky. Sheep congregate here and there, and dozens of cows lounge by crumbling stone walls, some gazing as we whiz by, others chewing their cuds, oblivious.

I have been warned, seen photos—I know what to expect. But as the first dome hovers into sight, I catch my breath. The bucolic road winds and rises and falls, and as we dip and rise again and crest a hill the tip of a great white sphere, shimmering in the summer heat, becomes visible in the distance. One giant dimpled dome, a great Kevlar golf ball. Then suddenly four domes, and then eight, as others float into view above the hill. A dip in the road and they’re obscured again and then again in sight.

As the taxi rounds the perimeter fence, the base becomes visible in flashes through a row of trees. The white globes are called radomes, and each houses a satellite dish antenna, protecting it from the elements and masking its orientation—the dome itself is just a kind of skin. I count twenty-eight of these domes in all, ghostly white against the green of the countryside. They look otherworldly.

And in a sense, they are. The dishes are hidden inside the radomes because their supersensitive antennae are trained on a corresponding set of satellites hovering more than twenty thousand miles above. Some of those are communications satellites that transmit secure messages to other intelligence installations around the world. Some are spy satellites, which take photographs, intercept communications, and use Global Positioning Systems to pinpoint the locations of various individuals or vehicles around the planet. And some of the satellites are regular commercial communications satellites, the kind that transmit your telephone calls and Internet traffic across the oceans. The first two varieties of satellite were built specifically to correspond with the base. This third kind, however, was not. These satellites are managed by a company called Intelsat, and the signals they relay are private, civilian communications. But the base collects these signals, too, soundlessly and ceaselessly intercepting great flows of private communications every minute of every hour. The sign at the gate reads: RAF Menwith Hill.

I approach the sandbagged entrance, smile at the grave British military policemen who stand guard, and peer inside. RAF stands for Royal Air Force, but the name is a deliberate misnomer. The base was built in the 1950s on land purchased by the British Crown, but in 1966 the site was taken over by the American National Security Agency. Thus while the station is nominally an RAF base, it is actually home to more than twelve hundred Americans. These people live in housing within the perimeter of the fence, send their children to primary and secondary school within the fence, use their own grocery store, post office, sports center, pub, and bowling alley, all within the fence. The bowling alley, in a questionable piece of nomenclature for a base that is instrumental to America’s nuclear program, is called the Strike Zone. There are houses and a chapel and a playground and a full-sized track and baseball diamond. The whole base covers 560 acres. Beneath a curling ribbon of razor wire, armed men with dogs patrol the fence.

While we are accustomed, in this age of American power projection, to the idea of full-time military personnel living in this type of enclave abroad, I was surprised to learn that the majority of the employees at Menwith Hill are in fact civilians: engineers, technicians, mathematicians, linguists, and analysts. The NSA has always employed large numbers of civilian contractors: professionals, generally with technical expertise, who satisfy the rigorous background tests and security clearances to work at the forefront of the most secret field in American intelligence. These people come from aerospace and technology firms that do regular contract work for the government. They move their belongings and their families to the base, drawn by the allowances made for them: free housing, free shipping of their furniture and cars, and most of all, a tax-free salary. They work in three eight-hour shifts, so that the great interception machine does not shut down. They work Christmas and New Year’s Day, and through the routine protests outside the gates of the base on the Fourth of July. There are linguists trained in Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, and the gamut of European languages. With another four hundred or so personnel from the British Ministry of Defence, this single quietly humming spy station, which the vast majority of British and American civilians have never heard of, has a staff as large as all of Britain’s storied domestic-intelligence service, MI5.

At the Black Bull Inn, a local pub, the night before my visit to the base, a couple of teenagers drinking pints of bitter and eating chicken curry–flavored potato chips at the bar joked about the carloads of beautiful young American women, “the Menwith Hill girls,” whom they occasionally see. The women drive American cars with the steering wheel on the left and head out to pubs in surrounding villages or into Harrogate or York on the weekends, before returning to disappear behind the fence. If the social life of these women has the quality of an apparition to the locals, their professional life is even more obscure. One of the boys at the bar, reed thin with dark hair and an eyebrow ring, said he had worked at “the Hill” for a while, in the cafeteria, but that the base was segregated into the Upper Hill and the Lower Hill, that there was a strict division between the living areas and the working areas, and that his security clearance, which in and of itself had required a battery of forms, questions, checks, and tests, was inadequate to let him get anywhere near the real activity on the base. He said that as far as he could tell, much of the work happens in the untold stretches of the Hill that are underground. “But from what I hear,” he said, raising a conspiratorial brow and eyeing my notebook to make sure I was getting this, “it’s an alien-testing zone.” His mates cackled at this, and all the louder when they saw me dutifully scribbling it down.

I stand at the entrance and, craning my neck, gaze through the fence. The guards are toting machine guns and look at me with idle curiosity. A digital screen by a cluster of low buildings flashes messages to cars driving into the base. Raike and Massage Tuesday Night . . . Geico Insurance Every Thursday . . . Karaoke Thursday Night . . . Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives.

“Pardon me, sir,” one of the guards clears his throat. He nods to indicate something behind me.

A blue sedan is idling, waiting to get past. I move aside. The driver is a young woman in a sweatshirt, her hair pulled back. We make eye contact for a second. She’s about my age—a Menwith Hill girl! The guards wave her through, and she’s gone.

Inside the fence, in one-story, windowless buildings and in high-tech underground basements, the Menwith Hill girls join their colleagues in the clandestine interception of billions of communications per day. It has been claimed that all telecommunications traffic in and out of Europe that passes through Britain is intercepted by the base.

This is the inscrutable face of American intelligence in the twenty-first century. When the Iron Curtain fell, it ruptured the fixed geography of Europe and the world, unleashing a slow tectonic shift that continues to alter the geopolitical landscape to this day. The end of the cold war also changed the nature of intelligence activities for the United States and its allies. The decentralization of the threat that had been posed by the Soviets, combined with a reduced defense budget, a new sense of optimism, and a diminished American tolerance for military casualties, led to a pronounced reduction in the number of human spies on the ground. Gone are the trench-coated cold warriors of John le Carré novels, the CIA spies who were at the vanguard of cold war intelligence, sent to infiltrate the opposition or work out of embassies, recruit moles and double agents, and risk their lives in the process. Human intelligence, or Humint, was already in a steady decline by the end of the cold war, and it continued to dwindle as an American priority through the 1990s. In 1998, Porter Goss, the Florida congressman and former CIA case officer who was the chairman of the House of Representatives’ Intelligence Committee and in September 2004 was appointed director of the CIA, declared simply, “It is fair to say that the cupboard is nearly bare in the area of human intelligence.”

But while American politicians were unwilling to sacrifice the lives of spies in countries that no longer played a decisive role against the Soviets or those of soldiers in places such as Mogadishu or Sarajevo, they were more than willing to invest in new technologies to fight wars and gather intelligence, as it were, by remote control. In a succession of conflicts, the George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations made it clear that the United States, wherever possible, would prefer to use gadgets instead of humans. In the words of former CIA operative Robert Baer, “The theory was that satellites, the Internet, electronic intercepts, even academic publications wou...