Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of the SIGINT collectors, the vast majority of the foreign fighters managed to successfully evade the U.S. Army units deployed along the border. An army battalion commander stationed on the border in 2003 recalled that they “weren’t sneaking across; they were just driving across, because in Arab countries it’s easy to get false passports and stuff.” Once inside Iraq, most of them made their way to Ramadi, in rebellious al-Anbar Province, which became the key way station for foreign fighters on their way into the heart of Iraq. In Ramadi, they were trained, equipped, given false identification papers, and sent on their first missions. The few foreign fighters who were captured were dedicated— but not very bright. One day during the summer of 2003, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Arnold, a battalion commander stationed on the Syrian border, was shown the passport of a person seeking to enter Iraq. “I think he was from the Sudan or something like that— and under ‘Reason for Traveling,’ it said, ‘Jihad.’ That’s how dumb these guys were.”
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Hayden and his senior managers had hoped that they could keep the massive reengineering of NSA out of the public realm. But these hopes were dashed when, on December 6, reporter Seymour Hersh published an article in the New Yorker magazine that blew the lid off NSA’s secret, revealing that America’s largest intelligence agency was having trouble performing its mission. Hersh’s article set off a furious debate within NSA about the difficulties the agency was facing. The considered judgment of many NSA insiders was in many respects harsher and more critical than anything Hersh had written. Diane Mezzanotte, then a staff officer in NSA’s Office of Corporate Relations, wrote, “NSA is facing a serious survival problem, brought about by the widespread use of emerging communications technologies and public encryption keys, draconian budget cuts, and an increasingly negative public perception of NSA and its SIGINT operations.”
Less than sixty days later, another disaster hit the agency. During the week of January 23, 2000, the main SIGINT processing computer at NSA collapsed and for four days could not be restarted because of a critical software anomaly. The result was an intelligence blackout, with no intelligence reporting coming out of Fort Meade for more than seventy-two hours. A declassified NSA report notes, “As one result, the President’s Daily Briefing—60% of which is normally based on SIGINT— was reduced to a small portion of its typical size.”
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During President Truman’s October 1948 nationwide whistle-stop train tour in his uphill battle for reelection against Governor Thomas Dewey, the U.S. government was at a virtualstandstill. On the afternoon of Friday, October 29, just as Truman was preparing to deliver a fiery campaign speech at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City, the Russian government and military executed a massive change of virtually all of their cipher systems. On that day, referred to within NSA as Black Friday, and continuing for several months thereafter, all of the cipher systems used on Soviet military and internal-security radio networks, including all mainline Soviet military, naval, and police radio nets, were changed to new, unbreakable systems. The Russians also changed all their radio call signs and operating frequencies and replaced all of the cipher machines that the Americans and British had solved, and even some they hadn’t, with newer and more sophisticated cipher machines that were to defy the ability of American and British cryptanalysts to solve them for almost thirty years, until the tenure of Admiral Bobby Ray Inman in the late 1970s.
Black Friday was an unmitigated disaster, inflicting massive and irreparable damage on the Anglo-American SIGINT organizations’ efforts against the USSR, killing off virtually all of the productive intelligence sources that were then available to them regarding what was going on inside the Soviet Union and rendering useless most of four years’ hard work by thousands of American and British cryptanalysts, linguists, and traffic analysts. The loss of so many critically important high-level intelligence sources in such a short space of time was, as NSA historians have aptly described it, “perhaps the most significant intelligence loss in U.S. history.” And more important, it marked the beginning of an eight-year period when reliable intelligence about what was occurring inside the USSR was practically nonexistent.
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