A former marine SIGINT operator stationed in Lebanon recalled, “We were trained and equipped to intercept conventional Soviet military radio communications, not the walkie-talkies used by the Shi’ites and Druze in the foothills overlooking our base… Initially we couldn’t hear shit.” The Shi’ite and Druze militiamen who were their principal targets did not use fixed radio frequencies or regular call signs, or follow standardized radio procedures, which made monitoring their communications extremely difficult. The differing Arabic dialects spoken by the militiamen were also extremely hard for the school-trained marine intercept operators to understand, as was the West Beirut street slang the militiamen used. Taken together, this meant that the marine radio intercept operators and analysts had to improvise (oftentimes under fire) to do their job. A former marine SIGINT detachment commander recalled, “It was a hell of a way to learn your job, but that’s what Marines are good at. Adapt and improvise. I just wish we didn’t have to. So many lives were lost because we weren’t prepared for the enemy that we faced.”
And:
In July 1979, Pelton was forced to resign from NSA after filing for bankruptcy three months earlier. Desperate for money, on January 15, 1980, Pelton got in touch with the Russian embassy in Washington, and in the months that followed, he sold them, for a paltry thirty-five thousand dollars, a number of Top Secret Codeword documents and anything else he could remember. For the Soviets this was pure gold, and a bargain at that.
The damage that Pelton did was massive. He compromised the joint NSA– U.S. Navy undersea-cable tapping operation in the Sea of Okhotsk called Ivy Bells, which was producing vast amounts of enormously valuable, unencrypted, and incredibly detailed intelligence about the Soviet Pacific Fleet, information that might give the United States a clear, immediate warning of a Soviet attack. In 1981, a Soviet navy salvage ship lifted the Ivy Bells pod off the seafloor and took it to Moscow to be studied by Soviet electronics experts. It now resides in a forlorn corner of the museum of the Russian security service in the Lubyanka, in downtown Moscow.
Even worse, Pelton betrayed virtually every sensitive SIGINT operation that NSA and Britain’s GCHQ were then conducting against the Soviet Union, including the seven most highly classified compartmented intelligence operations that A Group was then engaged in. The programs were so sensitive that Charles Lord, the NSA deputy director of operations at the time, called them the “Holiest of Holies.” He told the Russians about the ability of NSA’s Vortex SIGINT satellites to intercept sensitive communications deep inside the USSR that were being carried by microwave radio-relay systems. Pelton also revealed the full extent of the intelligence being collected by the joint NSA-CIA Broadside listening post in the U.S. embassy in Moscow. Within months of Pelton being debriefed in Vienna, the Soviets intensified their jamming of the frequencies being monitored by the Moscow embassy listening post, and the intelligence “take” coming out of Broadside fell to practically nothing. Pelton also told the Russians about virtually every Russian cipher machine that NSA’s cryptanalysts in A Group had managed to crack in the late 1970s. NSA analysts had wondered why at the height of the Polish crisis in 1981 they had inexplicably lost their ability to exploit key Soviet and Polish communications systems, which had suddenly gone silent without warning. Pelton also told the Russians about a joint CIA-NSA operation wherein CIA operatives placed fake tree stumps containing sophisticated electronic eavesdropping devices near Soviet military installations around Moscow. The data intercepted by these devices was either relayed electronically to the U.S. embassy or sent via burst transmission to the United States via communication satellites.
In December 1985, Pelton was arrested and charged in federal court in Baltimore, with six counts of passing classified information to the Soviet Union. After a brief trial, in June 1986 Pelton was found guilty and sentenced to three concurrent life terms in prison.
More (#5) from The Secret Sentry:
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