Eavesdropping scandal may undermine NSA

WASHINGTON – The White House decision to order surveillance of international phone calls by U.S. citizens without a warrant violated long-standing practices and could undermine a key U.S. intelligence agency that’s critical in the struggle against terrorists, former senior intelligence officials and other experts said this week.

The super-secret National Security Agency, which eavesdropped on the Soviet Union’s leaders and scored other intelligence coups during the Cold War, has spent three decades recovering from domestic spying scandals in the 1970s.

Now, with its electronic ears and vast computer banks turned primarily to intercepting suspected terrorists, the officials said they fear that the NSA once again will bear the brunt of congressional scrutiny and public outrage, complicating its mission.

“The damage it’s done to NSA’s reputation is almost irreversible in my view,” said a longtime top intelligence official with intimate knowledge of the agency’s workings.

Those concerns are part of a broader backlash in the intelligence community against some of the Bush administration’s tactics in the war on terror.

Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and others argued that the president has wartime powers to establish military tribunals, hold detainees, use harsh interrogation techniques and conduct domestic surveillance.

But a growing number of current and former intelligence officers argue that these tactics have backfired and left the nation’s spy agencies troubled and vulnerable to charges of abuse.

The officials said that morale in the CIA’s Operations Directorate, the spy service, is plummeting and that some senior officials are leaving or planning to leave and others have declined to take assignments.

Some clandestine service officers, they said, are especially concerned that a political and public backlash against a secret White House directive that authorized the CIA to apprehend suspected terrorists in foreign countries and jail them in secret overseas prisons or send them to third countries for interrogation could damage the agency in much the same way that the spy scandals of the 1970s did.

“There’s a lot of discomfort about the renditions,” as the practice is called, said one of the officials. “History shows that we pay the price for doing what the White House tells us to do.” The official and others quoted in this story spoke on condition of anonymity because they fear reprisal for criticism.

Counterterrorism officials said the NSA has played an invaluable role in battling al-Qaida and related groups, because intercepting their communications is often the only way to pre-empt them.

In the public – and Hollywood’s – mind, the agency is often seen as an ominous Big Brother, an image best epitomized by the 1998 Will Smith movie “Enemy of the State.”

The reality, former officials and NSA experts said, is far different. Under a 1978 law called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, elaborate procedures were put in place to ensure that the agency doesn’t routinely spy on Americans.

In April, then-NSA Director Gen. Michael V. Hayden assured the Senate Intelligence Committee that the NSA is “the most aggressive agency in the intelligence community when it comes to protecting privacy.”

Hayden, now the deputy director of national intelligence, defended Bush’s warrantless monitoring order during a White House briefing last week.

But the former top officials said the recently revealed program, which sidestepped a secret court, violated longtime agency practices. Those were established after the revelation of the NSA’s earlier abuses in operations code-named Minaret and Shamrock.

After the 1978 law was passed, the NSA issued an internal directive known as U.S. Signals Intelligence Directive 18, barring agency employees from eavesdropping on Americans in the United States, with few exceptions.

“As a Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) officer, it is continually drilled into us that the very first law chiseled in the SIGINT equivalent of the Ten Commandments is that ‘Thou shall not spy on American persons without a court order from FISA,’ ” said former NSA analyst Russell Tice.

If the NSA inadvertently intercepts the communications of a U.S. citizen or communications that mention a U.S. citizen, they are supposed to be destroyed. There are a handful of exceptions.

Former NSA Director Bobby Ray Inman, who helped push through the 1978 FISA law, said he worried that the agency is being unfairly tarred, with a “huge” impact on morale.

“They only act in accordance with law, and an executive order is law,” Inman said, referring to the order Bush signed permitting warrantless domestic surveillance. But he added: “Frankly, my experience over the years is that politicians don’t worry about” the impact of their actions on intelligence agencies’ morale.”