National Security Agency faces remodeling

WASHINGTON -- They eavesdrop on international drug trafficking, track weapons of mass destruction, keep an eye on conflicts from Bosnia to Sri Lanka, watch for nuclear testing in India, Pakistan and elsewhere.

With eyes and ears on so much, the National Security Agency had trouble focusing on terrorism before Sept. 11, critics say.

Created because of intelligence failures during the Korean War, the agency is a bureaucracy that now has the daunting task of recreating itself virtually overnight.

"It took a long time for the NSA and its predecessors to adjust to fighting the Cold War after World War II, and it's going to take a long time for the NSA to adjust to the war on terrorism," said James Bamford, distinguished visiting professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of two books on the NSA, including "Body of Secrets," published last year.

The agency's struggles drew public attention last week with the disclosure that two Arabic-language messages from Sept. 10 had warned of a major event the next day. They were among millions of intercepts of communications the NSA gathered that day. The Arabic messages were not translated until Sept. 12.

Long before the terrorist attacks, however, signs of problems were evident at the NSA.

The agency, along with the other intelligence agencies, failed to foresee the series of five underground nuclear tests by India four years ago and did not detect planning for the August 1998 terrorist bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa or the November 2000 attack on the destroyer USS Cole.

One criticism to emerge from the secret investigation about why the NSA missed Operation Shakti, the Indian nuclear tests in May 1998, is the agency was concentrating on North Korea's nuclear program.

"The general problems of the NSA have been known to the last two administrations and Congress," said John Gannon, former chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

Korea deja vu

The NSA's difficulties have some similarities to the failures of military intelligence during the Korean War.

Intercepted messages were not processed in time to be useful. The agency's work was hampered by a lack of translators and analysts to assess the translated material.

In the months leading to the Korean conflict, the military's intelligence resources were focused elsewhere, mainly on intercepting communications of the Soviet Union. Intelligence lapses by the military services led President Truman to order that the tasks of intercepting communications and breaking codes be centralized in a powerful new agency, the NSA.

Experts say the NSA's repeating of mistakes of the past reflects a systemwide problem that goes beyond individual intelligence agencies.

Gannon, a former deputy director of intelligence at the CIA, said, "The NSA has forward-looking leadership that has tackled the problems and has come up with a business plan that is trying to get the agency where it needs to be."

"The challenge is how do you prioritize the threats?" Gannon said.

In the past decade, amid an information explosion and a shift to many priorities instead of just the Soviet bloc, the NSA budget was cut significantly, by as much as a third, according to some estimates.

"If you want to be very brutal about it, you can say that the World Trade Center attack was part of the peace dividend," said Daniel Goure, director of the Office of Strategic Competitiveness in the first Bush administration.

"That's a little far-fetched, but not a lot," Goure said. "Part of the answer is that they were just stretched too thin."

Some recent increases in intelligence budgets have paid for improved computers at the NSA that are capable of analyzing larger amounts of data.

The CIA gathers "human intelligence," information from spies and agents. The NSA deals in "signals intelligence" -- telephone conversations, e-mails and military communications.

The NSA is part of the Defense Department. Its budget and many of its personnel belong to the military, including its director, Lt. Gen. Michael A. Hayden.