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Authors: James Bamford
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people. And there was certainly no better way to protect the people than to send them home on the dispersal plan. Everyone knows where they’re going, and everyone can protect in place in their own quarters. So all nonessential personnel were to leave the building.”
NSA was an easy target to hit. Nicknamed Crypto City, it consists of more than fifty buildings containing more than seven million square feet of space. The parking lots alone cover more than 325 acres and have room for 17,000 cars.
A key problem was that much of NSA’s most critical functions were consolidated in single buildings. Among the most important was the Tordella Supercomputer Building, which housed the agency’s electromagnetic brain. A 183,000-square-foot facility with nearly windowless walls decorated with light-colored enamel metal panels, it contains probably the largest collection of supercomputers in the world. The thinking machines are so powerful, they require the same amount of electricity (29 megavolt-amperes) needed to power half the city of Annapolis, Maryland’s capital. Among the machines whirring out code-breaking solutions and analyzing intercepted messages were the CRAY Y-MP EL, the Silicon Graphics Power Challenge, and the IBM RS/6000 SP, with a capability of crunching through two billion instructions per second.
Not only did the building contain NSA’s electronic brain, it also housed much of its memory. To store the massive amounts of data flowing in from its worldwide listening posts, NSA linked together several computers the size of telephone booths. The system is capable of storing five trillion pages of text—a stack of paper 150 miles high.
But it was NSA’s human brainpower that most concerned Hayden.
Throughout NSA, loudspeakers began sounding. “All nonessential personnel are to leave the building,” came the announcement over and over. But many of the 16,000 employees in “Crypto City” and its surrounding facilities were unsure as to whether that meant for a brief time or for the day, so quite a few went to their cars and just waited. Eventually, a massive traffic jam formed as they all began heading for the Baltimore-Washington Parkway.
Following definite word that the Pentagon had been struck and that there was still one or more hijacked aircraft headed toward Washington, NSA Director Hayden ordered the three to four thousand remaining essential personnel to immediately leave the agency’s three tall towers. They were to relocate to the three-story Ops 1 Building, the old low-rise A-shaped structure that was the agency’s first home in Fort Meade. All four buildings were interconnected, so employees never had to go outside.
In Ops 1, Hayden and his top staff marched through the automatic glass doors of the third-floor National Security Operations Center (NSOC), which was the agency’s “war room.” Above the door was the seal of the Central Security Service, NSA’s own military, and below, inlaid in the flooring, were the Center’s initials.
Normally quiet and sedate, the NSOC suddenly became a beehive of activity, with watch officers and signals intelligence officials fielding messages to and from the worldwide listening posts searching for answers in the dim light. All were watching for a CRITIC (Critical Intelligence) message—the highest precedence—warning of where the next attack might come.
The one group Hayden could not move to Ops 1 was the counterterrorism unit, eight floors up on the top of Ops 2B. Hayden visited the unit and described the employees working there as “emotionally shattered.” “One of the more emotional parts of the day, for me,” said Hayden, “I went into our CT [counterterrorism] shop and our logistics folks were tacking up blackout curtains because we can’t move the CT shop in the midst of this.” Maureen Baginski, the head of signals intelligence, visited the group and tried to calm them down. Hayden called his wife, Jeanine, at their home a few miles
NSA was an easy target to hit. Nicknamed Crypto City, it consists of more than fifty buildings containing more than seven million square feet of space. The parking lots alone cover more than 325 acres and have room for 17,000 cars.
A key problem was that much of NSA’s most critical functions were consolidated in single buildings. Among the most important was the Tordella Supercomputer Building, which housed the agency’s electromagnetic brain. A 183,000-square-foot facility with nearly windowless walls decorated with light-colored enamel metal panels, it contains probably the largest collection of supercomputers in the world. The thinking machines are so powerful, they require the same amount of electricity (29 megavolt-amperes) needed to power half the city of Annapolis, Maryland’s capital. Among the machines whirring out code-breaking solutions and analyzing intercepted messages were the CRAY Y-MP EL, the Silicon Graphics Power Challenge, and the IBM RS/6000 SP, with a capability of crunching through two billion instructions per second.
Not only did the building contain NSA’s electronic brain, it also housed much of its memory. To store the massive amounts of data flowing in from its worldwide listening posts, NSA linked together several computers the size of telephone booths. The system is capable of storing five trillion pages of text—a stack of paper 150 miles high.
But it was NSA’s human brainpower that most concerned Hayden.
Throughout NSA, loudspeakers began sounding. “All nonessential personnel are to leave the building,” came the announcement over and over. But many of the 16,000 employees in “Crypto City” and its surrounding facilities were unsure as to whether that meant for a brief time or for the day, so quite a few went to their cars and just waited. Eventually, a massive traffic jam formed as they all began heading for the Baltimore-Washington Parkway.
Following definite word that the Pentagon had been struck and that there was still one or more hijacked aircraft headed toward Washington, NSA Director Hayden ordered the three to four thousand remaining essential personnel to immediately leave the agency’s three tall towers. They were to relocate to the three-story Ops 1 Building, the old low-rise A-shaped structure that was the agency’s first home in Fort Meade. All four buildings were interconnected, so employees never had to go outside.
In Ops 1, Hayden and his top staff marched through the automatic glass doors of the third-floor National Security Operations Center (NSOC), which was the agency’s “war room.” Above the door was the seal of the Central Security Service, NSA’s own military, and below, inlaid in the flooring, were the Center’s initials.
Normally quiet and sedate, the NSOC suddenly became a beehive of activity, with watch officers and signals intelligence officials fielding messages to and from the worldwide listening posts searching for answers in the dim light. All were watching for a CRITIC (Critical Intelligence) message—the highest precedence—warning of where the next attack might come.
The one group Hayden could not move to Ops 1 was the counterterrorism unit, eight floors up on the top of Ops 2B. Hayden visited the unit and described the employees working there as “emotionally shattered.” “One of the more emotional parts of the day, for me,” said Hayden, “I went into our CT [counterterrorism] shop and our logistics folks were tacking up blackout curtains because we can’t move the CT shop in the midst of this.” Maureen Baginski, the head of signals intelligence, visited the group and tried to calm them down. Hayden called his wife, Jeanine, at their home a few miles
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