[Pages S9343-S9351]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

TERRORIST ATTACKS AGAINST THE UNITED STATES

Mr. BOND. Mr. President, September 11, 2001, will forever be burned
into American history as a day of horror without precedent.
Our hearts and prayers are with survivors and families of those who
were murdered in New York City, the Pentagon, and in the hijacked
airplanes.
Although still appalled by the damage, the United States is in the
process of recovering from these attacks.
Fate has written many painful chapters in America's history. Each is
sharply engraved into our collective memory. Most are battles and wars:
Gettysburg, Pearl Harbor, Iwo Jima, Pork Chop Hill. Others were acts of
madmen such as the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal building and
the slaying of our Presidents Lincoln, McKinley, and John F. Kennedy.
The magnitude of Tuesday's attack defies understanding. It is the
scale of what happened that day that freezes the mind in horror. The
wrenching sights of passenger planes deliberately flown into the
largest symbol of America's economic and military strength

[[Page S9344]]

was an assault on how we think of ourselves, our Nation and our role in
the world and in history.
Vehicles of peaceful domestic travel were bent horrifically into
missiles of death shot into the heart of our economy--into all of our
hearts. The blasts we watched in real-time and in slow-motion reruns in
our collective mind's eye have buried splinters deep into our souls.
As shock gives way to action, recovery and the identification of
those responsible, we must remember this is not the first time the
American people have been tested. History has probed the limits of our
strength and patience many times, over many generations of Americans.
As the realization of what has happened continues to sink into our
national consciousness, we must never forget that each time our Nation
is tested, each time we have survived--as we will again.
And while it seems impossible to believe today, barely days after
this horrific attack upon our soil, we must draw strength from the
knowledge that each test has failed to diminish our Nation. Just the
opposite. America's history is written by a people who rise to every
challenge, and history has shown we will prevail.
We are the greatest and most powerful nation today precisely because
we have met and triumphed over adversity. This is our national
identity. This is what it means to be an American. This is the strength
of character that built this Nation over the last four centuries.
Americans do not face challenges. We surmount them. And we grow
stronger as a result.
I am confident that we are already seeing this in the days after the
disaster. We see it in the faces of the New York firemen and police
officers, the dedicated men and women who fought to protect and recover
and who have often lost their lives in that effort. A grim
determination and smoldering pride etched in the ashes on their faces--
etched with sweat. And tears. And blood. We see it in the faces of our
military men and women still breathing life into our Nation's military
command center at the Pentagon.
We see it in the commitment of the urban search and rescue teams and
other public safety officers who have gone into New York City and into
the Pentagon to help. I am deeply honored and proud that my good
friends in the Missouri Task Force One, from the Columbia, MO, area,
are there helping, and they want to help. Americans want to help. While
the terrorists hit their targets, caused death and damage, their real
aim of terrorism is to strike a crippling psychological blow. The
terrorists will succeed only if we surrender our confidence in our
Nation. Americans cannot and will not allow them this victory.
Many people have asked me, what can we do? I hear that from
Missourians all the time. First, obviously, is prayer, for those who
have been lost, for those who suffer, for the families and loved
ones. I ask also for prayers for individuals, for families, for
guidance, that they may be strong, that this country may be strong,
that we may not be disabled by the threats of terrorism.

We must continue to be strong as Americans. There are things we can
do. Giving blood is one thing that is readily available. I ask all my
constituents to listen to their radios and televisions and contact the
local blood donor stations.
I ask citizens not to panic. We have seen panic in the buying of
gasoline with 30-car-long lines. Do not horde. Prices are going way up;
do not buy. Do not raise prices. Do not price gouge.
This country will be strong. We will have our economy back on track
if we behave rationally and responsibly. Let us not be crippled by
potential terrorism. Let us not put up barriers that are impossible to
overcome.
I have talked with people in the airline industry. Our airline
industry is suffering billions of dollars of losses. We must have a
better airline security system. But let us be smart about it. Let us
not make it impossible to travel by airplane.
We are beginning the process of taking down the extraordinary
security items around this Capitol. This is the people's place of
business. We want people to be able to visit. Normally on Thursday
mornings I have an open house for Missourians. They could not get here.
I had a tough enough time getting here myself. We are going to go back
to business in this Capitol. We need to go back to business as
Americans. We need to build the strength in our families. That will
strengthen our country.
I hope those considering scheduling sporting events will realize this
is part of our national culture. These should go forward. I ask we not
be so terrorized by the terrorists that we forget what we do in this
country and why we are strong.
I believe the President has indicated the war against terrorism will
be conducted with great vigor, with no terrorist, and no nation
harboring them, safe. The President's hands ought not to be tied. So we
can ensure our Nation is never dealt a similar blow, we must give the
President the authority, support him and give him the resources and
provide him the freedom to act, to preempt the acts of terrorism.
Tuesday's attacks have shaken us. But the bedrock beliefs and
principles of the United States remain strong. We will show the
terrorists.
Our immediate focus must be to recover from these attacks. And to
tend to the victims and their families. We may not know the full toll
for many weeks.
In the longer run, we must recognize that these attacks demand an
appropriate response from the United States.
I know the man who is the President of the United States. I know this
man. And I am confident that he will throw the full weight of the U.S.
Government behind the task of identifying and destroying those
responsible for the attacks. The President should also have the power
to take appropriate steps to prevent a reoccurrence. And I know that he
has the support of both political parties in the U.S. Congress. And
more importantly, he has the full support of the American people.
Our Nation must not rest until those behind the attacks are
destroyed. Our unyielding anger will span the world and reach the
terrorists wherever they may try to hide. The world is not big enough
to offer them the concealment they seek. We will find them, we will get
them, and we will make them pay for what happened Tuesday.
Any nation that seeks to provide protection or cover for the
terrorists ought to think twice before doing so. The President is
correct to make no distinction between the terrorists and those nations
that shelter them. The price of doing so will be very high.
Let us be clear about what Tuesday's attack was--and what it was not.
It was an act of war, not a simple criminal act. I say it was not
merely a criminal act because of its scale. It was too large to be only
a criminal act. It was an act of war against our people, our way of
life, and against all people who cherish democracy and freedom.
I believe there has been an unfortunate trend in the American
Government in recent years to ``criminalize'' acts that are by
definition acts of war against this country. That trend has delayed our
potential responses until the evidence collected approached the
standards required by a court of law. I believe that to have been a
mistake.
The war against terrorism--and its war against us--is just that, war.
And we ought to be free to respond in kind. Not only after that fact,
but I believe the President's hands ought not to be tied. To ensure our
Nation is never dealt a similar blow, we must give the President the
authority and freedom to act to preempt such acts. That is he must be
able to strike terrorists before they strike.

For many years the prevailing trend has been to shackle our
intelligence agencies--to err on the side of doing too little rather
than doing too much. I understand the forceful reasons behind this
trend. Nothing is more dear to us than the protection of our civil
liberties. Our political culture at root is defined by our steadfast
guardianship of our civil liberties.
I believe we can do more to attack terrorism without further
encroaching upon our civil liberties. I believe we can strengthen the
reach of our intelligence agencies significantly at no risk to our
civil liberties.
We know the incalculable cost of getting this balance wrong. In our
understandable zeal to protect our civil liberties, we hampered the
very agencies

[[Page S9345]]

that protect not only our lives but our very way of life.
America is a different nation today than it was Tuesday morning. We
have been attacked in a way without precedent, in kind and magnitude.
Our Nation needs time to grieve, we need time to tend to our dead and
to care for the wounded and their families.
Tuesday's attacks have shaken us. Yet the bedrock beliefs and
principles that anchor the United States remain strong. Just how strong
is something the terrorists will soon discover.
God bless the United States of America.
The ACTING PRESIDING pro tempore. Under the previous order, the
Senator from New Hampshire, Mr. Smith, is recognized to speak for up to
5 minutes.
Mr. SMITH of New Hampshire. Mr. President, this is a very sad time
for America. The unthinkable has happened. What we always feared could
happen, but prayed never would happen, has happened.
I rise today to pay tribute to the men and women who lost their lives
in this cowardly attack against the United States of America.
I, as so many others, am overcome by the magnitude of this horrific
act, a cowardly act against innocent people. It is hard to understand
what would motivate people to do such a thing. But now I think we
understand our hearts must go out to the victims, to their families,
and all who have suffered at the hands of this evil that struck this
greatest nation on Earth.
May God be with those who have passed and those who are suffering.
Words, I know, are of little solace in a terrible tragedy such as this
in dealing with the shock and pain. I know words may ring hollow
compared to the pain and disbelief that the families must be feeling. I
want those families to know we are as one nation under God. We are
united in our resolve, no matter who we are, to see justice done on
behalf of the lives lost so senselessly.
We must unite and comfort our fellow Americans in these difficult
days. Their grief is immeasurable and they need our support. They will
have it.
My State lost many citizens in this tragedy, including Thomas
McGuinness of Portsmouth who was the copilot of American Airlines
Flight 11. I knew Tom personally. He was a fine man. His family and the
families of all those who have lost loved ones are devastated by this
tragedy. They need our prayers.
I commend the efforts also of the brave men and women who are working
around the clock, risking their own lives to rescue those still trapped
in both the Pentagon and at the World Trade Center. We stand behind
them and pray for their success. As each hour goes by, we hope to see
another survivor and another family member united.
I also commend President Bush and Senators Daschle and Lott and the
leadership in the House for returning to this city and getting back to
business, letting these people know we will not tolerate this
interruption in our system, and demonstrating we will not be cowed by
the actions of these despicable people.
The American people understand an act of war was committed against
the United States of America. Make no mistake about it, it was an act
of war. You can say it is the Pearl Harbor of the new millennium, but
it is far worse than Pearl Harbor. I might add, we responded to Pearl
Harbor and we will respond to this. Make no mistake, the United States
of America will respond to this heinous act with overwhelming force. We
will find those responsible and those who supported these evil acts.
They will be eradicated. This is not a question of bringing criminals
to justice. This is an act of war, and it will be responded to as an
act of war.
After we win--and win we will--we do have some serious questions we
will have to answer. What went wrong? Why didn't we have the
intelligence assets we needed? How can we protect ourselves in the
future without giving up the civil liberties we cherish so much? Where
are our priorities? These are all important questions which need
serious attention and honest answers.
We must never forget the magnitude of this loss and its effect on our
way of life. September 11, 2001, will always be with us. Like December
7, 1941, we will always remember where we were. In the past, we have
not decisively acted against some of these terrorist attacks and
threats. This will not stand any longer.

Some talk about multilateral efforts to combat terrorism; that is
fine. I am here today to say to the American people we will act
unilaterally, if necessary, to protect our people. We need to send a
clear message to terrorists and those countries that harbor them that
there is no distinction, as the President has said, between the
terrorists and the country that harbors them; we will decisively act
against this cowardly aggression, and they will pay the full price for
what they did.
As our President said, America will hunt down and punish those
responsible. President Bush will have my support and the support of
every American to do just that. We must be on the offensive against
terrorists and those states and individuals who support them. The
policies of the past must change. We are at war, and this is a war that
we will win.
God bless America.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the previous order, the
Senator from Arkansas is recognized to speak for up to 5 minutes.
Mrs. LINCOLN. Mr. President, on Tuesday a series of terrorist attacks
on the United States shook our Nation and left thousands suffering or
dead. Almost all of us in this Chamber have risen to express our
compassion. Almost everything has been said. But with such a tragic
event, each one of us feels compelled to tell our own story.
I rise today to offer my continued prayers and condolences to the
victims and their families. And I rise to add my voice to those
condemning the atrocities committed against the United States of
America Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001.
The four hijackings, and the deliberate terrorist attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon, are an outrage against our nation
and against human decency. I support the President in his pledge to
devote all of our country's resources to the task of determining who is
responsible for these acts and of holding them accountable.
In the days to come, we will need to reflect on Tuesday's events to
determine what we will take from them and how we will respond.
To begin with, it appears certain that these attacks will force us to
re-define our national defense priorities. According to many reports,
the hijackers of the airplanes were armed only with knives and
boxcutters. This disturbing detail underscores the reality that the
greatest threats against our national security and our well-being may
no longer be missiles or tanks or armies. The greatest threat is
terrorists or rogue nations armed with simple weapons and a dangerous
resolve.
It is time that we demonstrate the same resolve in preventing and,
when necessary--as now--responding to acts of terror. We need to
reconsider how our security apparatus, our intelligence network, and
our channels of diplomacy can be strengthened and more effectively
employed to ensure that these attacks are never duplicated. Let us
begin a new dialogue about our national security that accounts for this
changed and changing reality. Let us devote all our resolve to tracking
down and destroying these agents of terror.
We need to recognize also that Tuesday's events must, by necessity,
call us out of our complacency. For too many years, our national
character has too often been focused inward.
Tuesday's tragedy should remind us of our duty to not only our
families and our immediate circles, but of our duty to our neighbors,
our communities, and our nation.
Still, the reports that we have heard suggest that these terrible
attacks have brought out much of the best in the American character--
the courage of the search and rescue team members, the commitment of
our law enforcement officers, the generosity of those who have given
their support to these efforts, and the sympathy and caring that all
Americans have extended to the suffering.
I am deeply disturbed, however, by some other reports that are coming
to light. Arkansas newspapers reported Wednesday morning that rumors of
oil shortages have forced a run on gas stations in the American
heartland, and that some station owners have raised

[[Page S9346]]

prices to exploit this fear. I am pleased that the Attorney General of
Arkansas, Mark Pryor, has pledged to investigate the actions of these
profiteers. Those who attempt to profit from these events should know
that their actions will not be tolerated and that, if necessary, they
will face prosecution for their actions. I ask my colleagues to join me
in denouncing this sort of profiteering from tragedy.
Foremost in my mind is the human dimension of Tuesday's events. It
will likely be several days before we have a clear sense of how many
lives were lost, but there is no doubt that the total will be in the
thousands. Numbers of this magnitude will ensure that the effects of
these horrific acts will be felt by all Americans.
We now know that Sara Low, a native of Batesville, AK, and a flight
attendant on American Airlines Flight 11, was killed when her plane
struck the World Trade Center. Sara was a 1991 graduate of Batesville
High School and a graduate of the University of Arkansas. Our deepest
sympathy and our prayers are with her parents, Mike and Bobbie Low, and
her family and friends as they grapple with this horrible tragedy.
It is a horrible and saddening reminder of how the shock waves of
these events are felt throughout our nation, far beyond New York and
Washington. As a daughter, as a wife, as a mother and as an American, I
am deeply pained by our suffering today.
It has now been over 48 hours since the first plane struck the World
Trade Center, and even now it is possible that there are scores of
people trapped in the debris and rubble in New York and in Virginia.
Our prayers are with them and their families, and it is my great hope
that, if there are survivors, they are rescued soon and reunited with
their loved ones.
We also extend our prayers and sympathy to the families of those who
were killed in Pennsylvania, where United Airlines Flight 93 was forced
into a crash landing.
Tuesday morning, these terrorists made their statement, at a great
and unprecedented cost of American lives. Let our statement to them be
that this was an act of war, and from this point forward, the United
States of America is at war against these kinds of actions.
Let them know that although they may strike at the United States,
they cannot strike at the freedom and resolve that make our nation
great.
I join my colleagues in letting these terrorists and anyone else who
would take such actions against this great Nation know, it will not be
tolerated.
I yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Arkansas yields
the floor.
The Senator from Alaska, Mr. Murkowski, is recognized to speak for up
to 5 minutes.
Mr. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, I join my colleagues and all
Americans--those from my State of Alaska and throughout the world--in
prayer, prayer for those who tragically lost their lives last Tuesday
and for those who are even now fighting for their lives in the rubble
associated with the tragedy in New York and possibly still at the
Pentagon.
The inhumanity of this act will live in infamy. We yearn in heartfelt
sorrow for the families of those injured, those lost. We all join
together in support of our President and to assert our resolve to
endure the evil wrought Tuesday, to ensure that evil is countered, and
that that evil is destroyed.
The hunt for those responsible has begun. The terror they have sought
to inspire will not stand. So let's be very clear, recognizing the
great and enduring virtues of our Nation: our liberty, our tolerance,
our fairness. These are the very values which the terrorists trampled
upon in pursuit of their misguided quest. These will not save those
responsible for these crimes. We recognize our own values are
sacrosanct, but our resolve to protect those values is absolutely
unshaken. We should not, as we follow the tracks of the killers to the
lairs of their leaders, presume to know their identity with certainty.
Neither can we begin to know their motivations for committing the most
criminal of acts--killing innocent people.
If the killers believed that they, through this act, would enter the
Kingdom of Heaven, they now realize the real destination to which Satan
has guided them.
But to the children of America I say: Have faith; your parents, your
teachers, your Government are all working hard to protect you, to
protect you from this horror. Your responsibility is to grow, to learn,
to play--and many adults are working to bring those responsible to
justice, to ensure that they and those who helped them never commit
this kind of a crime again.
To the terrorists who have sought to bring fear and chaos to the
United States, I say to you: You have failed. It is you who should be
afraid, afraid of the sense of justice of the American people, afraid
of your fate at the hand of God, afraid of what you have unleashed.
As we shared, along with Members of the House, on the steps the other
evening ``God Bless America,'' let me also mention the dimension of
this which we all relate to in our own lives.
I stand here as one who recalls as a child the ``Day of Infamy,''
December 7, 1941. I noticed a piece that indicated the deaths from that
surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. It was 2,403. Clearly, this tragic set
of circumstances brings the death toll to many times that amount.
We have the realization for the first time that an aircraft has been
used as a weapon by terrorists. How do we protect the public? What
change is it going to make in transportation? It has shaken some of the
foundations and symbols of our Nation--our buildings--which represent
prosperity in our economy. It has not shaken the resolve to recover nor
the resolve to pursue those responsible. We are prepared to move heaven
and Earth to bring to justice those who are responsible for this
carnage.
But everything did change Tuesday. Things will be different in this
country. We still do not know the extent of the threat, although we do
know that we all must be vigilant.
I join with my colleagues in an expression of faith and an expression
of hope and an expression of conviction that America will overcome this
tragedy. America will never forget this tragedy.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. Lincoln). Under the previous order, the
Senator from Florida is recognized to speak for up to 5 minutes.
Mr. GRAHAM. Thank you, Madam President. I wish to commend you and
Senator Smith for the eloquent remarks you have just delivered to the
American people.
We all are shocked by what occurred on September 11, and we recognize
that this will be a demarcation date in the history of America. It will
be a date upon which we will recognize our loss of innocence and the
new reality of our vulnerability. Not since the Civil War has there
been a conflict of such violence committed on the territory of the
United States as we experienced on Tuesday.
As with Pearl Harbor and the assassination of President John Kennedy,
all Americans will forever remember where they were and what was in
their mind as they heard of the tragic events of last Tuesday. Today
our prayers are with the victims in New York and here in the Pentagon
and with their families.
Our admiration and good wishes go to the brave firefighters,
policemen, doctors, nurses, and all the other emergency personnel who
are working so hard to find the survivors and to deal with the pain. We
pray for our Nation as well. We have entered a new phase in history,
one that will unfortunately be marked by a pervasive sense of
insecurity.
I am fortunate to be a grandfather of 10 beautiful boys and girls.
Their mothers called me Tuesday evening to tell me how frightened the
grandchildren were and that they were wondering whether their
neighborhood, whether their school, and whether their own brothers,
sisters, mothers, fathers, and friends would be subject to the same
thing they had just seen on television.

Every time we take a trip, particularly by airline, we are likely to
be reminded of Tuesday's incident. We will also face increased
security, particularly at airports and seaports. Our border checkpoints
will be reinforced. But all of these are necessary changes. Frankly, I
believe the vast majority of Americans will agree that there will be

[[Page S9347]]

reasonable, new restrictions in light of the new period of American
history in which we will now be living.
To honor the lives of the victims, we must take steps to assure that
other Americans will not be subject to the same fate. A first step in
that honoring will be to support the President of the United States of
America. He will have some extremely difficult decisions to make in the
next few days.
Clearly, we are not going to allow this horrific act to go
unanswered. As has been the case in so many other incidents of
conflict, we will enter this commitment to see that those who have
committed these deeds will be brought to justice with great enthusiasm.
The real test will be whether we are prepared to make the long march
that is likely to be required in order to root out the many cells of
terrorists around the world that represent a continuing threat to our
security. The President will need our support then even more than now.
We also need to rebuild some of our institutions that will be on the
front lines of our efforts to assure the security of America. One of
those with which I feel a particular responsibility is our national
intelligence capability. To deal with terrorism, there is no
alternative but to have the most effective capacities to anticipate
what the motivations and capabilities of our particular adversaries are
and then to be able to interdict those capabilities before they can be
put into action.
We have seen over the past several years a degradation in some
important areas of our intelligence capabilities. We will know in the
next few weeks whether those shortfalls bear a part of the
responsibility for what happened on Tuesday.
Illustrative of the areas in which we are going to need to pay
renewed attention and additional new resources will be rebuilding our
human intelligence. For a long period during the cold war we became
increasingly dependent upon technology as the means of gathering
information. That played a critical role. But in this new era there is
going to be no substitute for having well-trained, diverse in
background and language skills, and technologically competent persons
who can represent the interests of the United States in getting inside
these organizations so that we will have a level of understanding that
will allow us to prepare for and to avoid incidents such as Tuesday's
tragedy.
We also must make some investments in some of our technological
areas, particularly the National Security Agency, which for many years
had been our prime means of gathering information by essentially
eavesdropping on our adversaries. That capability, which was developed
to a very high level during the cold war when most of those
communications were over the air, has been degraded as countries,
including our own, have gone to other forms of communication. As an
example, communicating computer to computer does not allow the kind of
detection we have relied on in the past. It is going to be important
that we make a new commitment and a new investment to build up that
capability to what it has been historically.
With the permission of the body, I am submitting for the
Congressional Record a recent article which appeared in the Washington
Post which examines the National Security Agency, some of its immediate
challenges, and the pathway to a stronger and more secure future that
is being developed under the direction of its leader, LTG Michael V.
Hayden. I ask unanimous consent that be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:

[From the Washington Post Magazine, July 29, 2001]

Test of Strength

For two years, Air Force general Michael Hayden has waged a
secret struggle to overhaul the world's most powerful spy
agency. Nothing's riding on his success but the future of
America's national security

(By Vernon Loeb)

The call came after dinner on a Monday night, as the
general was watching the TV news at home. There was a
computer problem back at the agency. A software failure had
knocked out the network.
``Give me a sense,'' the general commanded the duty officer
over the secure phone line. ``What are we talking about?''
``The whole system is down,'' the duty officer said. A
result of overloading. Plus, the network had become so
tangled that no one really seemed to know how it worked.
There was no wiring diagram anyone could consult. It was
January 24, 2000. Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden was still new on
the job--just finishing his 10th month as director of the
National Security Agency--but he did not need a duty officer
to explain the implications of his computer problem. The
agency's constellation of spy satellites and its giant
listening stations on five continents were still vacuuming
communications out of the either. Their vast electronic
``take''--intercepted telephone calls, e-mails, faxes and
radio signals--still poured into memory buffers capable of
storing 5 trillion pages of data at agency headquarters at
Fort Meade. But once in house, the data froze. Nobody could
access it, nobody could analyze it.
The NSA--the largest and most powerful spy agency in the
world--was brain-dead.
Hayden called George J. Tenet on a secure phone and broke
the news to the director of central intelligence. The
nation's two top spymasters knew there was nothing they could
do but get out of the way and let the technicians try to
figure out what was wrong. The keepers of the nation's
secrets now had another one to keep--a secret Saddam Hussein
or Osama bin Laden or some other enemy of the state could
have surely used to great advantage.
The next morning, the only consolation Hayden had was the
snow: A blizzard had blasted Washington and shut down the
federal government, giving his gathering army of computer
engineers and techies some time--without the workforce
around--to bring the agency out of its coma. Hayden's despair
deepened as two full days passed without progress. The
mathematicians and linguists reported back for duty Thursday
morning, only to find a handwritten message taped to doors
and computer terminals: ``Our network is experiencing
intermittent difficulties. Consult your supervisor before you
log on.''
The crash had now become a security crisis. By noon, at a
hastily called ``town meeting,'' Hayden walked onto the stage
of the agency's Friedman Auditorium and told thousands of
employees--in person and on closed-circuit television--what
had happened.
``We are the keeper of the nation's secrets,'' he said at
the end of his grim presentation. ``If word of this gets out,
we significantly increase the likelihood that Americans will
get hurt. Those who would intend our nation and our citizens
harm will be emboldened. So this is not the back half of a
sentence tonight that begins, `Honey, you won't believe what
happened to me at work.' This is secret. It does not leave
the building.''
Could all 30,000 employees live by the code of secrecy
they'd grown up with?
To Hayden, a career intelligence officer who had served in
the first Bush White House and had run the Air Force's
cyberwar center, the computer crash seemed the perfect
matephor for an agency desperately in need of new technology.
But the reality, he would quickly see, was actually worse.
Antiquated computers were the least of the NSA's problems.
By virtue of its magnitude and complexity, the NSA invites
superlatives and outsize comparisons. Its collections systems
scoop up enough data every three hours to fill the Library of
Congress. It employs the world's largest collection of
linguists and mathematicians and owns the world's largest
array of supercomputers. To power the supercomputers, it uses
as much electricity as the city of Annapolis. To cool them,
it maintains 8,000 tons of chilled water capacity. One of its
most powerful computers generates so much heat it operates
while immersed in a nonconducting liquid called Flourinert.
But beyond the gee-whiz factor lies an agency in need of
reinvention.
Heir to America's World War II code-breaking heroics, the
agency was created in secret by President Harry Truman in
1952. Signals intelligence--SIGINT, in spy parlance--has long
been considered even more valuable than human intelligence or
satellite imagery, because the quantity and quality of the
potential take is so much greater. The NSA was intended to be
the world's premier SIGINT agency, encoding American secret
communications while stealing and decoding other nations'.
Soon after its founding, the agency started growing into a
juggernaut that would put listening posts around the globe,
spy ships and submarines out to sea, and reconnaissance
planes and satellites in the heavens.
The NSA rose to dominance in what were, in
telecommunications terms, simpler times. Radio signals and
microwaves were ripe for the taking as they bounced off the
ionosphere or traveled straight out into space; to intercept
them, one simply needed to get in their path. And the NSA
did this better than anyone else, using everything from
portable receivers that picked up vibrations off
windowpanes to geosynchronous satellites 22,000 miles
above Earth.
It was the NSA that first reported the presence of Soviet
offensive missiles in Cuba in 1962. It was the NSA that first
warned of the Tet offensive--five days before the attacks
commenced across South Vietnam in January 1968. All told, the
NSA broke the codes of 40 nations during the Cold War and,
through an operation code-named Gamma Guppy, intercepted
personal conversations of Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev. In
1986, President Ronald Reagan went so far as to bomb Col.
Moammar Gaddafi's Tripoli headquarters

[[Page S9348]]

after NSA intercepts revealed Libya's role in a terrorist
attack on a Berlin discotheque that had killed two U.S.
servicemen and a Turkish woman.
Making and breaking codes requires absolute secrecy, and
the NSA took secrecy to extremes. Most Americans had never
even heard of the agency for decades after it was
established. In 1975, a Senate select committee headed by
Sen. Frank Church revealed that the NSA had far exceeded the
foreign intelligence mission envisioned by Truman and had
been spying domestically on the likes of Jane Fonda, Joan
Baez, Benjamin Spock and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The revelations led to laws and regulations that strictly
prohibit the NSA from spying on U.S. soil--laws and
regulations, agency officials say, they now strictly follow.
But the agency's cult of secrecy proved far more resilient.
Even after the Church committee's revelations, it was a
standing joke at Fort Meade that NSA stood for No Such Agency
or Never Say Anything. In 1982, when author James Bamford was
writing his groundbreaking first book about the agency, The
Puzzle Palace, the Reagan administration threatened to
prosecute him for espionage if he did not return sensitive
documents he had obtained through the Freedom of Information
Act. The administration ultimately backed down, but its
treatment of Bamford was a sign of how secretive and arrogant
the NSA had become. (By contrast, Hayden cooperated with
Bamford on his second book about the NSA, Body of Secrets,
which was published in May.)
The agency's high opinion of itself was backed up by its
success throughout the Cold War, success that rested on three
pillars: massive budgets, superior technology and the luxury
of having a single main adversary--the Soviet Union--that
enjoyed neither of those first two advantages.
Now, all those pillars have crumbled.
The NSA is still one of the largest employers in the state
of Maryland, but it lost 30 percent of its budget and an
equivalent slice of its workforce during the 1990s. And
instead of one backward adversary, the agency found itself
trying to deploy against elusive terrorist groups, drug
cartels and rogue states, in addition to a full slate of
traditional targets ranging from Russia to China to India to
Pakistan. In 1980, the NSA focused about 60 percent of its
budget on the Soviet Union. By 1993, less than 15 percent was
fixed on Russia.
But if the end of the Cold War was hard on the NSA, the
onset of the digital age was harder. More and more
communications were moving through hard-to-tap fiber-optic
cable. More and more were encoded with powerful new
encryption software that was proving virtually impossible to
break. By the late 1990s, NSA officials had given up a futile
effort to limit the spread of encryption software, but they
were left fearful of how their agency's capabilities could
wither if, say, Microsoft started building powerful
encryption algorithms into its operating systems.
More immediately, the NSA had to confront the exploding
volume of global communications. In the 1950s, there were
5,000 computers in the world and not a single fax machine or
cell phone. Today, there are more than 100 million hosts on
the Internet serving hundreds of millions of networked
computers, not to mention 650 million cell phones in use
worldwide. And with broadband fiber-optic cable being laid
around the world at the rate of hundreds of miles an hour
(virtually the speed of sound), the speed for moving digital
data down these slender pipes more than doubles annually--
faster even than computing power, which doubles every year
and a half.
With more and more digital data moving across the Internet
and bouncing off communications satellites, SIGINT has become
more important than ever. Yet the interceptible data stream
has threatened to drown the NSA's analysts in a roiling sea
of 1s and 0s.
In this new context, private industry suddenly controls the
technology that the NSA needs to keep pace. But the NSA has
been isolated from the dynamism of the market by its own cult
of secrecy. The agency has fallen farther and farther behind,
unable to sort through a torrent of information streaming
back into Fort Meade's computers and, to some extent,
incapable of replacing its Cold War troops trained in radio
intercepts and Russian with Internet engineers and Arabic
speakers.
In 1999, the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence declared that the NSA was ``in serious
trouble,'' desperately short of capital and leadership. Civil
libertarians, Internet privacy activities and encryption
entrepreneurs--not to mention the European Parliament and
thousands, perhaps millions, of ordinary Europeans--question
the continuing need for such an agency, describing the NSA as
an ``extreme threat to the privacy of people all over the
world,'' in the words of an American Civil Liberties Union
Web site.
But the U.S. government considers SIGINT so essential that
one senior intelligence official recently called the NSA's
possible demise the greatest single threat to U.S. national
security. So, three years ago, when the House and Senate
intelligence committees began sounding the alarm, the
director of central intelligence began an all-out search for
somebody to fill the NSA's leadership void. George Tenet
turned to a man who lacked the innate spookiness normally
associated with this spookiest of agencies. A small man with
a crew cut and a bald pate. A man with a scholarly interest
in history. A man who would show no fear of either the public
or the agency he would have to overhaul.
Michael Hayden, 56, grew up in an era when the backbone of
America's industrial might comprised steel mills and
factories, in a neighborhood on Pittsburgh's North Side where
men carried lunch buckets to work and proudly traced their
ancestors to County Galway.
His father, Harry Hayden Sr., was a welder at Allis-
Chalmers, a plant that made giant electrical transformers.
Harry worked the 3:30-to-midnight shift, leaving his wife,
Sadie, to raise their three children almost by herself. But
he remembers how, when he would awake before dawn and walk to
the bathroom, the light would always be on in Michael's room
at 5:30 in the morning. The boy was studying.
Michael was a standout student, and an athlete as well.
``We never had to talk about Michael,'' says Harry, now 81.
``Everybody else was.''
As early as grade school, Michael showed a talent for
impressing talent spotters. His football coach at the St.
Peter's parochial schools says Hayden clearly had ``the
smarts'' to play quarterback--no small judgment, coming as it
does from Dan Rooney, son of the founding owner of the
Pittsburgh Steelers and now the franchise's president. In
time, however, Hayden distinguished himself most in the
classroom, graduating near the top of his class at North
Catholic High School and at Duquesne University, where he
majored in history.
One day, he surprised his father by coming home from
college and announcing that he had signed up for Air Force
ROTC. It was 1967, when a lot of young men were burning their
draft cards to protest the Vietnam War. ``He wanted to
travel, and I guess there wasn't a better way to do it,''
Harry says. Still, after graduating, Michael married his
college sweetheart, a Chicagoan named Jeanine Carrier. She
typed and proofread his master's thesis in American history
at Duquesne while he drove a cab, worked as a nigh bellman at
the Dusquesne Club and coached St. Peter's to a football
title.
Then he started his service in the Air Force, as an analyst
and briefer at the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command
at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. Harry Hayden Jr.
figures his older brother joined the service because he had
read everything he could about American history and wanted to
start participating.
A decade into his Air Force career, Michael held the rank
of major and was chief of intelligence for a fighter wing at
Osan Air Base in South Korea. The director of operations,
Col. Chuck Link, a fighter pilot, detected the same
leadership qualities Dan Rooney had recognized years earlier.
So did Hayden's men. Gene Tighe, a young intelligence
officer, remembers Hayden more as a mentor than a commanding
officer. ``He thought it was a great thing to be out and
about and getting this opportunity overseas,'' Tighe recalls.
``He wanted us to see the temples, the rice paddies, go
shopping in Hong Kong. He took a vested interest in making
you feel important.''
After Osan, Hayden spent six months studying at the Armed
Forces Staff College in Norfolk and 18 months learning
Bulgarian before he became an Air Force attache to Sofia.
Two years later, he came home without a new assignment, but
Link quickly recruited him to a job on a prestigious policy
and planning staff inside Air Force headquarters at the
Pentagon. Soon Link's boss, Gen. Chuck Boyd, the Air Force's
director of plans, took notice of Hayden's ability to think
conceptually and put his thoughts down on paper.
``He's got the soul of a historian, he really does,'' Boyd
says. ``He thinks things are explainable on the basis of how
things have been. It's a scholarly bent, combined with an
exceptional sensitivity to human behavior.''
One day in the summer of 1989, Boyd told Hayden to go down
to the National Security Council and see two men, an Air
Force general and an arms-control expert. Hayden took the
Metro across the river and reported to an office on the third
floor of the Old Executive Office Building. Only then did he
realize the he'd been sent to a job interview.
He spent the next two years as the NSC's director for
defense policy and arms control, where he wrote national
security adviser Brent Scowcroft's annual policy document on
strategy, then two more years at the Pentagon running a
policy staff for the secretary of the Air Force. In 1993,
Boyd, then commander of the U.S. European Command in
Stuttgart, Germany, asked Hayden to head its intelligence
directorate as the United States was becoming directly
involved in the Balkans. From his attache days in Bulgaria,
Hayden probably knew the region as well as anyone in the U.S.
military.
On June 2, 1995, Hayden walked into the U.S. Embassy in
Belgrade to learn that an American F-16 piloted by Air Force
Capt. Scott O'Grady had been shot down over Bosnia. The news
marked a turning point in Hayden's thinking as a soldier.
Serb Gen. Rathko Mladic had been saying publicly that he
would deny Serb airspace to NATO. Operations officers at the
European Command had dismissed the threat, but Hayden was
familiar with Mladic and did not see him making idle threats.
As an intelligence officer, he had informed the operational
commanders of Mladic's statements and relayed his impression
that the general was

[[Page S9349]]

not to be trifled with. But he didn't believe it was his
place to voice further objections--until after O'Grady was
shot down.
``Maybe I [should] have picked up the phone and told the
air commander, `Every time I see that orbit on your morning
slides, I get nervous,' '' Hayden says, ``But I didn't.''
The incident forced Hayden to see the obsolescence of the
military's traditional hierarchy, in which intelligence was
seen merely as a support function. Increasingly, Hayden
realized, intelligence was becoming so essential to make use
of and counter sophisticated weaponry that it had become as
much of a weapon in its own right as any bomb or missile.
``It was a kind of redefinition of self, as a professional,''
he says. ``It's not about intelligence successes or failures;
it's just successes or failures.''
Hayden's next assignment, as commander of the Air
Intelligence Agency at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio,
gave him plenty of opportunity to further hone his thinking.
Kelly is where the Air Force works on its plans for
cyberwar--attacks designed to take down adversaries'
computer networks. Hayden next served as deputy chief of
staff for the United Nations Command and U.S. Forces
Korea. To those inculcated in military culture, this move
sent a message. He crossed the divide between the bookish
world of intelligence into the front-line world of
operations. In the words of one senior intelligence
official, ``Here you've got an intel weenie who the four-
star operator recognized as something special.''
Late in 1998, he was leading a military delegation
negotiating with a group of North Korean generals at
Panmunjon, where talks at that high a level had not taken
place in seven years. He was in Seoul when Tenet, searching
for a new NSA director, summoned him for an interview. They
met at the Wye Plantation on Maryland's Eastern Shore, where
Tenet was attending Arab-Israeli peace talks hosted by the
Clinton administration. After a relaxed interview in which
Tenet asked Hayden about his views on life and change, Hayden
flew back to Korea with a clear signal from Tenet that the
NSA job was his. Given the job's normal three-year term and
his lack of SIGINT expertise, Hayden knew he'd been handed
the most challenging assignment of his career. Still, he
returned to Seoul in a celebratory mood. He took his wife to
the movie theater at Yongsan Army Garrison, which was playing
a new movie starring Will Smith, ``Enemy of the State.''
The film opens with a scene in which a rogue NSA official
(played by Jon Voigt) assassinates an influential congressman
(Jason Robards) who refuses to back a bill expanding the
agency's power to spy on Americans. From there, the movie
portrays the NSA as a lawless band of high-tech assassins who
try their best to kill a Washington lawyer (Smith) who just
happens to witness another NSA assassination on streets
around Dupont Circle.
As Hayden watched, surrounded by GIs whooping it up in the
theater, he sank lower and lower in his chair.
In real life, the NSA's image problems were a bit more
complicated.
In 1997, the European Parliament had commissioned a report
on Echelon, a global communications system. That report had
concluded that the NSA was capable of intercepting every fax,
phone call and e-mail in Europe. The conclusion was wrong--
Echelon is actually a relatively small system through which
the NSA and its electronic spy partners in the United
Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand divide
responsibility for processing intercepted satellite
communications--but it did not matter. The European
Parliament's anxieties flared into a controversy that
wouldn't go away, fueled by the lawmakers' suspicions that
the NSA was stealing European companies' secrets and passing
them on to their American competitors, a practice NSA
officials say they do not engage in.
Beyond industrial espionage, the Europeans also worried
about individual privacy, because the U.S. laws and
regulations that keep the NSA from spying on Americans
provide no similar protections for foreigners. By 1999, this
controversy had attracted the attention of civil libertarians
in the United States who were concerned about possible NSA
spying against Americans on the Internet, which the agency is
prohibited by law from doing.
While all this was brewing, the agency's boosters on
Capitol Hill were becoming alarmed that the NSA was in
serious trouble because of new communications technologies--
fiber-optic cables that couldn't be tapped, encryption
software that couldn't be broken and cell phone traffic too
voluminous to be processed.
Hayden was keenly aware of the irony: He was inheriting an
agency that was simultaneously being accused of omnipotence
and incompetence. And then, almost as soon as he arrived at
Fort Meade, Hayden discovered another wrinkle: The NSA
director didn't really run the agency. The agency, Hayden
soon come to understand, had been diffused into five
directorates that ran as fiefdoms unto themselves. The
bureaucratic overlap was staggering, and no one had a picture
of the whole. There were 68 different e-mail systems at Fort
Meade, and 452 internal review boards of one sort or another.
It wasn't as though the bureaucracy was actively trying to
sabotage him--``that would have required them to unify,''
Hayden says. Rather, he couldn't get the senior leadership to
agree on anything, ``from whether or not we should invest $2
billion in a new collection system to whether we should serve
grilled cheese'' to visiting delegations.
Early in his tenure, Hayden began plotting an internal
coup, naming two review teams--one made up of NSA insiders,
the other private-sector experts--to tell him what was wrong
with the agency. The results were startling.
The insiders' report blasted Hayden's predecessors and the
NSA's senior civilian managers, saying the agency ``has been
in a leadership crisis for the better part of a decade . . .
the legacy of exceptional service to the nation that is NSA
is in great peril. We have run out of time.''
The outsiders cited the agency's ``reluctance'' to move
from ``legacy targets to newer targets'' and said that NSA
had already become ``deaf'' to concerns from its customers--
military commanders, White House policymakers and the CIA.
``Right now, when stakeholders tell NSA that `NSA doesn't get
it,' the agency simply repeats itself and talks louder,''
their report said.
But Hayden remained cautious, painfully aware that he was
no expert in signals intelligence. He thought he saw what
needed to be done but didn't feel sure, especially when many
of his senior managers who were SIGINT experts were reluctant
to move.
Then the computers crashed in January 2000, confirming his
worst fears about the agency's antiquated technology and its
leaden bureaucracy.
With the snow outside headquarters still being cleared,
Hayden strode off the stage in Friedman Auditorium. His
challenge--This does not leave the building--was still
ringing in everyone's ears. In a room off the agency's
operations center, he called all of the agency's top
technicians and engineers together and told them just how
serious the meltdown had become. Tenet was still giving
them plenty of room to fashion a solution, Hayden said,
but pressure was building ``downtown.''
Hayden has no trouble remembering the day's event. That
Thursday happened to be his 32nd wedding anniversary. That
night, with the system showing some signs of life, he took
Jeannie to an inn west of Frederick called Stone Manor for
dinner. On the drive home, Robert Stevens, the NSA's deputy
director for technology, called to say that he needed to talk
to Hayden ``secure.'' Hayden called him back on a secure line
as soon as he got home.
The system had been dysfunctional for more than 72 hours.
It was back up to about 25 percent capacity, Stevens said,
but he didn't think the techies were on the right path. He
wanted permission to take the entire system down and start
all over again.
By then, a team of NSA engineers and contractors had
pinpointed an outdated routing protocol as the cause of the
failure. With the system completely shut down, they began
installing a massive hardware and software upgrade. And by
Friday morning, the system was coming back to life, node by
node. Deeply relieved, Tenet drove over to Fort Meade that
night and personally shook the hands of dozens of disheveled,
unshaven techies, many of whom hadn't been home since Monday.
Hayden, feeling much better about life the following
afternoon, went cross-country skiiing with his wife on the
Fort Meade gold course. Soon, he noticed that he was being
shadowed by an NSA patrol car. Trudging through the snow, an
officer asked Hayden to take off his skis and come with him
back to the operations center. George Tenet needed to talk to
him--ABC News had the story.
Tenet told Hayden to talk to the reporter, John McWethy, on
the record so he would get the story right. Hayden said fine.
He knew McWethy, and knew where he was based--the Pentagon.
The leak had come from there, not Fort Meade. ``You held the
line,'' Hayden later told his own people. ``You kept it
secret while it had to be secret.''
But with Hayden's relief came a realization about the
larger task ahead: The price he would pay for moving too
cautiously would greatly exceed whatever he would pay for
being too bold.
He would be bold.
Hayden's internal coup began with an innocuous act: He
hired a chief financial officer. Without one, he had no way
of making strategic decisions based on how much money was
being spent across the entire agency on line items like
research and development, information technology and
security. So Hayden hired Beverly L. Wright, a Wellesley
College graduate with an MBA from the Harvard Business School
and a solid reputation as CFO at the old Baltimore investment
bank of Alex. Brown.
For an agency that had always promoted its own and promised
lifetime employment, hiring from the outside was a radical
act.
Then Hayden did it again, hiring a former GTE
telecommunications executive named Harold C. Smith to take
control of the agency's information technology. In doing so,
he wanted to extend a powerful metaphor he'd drawn from his
experience in the Air Force. He had come to see the service
as the military expression of the American aviation industry
and American culture--its dynamism, its risk taking, its
proud individualism. He believed that the NSA had to become
the intelligence expression of American technology and
American culture. It needed to embrace the innovative,
flexible, entrepreneurial spirit that had come to define the
digital age. ``We can no longer provide to America what we
need to do so isolated from America,'' he says. ``To end the
isolation, America needs to know us better.''

[[Page S9350]]

And so, as his housecleaning began, Hayden also launched an
openness campaign, appearing in April 2000 at a rare public
session of the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence. With the European Parliament continuing its
Echelon investigation and the American Civil Liberties Union
voicing similar concerns, Hayden told the committee that NSA
employees took great care ``to make sure that we are always
on the correct side of the Fourth Amendment.''
``Let me put a fine point on this,'' Hayden testified.
``If, as we are speaking here this afternoon, Osama bin Laden
is walking across the bridge from Niagara Falls, Ontario, to
Niagra Falls, New York, as he gets to the New York side, he
is an American person. And my agency must respect his rights
against unreasonable search and seizure.''
Rep. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.) pressed Hayden on this point.
``Does NSA spy on the lawful activities of Americans?'' she
asked.
``No. The answer is we do not,'' Hayden said.
``Do you inadvertently collect information on U.S.
citizens?'' asked Rep. Tim Roemer (D-Ind.).
Yes, Hayden replied. But, he said, ``if it is not necessary
to understand the foreign intelligence value of the
information collected, it is not reported, it is destroyed.
And it is destroyed as quickly as we can do that.''
Back at Fort Meade, Hayden's grand plan for rebuilding the
agency for the digital age was slowed by his inability to
pick a deputy. He had departed from tradition again,
appointing a search committee instead of simply anointing one
of the bureaucracy's nominees. He was intrigued by the notion
of picking an outsider, even though retired Adm. Bobby Ray
Inman, a legendary past NSA director whom Hayden frequently
called for advice, strongly objected. ``What I thought he
couldn't do was go to somebody who didn't know the
business,'' Inman recalls. ``The learning curve is too long,
and you'd get waited out.''
Ultimately, Hayden resolved the conflict by picking an
insider who had worked as an outsider. William B. Black had
spent 38 years running some of the agency's spookiest
operations before retiring in 1997 and going to work for
Science Applications International Corp. He was, by
training, yet another Russian linguist. But Black had
served a tour as chief of an elite unit focused on Russian
communications. More important, he had run the Special
Collection Service, the joint NSA-CIA operation that works
out of foreign embassies and fuss the talents of human
spies and ultra-tech eavesdroppers to get very close to
particularly difficult targets. Most telling was Black's
final NSA assignment: special assistance to the director
for information warfare. In that role, he had established
the government's preeminent cyberwarfare unit--and
alienated so many NSA bureaucrats by poaching on their
cherished turf that resignation was his only viable
option.
Hayden liked Black's expertise and his reputation as an
iconoclast. In July 2000, he invited Black to his house for
dinner. Over couscous and roasted vegetables the director had
prepared himself, Hayden made it clear that he wanted a
deputy who could help change the system, not end-run it.
Black's one-word answer--``Exactly''--convinced Hayden that
he had his deputy.
With Black onboard, Hayden was ready to move. Last October,
he rolled out his reorganization plan, wresting control of
the agency from its own bureaucracy. All the NSA's support
services would be centralized under Hayden's chief of staff.
And where there were five overlapping directorates, Hayden
would have just two: one for information security (the
agency's codemakers) and another for signals intelligence
(its codebreakers).
Now, he hoped, senior managers could focus on going after
bytes.
A decade ago, a single NSA collection system could field a
million inputs per half-hour. Automated filtering systems
would winnow that to 10 messages that needed review by
analysts. With today's explosion in communications traffic,
multiply a million inputs per half-hour by a 1,000 or 10,000,
and 10 messages needing review becomes 10,000 or 100,000.
Cutting-edge fiber-optic systems now move data at 2.5 to 20
gigabits per second. The latest Intelsat satellites can
process the equivalent of 90,000 simultaneous telephone
calls. A single OC3 line on the Internet transmits 155
million bits per second--the equivalent of 18,000 books a
minute.
From an operational standpoint, the NSA's Cold War vacuum-
cleaner approach is no longer tenable--there's just too much
to be collected, and it's too hard to process. The only way
for the NSA to remain relevant in this environment is to
target the individuals and organizations whose communications
are most valuable--and targeting now is more complicated than
programming a target's telephone number into a computer. To
succeed in the digital age, NSA analysts must understand how
a target communicates, what its Internet protocol addresses
are, and how its traffic is routed around the world.
And with so many conceivable targets in the world, the only
way to zero in on the most important ones is to ask White
House officials, Pentagon commanders and CIA officers to
identify the targets they're interested in. The days when NSA
officials sent the White House whatever interested them are
over.
Now, SIGINT requires the agility to move from system to
system and adapt to new technologies. If that can be done,
the potential for electronic spying is enormous.
Sophisticated Internet surveillance techniques now make it
possible to acquire data ``in motion'' across the network--
and data ``at rest'' in computer databases, the new frontier.
``The world has never been more wired together than it is
today,'' says Stewart Baker, who served as the NSA's general
counsel from 1992 to 1994. ``It's the golden age of
espionage. Stealing secrets is going to get even easier for
people who employ technologically advanced tools and are
willing to work aggressively at it.''
Even so, the challenges are formidable. The NSA is known to
be hard at work trying to gain access to fiber-optic cables.
How it is doing is not publicly known. One means would be
tapping undersea cables or placing interception pods over
``repeaters'' that periodically boost fiber-optic signals.
But even if the lines can be tapped, transmitting the torrent
of intercepted data from the depths of the ocean to Fort
Meade in anything close to real time would be far harder
still, possibly requiring the NSA to lay its own fiber-optic
lines from the tap to some sort of relay station.
The most recent European Parliament report on Echelon
concluded that such links would be far too costly. The report
also said that new laser regenerators used to amplify fiber-
optic signals cannot be tapped the way repeaters can, meaning
that ``the use of submarines for the routine surveillance of
international telephone traffic can be ruled out.''
The Navy's decision to spend $1 billion to retrofit its
premier spy submarine, the USS Jimmy Carter, would suggest
American policymakers believe otherwise.
Another challenge facing Hayden's NSA is to decode
communications encrypted with powerful--and widely
available--software. When Hayden became director, the deputy
he inherited told Congress that the encryption software would
make the job of decoding encrypted messages ``difficult, if
not impossible,'' even with the world's largest collection of
supercomputers.
One alternative is to steal 1s and 0s before they are
encrypted, or after they are decrypted. This requires classic
esponage--as practiced by the Special Collection Service, the
top-secret joint CIA-NSA operation. In the Code War, American
spies recruited Soviet code clerks. Now the targets of
choice--the people paid to sell out their governments or
organizations--are systems administrators and other techies
capable of providing encryption keys or planting electronic
``trapdoors'' in computer systems that can be accessed from
computers on the other side of the world.
The irony amid all this new technology is that human
beings--old fashioned spies--are suddenly as important as
ever.
With his organization laid out and his mission clarified,
Hayden began updating his human resources last December. He
freed up enough slots and cajoled additional funds from
Congress to hire 600 people this year--three times what the
agency had been hiring annually. Sixty senior managers
accepted early retirement incentives, giving him enough
headroom to reach down a generation in selecting new
managers. Maureen A. Baginski, a member of the insiders team
that produced the scathing management assessment for Hayden
back in 1999, headed the class.
She would run the newly created directorate of signals
intelligence. Now, an operations officer targeting a
terrorist cell could team with an engineer who could help him
figure out how the cell's communications were routed around
the world. And though Baginski, too, is a former Russian
linguist, she clearly understood the challenges ahead. ``You
could literally stare for 25 years at the Soviet land mass
and never have this kind of volume problem,'' she says.
``They were slow, so it was okay if we were slow. Today, it's
volume, it's velocity and it's variety.''
Her management style, too, is more current--more attuned to
the idea of empowering the people beneath her. When a U.S.
Navy EP-3 reconnaissance aircraft--an NSA asset--crash-landed
on China's Hainan Island this spring after colliding with a
Chinese fighter jet, an operations officer called Baginski at
home late on a Saturday night, told her what had happened and
said, ``You will want to come in.''
Baginski replied: ``No, I will not want to come in.'' Her
reasoning was that the agency already had a person charged
with running an emergency response operation. ``Why should I
do it in a crisis if someone else does it every day?''
Baginski said.
As Baginski was settling in, Hayden was busy looking
outside the NSA for new people to work for her--and soon
found the agency swamped. In February, the home of No Such
Agency and Never Say Anything held a job fair to recruit
computer scientists, mathematicians, linguists and analyst to
become new spooks. Seventeen hundred people registered in
advance--and hundreds of walk-ins dressed in dark business
attire showed up and waited in a line that snaked through the
parking lot. Hayden's openness initiative was paying
dividends.
Soon, he advertised in the outside world to fill eight
other top jobs, including chief information officer, chief of
legislative affairs, deputy associate director for research
and chief of SIGINT systems engineering. All of the jobs paid
between $109,000 and $125,000, well below salaries for
commensurate jobs in the private sector. But, as Black is
fond of saying, ``patriotism still works on occasion.''
By the end of March, the NSA began its first major push to
involve the private sector in development of new SIGINT
technology

[[Page S9351]]

with an initiative it called Trailblazer. A total of three
contracts, worth about $10 million apiece, were awarded to
corporate consortia led by Booz Allen & Hamilton Inc.,
Lockheed Martin Corp. and TRW's systems and information
technology group.
Skeptics wonder whether it will all be enough, given the
speed with which technology is moving. They also question
whether there is enough top technical talent still left at
the NSA to manage complex relationships with contractors so
that the contracts result in real gains instead of white
elephants. The Federal Aviation Administration, after all,
hired IBM in the late 1980s to design a new air traffic
control system--and ended up abandoning the project at a cost
of $500 million.
But analysts on Capitol Hill and other close observers in
the private sector say Hayden, Black, Baginski and company
appear to be getting their message across that the NSA must
take risks if it is ever to ``own the virtual,'' as one
industry analyst put it.
James Adams, a British journalist turned Internet security
executive who serves on a panel of outside advisers created
by Hayden, says the agency's workforce breaks down into three
distinct camps: 25 percent are enthusiastic about Hayden's
program, 25 percent are threatened and dead set against it,
and 50 percent are sitting on the fence waiting to see who
wins.
Sometime this summer, Hayden plans to publish reduction-in-
force procedures to deal with the naysayers, if need be. He
will keep offering retirement incentives, preferring the
carrot to the stick, but now accepts that layoffs may be
necessary.
They would be the first in the agency's history.
With all the changes, Hayden may be making enemies among
his agency's old guard, but he's also building a powerful
constituency elsewhere. ``We went deaf for 72 hours because
of an antiquated system that should have been upgraded years
ago,'' says Tim Sample, staff director of the House Permanent
Select Committee on Intelligence. ``When you're at that point
in an organization, it takes a monumental effort over a
sustained period to get back up to speed. They needed a
leader--and that's what they got.''
Sample's boss, Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), the
committee's chairman, recently floated the idea of promoting
Hayden to a four-star general and extending his three-year
tour, now less than a year from completion.
Tenet has gone even further. ``My personal view is, Mike
Hayden must stay out there for five years--he has got to have
time on target,'' Tenet says. ``He's thinking out of the box.
He's engaged. He's not afraid of opening up the NSA. He's not
afraid of the American public. And he knows what has to be
done.''
Hayden is willing to stay on, if that's what Tenet and
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld desire. There is, he knows,
much work still to be done. His personal focus this summer--
now that the computers seem to be working again--is people.
Specifically, promotions. Six months ago, Hayden got rid of
all regulations requiring employees to spend two years at one
pay grade before they get promoted to the next. Now he's
trying to make sure that the agency's hidebound promotions
panels start taking advantage of that freedom. If the right
people don't advance, Hayden believes, nothing else really
matters.
He says he feels more and more confident about the course
he's charted. But there's a certain fatigue in his voice. ``I
feel tired,'' Hayden allows. ``But I see points of light more
frequently.''

Mr. GRAHAM. Madam President, with a prayer that God will be with us
as we enter this next and more challenging period of our Nation's
history, I extend the wish that God will bless our Nation and that we
will be worthy of his blessings.
Thank you.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under a previous order, the Senator from
Maine, Ms. Collins, is recognized to speak for up to 5 minutes.
Ms. COLLINS. Madam President, it is very difficult to wrap one's mind
around the terrible tragedy that our Nation has suffered. It is still
harder to comprehend what must have been in the hearts and minds of
people willing to commit such atrocities against their fellow human
beings. It is very difficult to even find the right words to speak
about the attack on America.
But speaking about it is something we must do. The American people
and the Government of the United States of America must speak
forcefully and with crystalline clarity. The families and friends of
those killed or wounded in these awful terrorist attacks must know that
the prayers of every American and of millions upon millions of people
around the world are with them now.
The heroic firefighters, police officers, rescue workers, National
Guardsmen, doctors, nurses, members of the clergy, and the citizens who
are volunteering, who are even now struggling to save the lives of the
surviving victims and to help grieving families, must know that our
hearts and our deepest gratitude are with them in their vital work.
Our Commander in Chief and all the men and women of the Armed Forces,
our law enforcement community, and our intelligence agencies must know
that we stand behind them, as perhaps never before in my lifetime, as
they set about with grim resolution to ensure that justice is done to
those responsible.
And the evil people who planned and committed these atrocities--and
all of those who may have aided and abetted them--must know that far
from paralyzing the American people and dividing us fearfully against
one another, what they have done instead is instantly to unite all of
us into one people. We stand united in the solidarity of grief and
commitment to our fellow citizens and utterly single minded in our
determination to remain unbowed and to see justice done.

In fact, this is my fifth year in the Senate, and never have I seen
the Senate more united and more determined than we are now.
These, then, are the messages we must send--and that we must keep
sending with relentless determination. America may have lost a measure
of our innocence, a degree of that special separateness that has helped
us to keep our land of liberty safe from some of the storms that have
long battered other peoples in an often turbulent world; we clearly are
not as separate or as safe as once we thought. But no one--no one--
should doubt our resolve and our resilience. It is in moments such as
these that the special character of America can and should shine
through with particular brilliance. It shines through in our sacrifices
in helping fellow citizens in terribly trying times. It shines through
in the sacrifices of those brave and heroic passengers who were on the
jet that did not make it to the intended target. It shines through in
our commitment, even in adversity, to the bedrock values that make our
system of government worth protecting, even as those values draw the
murderous ire of twisted souls whose only answer to the discourse of
liberty is a vocabulary of violence, terror, and death.
As we care for survivors and comfort those who have lost loved ones,
we also will set about finding those responsible. We must respond to
these horrors in a way befitting our voices as free and united people.
But let there be no doubt, respond we should and respond we will.
As difficult as it is to find a voice to talk about the horrors we
have experienced, I believe by finding our voices amid such shock,
rage, and pain we reaffirm our most cherished principles as citizens of
the United States of America.
With God's help, we shall persevere, we shall find comfort in our
grief, we shall find strength in the days ahead, and we shall hold
those responsible for these attacks on America responsible for their
actions.
Madam President, seeing no one seeking recognition, I suggest the
absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. REID. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the
quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

____________________