A few caveats up front. My boss recommended this book. When your boss recommends a book two things apply. One, you should definitely read it. Two, you should generally agree with your boss's perspective. My boss made a few mea culpa’s about the book, because he’s a nice guy, and acquiesced away from responsibility should I not like it. It’s my fault if you don’t like it. He knows I write critical book reviews and can be a dick when a book doesn’t rise to my level of satisfaction. Also, my boss is an expert in the subject matter. So if I didn’t like it…perhaps it would be because I did not understand it. Never fear, I liked the book so here is my positive review.
There are three distinct aspects to this book which are unique.
First, Eric Haseltine was a former director of research at NSA. He held that position for three years in the early 2000s just after 9/11. This is discovered early in the introduction by Gen Michael Hayden. Gen Hayden hired Hazeltine from Disney to spark innovation at the NSA. Whether that happened or not is debatable. This book, however, isn’t about Haseltine’s time at the NSA, although it’s an interesting discussion point given the seemingly controversial action related to his being hired. There was a lot of talk in the community that the US Government had hired the Disney Imagineer. It turns out, the only thing I’ve found that this Imagineer accomplished was to influence the seating arrangement of analysts who sit on the Ops floor of various intelligence centers. I’ve truly discovered nothing else.
Second, this is a book about political relationships inside the intelligence community, in particular the rivalry between the NSA and the CIA as the NSA struggled to come to grips with its charter. This is the axe the other reviewer from the CIA thinks Hazeltine is grinding. This rivalry still exists today which is a huge detriment to the country. Hazeltine, as an outsider, was in a key position to observe this tremendous power struggle. But we all know about the power struggle. It’s never been a mystery and occurred as soon as the NSA was established. I think generally speaking, the NSA is an organization whose existence is highly dubious…their technical prowess exists elsewhere. This may seem like a controversial statement but the NSA is the organization that continuously gives intelligence a bad name for having the means for spying on the American public. To counter this dubious side of the NSA, the intelligence they collect is locked behind legions of lawyers trying to keep the lid on potential missteps that could lead to violations of the constitution (inadvertent spying on Americans). This lock down of intelligence for legal purposes thus prevents vital intelligence from making it into the hands of the warfighters who actually need it. Undoubtedly an objective of Hazeltine’s work was to highlight the ineffectiveness of a government at odds with itself. I also personally disagree with the NSA’s belief that they are in a better position to inform the President. The CIA is absolutely correct. Technical collection is meaningless without context and it requires human analysts to provide context. This will never change.
Third, this is a book about The Gunman Project, which reports on the technical implants I mentioned above in the US Embassy in Moscow that were exposed by Charles Gandy. We can argue their value, but the Soviets sunk untold resources into creating the implant and operating it for perhaps a decade. Maybe they debatably gained nothing, that is short sighted. They learned how to do it, and they learned it could be done. Tradecraft is everything. Also, the only reason we pursued the implant was because the French government found an implant of their own in one of their networks and tipped off the United States to be on the lookout. I like that Charles Gandy gets the credit for all of this thanks to Hazeltine. He was left out of the previous history on this topic.
Perlroth never mentions Charles Gandy. Gandy could also be called the spy (or counterspy) in Moscow Station. He uncovered almost everything necessary to act in 1978 but then failed to get the Country to act on what he discovered for another six years…not until the intervention of Neely, who went behind his leadership’s back, directly to President Ronald Regan to secure the funding and resources, to start project Gunman, and find the leak in the embassy. Thus, heretofore, Neely got the credit for Gunman, when much much more of the credit belongs to Gandy.
I think Hazeltine gets the politics correct, and definitely corrects history with regard to Gandy, but it’s not clear he fully understands the technology he was describing. He continuously refers to signals known as TUMS as microwave flooding. He totally misunderstands the nature of these signals and why they were there, and wildly, and incorrectly, speculates about their intended use.
Gandy rediscovers the use by the Soviets of a signal called TUMS (technically unidentifiable Moscow Signals)…which amount to directing microwave radiation in the direction of the embassy. This signal is largely and incorrectly speculated about by Hazeltine as a means to cause vibrations in certain materials which may themselves resonate with the possibility of carrying information, such as voice vibrations, out of the spaces that they flood. He doesn’t really understand the technology behind what he’s writing about. Also, this technique would never work or many reasons. Regardless, many individuals still seem to carry around the belief in magic, just like a belief in aliens. (Gandy seems to believe this is real-or at least led Hazeltine to believe it's real) OK, fine, let our adversaries chase their tail trying to develop that kind of attack. Good luck. However, more important to the point of microwave flooding, why the United States permits the Soviets to flood US Sovereign territory with microwave energy, regardless of its purported innocuous or nefarious nature, is beyond me. One need only boil water in a microwave oven to understand that we shouldn’t put biological systems in an environment and allow anyone to pump in directed radio waves of any frequency, regardless of intent. If you disagree, feel free to rig your microwave oven to turn on with the door open, and stand in front of it for a pinch. (Don't do that)
The staff at the Embassy in Moscow discovered a chimney in the middle of their building that didn’t end at a fireplace. I was just an open vertical tunnel in the middle of the building. The CIA brings in Gandy from the NSA to investigate what’s going on. In the chimney they find a Yagi antenna (think old style TV antenna on the roof of your house) suspended by cables attached to a box of electronics pointed in the direction of the ambassador's office. Gandy discovered this on his first trip to Moscow station in the late 70’s. Why this didn’t change things at the embassy is a mystery to everyone. They brought him in. They found something. They didn’t look further. The guy at the CIA who was in charge, who brought Gandy in, literally did nothing. Later, he would rise in rank at the CIA and is one of their most decorated and experienced leaders in CIA history, a legend, in fact. This makes no sense. So…regardless of what was reported in this book, other things that are still classified, seem to have been a foot. We may never know the true story.
Eventually Gandy get’s a receiver hooked up to the subject antenna and hears clicks. Well Virginia, Bob is definitely your Uncle, but everyone but Gandy decided there was no Santa Claus. It’s another six years before Project Gunman is started based on the tip from the French, the US secretly empties the embassy of every shred of electronics, and the search for a bug begins in earnest. The search reveals the purpose of the original antenna left in the chimney. It’s use was to record keystrokes from the implants in the typewriters. The clicking that Gandy had heard.
Hazeltine might be off on tech but he is spot on with regard to the failure of the US to act on Gandy’s discoveries and the politics that lay behind the inability to act.
In the end, the most powerful lesson from this book, regardless of whether the technology disclosed evidence that condemned Soviet assets to death, or if anything of value ever came out of the Soviet intelligence operation, Gen Hayden captures the message in his introduction. He delivers it quite succinctly when he says, “The US cannot afford to underestimate the inventiveness and determination of highly motivated adversaries, nor can we underestimate the damage we do to ourselves when we fight each other responding to such adversaries.”
This is an important book. Everyone in this business should know this story well.
