[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 12]
[Senate]
[Pages 16952-16960]
[From the U.S. 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 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

[[Page 16953]]

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 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.

[[Page 16954]]

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 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

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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 
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

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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 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

[[Page 16957]]

     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 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

[[Page 16958]]

     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

[[Page 16959]]

     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.''
       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

[[Page 16960]]

     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 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.




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