Spying NSA's failures

Bamford looks into the mistakes made by the secretive agency protecting the nation

review

The Shadow Factory

By James Bamford

Doubleday / $27.95 / 345 pages

The bad news in James Bamford's fascinating new study of the National Security Agency is that Big Brother really is watching. The worse news, according to this veteran journalist, is that Big Brother often listens in on the wrong people and sometimes fails to recognize critical information, like the fact that terrorists are gathering and plotting an attack. When it does find a critical nugget like that, it occasionally files it away somewhere and doesn't tell anybody.

This is a tale of bad news, told by a master whose two previous books on the NSA, The Puzzle Palace (1982) and Body of Secrets (2001), laid bare some of the machinations of the world's largest and most technologically sophisticated spy agency.

In brisk and colorful narrative, The Shadow Factory details the agency's failure on Sept. 11 (the hijackers, on whom the NSA had been eavesdropping for 18 months without sharing the intelligence with the FBI or CIA, were camped out late that summer virtually on the NSA's doorstep, in Laurel).

Bamford whisks the reader through the NSA's embarrassing failure to figure out that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and through the distressing post-Sept. 11 years when the agency demonstrated both technical gee-whizzery and brash law-breaking.

The book is certain to raise questions about whether the NSA, with headquarters in those huge, foreboding structures just off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway on Fort Meade Road, ever can operate effectively and efficiently - and legally.

Bamford convincingly argues that the agency, grown from a few creative code-breakers into a vast network of sensors, wiretaps, robo-eavesdroppers, secret data-miners and storage bunkers, broke the law and spied on Americans and nearly got away with it. His detailed descriptions of secret underground fiber-optic wiretaps and clandestine operations centers persuasively describe the NSA's expanding reach.

Yet Bamford might have acknowledged that reporting on a complex organization whose effectiveness requires secrecy is an inherently incomplete work: Its successes are unknown. Surely, the NSA has done valuable work in identifying and tracking terrorists, achievements not noted by Bamford.