(cont.)
In recent years, NSA has regularly listened to bin Laden's unencrypted telephone calls.
Agency officials have sometimes played tapes of bin Laden talking to his mother to impress
members of Congress and select visitors to the agency.
In the late 1990s, NSA tracked efforts by Chinese and French companies to sell missile
technology to Iran, particularly the C-802 anti-ship missile. The eavesdropping led to U.S.
protests to the Chinese and French governments.
When U.S. troops evacuated Vietnam in 1975, "an entire warehouse overflowing with NSA's
most important cryptographic machines and other supersensitive code and cipher materials"
was left behind. It was the largest compromise of such equipment in U.S. history, Bamford
writes, but the agency still has not acknowledged it.
When Israeli fighter jets attacked the NSA eavesdropping ship USS Liberty in the
Mediterranean in 1967, killing 34 Americans and wounding 171, an NSA aircraft was
listening in and heard Israeli pilots referring to the American flag on the ship. U.S. officials,
including President Lyndon Baines Johnson, decided to forget the matter, Bamford writes,
because they did not want to embarrass Israel. To this day, Israeli officials say their forces
mistakenly attacked the U.S. ship.
Bamford says the reason for the strike was Israel's desperate effort to cover up its attacks
on the Egyptian town of El Arish in the Sinai. The Liberty was sitting offshore and the
Israelis feared that the ship would detect the operation, which included the shooting of
prisoners.
Yesterday, an NSA spokesperson questioned a point made in the book about the USS
Liberty.
"We do not comment on operational matters, alleged or otherwise; however, Mr. Bamford's
claim that the NSA leadership was 'virtually unanimous in their belief that the attack was
deliberate' is simply not true," the spokesperson said.
When he wrote "The Puzzle Palace" in 1982, Bamford was attacked by some NSA officials,
who said his revelations gave the Soviet Union and other U.S. adversaries too much
information on the secret agency. One former director referred to him as "an unconvicted
felon."
With the end of the Cold War, the agency has been less guarded. NSA's current director, Air
Force Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, has granted a number of interviews. Hayden "cracked the
door open a tiny bit," said Bamford, partly to burnish NSA's public image and correct
misconceptions.
Sun staff writer Laura Sullivan contributed to this article.
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