

In the early months of 2003, the National Security Agency saw demand for its services spike as a new war in Iraq, as well as ongoing and profound changes in how people used the internet, added to a torrent of new agency work related to the war on terror, according to a review of 166 articles from a restricted agency newsletter. months of 2003, the National Security Agency saw demand for its services spike as a new war in Iraq, as well as ongoing and profound changes in how people used the internet, added to a torrent of new agency work related to the war on terror, according to a review of 166 articles from a restricted agency newsletter. The Intercept today is releasing the first three months of SIDtoday, March 31 through the end of June 2003, using files provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. In addition, we are releasing any subsequent 2003 installments of SIDtoday series that began during this period. The files are available for download here. We combed through these files with help from other writers and editors with an eye toward finding the most interesting stories, among other concerns. SIDtoday was launched just 11 days into the U.S. invasion of Iraq by a team within the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate. SID is arguably the NSA’s most important division, responsible for spying on the agency’s targets, and SIDtoday became, as Peter Maass documents in an accompanying article, an invaluable primer on how the NSA breaks into and monitors communications systems around the world. At the outset, SIDtoday declared that its mission was to “bring together communications from across the SIGINT Directorate in a single webpage” and that one of its key areas of focus would be providing “information on the Iraq Campaign and Campaign Against Terrorism.” And, indeed, the first issues of SIDtoday document how the agency paved the way for the Iraq War with diplomatic intelligence, supported the targeting of specific enemies in Iraq, and continued servicing existing “customers” like the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture, whose appetite for signals intelligence grew sharply after the Sept. 11 attacks. While the agency was helping in Iraq, NSA personnel were also involved in interrogations at Guantánamo Bay, SIDtoday articles show, working alongside the military and CIA at a time when prisoners there were treated brutally. The Intercept’s Cora Currier describes the NSA’s involvement with the interrogations in a separate story, one that also documents how the agency helped with the capture and rendition to Guantánamo of a group of Algerian men in Bosnia. Other highlights from this set of documents follow below, alongside links to the relevant originals.

U.S. Marines from the 2nd Battalion, 8th Regiment enter the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah, March 23, 2003. Photo: Eric Feferberg/AFP/Getty Images

Shock and Awe: The Iraq War in SID In the first months of the Iraq War, SIDtoday articles bragged about the NSA’s part in the run-up to the invasion and reflected the Bush administration’s confidence that Saddam Hussein had hidden weapons of mass destruction. At the United Nations, readers were told, “timely SIGINT played a critical role” in winning adoption of resolutions related to Iraq, including by providing “insights into the nuances of internal divisions among the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.” When the military deployed to Iraq, SIGINT came too. Maj. Gen. Richard J. Quirk III, then a deputy director of SID, put out an “urgent” call for additional SIGINT analysts to volunteer for 90- to 120-day field deployment, stressing that “SIGINT is wired into our military operations as never before.” NSA’s Iraq War tasks would include “researching possible locations of stockpiled WMD material.” The Geospatial Exploitation Office, placed on 24/7 watch, provided “near-real-time tipping of communications associated with Iraqi leadership and other high-value targets.”

Photo: CENTCOM/Getty Images

Just three days into the campaign, on March 23, 2003, Pfc. Jessica Lynch and five others were taken prisoner after their convoy from the 507th Maintenance Company went off course near Nasiriyah, Iraq, and lost 11 soldiers in the ensuing attack. On April 1, Special Operations commandos rescued Lynch from her bed at the Saddam Hussein General Hospital in Nasiriyah, swooping down in Black Hawk helicopters and firing explosive charges. (It later emerged that Iraqi forces had previously left the hospital.) In “SID Support to POW Rescue,” Chief of Staff Charles Berlin revealed that the Lynch rescue was aided by blueprints from the Japanese construction firm that originally built the hospital, blueprints rounded up as the rescue was being planned and sent “as digital files” to the commandos “literally minutes before the aircraft departed with the strike team” on April 1. Information about the hospital had been collected by a dedicated Underground Facility Support Cell created by the NSA in 2002 as part of an interagency effort to assess “the infrastructure and vulnerabilities of underground facilities used by hostile governments or military forces.” Even before President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq on May 1, 2003, NSA was preparing its history of the war. Record management officers were given guidance on how to preserve records from the operation, and the general staff was told how to preserve even “seemingly mundane things.” Soon after the president’s “Mission Accomplished” victory speech, some NSA staff returned from deployment. But the role of signals intelligence in Iraq was not over. The NSA provided “time-sensitive SIGINT” support, including a “summary of contacts,” to aid the May 22, 2003, capture of a top Baathist official, Aziz Sajih Al-Numan, “king of diamonds” in the deck of playing cards that featured U.S. Central Command’s wanted Iraqis. Al-Numan was caught within 25 hours after the Army contacted NSA to request support. “Well done to all involved in his capture!” a SIDtoday article declared. In June, the “ace of diamonds,” Saddam’s secretary Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, was captured thanks to “near-real-time tipping [of geospatial intelligence] to the Special Operations Forces engaged in the hunt,” along with rapid translation of intercepted conversations, SIDtoday bragged. As the end of the quarter approached, SIDtoday reported on portents of continued resistance and warned, “The scope of hostilities is greater than many may realize,” and, separately, that “Iraq is still a troubled environment and much work needs to be done.” Additional SIDtoday articles about Iraq are available here. Hunting a Russian Mobster, “Mr. Kumarin” In an example of highly targeted intelligence gathering, the NSA spent “many months” acquiring the phone number of a Russian organized crime figure and began intercepting his calls, according to a May 2003 article. The intelligence work was sparked by the State Department, which in 2002 requested information on the leader of the Tambov crime syndicate in Russia, referred to only as “Mr. Kumarin,” and about any links between the syndicate and Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2009, the Russian authorities tried and convicted Vladimir Kumarin, who had changed his name to Vladimir Barsukov, for fraud and money laundering. The New York Times compared him to a “Russian John Gotti.” He was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

A North Korean soldier looks south through binoculars at the truce village of Panmunjom in the demilitarized zone dividing North and South Korea on April 9, 2009. Photo: Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images

Photo: Spaceimaging.com/Getty Images

Demand for NSA Intelligence Became “Voracious” The Signals Intelligence Directorate is full of expert spies, but they don’t choose who to spy on themselves. In the corporate lingo of SID, the “customer” decides, customers “including all departments of the executive branch,” according to the agency’s website. And the demand from customers exploded in 2003, judging from a series of SIDtoday articles about the Customer Relationships Directorate, an office focused on ensuring that NSA’s customers get what they need. One driver of this demand was the war on terror; inbound SIGINT requests to the NSA’s National Security Operations Center went from 300 in the two weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks to 1,700 by the end of the year, according to one SIDtoday article. Existing customers like the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture “suddenly became voracious consumers” of signals intelligence, as one article from April 2003 put it, and brand new customers appeared on the scene, such as the newly created Department of Homeland Security. SID also increased its interaction with domestic law enforcement agencies like the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Another driver of heightened SIGINT demand was the war in Iraq. According to the document describing the NSA’s role in war-related U.N. Security Council resolutions, “The number of timely SIGINT tippers delivered to [the U.S. Mission to the United Nations] during key points in the negotiations increased by a factor of four.” Creating a “Plausible Cover” for Sensitive Intelligence Sources Amid strong demand for intelligence, the NSA sometimes needed to alter sensitive information so it could be shared more widely. As part of SIDtoday’s explainer series “ConSIDer This,” one unknown author from the SIGINT communications team explained how to lower the classification level of intercepted communications, or COMINT, a process known as “downgrading.” The process could involve some subterfuge. “In order to downgrade COMINT, a plausible cover (i.e., collection from a less sensitive source) must exist,” the article stated. Changing of the Guard at SID As SIDtoday launched in 2003, the Signals Intelligence Directorate was in the midst of a leadership change as Director Maureen Baginski moved to a new position as the FBI’s head of intelligence and Maj. Gen. Quirk replaced her. Several other new managers and technical directors introduced themselves in the online newsletter’s series “Getting to Know the SID Leadership Team.” Also in that series: A senior technical leader complained that “voice dominates our reporting today, yet [digital information] is much more prolific in the global net” and explored reasons for this shortcoming.