How a 30-year-old lawyer exposed NSA mass surveillance of Americans—in 1975

The NSA at night—always watching.

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US intelligence agencies have sprung so many leaks over the last few years—black sites, rendition, drone strikes, secret fiber taps, dragnet phone record surveillance, Internet metadata collection, PRISM, etc, etc—that it can be difficult to remember just how truly difficult operations like the NSA have been to penetrate historically. Critics today charge that the US surveillance state has become a self-perpetuating, insular leviathan that essentially makes its own rules under minimal oversight. Back in 1975, however, the situation was likely even worse. The NSA literally "never before had an oversight relationship with the Congress." Creating that relationship fell to an unlikely man: 30 year old lawyer L. Britt Snider, who knew almost nothing about foreign intelligence.

Snider was offered a staff position on the Church Committee, set up by Congress in 1975 to function as a sort of Watergate-style inquiry. This initiative focused on CIA subversion of foreign governments and spying on American citizens, recently revealed in the New York Times by noted investigative reporter Seymour Hersch. Congressional "oversight" of intelligence agencies was, at the time, nearly useless, as the Senate's official history of the Church Committee notes:

In 1973, CIA Director James Schlesinger told Senate Armed Services Chairman John Stennis that he wished to brief him on a major upcoming operation. "No, no my boy," responded Senator Stennis. "Don't tell me. Just go ahead and do it, but I don't want to know." Similarly, when Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J.W. Fulbright was told of the CIA subversion of the Allende government in Chile, he responded, "I don't approve of intervention in other people's elections, but it has been a long-continued practice."

The committee was initially given nine months and 150 staffers to conduct its work. Snider was tasked with expanding the committee's inquiry to the NSA, which was so opaque that no one in Congress could even come up with an org chart for the Fort Meade-based operation. Years later, Snider became the CIA's inspector general. In late 1999 he wrote up his memories of that early NSA investigation and how it helped to reveal a massive program of NSA spying on telegrams—including those sent by US citizens. It turned out that the telegram companies had secretly agreed to the scheme out of a sense of "patriotic duty." Sounds a bit like the NSA of today, no?

Snider and a colleague named Peter Fenn were told to look into the NSA, but it wasn't a simple job. They had no evidence that the NSA even did anything wrong.

Unlike the CIA and FBI, which were the agencies principally in the Committee's sights—thanks to a number of sensational press accounts—there had been no press exposés about NSA. Our supervisor, in fact, seemed to take particular delight in pitting Pete and me against this mysterious Goliath. "They call it 'No Such Agency,'" he said. "Let's see what you boys can find out about it." It was the first time I had heard the agency referred to this way, and it was not long before I understood why. What ensued was something of an odyssey that lasted over the better part of a year. It began with a series of fruitless, sometimes comical, efforts to penetrate NSA's defenses. ("They must have done something," our boss wailed.)

The pair knew almost nothing about the NSA, so they asked the Congressional Research Service (CRS) to dig up every scrap of public information on the agency. They received in response "a one-paragraph description from the Government Organization Manual and a patently erroneous piece from Rolling Stone magazine"—and this from an agency that had existed for more than 20 years. So Snider started sniffing about in Congress, going to the two committees nominally tasked with overseeing the NSA budget (though not with actually overseeing the agency's work). Only a single person on each committee was cleared to know budget details, and neither person heard anything about NSA abuses. The two staffers appear from the modern perspective to be amazingly credulous. "You've got to understand," Snider reports them saying, the NSA would only "focus on foreign targets." Case closed.

So Snider and Fenn skipped the obvious channels and sought out former NSA employees who might be willing to talk. They found several of them, but learned little of interest:

While we were encouraged by their willingness to talk with us, the most egregious "abuses" we were told about were complaints about how NSA allocated its parking spaces among employees and about a few cases of time and attendance fraud. None of the people we interviewed had any knowledge of NSA's having undertaken surveillance against American citizens. It became clear to us from these interviews that NSA's operations were so compartmented that, unless we had the right person, others were not apt to know. How, though, did we find the right person? At that point, we did not even have an organization chart.

So they went directly to the NSA and secured a meeting with its director, Air Force Lt. General Lew Allen. "Broadly smiling" NSA handlers met them and escorted them through the NSA's Maryland headquarters and into Allen's office. Allen offered to arrange any briefings that might be helpful to the pair, and together Snider and Fenn began to learn how the NSA actually operated. But they still saw nothing that smacked of abuse:

These occurred over the ensuing weeks, and implicitly the message came through: "Whatever you do, kids, don't screw this up—it's important to the country." In fact, the briefings did give us a considerably improved understanding of NSA's mission and accomplishments, but they failed to identify a single avenue that appeared promising from an investigative standpoint. Part of it was due to our own ignorance and uncertainty in terms of where to probe and how hard to push, and part of it was due to NSA's uncertainty in terms of what to share with us. Given the current highly intrusive nature of Congressional oversight, it may seem strange that in 1975 NSA was an agency that had never before had an oversight relationship with the Congress. That became painfully clear as our investigation progressed.

After months of work, the two men had nothing. Perhaps there was no breakthrough on the horizon.

In May 1975, the Church Committee received an 800 page report from the separate Rockefeller Commission. The report contained hundreds of pages of testimony from CIA employees about possible problems at that agency, but Snider and Fenn also found two small references to the NSA. The first mentioned an office in New York, loaned from the CIA to NSA in order to spy on telegrams; the second "disclosed that CIA had asked NSA to monitor the communications of certain US citizens active in the antiwar movement."

Snider took the first of these. He asked the NSA to explain the telegram-spying program, but the agency didn't respond. Pulling out the big guns, Snider sent the NSA another round of questions, this time signed by Senator Church, the committee chairman. The NSA objected, saying that it could only talk about the secretive program to the two senators running the committee—no one else. Snider couldn't get the meeting arranged for months; the two senators were too busy to make the joint scheduling work, in part because of how much other work they were doing on matters of more direct concern to the committee. As the Senate history of the Church Committee notes, it "interviewed 800 individuals and conducted 250 executive and 21 public hearings. At the first televised hearing, staged in the Senate Caucus Room, Chairman Church dramatically displayed a CIA poison dart gun to highlight the committee's discovery that the CIA directly violated a presidential order by maintaining stocks of shellfish toxin sufficient to kill thousands."

That August, Snider's scheduling problem suddenly evaporated. The New York Times dropped another bombshell, reporting that NSA had been spying on US citizens who were communicating abroad.

With the allegations now a matter of public record, NSA wanted to explain its side of the story. So, in late August, NSA told me that a briefing was being arranged.

I can remember the clean-cut, earnest man in his early forties who met with me, but I do not recall his name. It was true, he said, that NSA had access for many years to most of the international telegrams leaving New York City for foreign destinations. The program was codenamed SHAMROCK and known to only a few people within the government. Every day, a courier went up to New York on the train and returned to Fort Meade with large reels of magnetic tape, which were copies of the international telegrams sent from New York the preceding day using the facilities of three telegraph companies. The tapes would then be electronically processed for items of foreign intelligence interest, typically telegrams sent by foreign establishments in the United States or telegrams that appeared to be encrypted.

While telegrams sent by US citizens to foreign destinations were also present in the tapes NSA received, the briefer said that, as a practical matter, no one ever looked at them. "We're too busy just keeping up with the real stuff," he said. The program had been terminated in May, he told me, by order of the Secretary of Defense. I asked if the Secretary had ended it because he knew the Committee was on to it. "Not really," he said, "the program just wasn't producing very much of value."

But even the NSA briefer didn't know the full details of SHAMROCK, especially historical information about when it had started and how. It appeared that only one man had that information: recently retired NSA Deputy Director Dr. Louis Tordella.

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Nate Anderson / Nate is the deputy editor at Ars Technica, where he oversees long-form feature content and writes about technology law and policy. He's currently at work on a book about Internet policing.

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