T.D.: And as far as responsibilities for that first day, it started that I would shadow Maureen for approximately a month or so, just to understand the nature of the job and find ways to assist in terms of process, management decision-making, and a whole various slew of other things including communications.
R.K.: So your job was, let me just get this straight. Your job was to learn the whole big picture -
T.D.: No, no, that was,- remember we're talking the Signals Intelligence Directorate which is the largest single organization in NSA, it's the main operations group, it's the group that does collection, it's the group that does analysis, it's the group that has the single biggest footprint at NSA and around the world in terms of NSA's mission.
You have various field sites and so it's quite vast and it was going to take a few weeks for me to get up to speed and I certainly wasn't unfamiliar with NSA, I had been a contractor there for a number of years, but it's quite different actually being an employee, and being dropped in it at a senior level, and having to pick up very quickly on all the various things that were going on, and so the arrangement was that I would just shadow her to learn that and would begin to assume my responsibilities reporting to her and in partnership with my peers, who included by the way Chris Inglis, the outgoing Deputy Director of NSA as we speak.
R.K.: So okay, I am not surprised that it was a kind of bait and switch for the job because you would think that with a top secret agency like NSA they're not going to even let people know
what jobs they're trying to fill. So they're going to try to -
T.D.: Well that's -
R.K.: - lure people in with something then they're going to put you where they really want you. I mean that's probably their normal modus operandi.
T.D.: Well that's actually a larger story. The pressures were so great that General Hayden reluctantly agreed to initiate this hiring program, turns out there was about a dozen of us that came in over a six month period. It was clear right from the get-go and of course I knew this and even was warned by others, they did not like having to hire in people like myself.
And it wasn't me, per se, as just me as a person being hired, it was the fact that we were looked at and it was very clear as we started our jobs we were very much outsiders and they were going to make sure that we did not have any direct authority that it would be very difficult for us to make any difference at all, because they were hiring people, I mean we had a senior systems engineer, we had requirements people, they had policy people, they had individuals actually hired to lead the legislative affairs office from the outside, who had never worked at NSA before, all of these people, some financial management folks who had been brought it, it was a very short duration program because 9/11 happened so we were distributed across NSA, most of us were actually assigned to the Signals Intelligence Directorate.
R.K.: So wait, you're saying there was a lot of pressure on Hayden, where was the pressure coming from?
T.D.: From Congress and other stake-holders but primarily the committees that had oversight responsibilities. They recognized over the course of the nineties and during a number of studies that were made, that NSA was severely challenged and even handicapped by the post-Cold War era. That it was having great difficulty, it was even struggling to make the shift from the analog world to the digital.
It's one of the great ironies of NSA's history, that they did not consider internet to have any secrets worth knowing because it was open, the only secrets worth knowing were the ones that were hidden and the ones that took a lot of technical prowess to figure it out. It was primarily obviously aimed at what was the legacy threat, the Cold War existential threat of Communism as embodied in the Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea, those were the primary countries, and the Warsaw Pact to include East Germany.
All that appeared after the fall of The Wall, everything kind of crumbled, in ninety two, ninety three, the Soviet Union implodes, something that I would become quite re- familiarized with when I was in Moscow here a few months ago presenting Edward Snowden with the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence Award, and the ironies in history are not lost on me as I walked across Red Square and looked across Lenin's Tomb being rehabilitated, so yeah it's, here we are twenty plus years later but that post-Cold War era threw NSA into a severe, and I want to emphasis severe identity crisis and it was like, who is the enemy now?
And in fact during this period I can even remember as a contractor, you know people talked to me about the good ole' days of the Soviet Union and the Red Scare when things were a lot more symmetric and you didn't have the kind of messiness of this multi-polar world in what was largely a bi-polar world, so institutionally, it was a very challenging time. Some people joked that NSA was spending most of its days gazing at it's collective navel trying to figure out what it was supposed to be.
Of course the internet and the digital age boomed, it really took off in the nineties, the early to mid-nineties, NSA was playing catch up and it's quite remarkable to me that NSA ultimately answered the challenge. They actually did. But we're now seeing the full flower of how that challenge was met.
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