So I was brought in, I gave up my career in industry and so I chose to serve my country again for the fourth time after having served my country as Airforce, enlisted Aircrew member during the Cold War and then later for a brief period at the CIA, and then I was an all-source intelligence officer with the United States Navy Reserves, I was assigned to the J-2, the National Military Joint Intelligence Center.
R.K.: What did you do at the CIA and how was that different from NSA?
T.D.: Well it was imagery analysis primarily. It was national photograph interpretation center. We analyzed over-head of various types. Non-SIGINT, non-COMINT, non-El-INT per se, it was primarily imagery from various sources, what people referred to as National Technical Means; technical means that it exists in the form of satellite and other specialized vehicles so I was there at the CIA doing imagery and I was actually assigned to the Science and Technology Branch and in the Intelligence Directorate, the DI, the Director of Intelligence, and looking at weapons of mass destruction, particularly radiological, biological and nuclear.
R.K.: And when were you there?
T.D.: The late eighties.
R.K.: Okay. So -
T.D.: I left and became a contractor and then I was with the Navy for five years as a Reserve Intel Officer, and then you accelerate forward and I did a whole lot in between including being
in on the, what I call the go-go nineties period, where I did a lot of work in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.
R.K.: So I guess what I am curious about is when we were together having dinner Tuesday night you talked about the culture of the NSA and the decision making process, how there is a kind of institutionalized pathology and dynamics there. Can you talk a little bit about how that works at NSA? What it's like and how it's different from CIA?
T.D.: That would take several hours to "unfold" the culture, you have to remember NSA was born out of the early years of the Cold War and that was nineteen fifty two, although there were predecessor organizations like the ASA, the Security Agency, it was actually formed five years after the National Securities Act by a special directive, a secret directive that remains mostly secret to this day, signed by President Truman, and its primary mission was foreign intelligence and in particular is was to deal with the Communist Threat and I mention the countries that, back then of course, the big big one of course was Communist China that came out in nineteen forty nine but the Soviet Union in particular was considered the moral threat to the United States and so with the rise of technology and communications, Signals Intelligence which is the combination of communications and electronic intelligence and there are other specialized "Ints" as well in that space.
That became the primary mission of NSA but it was formed in extraordinary secrecy, actually far more secret than the National Security Act that created the CIA out of the predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services that came about during WWII.
So this is in the deepest secrecy, no one knew about NSA, per se. Even when I was there as a contractor back in the late eighties you didn't talk about where you worked, it was always euphemistic phrases. If you were a contractor you always referred to NSA as the "Merlin Procurement office".
Typically if you were assigned to NSA as an employee you just said you worked for DOD which technically was true, although NSA also had responsibilities under the Directorate of Central Intelligence before the reorganization took place in the Bush era, what they called Title Fifty, wheras Title 10 was under the Department of Defense.
R.K.: When we had dinner you talked about some kind of institutionalised...
T.D.: Oh, sorry. I want to remind your audience, NSA has always been headed by a military general. It is fundamentally a military organization. It provides support to the war-fighter, it was always considered a technical collection agency, it was never designed as a 'finished' intelligence agency like the CIA. It is important to note that and it was forward intelligence facing. Now having said that, there are many many instances as..., in particular we simply don't learn the lessons of history. We've been here before with the abuse of national instruments of power, particularly secret power against our own country, and never mind some of the foreign follies and shenanigans over the years, and the failures. I am just talking about the domestic front alone.
NSA has this habit, when they can get away with it or under secret authorization, of violating the constitution on a rather significant scale, starting by the way in WWII which in some ways you could justify because of the war but I'll just give this as one example, Operation Shamrock, and the reason I am going to mention it is because of the most recent disclosure based on what Snowden has provided to journalists and reporters, it came out in the Guardian of yesterday.
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