Bob Sakakeeny: Ain’t Dead Yet

AIN’T DEAD YET

by Bob Sakakeeny

After returning from Frankfurt, I resumed my day job. I had expected to be assigned to the second Cuban but learned later that my replacement was a guy out of our base in Zweibrucken, Germany.

My team was severely understaffed, so we were on 12-hour shifts six days a week. Although recruitment had ramped up for all commands, Vietnam was getting most of the new personnel. More importantly, it took at least nine months to train analysts, so getting new staff was painfully slow.

Since my base commander hated my guts, when I got called to his office, I fully expected the Colonel to assign me to latrine duty. Instead, he gave me orders to go to GCHQ in Cheltenham – about an hour away – to be the liaison with the Five-Eyes.

We need to take a quick break for a history and acronym lesson. Most fans of British TV know that MI-5 and MI-6 are the British intelligence services responsible for monitoring internal (MI-5) and external (MI-6) threats (think FBI and CIA). GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) was the British signals intelligence operation. During WWII, America, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand shared resources to capture, analyze, and report on enemy communications. For a non-technical understanding of this work, watch the great movie The Imitation Game. And, for a higher-level understanding, talk to the lady in our building who spent 26 years working with the NSA.

Post-war, the Five-Eyes collaboration was formalized, and because of the sheer size of its budget, the NSA was the acknowledged leader of the pack, with GCHQ a feisty second in command. At the time of this story, the NSA relied on the armed services to collect the vast amounts of intelligence data and do the initial analysis, but everything was sent back to NSA headquarters in Maryland. The Army Security agency monitored enemy army units, the Naval Security Group had its obvious assignment, and I was in the Air Force Security Service. Pre-satellite listening stations had to be located near a signal’s source, so most of the listening posts were outside the US.

The base I was on had a two-fold mission: monitor the Soviet air force activities between Murmansk and Moscow and consolidate and transmit all the communications from the various listening posts in Europe to the US.

Thus endeth the lesson.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” the 34th president {Eisenhower} warned. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

One night an analyst and an operator on the mids-shift woke me up with an urgent request to go back to the bunker. They had intercepted a radar signal from a station outside of Moscow and needed an immediate ruling on how to alert Washington to it. As we watched the replay on a small screen originally used as an oscilloscope, we saw an object flying at a high speed coming from the north and heading toward Moscow. Suddenly, a smaller object was seen rising from the ground, intercepting and then destroying the larger object.

I got on the phone and called my counterpart at GCHQ, and he used another phone to call NSA headquarters. While we were talking, I had my operator duplicate the tape, so when ordered to go to Cheltenham I was able to grab it and set off in my trusty steed – a god-awful 1957 VW Bug. I had to wait at the GCHQ security gate because the guards did not believe that a lowly American enlisted man was allowed to see a senior UK officer at 4 in the morning.

Once inside the compound, we replayed the tape several times at various speeds. We finally agreed that we had witnessed a test of an Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM). We agreed that I would return to my base, send out an alert (called Critic), and continue analyzing the tape.

After a week of bleary-eyed work and constant calls, it suddenly dawned on me that I had screwed up. I had watched the transmission too many times but had failed to listen to it. I went back to the operator’s rack and had them mount the tape on the best audio equipment we would find.

Since I was not an operator, I had to rely on their expertise. After playing the tape’s audio a few times, we called over the section chief. This was an old veteran who had started in the Army Signal Corp during WWII. He listened twice and said with a scowl that it was a fake. I didn’t understand his reasons for determining it

was a fake until he said it was too smooth. In the days of analog transmission, there was always a lot of noise which caused little blips in a track. Like the difference between AM and FM radio.

My little pea brain reacted – finally. The boys at 5-Eyes must have realized this before I did, given their superior equipment and much longer experience analyzing signals. I finally understood that I had screwed myself and had been screwed.

I found an isolated teletype machine, turned off the noisy punch tape recorder, and sent a second Critic correcting the first. There wasn’t a test of an ABM system but instead an advancement in the creation of flight simulations.

Within 24 hours I got calls from the head of the Security Service, the Pentagon, and the White House telling me to retract my retraction. The President and Congress had used the first Critic to request funding for the development of an American ABM system. I was too dumb to give in to the pressure – picture saying no to LBJ. In a short time, the issue became moot as Congress passed the first of many bills funding the ABM development – a technology that still doesn’t work.

I took a short time off, and when I returned to duty, one of the linguists I worked with brought me a printout of a message just intercepted: будьте осторожны, Сак вернулся. {watch out, Sak is back}.

When the base commander sent for me again, I learned that my section was to be grown to full strength, but I had to train some who would be reassigned to Vietnam. Reward and punishment for the ABM fiasco.

My chief came with me – he wanted to verify that I was having one-onone’s with the CO for legitimate reasons. NCOs were the backbone of the Security Service while officers were necessary pimples.

As the new analysts arrived over the next few months, my chief and I had conversations about how to select the three who would be sent to Vietnam. He said he had one seasoned analyst who was crazy enough to keep volunteering for Vietnam, so we agreed to swap him for one of the Jeeps.

As the training continued, our small group met weekly to review our assignments and get some quick weapons training. While troops in Vietnam were

issued M16’s, most of the Air Force was getting M14’s – similar in many ways but prone to jamming.

The intercept site on Monkey Mountain, outside of Da Nang, was operational but was just having its equipment upgraded to intercept digital signals the North was thought to be adding to its air defense. Another analyst from San Vito, Italy, was assigned to the group to provide 24-7 coverage.

I won’t bore you with the details of our 36-hour flight except to note we were flying East from England, and we used prop airplanes, not jets. My ass still hurts with the memory of that ride.

We were given 24 hours to rest up and adjust to the heat. On the 2nd day, we met with our Marine escorts – Monkey Mountain was a joint operation between the two services. We choppered from sprawling Da Nang to the base of the mountain, and then walked to the top. Wait, what? The Marine escort needed to assess the vulnerability of our site to a ground attack, so they decided to combine their missions.

Our first surprise was that we were walking through woods and not jungle. As we walked up the slope, we felt the air get cooler – a welcome relief from the heat and humidity. One grunt, who had a radio strapped to his back, suddenly gave the halt sign. While on our haunches he whispered that the VC were on the mountain and launching mortars onto the edge of the airfield. Our group was to start moving East and a platoon of Marines from the base would be coming from the other side.

Our backpacks were relatively light, so we made good time. We also made a bad noise. We also were not listening. When the gunfire started, we faced uphill until realizing it was coming from downhill. We had to turn around while making sure we didn’t shoot our guys. As I turned, I felt a sharp sting above my left hip,

but it wasn’t debilitating. Just below me Andy, the gung-ho analyst who kept volunteering for Vietnam, was down and not moving. We were returning fire as best we could when my M14 jammed. All I could do was use my .45 – in the woods, facing downhill while the enemy was using superior AK-47s.

Fortunately, the Marine platoon arrived and soon the fighting stopped. In addition to Andy, one of the Marines was dead and two others were wounded. When the medic arrived, he noticed I was bleeding. A bullet had traveled through Andy and hit me.

After action, actions. The remaining analysts were taken up to the intercept site, the wounded were patched up at Da Nang, and I had the bullet removed and stitched under a local.

You won’t find Andy’s name on the Wall. The brass had his body flown to Clark Air Base in the Philippines and his parents were told he was killed during a training exercise. As I flew home my wound became infected and the bacteria ended up corroding the valve between my stomach and colon. To this day I cannot eat a full meal without getting sick to my stomach, since food only flows slowly through the damaged valve.

Monkey Mountain is now a prime resort where the Vietnamese can vacation with their families.