Untitled Document

02 June 2004

Code Talking

The war over our erstwhile ally Ahmad Chalabi has heated up this morning. It caught my attention as my computer crashed, attempting to digest the New York Times.

I rebooted the system to discover that Mr. Chalabi has been further damned as we install a new Government in Iraq, and prepare for the transfer of sovereignty to something that appears to not be a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Coalition Forces.

Mr. Chalabi had been seated with the First Lady at the State of the Union Address, but his stock has fallen fast.

Therfe is word that the spy agencies have had it in for him, resenting his direct access to the Administration and the policy-makers at the Pentagon. They think his assessments of joyful welcoming Iraqis was a bit rosy, and that some of his information was self-serving.

I can certainly accept that, but this morning the attacks have shifted to a new level.

I love it when the amateurs play spook. The leaks this morning have wandered over into the Sources-and-Methods country, and of course they have got it wrong. Or perhaps better phrased, it is not quite right, and in the business of code-talking nuance is everything.

Let's start with the basic charge. The New York Times says that Chalabi told an Iranian official that the United States had broken the secret communications code of Iran's intelligence service.

Code-breaking is hard work, and sometimes it is impossible. The simplest and most elegant code ever used was that of the Navajo radiomen in the Pacific, since the language has no written form and the Japanese had no way to break it.

But there is a lot of code-talking going on this morning.

If he did so, it would have been a critical disclosure, and would have ruined some fine code-breaking, and one of our best sources of unvarnished information about the situation inside Iran.

It is a damning indictment, a refinement of charges that the Administration began in a general manner several weeks ago. Chalabi's National Congress, one which apparently had as much support in Dearborn Michigan as it did in Iraq. Chalabi lost his access and aid and his headquarters in Baghdad were raided.

Mr. Chalabi says he knew nothing and would not have disclosed it if he had.

Perish the thought. Imagine someone in the Middle East using information for advantage!

The story this morning is that in mid-April Chalabi told the Baghdad station chief of Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security- the Vezarat-e Ettela'at va Amniat-e Keshvar (VEVAK ) that the Americans were reading his message traffic.

The Iranian spy service is the revolutionary successor to the Shah's SAVAK, and is considered a sophisticated player in the region. Since the 1979 revolution, VEVAK has been involved in over 200 terrorist attacks, specializing in the assassinations of nearly a hundred Iranian dissidents around the world.

The service has also been credited with involvement in the suicide bombings at the American and French military barracks in Beirut in 1983, (299 KIA), a series of bombings in Paris in September 1986 (12 KIA), attacks on the Israeli embassy and a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994 (125 KIA) and the bombing in Dhahran in June 1995 (19 KIA).

These are not nice people, and you can imagine that they have had our attention.

So if we had compromised their communications, it certainly was after 1995. The dramatic reduction in the number of foreign dead would suggest either better intelligence or a policy change on the part of the Iranians. But what is the next step in the Chalabi drama?

What does the seasoned VEVAK official do?

He doesn't use a one-time pad, or fly home himself to tell people the news in a swept room or shave someone's head, tattoo the message on, and let the hair grow back. He immediately sends an encrypted cable to Tehran with the big scoop, encrypted by the same code that Chalabi has just told him is compromised by the drunken Americans.

I may have been born at night, but it wasn't last night.

But I have also been around the block a couple times, and believe H.L. Menken's dictum that you can't go wrong underestimating people's intelligence. Sometimes things happen in the world because people are lazy and stupid.

But that is not universal, and underestimating a trained Persian assassin is done at your peril.

The Iranians might have read the classic World War II ploy by which the Pacific Fleet divined the target of the Japanese Main Battle Fleet. Codes of that day were complex and multi-leveled. Within the encrypted system were buried other operational codes. The Americans knew that the Japanese were headed for somewhere they called "AF." But he did not have the code-book that told him what the two letters meant.

Navy Spook Joe Rochefort was on the case at Station Hypo in Hawaii. He was one of the most gifted crypt-analysts of his generation. He was partly into a couple of the Japanese naval codes, which changed constantly. He was convinced that the two-letter code "AF" was Midway Island. In a brilliant gambit, he had the communications center on the island broadcast an innocuous logistics message in the clear. Midway reported their air conditioning was broken and needed parts.

Sure enough, the Japanese encrypted messages began to report that "AF" needed parts, and the mystery was solved. Chest Nimitz, Fleet Commander, believed Rochefort's deduction, and sent everything he had to meet the Japanese. We know how that one turned out, though it was a much closer-run affair than any of us would like to think, despite the crucial intelligence.

But as to the Chalabi affair, the press claims this morning that another encrypted message was sent by the Iranians, specifically referencing a cache of weapons inside Iraq. The assumption was that if the code had been broken, the Americans would have immediately showed up at the site.

Nothing happened.

I remember standing on a pier in Pearl Harbor, not far from where Joe Rochefort worked. It was in the mid-1980s, and we had just realized that something was very wrong. The Russians seemed to be reading our traffic as fast as we were.

We didn't know about traitor Johnny Walker, who sold out our codes, or his buddy Jerry Whitworth who was still selling them as we stood there discussing what to do.

Among other things, it cost us over a billion dollars to replace code machines and make other changes in military hardware because of the secrets that Walker's spy ring disclosed.

So this morning, senior officials are confirming the Times account of the story, and the F.B.I. has opened an investigation seeking The Truth.

I'm not going to hold my breath on that one.

Whatever happened, drunken Americans or smart Iranians or change in policy, is not what they are reporting. Sometimes people just change their codes. It is good business practice, but on the other hand, how often do you change the password on your personal computer?

There are bad people out there, you know, and many of them are talking in code.