NUMBERS STATIONS

During and since the  Cold War, several shortwave radio stations have transmitted continuous voice broadcasts of apparently random numbers in numerous languages in four or five figure groups. No public statement has been made by any originating country concerning the purpose of these signals, but they have a clandestine role in communicating with agents operating in denied areas. The numbers may conceal an  enciphered message, or a particular sequence broadcast at a predetermined time may convey a hidden meaning in much the way the messages personnel that accompanied the BBC news bulletins during World War II acted as a one-way channel to recipients briefed to understand the meaning of certain otherwise innocuous texts.
The broadcasts are not licensed by the International Telecommunications Union, although a Spanish four-digit channel was traced to the  Central Intelligence Agency’s transmitter at Warrenton, Virginia, and Cuba is the source of similar five-figure groups. Many of the transmissions appear to be live, but some are automated, with distinctive clicks to be heard between each number. The most common languages are English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Czech, and Chinese, and the transmissions are made in the AM mode, making them easy to receive on conventional radios. Some are sent only at particular times and on regular days, while others are almost continuous, sometimes being duplicated on two different frequencies. One of the more distinctive, transmitted from Cyprus, begins each hour with the opening notes of “The Lincolnshire Poacher” as its station identification.

NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION

Concern about nuclear matériel and components falling into the hands of irresponsible organizations or governments has led Western intelligence agencies to monitor the work of the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) in Vienna and intervene to prevent the spread of plutonium, weapons-grade uranium, and the equipment required to enrich atomic fuel. The first significant atomic development by a nonsignatory of the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty was Israel, which built a civil reactor at Dimona and then began to accumulate a nuclear arsenal of landmines and free-fall bombs. Successive Israeli governments have consistently refused to allow external inspection of the site, but disclosures made by a former technician, Mordechai Vanunu, in 1986, a year after he had been laid off, served to prove that Israel had acquired a far larger atomic stockpile than anticipated.
With 40 countries possessing the technology to construct reactors, the IAEA’s task is to detect any enrichment program and give advice to the United Nations Security Council regarding the production of weapons-grade matériel or the acquisition of other essential equipment or components. IAEA investigations conducted in Iran, Libya, and North Korea have demonstrated the spread of expertise from Pakistan’s A. Q. Khan and the former Soviet republics, and the inability of international inspectors to gain access to suspect sites in Iraq proved to be one of the catalysts for the 1992 Gulf War.

NOVEMBER 17 (N17)

A Greek terrorist organization credited with the murder of the  Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Athens, Richard Welch at his home in December 1975, as well as at least 50 bombings and 22 other assassinations. A self-styled MarxistLeninist revolutionary group named after the day on which the Greek Junta had ordered the army to occupy the campus of the University of Athens to suppress a student uprising in 1973, the group appeared immune to all attempts at penetration until Savas Xiros was injured while planting a bomb in Piraeus in June 2002. He identified his brother Vasilis as the gunman who had shot the British defense attaché, Brigadier Stephen Saunders, and named Alexandros Giotopoulos as N17’s leader. Both he and his principal subordinate, Paulos Serifis, were arrested and convicted of terrorist offenses committed over the previous 30 years.

NORWOOD, MELITA

Identified by the  KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin in 1992 as a lifelong Communist and spy, Norwood had been code-named HOLA and had been in contact with KGB’s  illegal rezident in London until January 1961. Born in London in 1912 of an immigrant Latvian bookbinder named Sirnis, Norwood had been a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and had been linked to Percy Glading in 1938 when the former CPGB national organizer was imprisoned for espionage. Her name and her family’s address in Hampstead were found in a notebook owned by Glading at the time of his arrest, when he was charged with stealing secrets from the Woolwich Arsenal, but MI5  had not pursued the clue. Later she had joined the headquarters of the British Non-Ferrous Metals Association in Euston as a typist for one of its directors, G. J. Bailey, and this had given her access to nuclear secrets, as the organization was a component of the Anglo-American Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb, against which the NKVD had initiated Operation ENORMOZ. In 1964 Norwood had been tentatively identified as the spy code-named TINA who had been mentioned in a single VENONA message from Moscow dated 16 September 1945 instructing her not to confide in her husband, a Communist school teacher, about her espionage. She died in June 2005, while her biography was being written by an English academic, David Bourke.

NORWEGIAN SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE

During the Cold War, a network of Norwegian  signals intelligence facilities in the far north of the country scooped up the VHF transmissions of Red Army units garrisoned in the Baltic states. Analysis of routine call signs and wireless traffic allowed the Norwegians, acting as surrogates for the U.S. National Security Agency, to monitor troop movements and any sudden deployment to the south or west. Soviet signals were intercepted at Tomaselv on Vadso Island, Kirkenes and Viksjofjell, and Fasuske. They were then sent to the NSA via an American communications relay at Gardermoen, on the outskirts of Oslo not far from the Norwegian signals intelligence headquarters at Saeter, or via a teleprinter to Chicksands in England. In addition, the Norwegians ran two direction-finding stations at Heimdal outside Trondheim, and at Randaberg, near Stavanger, with a further site at Nordstrand, outside Oslo, which concentrated on the southern  Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact satellite countries. The significance of the Norwegian activity can be judged by the fact that the entire Norwegian Intelligence Service only ever employed a thousand personnel, of whom more than half were engaged on “high priority” work, which was a euphemism for signals intelligence.

NORUSA

Acronym for the Norway–United States Communications Intelligence Agreement concluded in December 1954 governing the interception of signals from Norwegian stations and access to the resulting intelligence product.

NON-OFFICAL COVER (NOC)

The American term for commercial, business, or journalistic cover adopted by professional intelligence officers while conducting clandestine operations. Unlike their colleagues who may enjoy consular or diplomatic cover and therefore an immunity from arrest in their country of accreditation, NOCs are extremely vulnerable and therefore are supported by several layers of back-stopping.

NATIONAL UNDERWATER RECONNAISSANCE OFFICE (NURO)

Ajoint U.S. Navy/Central Intelligence Agency group created during the Cold War to coordinate and fund special projects conducted by  submarines, principally the USS Halibut, which in August 1968 found the wreck of the K-129 and serviced the  IVY BELLS cable pods: Seawolf, Parche, and Richard B. Russell.

NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL (NSC)

Created by the National Security Act of 1947, the NSC advises the president of the United States on security, intelligence, and foreign policy issues and consists of the vice president, the secretary of state, and the secretary of defense. The NSC is headed by the national security adviser, who is supported by a staff on temporary assignment from other departments.
Although the NSC has no operational capability, in 1985 Director of Central Intelligence William Casey opted to circumvent congressional oversight by using the NSC staff to undertake a complicated series of transactions that could not be completed legally by the Central Intelligence Agency. His objective was to free the CIA station chief in Beirut, William Buckley, who had been abducted by Tehran-controlled Hezbollah terrorists in March. The scheme, later known as the Iran-Contra affair, was intended to arrange through intermediaries for the sale of embargoed weapons to Tehran and to divert the windfall profits to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels who had been barred from CIA financial support since the passage of the Bolland Amendment in December 1982. Almost coincidentally, in January 1986, CIA pilot Eugene Hasenfus was captured in Nicaragua when his supply plane was shot down, apparent proof of violations of the Bolland Amendment. A subsequent investigation conducted by Senator John Tower revealed the extent to which Casey, who succumbed to a brain tumor in January 1987, had masterminded the operation, and consequently Col. Oliver North and two of the president’s national security advisers, Adm. John Poindexter and Robert McFarlane, were convicted of various offenses connected with the arms sales, diversion of funds, and misleading Congress and were fined.

NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY (NSA)

Created in October 1952 from the Armed Forces Security Agency, which was itself the successor to the Signal Security Agency that had conducted interception operations during World War II, the NSA is based at Fort Meade, Maryland, and is responsible for conducting signals intelligence operations for the United States government. The NSA was considered so secret, until its charter was published in 1984, that it was often referred to as “No Such Agency” even though it was the largest federal employer, with an estimated 40,000 personnel worldwide. The NSA runs its own intercept operations and processes raw intelligence collected by the U.S. Naval Security Group, the Army Intelligence and Security Command, and the Air Intelligence Agency.
The directors of the NSAhave been Gen. Ralph Canine (1952–56), Gen. John Samford (1956–60), Adm. Hugh Frost (1960–62), Gen. Gordon Blake (1962–65), Gen. Marshall Carter (1965–69), Adm. Noel Gayler (1969–72), Gen. Samuel Phillips (1972–73), Gen. Lew Allen (1973–77), Adm. Bobby Inman (1977–81), Gen. Lincoln Faurer (1981–85), Gen. William Odom (1985–88), Adm. William Studeman (1988–92), Adm. John McConnell (1992–96), Gen. Kenneth Minnihan (1996–99), and Gen. Michael Hayden (1999– ).

NATIONAL RECONNAISSANCE OFFICE (NRO)

Created in August 1960, the NRO was given responsibility for the supervision of satellite systems in the United States, notionally under the secretary of defense but actually answering to the director of central intelligence, who assigned personnel to the NRO, was its principal consumer, set its requirements, and provided the imagery analysis. The existence of the organization, which operates more than 30 ground stations across the globe and is based near Dulles International Airport, in Virginia just outside Washington, D.C., remained unannounced until 1992. In 1995 some responsibility for product processing was passed to the U.S. National Imagery and Mapping Agency. In 2005 the NRO’s director was Peter J. Teets.

NATIONALINTELLIGENCE DIRECTOR (NID)

Apost created in the United States by the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004 in response to recommendations made following the perceived intelligence failure of 11 September 2001. John Negroponte and his deputy, Gen. Michael Hayden, took supervisory responsibility for entire United States intelligence community, comprising the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Security Agency, the National Counterintelligence Executive, the U.S. Air Force’s  Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance Directorate, the U.S. Army’s G-2 Intelligence Office, the U.S. Marine Corps’ Intelligence Department, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Department of Energy’s Intelligence Office and Counterintelligence Office, the Department of Homeland Security’s Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate, the U.S. Coast Guard’s Intelligence Directorate, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Office of Intelligence and its counterterrorism and counterintelligence divisions, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and the U.S. Treasury’s Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Office.

NATIONAL IMAGERY AND MAPPING AGENCY (NIMA)

This organization is a 1996 amalgamation in the United States of the Defense Mapping Agency, the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office, the Central Imagery Office, and the Defense Dissemination Program Office. In November 2003 it was retitled the  National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

NATIONAL GEOSPATIAL-INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (NGA)

Based in Bethesda, Maryland, and created in November 2003, the NGAis the new title of the reorganized National Imagery and Mapping Agency.