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supposed to be. NSA was not supposed to find out about an airborne attack on America from CNN, after millions of other Americans had already witnessed it. It was supposed to find out first, from its own ultrasecret warning center, and then pass the information on to the White House and the strategic military forces.
    Among the agency’s most secret units is the Defense Special Missile and Astronautics Center (DEFSMAC), located within the NSA center. At the entrance is its seal: an orbiting satellite and a patch of stars above the earth. Even within the intelligence community, DEFSMAC (pronounced “deaf-smack”) remains little known. In fact, its purpose is to serve as the nation’s chief warning bell for a planned attack on America. It serves as the focal point for “all-source” intelligence—listening posts, early-warning satellites, human agents, and seismic detectors.
    Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara established the joint NSA-DIA activity at NSA on April 27, 1964, largely as a result of the Cuban missile crisis. “You didn’t want NORAD fooling around in technologies that they didn’t understand, or trying to evaluate a bunch of raw data, so DEFSMAC was put in,” said Lt. Gen. Daniel O. Graham, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Since its beginning, the organization has been headed by an NSA civilian with a DIA colonel as deputy director.
    As other warning organizations shrank with the end of the Cold War, DEFSMAC more than doubled its size to more than 230 people. This included a new, eighty-five-person operations center. Where once DEFSMAC had only Russia and China to monitor, its widely dispersed targets continued to grow to include India, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan.
    DEFSMAC watches the earth as a physician listens to a heart, hoping to detect the first irregular beat indicating that an attack is about to take place. “It has all the inputs from all the assets, and is a warning activity,” a former senior NSA official once explained. “They probably have a better feel for any worldwide threat to this country from missiles, aircraft, or overt military activities, better and more timely, at instant fingertip availability, than any group in the United States.”
    Upon receiving indicators that an attack was imminent, DEFSMAC officials would immediately send out near-real-time and in-depth, all-source intelligence alerts to almost two hundred “customers,” including the White House Situation Room, the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon, the DIA Alert Center, and listening posts around the world. At the same time, elsewhere within DEFSMAC, analysts would be closely monitoring all intercepts flooding in; examining the latest overhead photography; and analyzing data from early-warning satellites 22,300 miles above the equator. DEFSMAC would then flash the intelligence to the U.S. Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, NORAD at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, and other emergency command centers.
    But on the morning of September 11, DEFSMAC learned of the massive airborne attacks after the fact—not from America’s multibillion-dollar spy satellites or its worldwide network of advanced listening posts, or its army of human spies, but from a dusty, off-the-shelf TV set.
    Shortly after 9:00, General Hayden’s principal concern was not finding the next target but becoming the next target. He summoned his top internal and physical security people to his office. “My intention,” he said, “was to plumb their minds, to determine what do we do now to protect ourselves.”
    From the ground, NSA is one of the most well-protected facilities on earth. Hidden from the outside world by tall earthen berms and thick forest trees, it is surrounded by a labyrinth of barbed-wire fences, massive boulders placed close together, motion detectors, hydraulic antitruck devices, thick cement barriers, and cameras that peer down from rooftops. As part of the