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drugs, and he created the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) to conduct that campaign. Nixon expected the CIA and NSA to cooperate. At Fort Meade that meant Minaret should add American drug traffickers to its list. At CIA, Project Chaos was supposed to identify the traffickers, and NSA began to send Langley data on the pushers beginning late in 1972. The CIA, uncomfortable that action against drugs beingsent to the United States might be seen as a domestic operation, which implicated its charter prohibitions, stopped work on the drug networks after about six months. Not so Fort Meade. The BNDD put 450 Americans and over 3,000 foreign nationals on NSA’s watch list. At any given time drug suspects accounted for about a third of the names on the watch list. National Security Agency officials later claimed credit for helping to capture several major drug shipments, but provided no details, making such assertions impossible to check.
    Vice Admiral Noel S. Gayler followed General Carter at the helm of the NSA. In January 1971 he extolled NSA’s Minaret collection ability to Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and Attorney General John Mitchell. Gayler’s summary of the points covered is eloquent on the subject of NSA’s pretext for eavesdropping on American activists: they represented “foreign-related subversive activity.” 29 It was the same excuse the CIA used for Project Chaos. A week later a senior subordinate, NSA assistant director Benson K. Buffham, met the same two officials and obtained approval of the notes Gayler had made. On February 5 Mitchell attended a meeting of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, where he told the group that electronic surveillance was being applied to “violence-prone groups,” that there were more wiretaps in place than when the Nixon administration took office, that the NSA was advocating resumption of break-ins, and that all this lay within the scope of routine presidential power. 30
    But it was on Gayler’s watch that the bottom fell out on Minaret. This followed an attempt to prosecute several antiwar protesters for alleged conspiracy to destroy government property, including one man who had aimed at CIA recruiters visiting the University of Michigan. In legal maneuvers preceding trial it emerged that the government case was based on warrantless wiretaps. The defense moved to exclude the evidence. The 1968 Omnibus Crime Control Act had specifically required proper warrants for eavesdropping.Moreover, the phone taps here had been in place far longer than was typical, as if authorities had listened in until they could find something, anything, with which to charge the defendants. The dispute went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Nixon administration based its case precisely on the “national security” exception in the 1968 act—also the only legal basis for NSA monitoring. On June 19, 1972, the Supreme Court in the “Keith decision” ruled unanimously that warrants were necessary before commencing a wiretap even where national security issues were involved. 31 All Minaret phone monitoring was, of course, warrantless.
    Vice Admiral Gayler’s successor, Lieutenant General Samuel Phillips, did not immediately halt Minaret or Shamrock. Secrecy became the sole protection. As with the CIA’s mail-opening, halting an activity was much harder than initiating it. Fortunately for the NSA, the Vietnam war was winding down, reducing demand for intelligence on protesters. The CIA also helped indirectly with its decision to terminate work on narcotics trafficking. That suggested the need for an equivalent Pentagon review. There officials were also becoming more squeamish—by this time the secretary of defense was none other than James R. Schlesinger. On July 5, 1973, the assistant secretary responsible for intelligence matters asked the Pentagon’s general counsel to rule on whether the NSA