National Security Agency

[Magda Hassan]

The Secret Sentry Declassified

Declassified Documents Reveal the Inner Workings
and Intelligence Gathering Operations of
the National Security Agency

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 278

Posted - June 19, 2009

For more information contact:
Matthew Aid - (202) 994-7000

Washington, D.C., June 19, 2009 - Declassified documents confirm that prior to the launch of the first spy satellites into orbit by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in the early 1960s, the Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) collected by the National Security Agency and its predecessor organizations was virtually the only viable means of gathering intelligence information about what was going on inside the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, North Vietnam, and other communist nations. Yet, for the most part, the NSA and its foreign partners could collect only bits and pieces of huge numbers of low-level, uncoded, plaintext messages, according to Archive visiting fellow, Matthew M. Aid, who today posted a collection of declassified documents obtained for his new book The Secret Sentry on the Archive’s Web site.

• The Secret Sentry discloses that the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was far from the first time when U.S. government officials, including senior military commanders and the White House, “cherry picked” intelligence information to fit preconceived notions or policies and ignored intelligence which ran contrary to their expectations. The Secret Sentry and the documents posted today show that widespread manipulation of intelligence also occurred during the Korean and Vietnam Wars for example, when Washington ignored intelligence on Chinese intervention in Korea, resulting in catastrophic consequences. [See Document 9 and Document 21]
  

• The Secret Sentry also details how since the end of World War II, constant changes in computer, telecommunications, and communications security technologies have been the most important determinants of NSA’s ability to produce intelligence. NSA has oftentimes found itself behind the curve in terms of its ability or willingness to adapt to technological changes, with delays and bureaucratic inertia causing immense harm to the agency’s ability to perform its mission. [See Document 16, for example]. As a result, during the past four decades NSA has dramatically increased the amount of the raw material that it collects, even while it has produced less and less intelligence information. According to Matthew Aid’s informed sources, during the Reagan administration in the 1980s, NSA processed, analyzed, and reported approximately 20 percent of the communications traffic it intercepted. Today, that number has dropped to less than 1 percent. For example, during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, NSA was unable to process 60 percent of the Iraqi messages it intercepted, while the U.S. military SIGINT units participating in the invasion processed less than 2 percent of the Iraqi military communications traffic that they intercepted.
  

Today’s posting of 24 documents consists of a selection of reports and memoranda prepared by NSA officials concerning the role played by Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) in selected military conflicts and crises, a number of classified internal histories written by NSA historians on key events in the agency’s past, and a selection of declassified articles from NSA internal journals.
Archive Visiting Fellow Matthew M. Aid obtained the documents while conducting research for his new book, The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency (Bloomsbury, 2009). For the National Security Archive, Aid has edited a comprehensive set of declassified documents on the history of the NSA and its predecessor organizations from 1945 to the present, which ProQuest will publish later this year.


The National Security Agency
Edited by Matthew M. Aid
From its headquarters at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, the National Security Agency (NSA) today controls a massive 60,000+ person intelligence organization with an annual budget estimated at over $10 billion, making it the largest spy agency in America and probably the world. NSA’s power and influence within the U.S. intelligence community has grown without interruption since it was created in November 1952, thanks in large part to the agency’s ability to consistently produce copious quantities of reliable intelligence information on a vast array of subjects from around the world (Document 5). And despite the agency’s much publicized recent troubles, SIGINT continues to be the single most important intelligence source available to the President of the United States. As of September 2001, NSA was producing 60 percent of all the material that was to be found in President George W. Bush’s daily intelligence summary, the President’s Daily Brief (Document 4).
But at the time of its birth in November 1952, declassified documents show that NSA was struggling just to survive in a period that a CIA official would later describe as “the Dark Ages of American cryptology." (Note 1) The nascent 7,600-person agency was striving against significant odds to establish itself on a firm footing, build up its intelligence gathering networks aimed at the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, and trying to provide intelligence information for the U.S. military forces fighting in Korea (Document 2, Document 13).
Nowhere were NSA’s problems more evident than in the Korean War, which eventually degenerated into a bloody stalemate pitting U.S. and United Nations forces against the significantly larger Chinese and North Korean militaries. (Note 2) Despite some significant early successes against North Korean communications during the first year of the war (Document 7, Document 23), by the fall of 1952 NSA’s ability to provide meaningful intelligence declined markedly because North Korean and Chinese forces had systematically improved their communications security practices and procedures, reducing NSA’s SIGINT effort to whatever could be picked up from monitoring the enemy’s low-level walkie-talkie communications.
The Korean War also revealed one of the inherent problems afflicting all intelligence agencies--what to do when policymakers and military commanders refuse to heed the intelligence you provide because it conflicts with their own preconceived notions. For example, in the summer and fall of 1950, General Douglas MacArthur stubbornly discounted the SIGINT being sent to him showing an alarming increase in the size of Chinese forces based in Manchuria opposite Korea. By October 1950, the information derived from SIGINT and other intelligence sources overwhelmingly indicated that the Chinese intended to intervene militarily in the Korean War. General MacArthur and Washington ignored all of the indicators, with disastrous consequences (Document 21). In the end, NSA’s experience in the Korea War was not a happy one. A former NSA historian would later write that in Korea “There were successes and there were failures, but the failures tended to overshadow the successes” (Document 22).
NSA’s survival during the dark days of the 1950s was largely due to the efforts of two men. The first was Lt. General Ralph J. Canine, who served as director of NSA and its antecedent, AFSA, from 1951 to 1956. The combative Canine is today credited with lifting NSA out of the chaos that it found itself in by November 1952, and, in the span of four short years, making NSA a top-flight SIGINT organization and a force to be reckoned with inside the U.S. intelligence community (Document 8, Document 18). The second person responsible for NSA’s success during the 1950s was President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who proved to be a critically important supporter of the agency. NSA was repeatedly investigated during the 1950s by a series of panels, all of whom issued highly critical reports about the agency’s health and future prospects (Document 11). But Eisenhower, believing implicitly in the vital importance of the agency and its intelligence product, beat back all attempts by these committees to scale back or alter NSA’s efforts. In retrospect, it is doubtful that NSA would have survived the decade of the 1950s but for Eisenhower’s behind-the-scenes support and encouragement (Document 12).
The agency’s top target throughout the Cold War was the Soviet Union, which consistently ate up more than half of NSA’s collection and analytic resources between 1945 and 1989 (Document 6). The public is generally familiar with the significant successes by NSA’s cryptanalysts in breaking the codes used by Soviet intelligence operatives during World War II, an effort that has become known to history as the Venona decrypts (Document 1).But once the Moscow realized that the U.S. and Britain were breaking its codes, in the fall of 1948 the Soviets changed all their ciphers. It took three decades before Washington regained a degree of access to high-level Soviet communications. Nevertheless, the agency’s SIGINT efforts proved to be critically important in helping the U.S. intelligence community monitor the rising threat posed by the Soviet Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) program (Document 17), which was the highest priority collection target during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Another high priority operation during the 1960s was NSA’s collection efforts aimed at the Soviet’s manned and unmanned space program (Document 21). NSA was also involved, albeit indirectly, in the CIA’s famous Berlin Tunnel Operation, which was not discovered by the Soviets until 1956 (Document 14).
NSA’s performance during the Vietnam War (1961-1975) was marked by a number of notable successes on the battlefield (Document 15, Document 19), which were credited with being instrumental in helping U.S. forces in Southeast Asia win a series of battles against the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces. (Note 3) But NSA was also involved in a number of costly intelligence failures in Vietnam, such as the agency’s mishandling of intelligence during the Tonkin Gulf Crisis of August 1964 (Document 9), which led to America’s full-fledged entry into the Vietnam War.
By the early 1970s, with U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War winding down to its tragic climax, NSA found that it had to dramatically revamp itself in order to handle a series of new technological advances in the computer and telecommunications fields, which were threatening to severely impair the agency’s ability to perform its mission (Document 16). NSA also had to restructure its SIGINT collection efforts to encompass a host of new transnational targets, such as economic intelligence and monitoring the rising threat posed by international terrorism (Document 10).
Throughout its history, a series of catastrophic events have damaged NSA’s codebreaking efforts. One of the worst of these events occurred in January 1968, when North Korean naval forces seized the U.S. Navy spy ship USS Pueblo while it was engaged in an intelligence collection mission off the east coast of North Korea. Within weeks of the loss of the ship, many of NSA’s top intelligence sources in North Korea and elsewhere in the Far East suddenly went off the air (Document 3). After the seizure of the Pueblo, the North Korean government published an expose on the ship’s mission, with a few pages reproducing some of the captured documents (Document 24).

Documents
Note: The following documents are in PDF format.
You will need to download and install the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view.
Document 1: Extracts from Robert Louis Benson and Cecil J. Phillips, History of Venona (Ft. George G. Meade: Center for Cryptologic History, 1995), Top Secret Umbra, NSA FOIA.
Document 2: Thomas L. Burns, The Origins of the National Security Agency U.S. Cryptologic History, Series V, Vol. 1 (Ft. George G. Meade: Center for Cryptologic History, 1990), Top Secret, NSA FOIA.
Document 3: Robert E. Newton, The Capture of the USS Pueblo and Its Effect on SIGINT Operations, U.S. Cryptologic History, Special Series, Crisis Collection, Vol. 7 (Ft. George G. Meade: Center for Cryptologic History, 1992), Top Secret Umbra, NSA FOIA.
Document 4: David A. Hatch, Presidential Transition 2001: NSA Briefs a New Administration (Ft. George G. Meade: Center for Cryptologic History, 2004), Top Secret/COMINT/X1, NSA FOIA.
Document 5: National Cryptologic School, On Watch: Profiles From the National Security Agency’s Past 40 Years (Ft. George G. Meade: National Cryptologic School Press, September 1986), Top Secret Umbra, NSA FOIA.
Document 6: Frank B. Rowlett, Recollections of Work on Russian, February 11, 1965, Top Secret Dinar, NSA FOIA.
Document 7: Unknown Author, SIGINT in the Defense of the Pusan Perimeter: Korea 1950, date unknown, Unclassified with Top Secret Copse attachment, NSA FOIA.
Document 8: Jacob Gurin and deleted, “Ralph J. Canine: Profile of an Unforgettable Personality,” Cryptologic Spectrum, Vol. 1, No. 1, Fall 1969, For Official Use Only, NSA FOIA.
Document 9: Robert J. Hanyok, “Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds and the Flying Fish: SIGINT and the Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2-4 August 1964, Cryptologic Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 4/Vol. 20, No. 1, Winter 2000/Spring 2001, Top Secret/COMINT/X1, NSA FOIA.
Document 10: Robert J. Hanyok, “The First Round: NSA’s Effort Against International Terrorism in the 1970s,” Cryptologic Almanac, 50th Anniversary Series, November-December 2002, Top Secret/COMINT/X1, NSA FOIA.
Document 11: David A. Hatch, “Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?,” Cryptologic Almanac, 50th Anniversary Series, February 2003, Top Secret/COMINT/X1, NSA FOIA.
Document 12: David A. Hatch, “DDE & NSA: An Introductory Survey,” Cryptologic Quarterly, Vol. 23, Nos. 1-2, Spring/Summer 2004, Top Secret/COMINT/X1, NSA FOIA.
Document 13: George F. Howe, “The Early History of NSA,” Cryptologic Spectrum, Vol. 4, No. 2, Spring 1974, Secret, NSA FOIA.
Document 14: William T. Kvetkas, “The Last Days of Enigma,” Cryptologic Almanac, 50th Anniversary Series, March-April 2002, Top Secret/COMINT/X1, NSA FOIA.
Document 15: Major James S. Rayburn, USMC, “Direct Support During Operation DEWEY CANYON,” Cryptologic Spectrum, Vol. 11, No. 3, Summer 1981, Secret Spoke, NSA FOIA.
Document 16: Richard C. Raymond, “Challenge to Sigint: Change or Die,” Cryptologic Spectrum, Vol. 1, No. 13, Fall 1969, For Official Use Only, NSA FOIA.
Document 17: Unknown author, “Early History of the Soviet Missile Program (1945-1953), Cryptologic Spectrum, Vol. 5, No. 3, Summer 1975, Secret, NSA FOIA.
Document 18: Unknown Author, “From Chaos Born: General Canine’s First Charge to the NSA Workforce,” Cryptologic Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 2, Summer 1987.
Document 19: Unknown author, “Operation Starlight: A Sigint Success Story,” Cryptologic Spectrum, Vol. 1, No. 34, Fall 1971, Secret, NSA FOIA.
Document 20: Unknown author, “Stonehouse: First U.S. Collection of deleted [Space] Signals,” Cryptologic Spectrum, Vol. 5, No. 4, Fall 1975, Secret, NSA FOIA.
Document 21: Guy R. Vanderpool, “COMINT and the PRC Intervention in the Korean War,” Cryptologic Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 2, Summer 1996, Top Secret Umbra, NSA FOIA.
Document 22: Thomas R. Johnson, “American Cryptology During the Korean War: Opening the Door a Crack,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 45, No. 3, 2001, Unclassified, CIA FOIA.
Document 23: Richard A. “Dick” Chun, A Bit on the Korean COMINT Effort, 1971, Secret Spoke, NSA FOIA.
Document 24: Les Actes D’Agression Declares de L’Imperialisme U.S. Contre Le Peuple Coreen: Les matériaux concernant les actes d’agression du <Pueblo>, vaisseau-espion de l’armëe d’agression de l’imperialisme americain avant fait profondement intrusion dans les eaux territoriales de la Républicque Populaire Démocratique de Coree [Acts of Aggression Declared by American Imperialism Against the Korean People: Materials concerning the aggressive acts of American imperialism’s armed spy ship, Pueblo, and its deep intrusion in the territorial waters of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea] (Pyongyang: Editions en Langues Etrangeres, 1968) [Excerpts]

Notes
1. This period in NSA’s history is well covered in Thomas R. Johnson, American Cryptology during the Cold War, 1945-1989: Book I: The Struggle for Centralization, 1945-1960 (National Security Agency: Center for Cryptologic History, 1995), Top Secret Umbra, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB260/index.htm
2. A good general overview of the role played by SIGINT in the Korean War can be found in David A. Hatch and Robert Louis Benson, The Korean War: The SIGINT Background, U.S. Cryptologic History, Series V, Vol. 3 (Ft. George G. Meade: Center for Cryptologic History, 2000), Unclassified, http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/declass/k...t_bg.shtml. For an example of a major SIGINT success during the Korean War, see Jill E. Frahm, So Power Can Be Brought Into Play: SIGINT and the Pusan Perimeter, U.S. Cryptologic History, Series V, Vol. 4 (Ft. George G. Meade: Center for Cryptologic History, 2000), Unclassified, http://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_her...eter.shtml.
3. The most detailed single-volume account of NSA’s successes and failures during the Vietnam War can be found in Robert J. Hanyok, Spartans In Darkness: American SIGINT and the Indochina War, 1945-1975 U.S. Cryptologic History, Series VI, Vol. 7 (Ft. George G. Meade: Center for Cryptologic History, 2002), Top Secret/COMINT/X1, http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/cr...rkness.pdf.

[Magda Hassan]

[Magda Hassan]

National Security Agency Releases History of Cold War Intelligence Activities

Soviet Strategic Forces Went on Alert Three Times during September-October 1962 Because of Apprehension over Cuban Situation, Top Secret Codeword History of National Security Agency Shows

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 260

Posted - November 14, 2008

For more information contact:
Matthew Aid (202) 994-7000

In the news

"In a New History of NSA, Its Spies' Successes Are [Redacted]"
By Siobhan Gorman
The Wall Street Journal
November 14, 2008

Read the Documents
Document 1: Thomas R. Johnson, American Cryptology during the Cold War, 1945-1989: Book I: The Struggle for Centralization, 1945-1960 (National Security Agency: Center for Cryptological History, 1995), Top Secret Umbra, Excised copy, pp. i-xvii and 1-155
Document 2: Thomas R. Johnson, American Cryptology during the Cold War, 1945-1989: Book I: The Struggle for Centralization, 1945-1960, pp. 157-287
Document 3: Thomas R. Johnson, American Cryptology during the Cold War, 1945-1989: Book II: Centralization Wins, 1960-1972 (National Security Agency: Center for Cryptological History, 1995), Top Secret Umbra, Excised copy, pp. 289-494
Document 4: Thomas R. Johnson, American Cryptology during the Cold War, 1945-1989: Book II: Centralization Wins, 1960-1972, pp. 495-652
Document 5: Thomas R. Johnson, American Cryptology during the Cold War, 1945-1989: Book III: Retrenchment and Reform, 1972-1980 (National Security Agency: Center for Cryptological History, 1998), Top Secret Umbra, Excised copy, pp. i-ix, and 1-116
Document 6: Thomas R. Johnson, American Cryptology during the Cold War, 1945-1989: Book III: Retrenchment and Reform, 1972-1980, pp. 117-262

Washington DC, November 14, 2008 - Forty-six years ago, a month before the Cuban Missile crisis, Soviet leaders put their strategic forces on their “highest readiness stage since the beginning of the Cold War,” according to a newly declassified internal history of the National Security Agency published today for the first time by the National Security Archive. Possibly responding to President Kennedy’s call for reserves, perhaps worried that the White House had discovered Moscow’s plans to deploy missiles on Cuba, the Kremlin kept forces on alert for 10 days, beginning on September 11, 1962.

The USS Oxford on its maiden voyage, circa August 1961. The Navy wanted to see if this ship was seaworthy, so it not carrying NSA officers on board. Used in patrols of the Caribbean and Latin America, the Oxford was in Cuban waters during the Cuban Missile Crisis. (photo from collection of Matthew Aid)

The NSA’s signals intelligence (SIGINT) history also discloses that, a month later, on October 15th, the Soviets initiated a “precautionary, preliminary” alert, perhaps because Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev feared that U.S. intelligence had discovered the missiles. After President Kennedy’s speech on October 22nd 1962, announcing the “quarantine” (blockade) of Cuba, the Kremlin put military forces, especially air defense forces, on an “extraordinarily high state of alert.” Significantly, “offensive forces avoided assuming the highest readiness stage, as if to insure that Kennedy understood that the USSR would not launch first.”
In response to a declassification request by the National Security Archive, the secretive National Security Agency has declassified large portions of a four-part “top-secret Umbra” study, American Cryptology during the Cold War. Despite major redactions, this history discloses much new information about the agency’s history and the role of SIGINT and communications intelligence (COMINT) during the Cold War. Researched and written by NSA historian Thomas Johnson, the three parts released so far provide a frank assessment of the history of the Agency and its forerunners, warts-and-all.
According to National Security Archive visiting fellow Matthew Aid (author of the forthcoming history The Secret Sentry: The Top Secret History of the National Security Agency), Johnson’s study shows “refreshing openness and honesty, acknowledging both the NSA’s impressive successes and abject failures during the Cold War.” Another striking feature of Johnson’s study is the candor with which it discusses the fractious and damaging relationships between the agencies which make up the U.S. government’s intelligence establishment. Among the successes and failures disclosed by Johnson’s history are:

• After the end of World War II, with Soviet codes still unbreakable, the U.S. Army and Navy SIGINT organizations had relatively little to listen to. Johnson’s history reveals that as of mid-1946, the most productive source available to the U.S. Army SIGINT organization was French communications, which accounted for half of the finished reporting going to intelligence consumers in Washington.
  
• SIGINT coverage of the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China by the Air Force Security Agency (an NSA predecessor) during the early 1950s was so bad that a senior CIA official referred to this period as “the dark ages for communications intelligence.”
  
• The discovery of high-level Soviet spies operating inside the Australian government in 1947 led the U.S. to cut off Australian access to classified U.S. government information, which was not resumed until two years later in 1949. Full SIGINT cooperation with Australia did not resume until 1953; according to Johnson, the Australian-American intelligence rift “had a deleterious affect on early U.S. SIGINT efforts against the Peoples Republic of China."
  
• During the 1950s, relations between senior officials at the CIA and NSA were at times so bad that they impeded cooperation between the two agencies. The CIA deliberately cut NSA out of the famous Berlin Tunnel operation (1954-1956), with NSA’s director, General Ralph Canine, finding out about the operation from the New York Times after the Soviets discovered the Tunnel in April 1956.
  
• By the early 1960s, the NSA was beginning to encounter information overload as more and more intercepted messages were stored in huge warehouses of magnetic tapes. According to Johnson, “the volume of unprocessed … tape was becoming difficult to manage technically and was embarrassing politically.”
  
• The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was a major strategic intelligence failure for NSA. SIGINT provided no warning of the presence of Soviet nuclear-armed intermediate and medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba prior to their discovery by U-2 reconnaissance aircraft; according to Johnson, this “marked the most significant failure of SIGINT to warn national leaders since World War II.”
  
• In April 1975, as the North Vietnamese military prepared for the final offensive to capture the beleaguered South Vietnamese capital of Saigon, ambassador Graham Martin refused to believe SIGINT reporting which clearly indicated that the offensive was about to commence, arguing that the intercepts were a “deception.” He believed that North Vietnamese wanted a coalition government, not military victory. The offensive began on April 26, 1975. Three days later, Saigon fell.
  
• Even though the 1970s was a period of lower budgets and dramatic personnel reductions for NSA, it regained some degree of access to Soviet encrypted communications during the late 1970s. A sentence that the Agency did not delete hints at this and other major cryptanalytic successes “Even with decreased money, cryptology was yielding the best information that it had produced since World War II.”
  
• Ten days before the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on 28 December 1979, U.S. intelligence agencies provided “specific warning” of the invasion. The post-mortems evaluating intelligence estimates of the Soviet invasion “were unanimous in describing [them] as an intelligence success.”
  
• During the 1960s and early 1970s, the NSA officials who ran the Agency’s domestic watch-list/eavesdropping program (Minaret) disguised the origin of their reports because they “seemed to understand that the operation was disreputable if not outright illegal.”
  

The NSA released the first three parts of American Cryptology during the Cold War in response to a mandatory review request filed by the National Security Archive. The excisions are currently under appeal, both at the NSA as well as the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel. With book four of the history recently completed, the Archive has also requested its declassification.
The National Security Agency during the Cold War
Commentary by Matthew M. Aid

The NSA’s SIGINT station in Sinop (circa 1964) was one of several sites in Turkey that monitored Soviet missile tests at Kapustin Yar (photo from collection of Matthew Aid)..

Dr. Thomas R. Johnson’s four-part top secret codeword history of the National Security Agency, American Cryptology during the Cold War, 1945-1989), three parts of which have been released to date, is a unique and invaluable study for readers interested in the history of U.S. intelligence during the Cold War or for those who are simply interested in the role of the secretive National Security Agency in the U.S. government.
U.S. intelligence agencies have produced numerous single-volume histories, usually published at the unclassified level and meant for public distribution. In all but a few cases, these histories tend to be tendentious and emphasize all positive aspects of their agency’s accomplishments while ignoring all of the mistakes and miscues endemic to U.S. intelligence history. For example, most unclassified histories produced by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI) have focused on those historical episodes or intelligence collection systems, which were unqualified successes, such as the histories of the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft and the recently declassified internal history of the 1954-1956 Berlin Tunnel Project. (Note 1) But the CIA has consistently refused to declassified any of its histories on the less successful episodes in the Agency’s history, such as the CIA’s spectacular failures attempting to conduct clandestine intelligence gathering (or human intelligence, HUMINT) and covert action operations inside the USSR and Eastern Europe during the 1940s and 1950s, or within the Peoples Republic of China during the 1950s and 1960s. (Note 2) Sadly, the Agency’s reluctance to release these and other critical internal histories was reinforced by the negative publicity that the Agency garnered when it released in 2007 the so-called “Family Jewels” documents concerning CIA improper or illegal activities prior to 1973.
One of the things that make Dr. Johnson’s history unique among official histories is its refreshing openness and honesty, acknowledging both the NSA’s impressive successes (Johnson states that “No other intelligence source had the revolutionary impact of SIGINT” (Book I, p. 1) and abject failures during the Cold War. For example, the Johnson history frankly acknowledges that one of the single greatest impediments to an effective U.S. national signals intelligence (SIGINT) effort during the Cold was a lack of cooperation and unity of effort within the U.S. intelligence community. This fractious relationship dates back to before the beginning of World War II, when the U.S. Army and Navy SIGINT organizations refused to cooperate with one another (see Book I, pp. 3-7). Internecine warfare amongst the three military services stalled the creation in May 1949 of America’s first unified SIGINT agency, the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), then left it bereft of any meaningful power or influence. Not surprisingly, AFSA was an abject failure as an institution, and was disbanded three and one-half years late in October 1952 in favor of a new and truly unified SIGINT organization, the National Security Agency (NSA) (Book I, pp. 23-35).

Early Cold War
Johnson’s history provides some tantalizing glimpses, for example, into NSA’s cryptologic successes and failures against the Soviet Union during the Cold War (Book I, pp. 157-194). The report describes the genesis of NSA’s attack on Soviet codes and ciphers during World War II, including details about the Anglo-American solution of the Venona one-time pad ciphers used by the KGB during World War II. Unfortunately, so far NSA has refused to declassify the portion of Dr. Johnson’s history pertaining to “Black Friday,” when Army intelligence discovered the across-the-board change of Soviet codes and ciphers in October 1948. This effectively wiped out all Anglo-American cryptanalytic access to Moscow’s high-level communications. The history is also silent about the fact that it took NSA almost thirty years before it was able to solve Soviet high-level cipher systems again. Nevertheless, NSA has released some discussion, albeit in a highly redacted form, of its successes in monitoring Soviet missile tests, finding Soviet ICBM launch sites, tracking Soviet submarines, and the critical SIGINT support that NSA provided to the CIA’s U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union between 1956 and 1960.
While U.S. Army and Navy SIGINT specialists were trying to crack Soviet codes after the end of World War II, they had relatively little to listen to. Johnson’s history reveals that as of mid-1946, the most productive source available to the U.S. Army SIGINT organization was French communications, which accounted for half of the finished reporting going to intelligence consumers in Washington. (Book I, p. 10)
The history shows that AFSA’s performance during the Korean War (1950-1953) was marked by occasional successes and a series of shocking failures (Book I, pp. 43-56). The Agency provided no warning that North Korea intended to invade South Korea in June 1950 because it was paying no attention to Korea. AFSA provided vitally important intelligence during the Battle of the Pusan Perimeter (August-September 1950), but the intelligence it generated in October-November 1950 indicating that Communist China intended to intervene militarily in the Korea was ignored or badly misinterpreted by senior U.S. government officials and military officials, including General Douglas MacArthur. The report shows that for the first year of the war, AFSA experienced considerable success breaking North Korean ciphers, but curiously NSA refused to declassify the fact that throughout the entire Korean War AFSA’s cryptanalysts were unable to break any significant Chinese military cipher systems.
The situation changed dramatically in the summer of 1951 when AFSA lost its access to North Korean traffic; the enemy changed all its codes and ciphers to unbreakable one-time pad cipher systems. This meant that for the remaining two years of the Korean War AFSA was forced to depend on low-level voice intercept and traffic analysis for virtually everything that it knew about the Chinese and North Korean militaries. And finally, the Johnson history reveals (but the reader has to read between the lines) that the U.S. refused to assist the South Korean military in forming its own SIGINT service because of security concerns.
Chinese communications systems, as well as Soviet, remained a tough problem for the AFSA. The AFSA’s SIGINT coverage of the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China during the early 1950s was so bad that a senior CIA official referred to this period as “the dark ages for communications intelligence.” (Book I, p. 61) In any event, NSA was not doing well with the information that it had. According to Johnson’s account, the Agency’s early SIGINT reporting to consumers left much to be desired, with a 1953 report stating that NSA intelligence product was “generally so cluttered with qualifying expressions as to virtually preclude their use by a consumer.” (Book I, p. 70)
As NSA became more and more technically proficient, it created a problem that was even more serious than anodyne reporting. By the early 1960s, the Agency was experiencing an information overload as it stored more and more intercepted messages in huge warehouses of magnetic tapes. According to Johnson, “the volume of unprocessed … tape was becoming difficult to manage technically and was embarrassing politically.” (Book II, p. 373) This was a problem that would bedevil the NSA for decades.
Cuban Missile Crisis
NSA’s performance during the Cuban Missile Crisis (Book II, pp. 317-332) was superior, especially in the important area of tracking the movements of Soviet merchant ships carrying Soviet troops, weapons and equipment to Cuba. Nevertheless, the Johnson history reveals that SIGINT picked up no indication that the Soviets had placed offensive ballistic missiles in Cuba prior to their being discovered by a CIA U-2 reconnaissance aircraft in October 1962. This failure had significant implications because since the first days of the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. intelligence community had depended on NSA for 90 percent of their intelligence information warning of a Soviet strategic threat to the U.S. Dr. Johnson concludes that “SIGINT warning, so highly touted during the Eisenhower administration, failed in Cuba.”
Despite the NSA’s failure, it kept the White House and the Pentagon informed of Soviet military activities. Disclosed for the first time in the NSA account is that U.S. intelligence tracked the readiness condition of Soviet air defense and strategic forces during the Crisis. What has remained secret for years is that Soviet forces went on high alert three times during September and October 1962. The first was on 11 September 1962, when for ten days “Soviet forces went into their highest readiness stage since the beginning of the Cold War,” perhaps because the Soviets believed that U.S. intelligence had learned about the missile deployments. Especially telling is that also on 11 September, the Kremlin publicized its apprehension that President Kennedy’s request to Congress for stand-by authority to call up reservists foreshadowed an attack on Cuba, which the Soviets said was grounds for war. (Note 3) Another alert of a more “precautionary, preliminary” nature began on 15 October, perhaps also because Khrushchev supposed that the missiles had been discovered. Finally, after Kennedy’s speech, Soviet forces went on an “extraordinarily high state of alert,” with the emphasis on air defense forces. Significantly, “offensive forces avoided assuming the highest readiness stage, as if to insure that Kennedy understood that the USSR would not launch first.” (Book II, p. 331)
Johnson’s account of the Missile Crisis illuminates a failure of intelligence cooperation, which is a major theme in his study. On October 23, 1962, with the Cuban Missile Crisis at its height, the Director of Naval Intelligence failed to inform the White House or Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that new High-Frequency Direction Finding (HFDF) data showed that many of the Soviet merchant ships bound for Cuba had already stopped dead in the water or had turned back for Russia. The Secretary of Defense discovered this huge mistake the next day, with Johnson noting that “McNamara was furious, and he subjected Admiral Anderson, the Chief of Naval Operations, to an abusive tirade. So many years have passed that it is impossible to determine why the Navy held up information that seemed critical to the president’s decisions.” (Book II, p. 329)
SIGINT at the White House
An important development that began during the 1960s was the growing use of SIGINT at the White House. Over the objections of the CIA and State Department, President Lyndon Johnson insisted that NSA transmit SIGINT directly to the White House Situation Room. Johnson may have been the “most avid consumer of intelligence ever to occupy the White House” and he read SIGINT constantly to support his decisions during the Vietnam War. SIGINT would continue to be available to White House officials in the years that followed, although they would use it in different ways. For example, Richard Nixon was not interested in reading intelligence reporting and his security assistant Henry Kissinger was not as “experienced” with SIGINT as his predecessor Walt Rostow had been. The Johnson history is critical of the way that Kissinger handled SIGINT: his reports to Nixon would “subsume [SIGINT] into a mishmash of sources” and not highlight it as Johnson’s advisers had. (Book II, pp. 353-354 and 486)
In spite of a declining ability to generate high-level intelligence about what was going on inside the USSR and China, codebreaking efforts against targets in the Third World improved dramatically (Book II, pp. 425-475). For example, SIGINT provided important intelligence information prior to and during the 1967 Middle East War. Moreover, SIGINT helped U.S. intelligence monitor developments in the Warsaw Pact. During the summer of 1968, SIGINT reporting coming out of NSA clearly showed that growing numbers of Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops were being deployed along the borders of Czechoslovakia. The invasion did not take the White House by surprise (it had “strategic warning”), but the CIA did not provide advance warning because CIA analysts refused to accept the possibility that the Soviets would invade the country (although a minority believed otherwise (Note 4)). (Book II, pp. 454-461). Interestingly, SIGINT also picked up what some U.S. analysts saw as possible Soviet move against Romania, which led President Johnson to make a public warning to Moscow. (Book II, p. 462)
The growing NSA presence greatly increased the vulnerability of its operators to physical harm. In June 1967, Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats attacked the NSA spy ship USS Liberty, killing 34 crewmembers, including 25 military and civilian cryptologists. Dr. Johnson concludes that based on the available SIGINT that the Israelis did not know that the ship they were attacking was a U.S. Navy ship. In January 1968, the North Koreans seized the U.S. Navy spy ship USS Pueblo, which Johnson correctly describes as an intelligence disaster of unparalleled proportions. Then in January 1969, a North Korean MiG-21 fighter shot down a U.S. Navy EC-121 SIGINT aircraft, killing all 31 crewmembers, including nine military cryptologists.
Johnson devotes a significant amount of space to NSA’s involvement in the Vietnam War, beginning with the arrival of the first American SIGINT personnel in 1961 and concluding with the fall of Saigon in 1975 (Book II, pp. 495-584). One of the major revelations stemming from Dr. Johnson’s review is that SIGINT was the principal driver of the U.S. military’s counterinsurgency operations in South Vietnam throughout the war, with most of the Army’s major search-and-destroy missions being predicated on intelligence derived from SIGINT. (Book II, pp. 534-538). On the controversial August 1964 Tonkin Gulf incidents, which served as the predicate for America’s entry into the Vietnam War, Dr. Johnson concludes that: “The White House had started a war on the basis of unconfirmed (and later-to-be-determined probably invalid) information.” (Book II, p. 522) (Note 5)
NSA’s ability to locate North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troop concentrations in South Vietnam and Laos and track their movements via SIGINT is discussed in detail, which led to a number of major battlefield successes during the war. Dr. Johnson reveals that SIGINT was able to provide significant advance warning of virtually all NVA/VC offensives from 1966 until the end of the war in 1975 (p. 539); SIGINT was the only reliable source of intelligence concerning the number of North Vietnamese troops coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from the fall of 1967 onwards (Book II, pp. 539-540); and NSA provided 55% of all targeting information for U.S. bombers during the Vietnam War (p. 583).
The history also confirms that NSA provided advanced warning of the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive in January 1968, but President Johnson and the CIA in Washington, along with General William Westmoreland in Saigon, appear to have discounted NSA reporting that the NVA and VC were about to launch a nationwide offensive. Instead, they held that the upcoming offensive would focus on U.S. forces further north. (pp. 562-563). The Johnson history also reveals that U.S. military SIGINT units in Vietnam were heavily dependent on South Vietnamese translators to intercept and process enemy radio traffic, but, as in the Korean War, the U.S. government, at NSA’s urging, forbade giving SIGINT-derived intelligence to the South Vietnamese government or military (pp. 509-510).
Another intelligence failure occurred at the end of the Vietnam conflict. In April 1975, as the North Vietnamese military prepared for the final offensive to capture the beleaguered South Vietnamese capital of Saigon, the U.S. ambassador in Saigon, Graham Martin, refused to believe NSA SIGINT reporting indicating that the North Vietnamese offensive was about to begin. Believing that the North Vietnamese wanted a coalition government, not a military victory, Martin argued that the intercepts were a “NVA deception.” The NVA offensive began on April 26, 1975. Three days later, Saigon fell. (Book III, p. 9)
The 1970s
The NSA’s declassification staff heavily redacted Book III covering the turbulent decade of the 1970s. Nevertheless, one can find a number of interesting tidbits sandwiched among the deletions. For example, the brief but interesting section on NSA’s domestic eavesdropping programs (Shamrock and Minaret), includes a telling quote on p. 85: “Years later the NSA lawyer who first looked at the procedural aspects stated that the people involved [in Minaret] seemed to understand that the operation was disreputable if not outright illegal.” Dr. Johnson also details NSA’s fractious relations with the various congressional committees established during the mid-1970s to investigate abuses by the U.S. intelligence community, which involved unprecedented public testimony by NSA officials before the Church Committee (although the Committee gave them two days of rehearsal!). Johnson also covers the effort to bring domestic intercepts more squarely under the rule of law, with the passing of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978 (Book III, pp. 94, 106-107).
Despite the fact that the 1970s was a period of lower budgets and dramatic personnel reductions at Fort Meade, the Agency finally regained some degree of access to Soviet encrypted communications during the Carter administration in the late 1970s. This and a number of other major cryptanalytic successes are hinted at in a sentence that NSA did not delete from Dr. Johnson’s text, which stated: “Even with decreased money, cryptology was yielding the best information that it had produced since World War II.” (Book III, p. vii). Also surviving the security review is some of the discussion of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. According to Johnson, “Generalized warnings [of an invasion] had begun in September, and specific warnings preceded the operation by at least ten days.” Thus, intelligence post-mortems “were unanimous in describing it as intelligence success.” (p. 254) (Note 6)
Inter-Agency Rivalries

The NSA’s facility in Teufelsberg, Berlin, 1990. Built on the rubble of bombed-out buildings from World War II in then-occupied West Berlin, Teufelsberg gave U.S. intelligence access to communications of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) and its alliance relations with the former Soviet Union (photo from collection of Matthew Aid).

As indicated earlier, the Johnson history shows in stark detail that NSA’s relations with the U.S. military and the U.S. intelligence community was often troubled. For example, the coverage of the NSA’s relationship with the U.S. Air Force during the early 1950s provides a history of nearly constant internecine warfare over whether NSA had the authority to control the USAF’s SIGINT activities (Book I, pp. 80-83). The Johnson study also shows how the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), along with the CIA, marginalized the NSA when it sent up SIGINT satellites. Despite NSA’s responsibilities, it had very little management or tasking responsibility for the first generation of SIGINT satellites sent into orbit by the NRO in the early 1960s. According to Johnson, “NSA was still a minor player. It had very few cleared people, and its only responsibility was to process and report ELINT data.” (Book II, p. 405)
Most revealing are details (hidden amidst a blizzard of deletions by the CIA) concerning NSA’s series of no-holds barred bureaucratic turf battles with the CIA and its predecessors that began immediately after the end of World War II and continued without interruption right up until the 9/11 terrorist attacks in September 2001 (Book I, pp. 86-107; Book II, pp. 341-343). The Berlin Tunnel episode provides a starting example. The CIA deliberately cut NSA out of the famous Berlin Tunnel operation (1954-1956), with NSA’s director, General Ralph Canine, finding out about the operation from the New York Times after the Soviets discovered the Tunnel in April 1956. This episode only served to further upset the already rancorous CIA-NSA relationship, with the Johnson history noting that General Canine “was understandably upset when he found out that he had been bypassed and left in the dark.” (Book I, p. 106) Even a NSA-CIA “peace treaty” signed in 1977, details of which are deleted from the history, failed to put an end to the seemingly never-ending battles between the two agencies (Book III, pp. 224-231). This lack of unity of effort plagued NSA’s SIGINT collection and analytic efforts throughout and after the Cold War, to the ultimate detriment of U.S. national security.
On one of Washington’s most important intelligence relationships, the Anglo-American connection, the history includes a brief but revealing discussion of the interactions of NSA’s predecessors with some of its English-speaking SIGINT partners, and the difficulties they experienced in fashioning a postwar SIGINT alliance that focused on a new target – the USSR. (Book I, pp. 13-19) The late 1945 Gouzenko spy scandal delayed U.S. acceptance of Canada as a full-fledged cryptologic partner until Ottawa signed a separate SIGINT-sharing agreement (the CANUSA Agreement) in the fall of 1949. The discovery of high-level Soviet spies operating inside the Australian government in 1947 led the U.S. to cut off Australian access to classified U.S. government information for two years. Full U.S.-Australia SIGINT cooperation did not resume until 1953, with Johnson noting that the rift “had a deleterious affect on early U.S. SIGINT efforts against the Peoples Republic of China.”(Book I, pp. 16-19)
Unlike the CIA, where the Agency’s censors religiously delete all information concerning the size of the Agency’s staff and budget, considerable detail concerning the organization and manpower strength of NSA are revealed for the first time in Dr. Johnson’s history, confirming that the Agency for most of the Cold War was the single largest and most expensive component of the U.S. intelligence community (Book I, pp. 63-67; Book II, pp. 293-294). NSA reached its historic peak strength in 1969, with 93,067 military and civilian cryptologists working for the Agency and the three military service cryptologic agencies that were subordinate to NSA. (Book II, p. 293).
While NSA’s decision to release the Johnson history is commendable, the many and frequently lengthy excisions gives pause for thought. No doubt, much about the NSA’s history necessarily remains secret, but the copious excisions make one suspect that the security reviewers have gone too far. For example, after 60 years, NSA should be able to release something about “Black Friday.” Moreover, excisions about the Berlin Tunnel project (Book I, 104-105) fly in the face of the CIA’s declassification of its internal history of that well-known operation. (Note 7) Another futile excision concerns verification problems raised by the SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) II Agreement. (Book III, pp. 202-206, and pp. 219 ff) No doubt, much of the deleted information concerns the impact of the 1979 Iranian revolution and the loss of SIGINT facilities which played a major role in tracking Soviet ICBM tests, especially intercepting missile telemetry. Given that the memoirs of President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance included frank discussions of the Iranian listening posts, it should be relatively easy for the NSA to declassify some information on SALT II verification. Not all of the excisions, however, are NSA’s responsibility. The many “OGA” [Other Government Agency] excisions are evidence of the CIA’s security review.
The first three parts of American Cryptology during the Cold War were released to the National Security Archive through a mandatory review request. To challenge the significant excisions, the Archive filed appeals, which led NSA to release more information from book II and III. The Archive has appealed the many excisions that remain with the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel. NSA has not yet complete work on the Archive’s appeal of book I, apparently because of delays at the Central Intelligence Agency. With book 4 recently completed, the Archive has requested the NSA to release it as well.
Matthew Aid, a visiting scholar at the National Security Archive, has written extensively on the history of the National Security Agency and U.S. SIGINT programs for Intelligence and National Security, among other scholarly journals. His book, The Secret Sentry: The Top Secret History of the National Security Agency will be published by Bloomsbury in early 2009. He thanks John Prados and Jeff Richelson for their comments.
Read the Documents
Document 1: Thomas R. Johnson, American Cryptology during the Cold War, 1945-1989: Book I: The Struggle for Centralization, 1945-1960 (National Security Agency: Center for Cryptological History, 1995), Top Secret Umbra, Excised copy, pp. i-xvii and 1-155
Document 2: Thomas R. Johnson, American Cryptology during the Cold War, 1945-1989: Book I: The Struggle for Centralization, 1945-1960, pp. 157-287
Document 3: Thomas R. Johnson, American Cryptology during the Cold War, 1945-1989: Book II: Centralization Wins, 1960-1972 (National Security Agency: Center for Cryptological History, 1995), Top Secret Umbra, Excised copy, pp. 289-494
Document 4: Thomas R. Johnson, American Cryptology during the Cold War, 1945-1989: Book II: Centralization Wins, 1960-1972, pp. 495-652
Document 5: Thomas R. Johnson, American Cryptology during the Cold War, 1945-1989: Book III: Retrenchment and Reform, 1972-1980 (National Security Agency: Center for Cryptological History, 1998), Top Secret Umbra, Excised copy, pp. i-ix, and 1-116
Document 6: Thomas R. Johnson, American Cryptology during the Cold War, 1945-1989: Book III: Retrenchment and Reform, 1972-1980, pp. 117-262

Notes
1. A significant exception is Harold Ford’s CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes, 1962-1968 (CIA History Staff: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1998) which reviews the intelligence controversies, warts and all, even the role of DCI John McCone in “distort[ing]” the findings of a National Intelligence Estimate so that it had a less pessimistic take on the degree of progress in South Vietnam.

2. For example, so far the CIA has refused to declassify most of the contents of a major history, "Office of Policy Coordination, 1948-1952," although a pending appeal before the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel could lead to a reversal.
3. “Kennedy Assailed,” by Seymour Topping, The New York Times, 12 September 1962.
4. Jeffrey Richelson, A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 327.
5. It is worth noting that there are interesting differences between Johnson’s account of the Gulf of Tonkin incident (as well as the Tet offensive) and that offered by NSA historian Robert Hanyok in “Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2-4 August 1964,” at http://www.nsa.gov/vietnam/releases/relea00012.pdf, and in Spartans in Darkness: American SIGINT and the Indochina War, 1945-1975 (National Security Agency: Center for Cryptological History. 2002), at http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/spartans/index.html. For example, while Hanyok argues that NSA officials manipulated intelligence on the August 4 events in the Tonkin Gulf, Johnson suggests that the analysts misinterpreted North Vietnamese messages.

6. According to a CIA study by Douglas MacEachin’s study, Afghanistan was a collection success but an analytical failure; see Predicting the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan: The Intelligence Community's Record (Central Intelligence Agency: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2002).
7. Central Intelligence Agency, “Clandestine Services History: The Berlin Tunnel Operation, 1952-1956,” 24 June 1968, at http://www.foia.cia.gov/browse_docs.asp (The Agency has released several versions of this history; this links to the most complete release). For the inconsistencies, see Federation of American Scientists, Secrecy News, at http://ftp.fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/2007/12/120607.html

[Peter Lemkin]

Thanks for that, but the NSA is not going to tell its secrets - not the good ones - nor state of the 'art' today. Bamford's books are the best around, and even they don't tell the whole tale. What they do tell is frightening enough....virtually every private electronic [and a few others] communication in most important parts of the world are caputred and monitored; stored in computers and sorted thorugh using the largest computer system that exists. My post here - and our every email, call, web-browsing, bank teller action....et al. Big Brother is watching....not just potential foes, but everyone. NSA has secret permission to use 'slitters' in all USA telecomunications companies to get the signals - others they get via satellite, antennas, patches on cables and other means. Remember that Perkins [Confessions of an Economic Hitman] was hired by NSA - so they don't just do electronic spying.

[Magda Hassan]

The National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) is a cryptologic intelligence agency of the United States government, administered as part of the United States Department of Defense. Created on November 4, 1952 by President Harry S. Truman, it is responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence, which involves cryptanalysis. It is also responsible for protecting U.S. government communications and information systems from similar agencies elsewhere, which involves cryptography. As of 2008, NSA has been directed to help monitor U.S. federal agency computer networks to protect them against attacks.[1] NSA is directed by a lieutenant general or vice admiral. NSA is a key component of the U.S. Intelligence Community, which is headed by the Director of National Intelligence. The Central Security Service is a co-located agency created to coordinate intelligence activities and co-operation between NSA and U.S. military cryptanalysis agencies. NSA's work is limited to communications intelligence; it does not perform field or human intelligence activities. By law, NSA's intelligence gathering is limited to foreign communications, but its work has begun to include some domestic surveillance.[2]


Organization

The National Security Agency is divided into two major missions: the Signals Intelligence Directorate (SID), which produces foreign signals intelligence information, and the Information Assurance Directorate (IAD), which protects U.S. information systems.[3]

Role

NSA's eavesdropping mission includes radio broadcasting, both from various organizations and individuals, the Internet, telephone calls, and other intercepted forms of communication. Its secure communications mission includes military, diplomatic, and all other sensitive, confidential or secret government communications. It has been described as the world's largest single employer of mathematicians,[4] and the owner of the single largest group of supercomputers[clarification needed], but it has tried to keep a low profile. For many years, its existence was not even acknowledged by the U.S. government, earning it the nickname, "No Such Agency" (NSA).
Because of its listening task, NSA/CSS has been heavily involved in cryptanalytic research, continuing the work of predecessor agencies which had broken many World War II codes and ciphers (see, for instance, Purple, Venona project, and JN-25).
In 2004, NSA Central Security Service and the National Cyber Security Division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agreed to expand NSA Centers of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education Program.[5]
As part of the National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 (NSPD 54), signed on January 8, 2008 by President Bush, the NSA became the lead agency to monitor and protect all of the federal government's computer networks from cyber-terrorism.[1]

Facilities


NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland


Headquarters for the National Security Agency are at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, about 15 miles (16 km) southwest of Baltimore. The NSA has its own exit off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway labeled "NSA Employees Only." The scale of the operations at the NSA is hard to determine from unclassified data; some 18,000 parking spaces are visible in photos of the site. In 2006, the Baltimore Sun reported that the NSA was at risk of electrical overload because of insufficient internal electrical infrastructure at Fort Meade to support the amount of equipment being installed. This problem was apparently recognized in the 1990s but not made a priority, and "now the agency's ability to keep its operations going is threatened."[6] Its secure government communications work has involved the NSA in numerous technology areas, including the design of specialized communications hardware and software, production of dedicated semiconductors (at the Ft. Meade chip fabrication plant), and advanced cryptography research. The agency contracts with the private sector in the fields of research and equipment.
In addition to its Ft. Meade headquarters, the NSA has facilities at the Texas Cryptology Center in San Antonio, Texas; at Fort Gordon, Georgia, and elsewhere.

National Computer Security Center

The National Computer Security Center, once part of the National Security Agency, was established in 1981 and was responsible for testing and evaluating computer equipment for use in high security and/or confidential applications. NCSC was also responsible for publishing the Orange Book and Red Book detailing trusted computing and network platform specifications. The two works are more formally known as the Trusted Computing System Evaluation Criteria and Trusted Network Interpretation, part of the Rainbow Series, however, they have largely been replaced by the Common Criteria.

History

The National Security Agency can be traced to the May 20, 1949, creation of the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA). This organization was originally established within the U.S. Department of Defense under the command of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The AFSA was to direct the communications and electronic intelligence activities of the U.S. military intelligence units: the Army Security Agency, the Naval Security Group, and the Air Force Security Service. But the agency had little power and lacked a centralized coordination mechanism. The creation of NSA resulted from a December 10, 1951, memo sent by CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith to James S. Lay, Executive Secretary of the National Security Council.[7] The memo observed that "control over, and coordination of, the collection and processing of Communications Intelligence had proved ineffective" and recommended a survey of communications intelligence activities. The proposal was approved on December 13, 1951, and the study authorized on December 28, 1951. The report was completed by June 13, 1952. Generally known as the "Brownell Committee Report," after committee chairman Herbert Brownell, it surveyed the history of U.S. communications intelligence activities and suggested the need for a much greater degree of coordination and direction at the national level. As the change in the security agency's name indicated, the role of NSA was extended beyond the armed forces.
The creation of NSA was authorized in a letter written by President Harry S. Truman in June 1952. The agency was formally established through a revision of National Security Council Intelligence Directive (NSCID) 9 on October 24, 1952,[7] and officially came into existence on November 4, 1952. President Truman's letter was itself classified and remained unknown to the public for more than a generation.

Insignia


The NSA's insignia.


The heraldic insignia of NSA consists of a bald eagle facing its right, grasping a key in its talons, representing NSA's clutch on security as well as the mission to protect and gain access to secrets. The eagle is set on a background of blue and its breast features a blue shield supported by thirteen bands of red and white. The surrounding white circular border features "National Security Agency" around the top and "United States of America" underneath, with two five-pointed silver stars between the two phrases. The current NSA insignia has been in use since 1965, when then-Director, LTG Marshall S. Carter (USA) ordered the creation of a device to represent the Agency.[8]

Effect on non-governmental cryptography

NSA has been involved in debates about public policy, both indirectly as a behind-the-scenes adviser to other departments, and directly during and after Vice Admiral Bobby Ray Inman's directorship. NSA was a major player in the debates of the 1990s regarding the export of cryptography. Restrictions on export were reduced but not eliminated in 1996.

Data Encryption Standard (DES)

Main article: Data Encryption Standard
NSA was embroiled in some minor controversy concerning its involvement in the creation of the Data Encryption Standard (DES), a standard and public block cipher algorithm used by the U.S. government and banking community. During the development of DES by IBM in the 1970s, NSA recommended changes to some details of the design. There was suspicion that these changes had weakened the algorithm sufficiently to enable the agency to eavesdrop if required, including speculation that a critical component—the so-called S-boxes—had been altered to insert a "backdoor" and that the reduction in key length might have made it feasible for NSA to discover DES keys using massive computing power. It has since been observed that the S-boxes in DES are particularly resilient against differential cryptanalysis, a technique which was not publicly discovered until the late 1980s, but which was known to the IBM DES team. The United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reviewed NSA's involvement, and concluded that while the agency had provided some assistance, it had not tampered with the design.[9][10]

Clipper chip

Main article: Clipper chip
Because of concerns that widespread use of strong cryptography would hamper government use of wiretaps, NSA proposed the concept of key escrow in 1993 and introduced the Clipper chip that would offer stronger protection than DES but would allow access to encrypted data by authorized law enforcement officials. The proposal was strongly opposed and key escrow requirements ultimately went nowhere. However, NSA's Fortezza hardware-based encryption cards, created for the Clipper project, are still used within government, and NSA ultimately published the design of the SKIPJACK cipher (but not the key exchange protocol) used on the cards.

Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)

Main article: Advanced Encryption Standard
Possibly because of previous controversy, the involvement of NSA in the selection of a successor to DES, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), was initially limited to hardware performance testing (see AES competition). NSA has subsequently certified AES for protection of classified information (for at most two levels, e.g. SECRET information in an unclassified environment) when used in NSA-approved systems. The widely-used SHA hash functions were designed by NSA.

Dual EC DRBG random number generator

Main article: Dual EC DRBG
NSA promoted the inclusion of a random number generator called Dual EC DRBG in the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology's 2007 guidelines. This led to speculation of a backdoor which would allow NSA access to data encrypted by systems using that random number generator.[11]

Academic research

NSA has invested many millions of dollars in academic research under grant code prefix MDA904, resulting in over 3,000 papers (as of 2007-10-11). NSA/CSS has, at times, attempted to restrict the publication of academic research into cryptography; for example, the Khufu and Khafre block ciphers were voluntarily withheld in response to an NSA request to do so.

Patents

NSA has the ability to file for a patent from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office under gag order. Unlike normal patents, these are not revealed to the public and do not expire. However, if the Patent Office receives an application for an identical patent from a third party, they will reveal NSA's patent and officially grant it to NSA for the full term on that date.[12]
One of NSA's published patents describes a method of geographically locating an individual computer site in an Internet-like network, based on the latency of multiple network connections.[13]

NSA programs


ECHELON

Main article: ECHELON
NSA/CSS, in combination with the equivalent agencies in the United Kingdom (Government Communications Headquarters), Canada (Communications Security Establishment), Australia (Defence Signals Directorate), and New Zealand (Government Communications Security Bureau), otherwise known as the UKUSA group[14], is widely reported to be in command of the operation of the so-called ECHELON system. Its capabilities are suspected to include the ability to monitor a large proportion of the world's transmitted civilian telephone, fax and data traffic, according to a December 16, 2005 article in the New York Times.[15]
Technically, almost all modern telephone, internet, fax and satellite communications are exploitable due to recent advances in technology and the 'open air' nature of much of the radio communications around the world. NSA's presumed collection operations have generated much criticism, possibly stemming from the assumption that NSA/CSS represents an infringement of Americans' privacy. However, NSA's United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18) strictly prohibits the interception or collection of information about "...U.S. persons, entities, corporations or organizations..." without explicit written legal permission from the United States Attorney General, when the subject is located abroad, or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court when within U.S. Borders.[16] The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that intelligence agencies cannot conduct surveillance against American citizens. There are a few extreme circumstances where collecting on a U.S. entity is allowed without a USSID 18 waiver, such as with civilian distress signals, or sudden emergencies such as the September 11, 2001 attacks; however, the USA PATRIOT Act has significantly changed privacy legality.
There have been alleged violations of USSID 18 that occurred in violation of NSA's strict charter prohibiting such acts.[citation needed] In addition, ECHELON is considered with indignation by citizens of countries outside the UKUSA alliance, with numerous allegations that the United States government uses it for motives other than its national security, including political and industrial espionage.[17][18] Examples include the gear-less wind turbine technology designed by the German firm Enercon[19][20] and the speech technology developed by the Belgian firm Lernout & Hauspie. An article in the Baltimore Sun reported in 1995 that aerospace company Airbus lost a $6 billion contract with Saudi Arabia in 1994 after NSA reported that Airbus officials had been bribing Saudi officials to secure the contract.[21][22] The chartered purpose of NSA/CSS is solely to acquire significant foreign intelligence information pertaining to National Security or ongoing military intelligence operations.
In his book Firewall, Andy McNab speculates that the UKUSA agreement is designed to enable NSA, GCHQ, and other equivalent organizations to gather intelligence on each other's citizens. For example, NSA cannot legally conduct surveillance on American citizens, but GCHQ might do it for them.

Domestic activity

NSA's mission, as set forth in Executive Order 12333, is to collect information that constitutes "foreign intelligence or counterintelligence" while not "acquiring information concerning the domestic activities of United States persons". NSA has declared that it relies on the FBI to collect information on foreign intelligence activities within the borders of the USA, while confining its own activities within the USA to the embassies and missions of foreign nations.
NSA's domestic surveillance activities are limited by the requirements imposed by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; however, these protections do not apply to non-U.S. persons located outside of U.S. borders, so the NSA's foreign surveillance efforts are subject to far fewer limitations under U.S. law.[23] The specific requirements for domestic surveillance operations are contained in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA), which does not extend protection to non-U.S. citizens located outside of U.S. territory.[23]
These activities, especially the publicly acknowledged domestic telephone tapping and call database programs, have prompted questions about the extent of the NSA's activities and concerns about threats to privacy and the rule of law.

Wiretapping programs


Domestic wiretapping under Richard Nixon

Further information: Church Committee
In the years after President Richard Nixon resigned, there were several investigations of suspected misuse of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and NSA facilities. Senator Frank Church headed a Senate investigating committee (the Church Committee) which uncovered previously unknown activity, such as a CIA plot (ordered by President John F. Kennedy) to assassinate Fidel Castro. The investigation also uncovered NSA's wiretaps on targeted American citizens. After the Church Committee hearings, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 became law, limiting circumstances under which domestic surveillance was allowed.

ThinThread wiretapping and data mining

Main article: ThinThread
A wiretapping program named ThinThread was tested in the late 1990s, but never put into operation. ThinThread contained both advanced data mining capabilities and built-in privacy protections. These privacy protections were abandoned in the post-9/11 effort by President George W. Bush to improve the intelligence community's responsiveness to terrorism. The research done under this program may have contributed to the technology used in later systems.[24]

Warrantless wiretaps under George W. Bush

Main article: NSA warrantless surveillance controversy
On December 16, 2005, the New York Times reported that, under White House pressure and with an executive order from President George W. Bush, the National Security Agency, in an attempt to thwart terrorism, had been tapping the telephones of select individuals in the U.S. calling persons outside the country, without obtaining warrants from the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret court created for that purpose under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).[25]
One such surveillance program, authorized by the United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18 of President George Bush, was the Highlander Project undertaken for the National Security Agency by the United States Army 513th Military Intelligence Brigade. NSA relayed telephone (including cell phone) conversations obtained from both ground, airborne, and satellite monitoring stations to various U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Officers, including the 201st Military Intelligence Battalion. Conversations of citizens of the United States were intercepted, along with those of other nations.[1]
Proponents of the surveillance program claim that the President has executive authority to order such action, arguing that laws such as FISA are overridden by the President's Constitutional powers. In addition, some argued that FISA was implicitly overridden by a subsequent statute, the Authorization for Use of Military Force, although the Supreme Court's ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld deprecates this view. In the August 2006 case ACLU v. NSA, U.S. District Court Judge Anna Diggs Taylor concluded that NSA's warrantless surveillance program was both illegal and unconstitutional. On July 6, 2007 the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Judge Taylor's ruling, reversing her findings.[26]

AT&T Internet monitoring

Further information: Hepting v. AT&T, Mark Klein, NSA warrantless surveillance controversy
In May 2006, Mark Klein, a former AT&T employee, alleged that his company had cooperated with NSA in installing hardware to monitor network communications including traffic between American citizens.[27]

Wiretapping under Barack Obama

The New York Times reported in 2009 that the NSA is intercepting communications of American citizens including a Congressman, although the Justice Department believed that the NSA had corrected its errors.[28] United States Attorney General Eric Holder resumed the wiretapping according to his understanding of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008 which Congress passed in July 2008 but without explaining what had occurred.[29]

Transaction data mining

NSA is reported to use its computing capability to analyze "transactional" data that it regularly acquires from other government agencies, which gather it under their own jurisdictional authorities. As part of this effort, NSA now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions and travel and telephone records, according to current and former intelligence officials interviewed by the WSJ.[30]

In fiction

Main article: NSA in fiction
Since the existence of NSA has become more widely known in the past few decades, and particularly since the 1990s, the agency has regularly been portrayed in spy fiction. Many such portrayals grossly exaggerate the organization's involvement in the more sensational activities of intelligence agencies. The agency now plays a role in numerous books, films, television shows, and computer games.

Staff

Main article: Director of the National Security Agency
Directors

• November 1952 – November 1956 Lt. Gen. Ralph J. Canine, USA
  
• November 1956 – November 1960 Lt. Gen. John A. Samford, USAF
  
• November 1960 – January 1962 V. Adm. Laurence H. Frost, USN
  
• January 1962 – June 1965 Lt. Gen. Gordon A. Blake, USAF
  
• June 1965 – August 1969 Lt. Gen. Marshall S. Carter, USA
  
• August 1969 – August 1972 V. Adm. Noel A. M. Gaylor, USN
  
• August 1972 – August 1973 Lt. Gen. Samuel C. Phillips, USAF
  
• August 1973 – July 1977 Lt. Gen. Lew Allen, Jr., USAF
  
• July 1977 – April 1981 V. Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, USN
  
• April 1981 – May 1985 Lt. Gen. Lincoln D. Faurer, USAF
  
• May 1985 – August 1988 Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, USA
  
• August 1988 – May 1992 V. Adm. William O. Studeman, USN
  
• May 1992 – February 1996 V. Adm. John M. McConnell, USN
  
• February 1996 – March 1999 Lt. Gen. Kenneth A. Minihan, USAF
  
• March 1999 – April 2005 Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, USAF
  
• April 2005 – present Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, USA
  

Deputy Directors

• December 1952 – November 1953 R. Adm. Joseph Wenger, USN
  
• November 1953 – June 1956 Brig. Gen. John Ackerman, USAF
  
• June 1956 – August 1956 Maj. Gen. John A. Samford, USAF
  
• August 1956 – September 1957 Mr. Joseph H. Ream
  
• October 1957 – July 1958 Dr. H. T. Engstrom
  
• August 1958 – April 1974 Dr. Louis W. Tordella, USN
  
• April 1974 – May 1978 Mr. Benson K. Buffham
  
• May 1978 – April 1980 Mr. Robert E. Drake
  
• April 1980 – July 1982 Ms. Ann Z. Caracristi
  
• July 1982 – June 1985 Mr. Robert E. Rich
  
• June 1985 – March 1988 Mr. Charles R. Lord
  
• March 1988 – July 1990 Mr. Gerald R. Young
  
• July 1990 – February 1994 Mr. Robert L. Prestel
  
• February 1994 – October 1997 Mr. William P. Crowell
  
• October 1997 – June 2000 Ms. Barbara A. McNamara
  
• June 2000 – August 2006 Mr. William B. Black, Jr.
  
• August 2006 – present Mr. John C. (Chris) Inglis, Brig. Gen. (retired), USAF & USANG& mark
  

Notable cryptanalysts

• Lambros D. Callimahos
  
• Agnes Meyer Driscoll
  
• William F. Friedman
  
• Solomon Kullback
  
• Robert Morris
  

• Frank Rowlett
  
• Abraham Sinkov
  
• Louis W. Tordella
  
• Herbert Yardley
  

NSA encryption systems

Main article: NSA encryption systems

STU-III secure telephones on display at the National Cryptologic Museum


NSA is responsible for the encryption-related components in these systems:

• EKMS Electronic Key Management System
  
• FNBDT Future Narrow Band Digital Terminal
  
• Fortezza encryption based on portable crypto token in PC Card format
  
• KL-7 ADONIS off-line rotor encryption machine (post-WW II to 1980s)
  
• KW-26 ROMULUS electronic in-line teletype encryptor (1960s–1980s)
  
• KW-37 JASON fleet broadcast encryptor (1960s–1990s)
  
• KY-57 VINSON tactical radio voice encryptor
  
• KG-84 Dedicated Data Encryption/Decryption
  
• SINCGARS tactical radio with cryptographically controlled frequency hopping
  
• STE secure terminal equipment
  
• STU-III secure telephone unit, currently being phased out by the STE
  
• TACLANE product line by General Dynamics
  

NSA has specified Suite A and Suite B cryptographic algorithms to be used in U.S. government systems; the Suite B algorithms are a subset of those previously specified by NIST and are expected to serve for most information protection purposes, while the Suite A algorithms are secret and are intended for especially high levels of protection.

Some past NSA SIGINT activities

• VENONA project
  
• Gulf of Tonkin Incident
  
• USS Liberty incident
  
• USS Pueblo (AGER-2)
  
• Operation Ivy Bells
  
• Korean Air Lines Flight 007 [2]
  

See also

• James Bamford
  
• Biometric Consortium
  
• Bureau of Intelligence and Research
  
• Central Intelligence Agency
  
• Central Security Service
  
• Counterintelligence Field Activity
  
• Defence Signals Directorate
  
• Defense Intelligence Agency
  
• United States Department of Homeland Security
  
• Diplomatic Security Service
  
• Espionage
  
• Federal Bureau of Investigation
  
• Government Communications Headquarters
  

• Narus
  
• National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
  
• National Reconnaissance Office
  
• National Security Whistleblowers Coalition
  
• Ronald Pelton
  
• John Anthony Walker
  
• Project SHAMROCK
  
• Security-Enhanced Linux
  
• Signals intelligence
  
• Skipjack (cipher)
  
• TEMPEST
  
• Type 1 product
  

NSA computers

• FROSTBURG
  
• IBM 7950 Harvest
  

References

1. ^ a b Ellen Nakashima (2008-01-26). "Bush Order Expands Network Monitoring: Intelligence Agencies to Track Intrusions". The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con...61_pf.html. Retrieved on 2008-02-09.
   
2. ^ Gorman, Siobhan (March 10, 2008). "NSA's Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data". The Wall Street Journal (Dow Jones). http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120511973377523845.html. Retrieved on 2008-04-28.
   
3. ^ "The National Security Agency Frequently Asked Questions". National Security Agency. http://www.nsa.gov/about/about00018.cfm#1. Retrieved on 2008-07-04.
   
4. ^ Introduction to NSA/CSS, NSA. Retrieved 15 May 2006.
   
5. ^ NSA Public and Media Affairs. National Security Agency and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Form New Partnership to Increase National Focus on Cyber Security Education. Press release. http://www.nsa.gov/releases/relea00077.cfm. Retrieved on 2008-07-04.
   
6. ^ Gorman, Siobhan. "NSA risking electrical overload". http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationw...-headlines. Retrieved on 2006-08-06.
   
7. ^ a b In Body of Secrets (Anchor Books 2002), footnote on p. 30, James Bamford mentions to a CIA, Top Secret /Codeword memorandum "Proposed Survey of Intelligence Activities" (December 10, 1951). Retrieved 23 October 2008.
   
8. ^ "The National Security Agency Insignia". National Security Agency. http://www.nsa.gov/history/histo00018.cfm. Retrieved on 2008-07-04.
   
9. ^ Davies, D.W.; W.L. Price (1989). Security for computer networks, 2nd ed.. John Wiley & Sons.
   
10. ^ Robert Sugarman (editor) (July 1979). "On foiling computer crime". IEEE Spectrum (IEEE).
    
11. ^ Bruce Schneier (2007-11-15). "Did NSA Put a Secret Backdoor in New Encryption Standard?". Wired News. http://www.wired.com/politics/security/c...tters_1115. Retrieved on 2008-07-04.
    
12. ^ Schneier, Bruce (1996). Applied Cryptography, Second Edition. John Wiley & Sons. pp. 609–610. ISBN 0-471-11709-9.
    
13. ^ "United States Patent 6,947,978 - Method for geolocating logical network addresses.". United States Patent and Trademark Office. 2005-09-20. http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parse...%2F6947978. Retrieved on 2008-07-04.
    
14. ^ Richelson, Jeffrey T.; Ball, Desmond (1985). The Ties That Bind: Intelligence Cooperation Between the UKUSA Countries. London: Allen & Unwin. ISBN 0-04-327092-1
    
15. ^ James Risen and Eric Lichtblau (December 16, 2005). "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politi...nted=print. Retrieved on 2008-07-04.
    
16. ^ National Security Agency. United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18. National Security Agency July 27, 1993. Last access date March 23, 2007
    
17. ^ "European Parliament Report on ECHELON" (PDF). July 2001. http://www.fas.org/irp/program/process/r...lon_en.pdf. Retrieved on 2008-07-04.
    
18. ^ "Nicky Hager Appearance before the European Parliament ECHELON Committee". April 2001. http://cryptome.org/echelon-nh.htm. Retrieved on 2008-07-04.
    
19. ^ Die Zeit: 40/1999 "Verrat unter Freunden" ("Treachery among friends", German), available at archiv.zeit.de
    
20. ^ Report A5-0264/2001 of the European Parliament (English), available at European Parliament website
    
21. ^ "BBC News". http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/820758.stm. Retrieved on 2008-07-04.
    
22. ^ "Interception capabilities 2000". http://www.cyber-rights.org/interception...htm#Report. Retrieved on 2008-07-04.
    
23. ^ a b David Alan Jordan. Decrypting the Fourth Amendment: Warrantless NSA Surveillance and the Enhanced Expectation of Privacy Provided by Encrypted Voice over Internet Protocol. Boston College Law Review. May, 2006. Last access date January 23, 2007
    
24. ^ Gorman, Siobhan (2006-05-17). "NSA killed system that sifted phone data legally". Baltimore Sun (Tribune Company (Chicago, IL)). http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationw...&cset=true. Retrieved on 2008-03-07. "The privacy protections offered by ThinThread were also abandoned in the post-September 11 push by the president for a faster response to terrorism."
    
25. ^ James Risen & Eric Lichtblau (December 16, 2005), Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts, New York Times
    
26. ^ 6th Circuit Court of Appeals Decision
    
27. ^ "For Your Eyes Only?". NOW. February 16 2007. http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/307/index.html. on PBS
    
28. ^ Lichtblau, Eric and Risen, James (April 15, 2009). "N.S.A.’s Intercepts Exceed Limits Set by Congress". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/us/16nsa.html. Retrieved on 2009-04-15.
    
29. ^ Ackerman, Spencer (April 16, 2009). "NSA Revelations Spark Push to Restore FISA". The Washington Independent (Center for Independent Media). http://washingtonindependent.com/39153/n...store-fisa. Retrieved on 2009-04-19.
    
30. ^ Gorman, Siobahn (2008-03-10). "NSA's Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data". The Wall Street Journal Online. http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB12...23845.html. Retrieved on 2008-03-17.
    

Further reading

• Bamford, James, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency, Doubleday, 2001, ISBN 0-385-49907-8.
  
• Bamford, James, The Puzzle Palace, Penguin Books, ISBN 0-14-006748-5.
  
• Hanyok, Robert J. (2002). Spartans in Darkness: American SIGINT and the Indochina War, 1945-1975. National Security Agency. http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/spartans/index.html. Retrieved on 2008-11-16.
  
• Johnson, Thomas R. (2008). American Cryptology during the Cold War. National Security Agency: Center for Cryptological History. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB260/. Retrieved on 2008-11-16.
  
• Levy, Steven, Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age – discussion of the development of non-government cryptography, including many accounts of tussles with the NSA.
  
• Radden Keefe, Patrick, Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping, Random House, ISBN 1-4000-6034-6.
  
• Liston, Robert A., The Pueblo Surrender: a Covert Action by the National Security Agency, ISBN 0-87131-554-8.
  
• Kahn, David, The Codebreakers, 1181 pp., ISBN 0-684-83130-9. Look for the 1967 rather than the 1996 edition.
  
• Tully, Andrew, The Super Spies: More Secret, More Powerful than the CIA, 1969, LC 71080912.
  
• Bamford, James, New York Times, December 25, 2005; The Agency That Could Be Big Brother. [URL]http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/25/weekinreview/25bamford.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=The%20Agenc...

[Magda Hassan]

Thanks for that, but the NSA is not going to tell its secrets - not the good ones - nor state of the 'art' today. Bamford's books are the best around, and even they don't tell the whole tale. What they do tell is frightening enough....virtually every private electronic [and a few others] communication in most important parts of the world are caputred and monitored; stored in computers and sorted thorugh using the largest computer system that exists. My post here - and our every email, call, web-browsing, bank teller action....et al. Big Brother is watching....not just potential foes, but everyone. NSA has secret permission to use 'slitters' in all USA telecomunications companies to get the signals - others they get via satellite, antennas, patches on cables and other means. Remember that Perkins [Confessions of an Economic Hitman] was hired by NSA - so they don't just do electronic spying.

Yeah, they're not going to give anything away if they can help it. Bamford is definitely The Man when it comes to the NSA. I saw one of his documentaries not too long ago here called The Spy Factory. Very good. :vroam:

[Peter Lemkin]

That last article was a good one on much of what is publicly acknowledged about the NSA. Nice isn't it....makes you feel safe and protected - no matter where you live. Madness! I remember the day I was flying to D.C. to talk to Sen. Kerry's office about Plumlee's testimony, the woman sitting next to me was a PhD in math going for an interview at NSA. I asked her if she had any idea what they did with the 'math skills' of their staff....she had little idea, only that it would provide good pay and intellectual challenges. I'm sure it did for her.....and for the rest of us, she and the others there have bit by bit [literally] undermined privacy and democracy, IMO. Lots of software and hardware have 'back doors' now. The USAs posture is one of perpetual war - and the enemy is everywhere. Another personal note. I used DES level encrption via hardware [not software] when working on the book about TP et al, way back when. The software attached was the most difficult to use and my own computer often would deny me access. I had a phone number in FL to call - of the company that designed the hardware board. When I'd call, the operator would always ask what branch of government I was calling from....and I'd say my name. They would often laugh; I and only a few other individuals had purchased their hardware (trust me, it was not easy to get!). One day when I called for help the phone number was disconnected and a search turned-up a news item that the NSA wanted their product no longer used - and they 'disappeared'. It took me about a month to figure-out, without their help, how to remove their program and get my data back so I could use it unencrypted......

[Ed Jewett]

THE ECHELON FACTOR: WHEN HUMINT & ELINT MERGE

by Robert Morton (about the author) Page 1 of 1 page(s)

opednews.com Permalink[URL="http://www.opednews.com/articles/THE-ECHELON-FACTOR-WHEN-H-by-Robert-Morton-091216-684.html"]
[/URL]

For OpEdNews: Robert Morton - Writer


Stacey walked into security clearance at the National Security Agency (NSA) in Fort Meade, Md. She differed from the thousands of other highly-trained and indoctrinated ECHELON signals intelligence analysts. She logged onto her computer terminal and entered a personal code. Her assignment was to hunt down a terrorist, codenamed "radical archer." He had purchased shoulder-firing missiles that were stolen from a British army unit outside London. He reportedly has many friends in Tunisia, including black market arms dealers. If knowledge is power, Stacey was about to become the most powerful person in the world. She revved up a mighty program codenamed "Dictionary" and tapped in 4-digit codes for the Tunis, Tunisia locale; people's names and subject headings; and internet addresses, telex cell phone, and fax numbers used by individuals, businesses, government offices and private organizations associated with "radical archer."
She pressed ENTER and connected to a synergistic, global interception and relay espionage system that pries into private and commercial communications. Stacey's confidential Dictionary program stores the Dictionary lists of other ECHELON agencies from around the world. So, if she intercepts a keyword listed on Britain's Dictionary, her computer would pick out and record the intercept, and send it to Britain's spy headquarters, and vice versa. Ground stations in the U.S., UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and in other nameless locations place their interception systems at each other's disposal. Using a worldwide network of massive ground-based radio antennae, Stacey effortlessly infiltrated the group of Intel satellites encircling the earth used by telephone companies as well, enabling Stacey to pry into maritime communications off the Tunisian coast. Other keywords entered into ECHELON's Dictionary sifted through millions of simultaneous phone calls, fax, and 90% of the world's private e-mail addresses, filtering out information that could lead to the whereabouts of "radical archer." Stacey tapped in other ground station codes, gaining access to Russian, Indonesian, and Latin American satellites. Amazingly, she intercepts thousands of phone calls to and from Tunisia that are transported by cables under the Mediterranean Sea. Navy Seals secretly installed intercept devices on the cables 300 feet down.
Any one and anything that America's intelligence community is concerned about will become an ECHELON target. There is no medium of transporting information that cannot be listened to by Stacey. She operates in a legislation-free environment, above the law, and can effortlessly invade family businesses and personal civilian privacy. She's accountable to no one. Her name, position, and salary remain nameless and traceless, for her funding resources are buried deep within the Pentagon's procurement budget and hide in the stock market under a street name account held by the CIA.
Suddenly, a red light glowed, signaling a "hit" from the U.S. Embassy in Tunis, Tunisia. The CIA secretly installed sophisticated microwave receivers and processors. A phone call was intercepted from a hotel in la Goulette, a seaside town on the Mediterranean Sea outside Tunis. The complete, two-way phone conversation was printed out in English translation. Then, another hit! Stacey's heartbeat quickened. Dictionary keywords snatched information from an innocent-looking, red brick building at 8 Palmer Street in downtown London, England. Every telex passing in and out of London is intercepted by ECHELON computers operating within the walls of this charming, petite building with Daisy-filled window boxes. Stacey alerted her station chief, who analyzed the intercepts, matching the voice prints and subject matter with intel collected from the Fusion Center in Trenton, NJ. CBIF and CIA counter-intelligence agents were studying a warehouse owner in New Jersey they deemed suspicious. Stacey's new intelligence was passed on to them. A brief meeting at the Trenton Fusion Center was held. It was determined that the time for surveillance and further intelligence gathering by HUMINT agents was over"it was now time to strike. An hour later, surprised passersby watched as a warehouse in New Jersey was raided by 185 local police and FBI agents, along with dozens of other unidentified men wearing hoods to cover their identities. The shoulder-firing missiles were not found. Simultaneously, cargo ships were searched by 180 NYPD officers and FBI in New York Harbor. Dozens of the faceless soldiers wearing hoods accompanied them as well. No missiles found.
The New Jersey warehouse owner and his brother were taken out in handcuffs. A half hour later, halfway around the world, a dozen armed men from the CIA's Operations Division accompanied the local CIA station chief into the lobby of an unknown hotel in La Goulette, Tunisia. They could recognize "radical archer" by sight and would receive $10,000 for interrogating him and an additional $20,000 for finding out where the missiles were. Then, they would receive a $10,000 stipend for murdering him"but only in that order. Unfortunately for "radical archer," he made a poor decision by visiting the hotel. He underestimated the real time, instant communication between ELINT and HUMINT technologies. The period between critical intel info and action was reduced to minutes...worldwide! HUMINT agents escorted him from the hotel, shackled and wearing a hood, into a large van that mysteriously appeared outside. Within a half hour, he told the CIA team where the missiles were. The CIA team, along with Tunis Police officials, raided a home on the city's outskirts. The two dozen British Starstreak missiles, still in their sealed launch tubes were found. All were intact. Each tube was attached to an aiming unit for firing. The terrorists could track the target using the aiming unit's optically stabilized sight. Thus, allowing them to use the aiming unit to compute the right trajectory to bring the missile together with the targets, which would no doubt be commerical airliners full of western tourists. Stacey stared at her computer screen and breathed a sigh of relief when the ordeal was over. As she watched the TV broadcasts of the New Jersey raids behind her computer station, she felt pleased with how Charlie Allen's pioneering concept of Fusion Centers healed the fissure between the two worlds of law enforcement (LE) and counter-intelligence (CI). The CI surveillance way of life now coexisted alongside LE's criminal arrest culture; they knew when to observe"and when to strike. Of course, no broadcast of what happened in Tunis, Tunisia was seen...or heard.

I write about the 16 agencies comprising the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). I am writing a Spy novel and am a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO). The Blog I maintain has daily updated newspaper article about the IC. There is also a POLL I encourage people to take as well. Hope to talk to you soon.





www.declassifiedsecrets.blogspot.com/

[Chris Bowen]

get http://www. in your address bar & then type the word illuminati but spelt backwards , add the .com.

[David Guyatt]

How very interesting Chris.