Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency

ACCLAIM 
FOR  JAMES  BAMFORD'S

BODY  OF 
SECRETS

"James Bamford, who wrote one of the really good books about
American intelligence twenty years ago, has now done it again. . . .
Body of
Secrets
has something interesting and important to add to many episodes of
cold war history . . . [and] has much to say about recent events."

—
The New York Review of
Books

"Body
of Secrets
is one fascinating book. . . . Chock-full of juicy stuff. . . .
Interesting to read, well-written and scrupulously
documented."                                             —
Salon

"An engaging and
informed history. . . . Bamford weaves a narrative about the NSA that includes
. . . many heretofore undisclosed tidbits of information."              —
The
Nation

"At times surprising, often quite troubling but always
fascinating. . . . Writing with a flair and clarity that rivals those of the
best spy novelists, Bamford has created a masterpiece of investigative
reporting."

—
Publishers Weekly
(starred
review)

"'Body of Secrets
adds fresh material about the
world's nosiest and most secret body. . . . This revised edition will fascinate
anyone interested in the shadow war."

—
The
Economist

JAMES 
BAMFORD

James Bamford is the author of
The Puzzle Palace,
an
award-winning national bestseller when it was first published and now regarded
as a classic. He has taught at the University of California's Goldman School of
Public Policy, spent nearly a decade as the Washington Investigative Producer
for ABC's
World News Tonight with Peter Jennings,
and has written
extensively on national security issues, including investigative cover stories
for
The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine,
and the
Los
Angeles Times Magazine.
He lives in Washington, D.C.

Also by
James Bamford

The Puzzle
Palace

FIRST
ANCHOR BOOKS  EDITION,  APRIL  2002

Copyright
©
2001,
2002 by James Bamford

All rights
reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Published
in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc.,

New York,
and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Originally
published in hardcover in slightly different form in the United States by

Doubleday,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2001.

Anchor
Rooks and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library
of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows:

Bamford,
James.

Body of
secrets: anatomy of the ultra-secret National Security Agency: from the Cold
War through the dawn of a new century / James Bamford.—1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN
0-385-49907-8

Includes
bibliographical references and index.

1. United
States. National Security Agency—History. 2. Electronic intelligence—United

States—History.
3. Cryptography—United States—History. I. Title.

UB256.U6
B36 2001

327.1275—dc21

00-058920

Anchor
ISBN: 0-385-49908-6

Book design
by Maria Carella
www.anchorbooks.com

Printed in
the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5
4 3 2 1

To Mary
Ann

And to my
father, Vincent

And in
memory of my mother, Katherine

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My most sincere thanks to the many people who helped bring
Body
of Secrets
to life. Lieutenant General Michael V. Hayden, NSA's director,
had the courage to open the agency's door a crack. Major General John E.
Morrison (Retired), the dean of the U.S. intelligence community, was always
gracious and accommodating in pointing me in the right directions. Deborah
Price suffered through my endless Freedom of Information Act requests with
professionalism and good humor. Judith Emmel and Colleen Garrett helped guide
me through the labyrinths of Crypto City. Jack Ingram, Dr. David Hatch, Jennifer
Wilcox, and Rowena Clough of NSA's National Cryptologic Museum provided endless
help in researching the agency's past.

Critical was the help of those who
fought on the front lines of the cryptologic wars, including George A. Cassidy,
Richard G. Schmucker, Marvin Nowicki, John Arnold, Harry O. Rakfeldt, David
Parks, John Mastro, Wayne Madsen, Aubrey Brown, John R. DeChene, Bryce
Lock-wood, Richard McCarthy, Don McClarren, Stuart Russell, Richard E. Kerr,
Jr., James Miller, and many others. My grateful appreciation to all those named
and unnamed.

Thanks also to David J. Haight and
Dwight E. Strandberg of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and to
Thomas E. Samoluk of the U.S. Assassinations Records Review Board.

Finally I would like to thank
those who helped give birth to
Body of Secrets,
including Kris Dahl, my
agent at International Creative Management; Shawn Coyne, my editor at
Doubleday; and Bill Thomas, Bette Alexander, Jolanta Benal, Lauren Field, Chris
Min, Timothy Hsu, and Sean Desmond.

Acknowledgments      ix

1     
Memory
             1

2     
Sweat
                7

3     
Nerves
               32

4     
Fists
                   64

5     
Eyes
                  92

6     
Ears
                  139

7     
Blood
                 185

8     
Spine
                 240

9     
Adrenaline
        283   

10   
Fat
                     354

11   
Muscle
               406

12   
Heart
                 481

13   
Soul
                   528

14   
Brain
                578

Afterword
                 614

Appendixes
              652

Notes
                        660

Index
                         746

"In God we trust, all others we monitor."

—Intercept operator's motto

NSA study,
Deadly
Transmissions,
December
1970

"The public has a duty to watch its Government closely and
keep it on the right track."

Lieutenant General Kenneth
A.. Minihan, USAF

Director, National Security
Agency

NSA
Newsletter,
June 1997

"The American people have to trust us and in order to trust
us they have to know about us."

Lieutenant General Michael
V. Hayden, USAF

Director, National Security
Agency

Address on October 19, 2000

"Behind closed doors, there is no guarantee that the most
basic of individual freedoms will be preserved. And as we enter the 21st
Century, the great fear we have for our democracy is the enveloping culture of
government secrecy and the corresponding distrust of government that
follows."

Senators Daniel Patrick
Moynihan and Rob Wyden

U.S. Senate Report,
Secrecy
in International and

Domestic
Policy Making: The Case for More Sunshine,

October 2000

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His step had an unusual urgency to
it. Not fast, but anxious, like a child heading out to recess who had been
warned not to run. It was late morning and the warm, still air had turned heavy
with moisture, causing others on the long hallway to walk with a slow shuffle,
a sort of somber march. In June 1930, the boxy, sprawling Munitions Building,
near the Washington Monument, was a study in monotony. Endless corridors
connecting to endless corridors. Walls a shade of green common to bad cheese
and fruit. Forests of oak desks separated down the middle by rows of tall
columns, like concrete redwoods, each with a number designating a particular
workspace.

Oddly, he
made a sudden left turn into a nearly deserted wing. It was lined with closed
doors containing dim, opaque windows and empty name holders. Where was he
going, they wondered, attempting to keep up with him as beads of perspiration
wetted their brows. At thirty-eight years old, the Russian-born William
Frederick Friedman had spent most of his adult life studying, practicing,
defining the black art of code breaking. The year before, he had been appointed
the chief and sole employee of a secret new Army organization responsible for
analyzing and cracking foreign codes and ciphers. Now, at last, his one-man
Signal Intelligence Service actually had employees, three of them, who were
attempting to keep pace close behind.

Halfway
down the hall Friedman turned right into Room 3416, ; small office containing a
massive black vault, the kind found in large banks. Reaching into his inside
coat pocket, he removed a small card. Then, standing in front of the thick
round combination dial to block the view, he began twisting the dial back and
forth. Seconds later he yanked up the silver bolt and slowly pulled open the
heavy door, only to reveal another wall of steel behind it. This time he
removed a key from his trouser pocket and turned it in the lock, swinging aside
the second door to reveal an interior as dark as a midnight lunar eclipse.

Disappearing
into the void, he drew out a small box of matches and lit one. The gentle flame
seemed to soften the hard lines of his face: the bony cheeks; the pursed,
pencil-thin lips; the narrow mustache, as straight as a ruler; and the wisps of
receding hair combed back tight against his scalp. Standing outside the vault
were his three young hires. Now it was time to tell them the secret. Friedman
yanked on the dangling cord attached to an overhead lightbulb, switched on a
nearby fan to circulate the hot, stale air, and invited them in. "Welcome,
gentlemen," he said solemnly, "to the secret archives of the American
Black Chamber."

Until a
few weeks before, none of the new recruits had had even the slightest idea what
codebreaking was. Frank B. Rowlett stood next to a filing cabinet in full
plumage: blue serge jacket, white pinstriped trousers, and a virgin pair of
white suede shoes. Beefy and round-faced, with rimless glasses, he felt proud
that he had luckily decided to wear his new wardrobe on this day. A high school
teacher from rural southern Virginia, he received a degree in math the year
earlier from Emory and Henry College, a small Virginia school.

The two
men standing near Rowlett were a vision of contrasts. Short, bespectacled
Abraham Sinkov; Brooklynite Solomon Kullback, tall and husky. Both were high
school teachers from New York, both were graduates of City College in New York,
and both had received master's degrees from Columbia.

Like a
sorcerer instructing his disciples on the mystic path to eternal life, Friedman
began his introduction into the shadowy history of American cryptology. In
hushed tones he told his young employees about the Black Chamber, America's
first civilian codebreaking organization. How for a decade it operated in
utmost secrecy from a brown-stone in New York City. How it skillfully decoded
more than 10,000 messages from nearly two dozen nations, including those in
difficult Japanese diplomatic code. How it played the key role in deciphering
messages to and from the delegates to the post-World War I disarmament talks,
thus giving the American delegation the inside track. He told of Herbert
Osborne Yardley, the Black Chamber's hard-drinking, poker-playing chief, who
had directed the Army's cryptanalytic activities during the war.

Then he
related the story of the Chamber's demise eight months earlier. How the newly
appointed secretary of state, Henry Stimson, had become outraged and ordered
its immediate closing when he discovered that America was eavesdropping on
friends as well as foes. Friedman told of the firing of Yardley and the rest of
the Chamber's employees and of how the government had naively taken itself out
of the code-breaking business.

It was a
troubling prospect. If a new war were to break out, the United States would
once again have to start from scratch. The advances achieved against Japan's
codes would be lost forever. Foreign nations would gain great advantage while
the United States clung to diplomatic niceties. Standing in the vault
containing the salvaged records of the old Black Chamber, Friedman told his
three assistants, fresh out of college, that they were now the new Black
Chamber. The Army, he said, had given its cautious approval to secretly raise
the organization from the ashes, hide it deep within the bureaucracy, and
rename it the Signal Intelligence Service. The State Department, they were
sternly warned, was never to know of its existence.

In late
June 1930, America's entire cryptologic body of secrets— personnel, equipment
and records—fit comfortably in a vault twenty-five feet square.

On the
southbound lane of the Baltimore—Washington Parkway, near the sleepy Maryland
hamlet of Annapolis Junction, a restricted, specially constructed exit ramp
disappears quickly from view. Hidden by tall earthen berms and thick trees, the
ramp leads to a labyrinth of barbed-wire fences, massive boulders placed close
together, motion detectors, hydraulic antitruck devices, and thick cement barriers.
During alerts, commandos dressed in black paramilitary uniforms, wearing
special headgear, and brandishing an assortment of weapons including Colt 9mm
submachine guns, quickly respond. They are known as the "Men in
Black." Telephoto surveillance cameras peer down, armed police patrol the
boundaries, and bright yellow signs warn against taking any photographs or
making so much as a note or a simple sketch, under the penalties of the
Internal Security Act. What lies beyond is a strange and invisible city unlike
any other on earth. It contains what is probably the largest body of secrets
ever created.