Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (2 page)

Seventy-one
years after Friedman and his three new employees gathered for the first time in
their vault, with room to spare, the lineal descendant of the Black Chamber now
requires an entire city to contain it. The land beyond the steel-and-cement
no-man's-land is a dark and mysterious place, virtually unknown to the outside
world. It is made up of more than sixty buildings: offices, warehouses,
factories, laboratories, and living quarters. It is a place where tens of
thousands of people work in absolute secrecy. Most will live and die without
ever having told their spouses exactly what they do. By the dawn of the year
2001, the Black Chamber had become a black empire and the home to the National
Security Agency, the largest, most secret, and most advanced spy organization
on the planet.

Known to
some as Crypto City, it is an odd and mysterious place, where even the priests
and ministers have security clearances far above Top Secret, and religious
services are held in an unbuggable room. "The NSA Christmas party was a
big secret," recalled one former deputy director of the agency. "They
held it at Cole field house but they called it something else." Officials
hold such titles as Chief of Anonymity, and even the local newsletter, with its
softball scores and schedules for the Ceramic Grafters Club, warns that copies
"should be destroyed as soon as they have been read." Crypto City is
home to the largest collection of hyperpowerful computers, advanced
mathematicians, and language experts on the planet. Within the fence, time is
measured by the femtosecond—one million billionth of a second—and scientists
work in secret to develop computers capable of performing more than one septillion
(1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) operations every second.

Nearby
residents can only guess what lies beyond the forbidden exit ramp. County
officials say they have no idea how many people work there, and no one will
tell them. Traffic planners from the county planning department, it is said,
once put a rubber traffic-counting cord across a road leading to the city, but
armed guards came out and quickly sliced it. "For a long time we didn't
tell anybody who we were," admitted one agency official. "The focus
was not on community activity. [It was] like everyone outside the agency was
the enemy."

In an
effort to ease relations with its neighbors, officials from the city gave
Maryland's transportation secretary, James Lighthizer, a rare tour. But the
state official was less than overwhelmed. "I didn't get to see a darn
thing," he said.

At a
nearby gas station, owner Clifford Roop says the people traveling into and out
of the city keep to themselves. "They say they work for the DoD [Department
of Defense]. They don't talk about their work at all." Once, when a
reporter happened into the station and began taking a few notes, two police
cruisers from the secret city rushed up to the office and demanded an ID from
the journalist. This was not an unusual response. When a photographer hired by
real estate developers started up a hill near Crypto City to snap some shots of
a future construction site, he was soon surrounded by NSA security vehicles.
"They picked him up and hauled him in and asked what he was doing,"
said Robert R. Strott, a senior vice president at Constellation Real Estate,
which was a partner in the project. During interrogation the photographer not
only denied attempting to take a shot of Crypto City, he said he had never even
heard of NSA. Worried that occupants of an eleven-story office building might
be able to look into the city, NSA leased the entire building before it was
completed.

To dampen
curiosity and keep peace with the neighbors, NSA director William O. Studeman,
a three-star admiral, once gave a quiet briefing to a small group of community
leaders in the area. "I do this with some trepidation," he warned,
"because it is the ethic of the agency—sometimes called in the vernacular
the supersecret NSA—to keep a low profile." Nevertheless, he gave his
listeners a brief idea of NSA's tremendous size. "We're the largest and
most technical of all the [U.S. intelligence] agencies. We're the largest in
terms of people and we're the largest in terms of budget. . . . We have people not
only here at NSA but there are actually more people out in the field that we
have operational control over—principally military—than exist here in Maryland.
. . . The people number in the tens of thousands and the budget to operate that
system is measured in the billions of dollars annually—billions annually."

A decade
ago, on the third floor of Operations Building 1 at the heart of the sprawling
city, a standing-room-only crowd packed a hall. On stage was Frank Rowlett, in
whose honor an annual award was being established. As he looked out toward the
audience in the Friedman Auditorium, named after his former boss, his mind no
doubt skipped back in time, back to that hot, sticky, June afternoon in 1930
when he walked into the dim vault, dressed in his white suede shoes and blue
serge jacket, and first learned the secrets of the Black Chamber. How big that
vault had grown, he must have marveled.

For most
of the last half of the twentieth century, that burgeoning growth had one
singular objective: to break the stubborn Russian cipher system and eavesdrop
on that nation's most secret communications. But long before the codebreakers
moved into the sterile supercomputer laboratories, clean rooms, and anechoic
chambers, their hunt for the solution to that ultimate puzzle took them to dark
lakebeds and through muddy swamps in the early light of the new Cold War.

YNTS QHABT YBK KJVT NR ORLSJN HCTCYA HQYKJV CYOCMBYNT

GXRYK SXRKVWNRNIO YJVONHB NH VH KXASH OAXBBJNHB WNHB

KSXXMT, FVTS SVJYMBF CFI El BNSYYC JTMKEID

AXITUL PGGTXLW VGA OCXFT AUMCAL VAGH RXDKQPUR PXDM

HQRSESTYY TBDSPKTTY YTT ERYHURBRWCVRPW RW JCBRSKJURTWESK DPSRHRTY

The wet, fertile loam swallowed
the corporal's boots, oozing between the tight laces like melted chocolate. The
spring night was dark and cool and he was walking backward in the muck, trying
to balance his end of the heavy box. More men followed, each weighted down with
stiff crates that gave off the sweet aroma of fresh pine. Except for the
chirping sound of crickets, and an occasional grunt, the only sounds to be
heard were sudden splashes as the heavy containers were tossed from boats into
the deepest part of the lake. Germany would keep its secrets.

It was the
final night of April 1945. A few hundred miles away, in a stale bunker beneath
Berlin, Adolf Hitler and his new bride bid a last farewell to each other, to
the Reich, and to the dawn. The smoldering embers of Nazism were at long last
dying, only to be replaced by the budding flames of Soviet Communism.

Just five
days after Hitler's postnuptial suicide, General William O. Donovan, chief of
the Office of Strategic Services, delivered a secret report to President Harry
Truman outlining the dangers of this new conflict. Upon the successful
conclusion of World War II, Donovan warned, "the United States will be
confronted with a situation potentially more dangerous than any preceding
one." Russia, he cautioned, "would become a menace more formidable to
the United States than any yet known."

For nearly
a year both Washington and London had been secretly planning the first battle
of the new Cold War. This war, unlike the last, would have to be fought in the
shadows. The goal would be the capture of signals rather than cities; complex
mathematical algorithms and whirring computers, rather than brawn and bullets,
would determine the winner. The work would be known as signals
intelligence—"Sigint," to the initiated—a polite term for
"reading someone else's mail." Sigint would include both
communications intelligence (Comint), eavesdropping on understandable language,
and electronic intelligence (Elint), snatching signals from such things as
radar.

More than
a month before Hitler's death, the battle began: a small team of American and
British codebreakers boarded airplanes and headed across the English Channel.
The team was part of a unique, highly secret organization with the cover name
TICOM, short for Target Intelligence Committee. Its mission, in the penultimate
days of the war, was to capture as many German codebreakers and cipher machines
as possible. With such information, Allied cryptologists could discover which
of their cipher systems might have been broken, and thus were vulnerable to
attack. At the same time, because the Germans had developed advanced systems to
attack Soviet codes and ciphers, the West would gain an invaluable shortcut in
finding ways to break Russian cipher systems. The key, however, was finding the
men and machines before the Russians, who could then use the German successes
to break American and British ciphers.

Colonel
George A. Bicher, the director of the U.S. Signal Intelligence Division in
Europe, conceived of TICOM in the summer of 1944. The organization was so
secret that even today, more than half a century later, all details concerning
its operations and activities remain classified higher than Top Secret by both
the American and British governments. In 1992, the director of the National
Security Agency extended the secrecy order until the year 2012, making TICOM
probably the last great secret of the Second World War.

Senior
commanders on both sides of the Atlantic quickly saw the potential in such an
organization. In August 1944, General George C. Marshall, the U.S. Army Chief
of Staff, sent a codeword radio message to General Dwight D. Eisenhower at his
headquarters in London instructing him to give TICOM the highest priority.
Later that day, he followed up with a laundry list to Eisenhower detailing the
items he wanted TICOM to capture, including all the codemaking and
code-breaking documents and equipment they could get their hands on.

TICOM's
members were among the few who knew the Ultra secret, that the United States
and Britain had broken Germany's highest-level codes. And they knew that
whoever won the race to Hitler's cache of cryptologic secrets held the
advantage in the next war, whether cold or hot. Because many of the members of
TICOM would go on to run both NSA and the British postwar codebreaking center,
it was a war they themselves would eventually have to fight.

For more
than four years, the best German cryptanalysts had been attacking American,
British, and Russian code and cipher systems, with deadly success. With luck,
somewhere in the ruins the Allies would find a key that could unlock a number
of complex Soviet codes, saving years of frustrating work. And some locked
vault might also contain reams of intercepted and decoded Russian messages,
which would offer enormous insight into Soviet military and political
intentions after the war. At the same time, the interrogation transcripts and
other documents could shed light on unknown weaknesses in American and British
cryptography, weaknesses that might prove fatal in any future conflict.

Because
all of the key cryptologic targets were located in Berlin, there was added
urgency: Russian forces would shortly occupy that area. Thus, "the plan
contemplated a simultaneous seizure and exploitation of the chief Sigint
centers through an air-borne action," said the TICOM report. These centers
had been pinpointed by means of Ultra decrypts: messages that had been
encrypted by Germany's high-level cipher machine, the Enigma, and decoded by
British and American codebreakers.

As
outlined in the TICOM reports, there were four principal objectives:

a. To learn the extent of the
German cryptanalytic effort against England and America;

b. To prevent the results of such
German cryptanalysis against England and America from falling into unauthorized
hands as the German Armies retreated;

c. To exploit German cryptologic
techniques and inventions  before they could be destroyed by the Germans; and

d. To uncover items of signal
intelligence value in prosecuting the war against Japan.

"The
TICOM mission was of highest importance," the document concluded.
"American cryptographers did not then know with certainty the extent to
which United States communications were secure or insecure, nor did they know
the extent of the enemy's cryptanalytic abilities, strength, and
material."

TICOM's
plan to quickly snatch up the people, papers, and equipment as the Nazi war
machine began to collapse was nearly completed by Christmas, 1944. But within
months, Germany was in chaos; Hitler's codebreaking agencies began to scatter.
The original plan, said the report, "was no longer feasible." The
chances that Anglo-American parachute teams might seize worthwhile personnel
and material, and then hold them through the final battles, became remote.

Instead,
TICOM decided to alert six teams in England and send them into enemy territory
as United States and British troops were overrunning it. The teams were to
"take over and exploit known or newly discovered targets of signal
intelligence interest and to search for other signal intelligence targets and
personnel."

It was in
drafty brick buildings on a drab Gothic-Victorian estate called Bletchley Park
that the future TICOM team members had labored during much of the war. Hidden
away in the foggy English county of Buckinghamshire, Bletchley was formally
known as the Government Code and Cypher School. After the war it changed its name
to the less descriptive Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). The
suburban location was chosen because it was halfway between the universities of
Oxford and Cambridge, key locations for finding new recruits, and only
forty-seven miles from London.