Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (4 page)

Over the
next several days the dark gray equipment was carefully lifted from its crates
and set up in the basement of the building. Then, like magic, high-level
encrypted Russian communications, pulled from the ether, began spewing forth in
readable plaintext. Whitaker, who pulled into the camp a short time later, was
amazed. "They were working like beavers before we ever arrived," he
scribbled in his notebook. "They had one of the machines all set up and
receiving traffic when we got there."

The
Russian system involved dividing the transmissions into nine separate parts and
then transmitting them on nine different channels. The German machines were
able to take the intercepted signals and stitch them back together again in the
proper order. For Campaigne and the rest of the TICOM team, it was a once-in-a-lifetime
discovery. Back in Washington, Campaigne would eventually go on to become chief
of research at NSA.

Once the
demonstration was over, Campaigne had the German soldiers repack the equipment
and the next day it was loaded on a convoy, completely filling four heavy
trucks. Two TICOM members, including First Lieutenant Selmer Norland, who would
also go on to a long career at NSA, accompanied the equipment and soldiers back
to England. There it was set up near Bletchley Park and quickly put into operation.
It, or a working model, was later shipped back to Washington. The discovery of
the Russian codebreaking machine was a principal reason why both the U.S. and
British governments still have an absolute ban on all details surrounding the
TICOM operations.

All told,
the TICOM teams salvaged approximately five tons of German Sigint documents. In
addition, many cryptologic devices and machines were found and returned to
Bletchley.

Equally
important were the interrogations of the nearly 200 key German codebreakers,
some of which were conducted at a secret location codenamed Dustbin. In
addition to the discovery of the Russian Fish, another reason for the enormous
secrecy surrounding TICOM may be the question of what happened to the hundreds
of former Nazi code-breakers secretly brought to England. Were any of the war
criminals given new identities and employed by the British or American
government to work on Russian codebreaking problems? Among those clandestinely
brought into the United States was the top codebreaker Dr. Erich Huettenhain.
"It is almost certain that no major cryptanalytic successes were achieved
without his knowledge," said one TICOM document.

Among the
surprises to come out of the interrogations was the fact that the Germans knew
all along that Enigma was not totally secure. "We found that the Germans
were well aware of the way the Enigma could be broken," recalled Howard
Campaigne. "But they had concluded that it would take a whole building
full of equipment to do it. And that's what we had. A building full of
equipment. Which they hadn't pictured as really feasible."

In
Washington, the TICOM materials were of enormous help in determining just how
secure, or insecure, America's own cryptographic systems were. The picture
painted by the documents and interrogations showed that while a number of
lower-level systems had been read by German codebreakers, the most important
ciphers remained impenetrable. "European cryptanalysts were unable to read
any U.S. Army or Navy high-level cryptographic systems," the highly secret
report said.

The
Germans were never able to touch America's "Fish," a machine known as
the SIGABA. Like the Fish, SIGABA was used for the Army and Navy's most
sensitive communications. In fact, because TICOM showed that the SIGABA
survived the war untouched by enemy codebreakers, it remained in service for
some time afterward. It was finally taken out of service only because it did
not meet the speed requirements of modern communications.

The TICOM
report also indicated that other systems were not secure. One Army system and
one Navy system were read for a short time. Both of the unenciphered War
Department telegraph codes were read by the Germans, and Hungary received
photostats of War Department Confidential Code Number 2, probably from the
Bulgarians. Also, thanks to a spy, Military Intelligence Code Number 11, which was
used by the military attach
é
in Cairo,
was read throughout the summer of 1942.

The most
serious break was the solving of the Combined Naval Cypher Number 3, used by
U.S. and Royal Navy convoy operations in the Atlantic; this Axis success led to
many deaths. Other systems were also broken, but they were of less importance
than the Allied breaks of Enigma and Fish.

By far the
greatest value of TICOM, however, was not in looking back but in looking
forward. With the end of the war, targets began shifting, the signals
intelligence agencies dramatically downsized, and money became short. But at
the start of the Cold War, as a result of TICOM, America had a significant
lead. Not only did the U.S. code-breakers now have a secret skeleton key to
Russia's Fish machine, it had a trapdoor into scores of code and cipher systems
in dozens of countries. As a result of the German material and help from the
British, for example, diplomatic communications to and from Afghanistan became
"practically 100% readable." Thus, when Soviet officials discussed
Asian diplomatic issues with the Afghan prime minister, the U.S. could listen
in.

It was a remarkable
accomplishment. At the outbreak of the war in Europe in 1939, the United States
was attacking the systems of only Japan, Germany, Italy, and Mexico. But by the
day the war ended, according to the TICOM report, "cryptanalytic attack
had been directed against the cryptographic systems of every government that
uses them except only our two allies, the British and the Soviet Union."
Now readable, either fully or partially, were the encryption systems of
Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Colombia, the Dominican
Republic, Egypt, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Iran,
Iraq, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, Portugal,
Saudi Arabia, Spain, Switzerland, Syria, Thailand, Transjordan, Turkey, Uruguay,
Venezuela, and Yugoslavia.

Between
the attack on Pearl Harbor and August 1945, the Army's Signal Security Agency's
Language Branch scanned more than 1 million decrypted messages and, of those,
forwarded approximately 415,000 translations. But then it was over. Brigadier
General W. Preston Corderman, chief of the Army codebreakers, was sure there
would no longer be a need for much of a cryptanalytic effort. He therefore
assembled the staff beneath the tall maple trees that gave his headquarters
shade in the summer. The war was over, he told them, and so was their country's
need for their services.

"Overnight,
the targets that occupied most of the wartime cryptologic resources—Germany and
Japan—had become cryptologic nonentities," said one NSA report. "One
by one the radio receivers that had been faithfully tuned to enemy signals were
switched off. Antenna fields were dismantled, equipment mothballed as station
after station around the world ceased monitoring the airwaves, turned off the
lights and padlocked the doors. Gone were the Army intercept stations at Miami,
Florida; at New Delhi, India; at OSS Operations in Bellmore, New York; at
Tarzana, California; and at Accra on the African Gold Coast. Silent were the
Radio Intelligence Companies supporting General MacArthur in the Southwest
Pacific and the Signal Service Companies in Europe."

The
relative handful of American codebreakers who stayed on quickly shifted gears.
The Soviet Union instantly became their number one target.

One key
listening post not shut down was Vint Hill Farms Station. Known as Monitoring
Station Number 1, it was located in the rural Virginia town of Warrenton.
During the war, Vint Hill played a pivotal role in eavesdropping on enemy
communications for thousands of miles in all directions. At war's end, 2,600
people stayed on, many of them intercept operators, to handle the transition
from hot war to cold war. They were able to eavesdrop on key Russian diplomatic
and military communications sent over the Fish machine. "They intercepted
printers at Vint Hill, Russian printers," said Colonel Russell H. Horton,
who commanded the station shortly after the end of the war. "They had
these ... circuits that had nine channels if I'm not mistaken. They had
machines all hooked up so that they separated the channels and did all of the
interception in Cyrillic characters." Horton added, "As far as I
know, there was no effort against the Russians until after the war."

Although
the fact was known to only a few, a small group of code-breakers had in fact
been working on Russian code problems during the war. In 1943, American
intelligence began to worry about a possible alliance between Nazi Germany and
Russia as part of a comprehensive peace deal. Such a merger would have been a
nightmare for the Allies. As a result, a few Army cryptanalysts were pulled
away from work on German systems and assigned to a highly secret new unit with
the goal of attempting to solve the enormously complex Soviet codes and
ciphers.

Since
1939, thousands of encrypted Soviet messages, sent between Moscow and
Washington, had been acquired from Western Union and other commercial telegraph
companies. A major break occurred when it was discovered that identical code
groups turned up in seven pairs of messages. To find even a single pair was a
billion-to-one shot. Army codebreakers had discovered a "bust," an
error or anomaly that opens a crack into the cipher system. Such a bust might
be caused, for example, by a malfunction in a random-number generator. This
bust, however, was caused by the Soviets reusing pages from one-time pads—the
violation of a cardinal cryptographic rule. One-time pads had become two-time
pads. Cecil Phillips, a former senior NSA official, played a key role in the
early Soviet-watching program. "For a few months in early 1942," he
said, "a time of great strain on the Soviet regime, the KGB's
cryptographic center in the Soviet Union for some unknown reason printed
duplicate copies of the 'key' on more than 35,000 pages . . . and then
assembled and bound these one-time pads. . . . Thus, two sets of the ostensibly
unique one-time pad page sets were manufactured."

The
decision by the Soviet codemakers to duplicate the pages was likely the result
of a sudden shortage of one-time pads, a result of Hitler's invasion of Russia
in June 1941. To quickly fill the enormous demand for the pads, Russian
cryptographers likely chose the easiest course: carbon paper. Suddenly
production was doubled while, it was reasoned, security was diminished only
slightly.

Phillips
estimated that between 1942 and 1948, when the last onetime pad was used, more
than 1.5 million messages were transmitted to Soviet trade and diplomatic posts
around the world. Of those, American codebreakers obtained about a million,
30,000 of which had been enciphered with the duplicate pages. But despite the
bust, days and weeks of frustrating work were required to squeeze out a
clear-text message from a cipher text. Even then, usually the most they would
have was a long, out-of-date message concerning such things as shipping
schedules of the Soviet Purchasing Commission.

For more
than thirty years the codebreakers worked on those messages. By the time the
file drawer was closed for the last time, in 1980, they had managed to read
portions of more than 2,900 Soviet diplomatic telegrams sent between 1940 and
1948. Codenamed Venona, the program was one of the most successful in NSA's
history. It played a major role in breaking up key Soviet espionage networks in
the United States during the postwar period, including networks aimed at the
secrets of the atomic bomb.

On April
25, 1945, as TICOM officers began sloshing through the cold mud of Europe,
attempting to reconstruct the past, another group of codebreakers was focused
on a glittering party half the earth away, attempting to alter the future.

Long black
limousines, like packs of panthers, raced up and down the steep San Francisco
hills from one event to another. Flower trucks unloaded roses by the bushel.
Flashbulbs exploded and champagne flowed like water under the Golden Gate. The
event had all the sparkle and excitement of a Broadway show, as well it should
have. The man producing it was the noted New York designer Jo Mielziner,
responsible for some of the grandest theatrical musicals on the Great White
Way. "Welcome United Nations," proclaimed the bright neon marquee of
a downtown cinema. The scene was more suited to a Hollywood movie premiere than
a solemn diplomatic event. Crowds of sightseers pushed against police lines,
hoping for a brief glimpse of someone famous, as delegates from more than fifty
countries crowded into the San Francisco Opera House to negotiate a framework
for a new world order.

But the
American delegates had a secret weapon. Like cheats at a poker game, they were
peeking at their opponents' hands. Roosevelt fought hard for the United States
to host the opening session; it seemed a magnanimous gesture to most of the
delegates. But the real reason was to better enable the United States to
eavesdrop on its guests.

Coded
messages between the foreign delegations and their distant capitals passed
through U.S. telegraph lines in San Francisco. With wartime censorship laws
still in effect, Western Union and the other commercial telegraph companies
were required to pass on both coded and uncoded telegrams to U.S. Army
codebreakers.