Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (95 page)

Eventually
the ASA built its own codebreaking computer, which they named Abner. "We
chose the name from Li'l Abner Yokum, the comic strip character who was a big
brute, but not very smart," said Snyder, a longtime NSA computer expert,
"because we believed that computers, which can be big and do brute-force
operations, aren't very bright either; they can only follow simple instructions
but can't think for themselves." Abner was originally given only fifteen
simple programs, or "instructions" (later doubled to thirty).
Nevertheless, when it was secretly completed in April 1952 it was the most
sophisticated computer of its time. One could enter or extract information not
only with the standard keypunched computer card but also with punched paper
tape, magnetic tape, a parallel printer, a typewriter, or a console.

At NSA
Tordella became chief of NSA-70, which was responsible for high-level
cryptanalysis. He and the others who were pushing for ever-increasing computer
power got a boost in 1954. James Killian, a Harvard professor exploring U.S.
vulnerability to another surprise attack, concluded that 90 percent of war
warnings would inevitably come from signals intelligence. But, he pointed out,
since nuclear attack could come in a matter of minutes, it would be necessary
to speed up the timeline on eavesdropping and codebreaking to beat the clock.
"From then on," said one former NSAer, "the focus of the Sigint
process was on speed."

Several
years later, in July 1956, one of the most costly as well as far-reaching
research programs ever undertaken by NSA was born. Its birthplace, however, was
not a chalk-covered blackboard in Research and Engineering but a cocktail
party. Over drinks, several high-level NSA equipment planners began discussing
with Director Canine a number of the agency's perennial problems. At the top of
the list was the battle between the codebreakers, always looking to attack
ever-increasing volumes of data, and the engineers, constantly attempting to
design and build bigger and faster computers to meet those needs. No matter how
powerful the new equipment, the engineers never seemed to catch up. Tordella
began pushing for research into second-generation computer technology.

At the
time, NSA was using the PACE 10, the first analog desktop computer used at the
agency. It was self-contained, to the extent that the logic was in the
interior. The output was a printing device. The plug-in units had a wire
associated with them and each panel was set up to do a different mathematical
function. For a fairly complex mathematical problem, one would plug in all the
appropriate panels and hand-wire them together. The computer's operations
manual boasted that once it was set up, a problem could be completed in fifteen
to sixty seconds.

On the
drawing board was a second-generation computer known as Harvest. It was
designed to be an estimated hundredfold improvement in speed over the best
current computers, but a completion date was still several years away.
Exasperated by this situation, Canine exploded: "Dammit, I want you
fellows to get the jump on those guys [computer companies]! Build me a
thousand-megacycle machine! I'll get the money!"

The head
of NSA's REMP (Research, Engineering, Math and Physics) Branch at the time was
Howard Campaigne, who had helped uncover the high-level Russian
"Fish" cipher system as part of TICOM. "After the ideas of
Harvest were started," he said, "we in research tried to think of
other things; and one of the suggestions that came up was that we ought to have
a big program. We ought to attack it like the Manhattan Project. We ought to
really go after it. And so we dreamed up this 'Project Lightning.' "

It was a
time, according to Campaigne, when anything was possible. "We were always
surprised. We had an idea which looked expensive and we'd go ahead and they'd
always be encouraging—'Do it,' " he said. "During most of my career,
we always had encouragement from above to do things. If you can see something
to do, do it. We made some mistakes, but by and large, most of the things we
attacked were at least partially successful." Among the successes was
developing the first solid-state computer by replacing vacuum tubes with
transistors. Then the transistors were replaced by magnetic cores in a computer
named Bogart.

But by the
late 1960s, said Campaigne, things began to change. "In the late sixties
we weren't getting encouragement. We were being told the budget had to be cut.
We had to do without. ... I used to argue that it [the research-and-development
percentage of the overall NSA budget] should be more than five percent. It
ought to be up in the seven and eight percent [range]. . . . During the
Lightning program, my budget had been as high as nine million dollars a year.
And when I left in '69, that was my last full fiscal year, our budget was three
million. It had been cut to a third. . . . And we had been pretty much cut down
in contract work. All the contracts were much smaller than they had been. So
when I became eligible to retire, I figured, Well, gee, no point in staying
around here to cut budgets. So I went out." By the late 1990s, the research-and-development
portion of the overall NSA budget had dropped even further than during
Campaigne's time, to less than 4 percent.

Part of
NSA's early success, said Campaigne, was a willingness to take chances.
"What the research-and-development people are doing is just trying things
out," he said. "They're doing experiments. And so you'd expect them
to have a lot of failures and a few successes. Historically, as a matter of
fact, they had many more successes than they should have." Later on, as
NSA grew, the experiments became less bold. "The reason is they're so
damned cautious. See, they're more cautious than we were. At least, more
cautious than we should have been. ... I guess it's because the researchers
like to look good. They don't like to have a failure, even though they're there
just to experiment. They like to succeed. But, in fact, somebody who was
administering a research-and-development activity ought to say, 'You know, you
guys are too damn cautious. Get out there and do some experimenting.' "

Campaigne's
optimistic push-ahead-at-all-costs philosophy derived from his belief that
every cipher machine, no matter how difficult, could eventually be broken.
"There is no such thing as an unbreakable cipher," he said, "and
it irritates me when people talk about such things without realizing it's
nonsense. . . . But people keep thinking there might be such a thing as an
unbreakable cipher."

Secrecy
was always NSA's best ally when attempting to get money from Congress.
"All those committee chairs were very friendly in those days, and secrecy
impressed them," said Arthur Levenson, in charge of Russian codebreaking
at NSA and also a veteran of TICOM. "We got most of what we wanted, and a
free hand in how we used it." Another former official said, of congressional
oversight: "We didn't have any in those days." When General Canine
was asked a question during a closed budget appropriations committee hearing,
his favorite answer was, "Congressman, you don't really want to know the
answer to that. You wouldn't be able to sleep at night." Said one former
official, "And the members would look at each other and they were content
with that."

Awarded
$25 million by Congress, and okayed by Eisenhower, NSA's five-year race to
develop "thousand-megacycle electronics" was on.

Lightning
research began in June 1957. Contractors on the project, the largest
government-supported computer research program in history up until then,
included Sperry Rand, RCA, IBM, Philco, General Electric, MIT, the University
of Kansas, and Ohio State. Though the project's primary goal was to increase
circuitry capability by 1,000 percent, the end results went even further,
extending the state of the art of computer science well beyond expectations.
Research was conducted on cryogenic components, subminiaturization of
components, and superfast switching devices, called tunnel diodes.

One of the
most rewarding by-products of Lightning was the boost it gave the development
of NSA's mammoth Harvest complex, which was designed to be NSA's largest
general-purpose computer. For years computers were designed to attack specific
codebreaking machines, such as the complex, Swiss-made Hagelin, which was used
by many countries around the world. "We had in the past, before that time,
we had built a special device for every problem," said Howard Campaigne.
"And we'd gotten some very effective devices. But it always took a long
time to build it. We had to formulate the problem and design the equipment, and
get it constructed, and debugged, and all that had to take place when we ought
to be operating."

But a
superpowerful computer like Harvest, it was hoped, would be able to attack not
only the Hagelin machine but also a variety of cipher machines and systems from
multiple countries. "As the computers became more sophisticated,"
said Solomon Kullback, one of William F. Friedman's original pioneers, it
became possible to "program one of these high-speed general purpose
computers so that it could simulate the action of the Hagelin and use them for
the Hagelin problem." However, the computer would not be limited to the
Hagelin machine.

The
original name for the computer was to be Plantation, but it was discovered that
the White House had already taken the name to use as a codeword for emergency
relocation. "The idea . . . was to have a modular computer set up in which
you'd have things which resembled barns and stables and that the plantation
[would be] a center or central thing," recalled Howard Campaigne. "So
they called it Harvest as part of this plantation group of things."

Ironically,
Solomon Kullback, who headed NSA's research-and-development office for a
decade, never had any real enthusiasm for computers until they started proving
their worth. "He didn't interfere with us," said Campaigne. "He
didn't try to stop us or anything like that, but he just had no personal
enthusiasm for it at all. And later on he was willing to spend plenty of money
on them. And there were a lot of people like that."

In 1955
IBM began planning its most ambitious computer, the Stretch. So huge was
Stretch that IBM designers believed the market contained only two possible
customers: NSA and the Atomic Energy Commission. The AEC signed up for the
computer primarily because of its advantages in high-speed multiplication. But
NSA, looking for more flexibility as well as the manipulation of great volumes
of data, sent the engineers back to the drawing board for a more customized
version. In April 1958 a final design was approved, and in February 1962 the
agency took delivery of its long-awaited Stretch, now modified and considerably
faster. "IBM regarded it as a bad experience because the Stretch as a whole
they lost money on," said Howard Campaigne. "And since then, they've
been very careful about getting into big computers. They just let Seymour Cray
build them."

Once in
place as the heart—or, more appropriately, brain—of NSA's enormous Harvest
complex, even Stretch began to look somewhat diminutive. Attached was a variety
of unusual, complex accessories that more than doubled the computer's original size.
One was the Stream Processing Unit, which was able to take over a number of the
more tedious and time-consuming cryptanalytic functions. A key to codebreaking
is the ability to quickly test encrypted text against every conceivable
combination of letters in an alphabet. Because it may take millions of tries
before the right combination of letters is found which breaks the cipher, speed
is essential. "It was clear to us that one way of getting high capacity
was to go fast," said Campaigne. An evaluation conducted by an NSA team
concluded that Harvest was more powerful than the best commercially available
computer by a factor of 50 to 200, depending on the particular application.

During
World War II, the U.S. Navy's codebreaking machine, known as the
bombe,
was
able to perform tests on 1,300 characters per second. In other words, it was
able to try 1,300 separate keys in the German lock every second, looking for
the right one to pop it open. With the new Stream Processing Unit, that speed
was increased to some 3
million
characters each second—a 230,000 percent
increase. Thus, to pick the lock, NSA could now try 3 million new keys every
second until the right one was found—truly lightning speed.

From one
foreign cipher system alone, Harvest was able to process 7,075,315 intercepted
messages of about 500 characters each, examining every possible combination, to
see if they contained any 7,000 different target words or phrases on a watch
list. The watch list might include such words as "submarine" or
"battalion," or the names of key leaders. It was all done in just
three hours and fifty minutes: an average of over 30,000 intercepted messages
per minute.

Like
misers hoarding every last penny in a rusted treasure chest, NSA computer
scientists hoard microseconds. "You save enough microseconds and lo and
behold you've got a tremendously fast machine," recalled Solomon Kullback.

Harvest
not only increased NSA's speed, it also enlarged its memory, with a specially
designed system that permitted the storage and retrieval of data at nearly 10
million characters per second.

Still
another area advanced by Harvest was information retrieval, which used a unit
known as Tractor. Tractor was capable of automatically locating desired
information from a magnetic tape library of 480 reels, each capable of storing
some 90 million characters. The machines would then mount, position, and thread
the correct tape, and transfer the information at a then mind-boggling 1,128,000
characters per second—"a rate," said a secret NSA document at the
time, "that is still beyond present computer tape technology."
Whereas most magnetic tape contained 100 bits to the inch, NSA managed to pack
3,000 bits in the same space, and then whisk them past the reading heads at 235
inches per second.