by DAVID KAHN
* Probably as in the Petrov technique.
19
N.S.A.
IT HAS BEEN SAID that 90 per cent of all the scientists who have ever lived are living today. The remark applies to cryptology with even greater force. The age is one of communications and of Cold War. The titans that confront one another in Berlin and Vietnam and outer space owe much of their effectiveness as superpowers to the vast webs of communications through which they receive information and transmit commands. These networks, more extensive and more heavily used than any in history, furnish cryptologists with unparalleled opportunities. The Cold War gives them the impetus to exploit these opportunities—a stimulus that, in view of the dangers of national extinction, becomes almost an imperative. These two factors converge to produce more cryptology and more cryptologists than ever before.
The size and magnitude of modern communications are staggering. The Defense Communications System, a worldwide strategic network of the American armed forces, transmits well over a quarter of a million messages a day, or more than 10,000 messages every hour. Its 10,000,000-plus channel miles—enough to circle the globe 400 times—are distributed among 85 subordinate nets that provide 25,000 channels and pass through 200 relay stations and more than 1,500 tributary stations. Its plant is worth $2.5 billion and it costs nearly three quarters of a million dollars a year to run. Operating it are more than 30,000 soldiers, sailors, and airmen. The D.C.S. consists essentially of the strategic nets of the three service branches—the Army’s STARCOM, or Strategic Army Network, the Navy’s Naval Communications System, and the Air Force’s AIRCOM, or U.S.A.F. Communications Complex—all welded into a compatible whole. The D.C.S. does not include the tactical, ship-shore, or air-ground facilities, all of which add to the communications volume. So heavy can the tactical volume become that the Navy has outfitted ships purely as communications vessels. The converted escort carrier Annapolis put to sea in the spring of 1964 with its cavernous aircraft storage space filled with a mass of radios, teletypewriters, and cipher machines. The Army talks over featherweight walkie-talkies and tiny helmet radios and observes the battlefield from rear command posts via portable field television sets.
But a few statistics, however overwhelming, and a few devices, however striking, cannot truly convey the volume, the variety, and the importance of communications in military affairs today. It can sink in only by enumerating one by one the at first interesting, then surprising, and finally numbing list of the various networks that a military force needs to send its many kinds of messages. Take, in this regard, the Air Force.
Its basic network for passing official traffic on a global basis is the radio and wire teletype AIRCOMNET, which handles the bulk of Air Force communications. AIROPNET, also teletype, provides communications among air bases to control worldwide flight movement. The Air-Ground Communications Network provides a voice link to airplanes from interconnected ground command posts and air bases for strike orders and traffic control. The Flight Service Network provides telephone service among military and civilian airports for flight safety. U.S.A.F. Weather Communications comprises the Weather Teletype Network, the Facsimile Network, and the Global Weather Intercept and Broadcast Network—all closely interrelated to provide worldwide meteorological information.
The Strategic Air Command alone employs six communications systems. Most vital is the Primary Alerting System, a wholly separate telephone system that connects the command post at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha directly with all S.A.C. control rooms and major headquarters, even those in Alaska, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Its wires run solid from the famous red telephone at Offutt to loudspeakers and handsets at all control rooms. Over these circuits a commander would alert the major retaliatory forces of the United States. Backing this up is the all-radio Commander’s Net, for the S.A.C. chief’s exclusive use. The Teletype Net carries most S.A.C. traffic, and the Telephone Net, part wire and part radio, part commercial (through leases) and part military, supplements it. The Radio Telephone Network, within the continental United States, provides an emergency reserve for the Telephone Net. The High-Frequency Single Side Band Tactical Air-Ground Radio System sends messages to attacking S.A.C. bombers, including fail-safe messages.
The Tactical Air Command depends upon four networks—the Operational Teletype Circuits, Operational Telephone Circuits, Bomb Damage Assessment Reporting Circuits, and Reserve Forces Operational Telephone Network—as well as some mobile communications. The Air Defense Command relies upon its Alert No. 1 Teletype Network to transmit reports of possible attacking airplanes or missiles. It also has a Command Teletype Network and a Telephone Network. COMLOGNET transmits logistic data at high speed directly from punched tabulating cards. For verbal traffic concerning supplies, the Air Materiel Command employs SITECOMNET for operations, AMCOMNET for command and administration, LOGAIRNET for airlifting critical items, and LOGBALNET to supply ballistic-missile needs. Then the Military Air Transport Service has three networks—teletype, voice, and facsimile—and the U.S.A.F. Security Service enjoys a network of its own. In addition, the several theaters have independent networks for local traffic, such as the Alaskan, Caribbean, and Pacific communications; the European-Near East web, with its high density of military installations and integration with North Atlantic Treaty Organization nations, is particularly complicated. U.S. Air Force traffic flows over all of these.
Even considering only the radio circuits, the possibilities for traffic analysis and cryptanalysis are enormous. The United States protects itself from these, and at the same time it exploits the opportunities afforded by the comparable Communist networks. The hugeness of this task has engendered the greatest cryptologic organization in history—the National Security Agency and the three armed service cryptologic agencies.
N.S.A. probably owes its existence, like the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense itself, to Pearl Harbor. Congress, after its investigation of the surprise attack, recommended “that there be a complete integration of Army and Navy intelligence agencies,” and the record of the investigation contains a few anticipatory suggestions for cryptologic centralization as well. Major General C. A. Willoughby, MacArthur’s G-2, complaining about Navy selection of cryptanalyzed information passed over to him, admonished: ‘The solution to this vexing and dangerous problem is a completely joint, interlocking intercept and cryptoanalytical service, on the highest level, with the freest interchange of messages and interpretation.” Colonel Henry Clausen, who investigated MAGIC in 1944, told the Joint Congressional Committee the following year: “I also think that the basic recommendation that can come from this committee is a very fine one if you make it that never again shall MAGIC, this information, be monopolized by one service or the other service, but have it distributed by one agency on an overall basis.” Former Pacific Fleet intelligence officer Captain Edwin Layton may have had this in mind when, after deploring the publicity given to American cryptanalysis by the committee hearings, added that “it may serve a very fine purpose for the future.” And in a memorandum concerning a proposed Central Intelligence Agency that Allen W. Dulles submitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1947, the future Director of Central Intelligence noted that “An important balance [to intelligence obtained openly] must be supplied by secret intelligence which includes what we now often refer to as ‘Magic,’ “ and that any Central Intelligence Agency should have access to “intelligence gained through intercepted messages, open and deciphered alike.”
In the first postwar years, the cryptologic duties of the American armed forces reposed in the separate agencies of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force. The Army, at least, charged its agency with maintaining “liaison with the Department of the Navy, Department of the Air Force, and other appropriate agencies, for the purpose of coordinating communication security and communication intelligence equipment and procedures.” Presumably the Navy and the Air Force units were similarly charged. This arrangement, which relied on internal d
esire instead of external direction, prolonged the abuses hinted at by Willoughby. To rectify them and achieve the benefits of centralized control, the Defense Department in 1949 established the Armed Forces Security Agency. The A.F.S.A. took over the strategic communications-intelligence functions and the coordination responsibilities of the individual agencies. It left them with tactical communications intelligence, which can best be performed near the point of combat and not at a central location (except for basic system solutions), and with low-echelon communications security, which differs radically in ground, sea, and air forces. Even in these areas A.F.S.A. backed them up. A.F.S.A. drew its personnel from the separate departmental agencies, though it later hired separately, and housed itself in their buildings.
The merits of the unified approach to cryptology quickly manifested themselves. They warranted expanding that approach beyond the Defense Department to all cryptologic activities of the United States government, such as State Department cryptosysterns. Accordingly, President Harry S Truman promulgated a directive that created the National Security Agency on November 4, 1952, abolishing A.F.S.A. and transferring its personnel and assets to N.S.A.
That directive was classified as security information, and for several years no government document publicly acknowledged the agency’s existence. Finally, in 1957, the United States Government Organization Manual included a brief but vague description. Today the official description reads:
CREATION AND AUTHORITY.—The National Security Agency was established by Presidential directive in 1952 as a separately organized agency within the Department of Defense under the direction, authority, and control of the Secretary of Defense who was designated executive agent for the performance of highly specialized technical functions in support of the intelligence activities of the United States.
PURPOSE.—The National Security Agency has two primary missions—a security mission and an intelligence information mission. To accomplish these missions, the Director, National Security Agency, has been assigned responsibilities as follows: (1) prescribing certain security principles, doctrines, and procedures for the U.S. Government; (2) organizing, operating, and managing certain activities and facilities for the production of intelligence information; (3) organizing and coordinating the research and engineering activities of the U.S. Government which are in support of the Agency’s assigned functions; and (4) regulating certain communications in support of Agency missions.
The unspecified nature of those two missions involves, of course, cryptology. In its security function, N.S.A. creates and supervises the cryptography of all U.S. government agencies. In intelligence, it intercepts, traffic-analyzes, and cryptanalyzes the messages of all other nations, friend as well as foe.
In its first years, A.F.S.A.-N.S.A. was scattered in offices throughout the Washington area, notably at Arlington Hall, home of the Army Security Agency, though its official address was 3801 Nebraska Avenue, North West, home of the Navy Branch. In 1953, however, the Defense Department called for bids on the preliminaries for constructing a single big building at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, about half way between Washington and Baltimore. In July of 1954, the Charles H. Tompkins Company of Washington was awarded a $19,944,451 contract to construct one of the most costly buildings in the Washington area on an 82-acre site in conjunction with the J. A. Jones Company. It was essentially completed in the fall of 1957, but it was not until early in 1958 that the last of the employees had moved in. By then the total cost had risen to about $35,000,000 for the structure, for associated facilities such as parking lots, utility lines, electrical power substation, supply building, and barracks for the Marine Corps guards, and for moving in existing equipment and installing new.
The long, three-story structure, of concrete, glass, and steel, in the shape of a squared-off A, stands in a shallow bowl fringed with pine trees and surrounded by acres of asphalt parking lots. It faces south, fronting upon Savage Road, a narrow road that widens as it passes N.S.A. and then shrinks again. The Baltimore-Washington Expressway runs a few hundred yards to the west. This Operations Building is 980 feet wide by 560 feet deep, and along its full width runs the longest unobstructed corridor in the country, an honor previously claimed by the 750-foot central corridor of the United States Capitol.
In addition to dozens of offices and basement facilities for computers, the structure encloses a cafeteria accommodating 1,400 and an auditorium seating 500, eight snack bars, a post exchange, a dispensary with X-ray and operating rooms and dental chairs, a shoe-repair and clothes-cleaning shop, a barber shop, and a branch of the State Bank of Laurel. A system of “security conveyor belts” runs through the basement, carrying trays of documents to eight substations. A German pneumatic-tube system can whisk up to 800 containers an hour at 75 feet per second to interoffice destinations selected by a dial at each station. The building is fully air-conditioned. It has a public-address system. It is said to have more electric wiring than any building in the world. Its institutional, characterless offices, filled with metal desks, partitions, and lockable file cabinets, are the black chambers of today.
But although this cathedral of cryptology—far and away the greatest ever erected to that science—was the third largest building in the Washington area (after the Pentagon and the new State Department headquarters), and although its 1,400,000 square feet exceeded the C.I.A.’s 1,135,000, it proved too small after only five years. In May of 1963 the J. W. Bateson Co., Inc., was awarded a contract for $10,940,000 to construct a nine-story Operations Building Annex of boxy, modern style between the jutting arms of the square A. It added 500,000 square feet to the N.S.A. headquarters complex, 140,000 of it in a basement area almost certain to be used for computers. The annex was completed in late 1965.
This expansion was clearly made necessary by the rapid growth of the agency. In 1956, the director told a Senate committee, “We have almost 9,000 civilian employees here in the Washington area and around the world.” In 1960, two former employees reported that 10,000 persons worked in the Operations Building. Based on a nationwide governmental average space-utilization of 150 square feet per worker, the two N.S.A. buildings would house more than 12,500 employees; based on the figure of 135 square feet per worker that modern buildings attain, the number of employees there would exceed 14,000. This is certainly greater than the number of C.I.A. employees in Washington, estimated at about 10,000, and even when the uncertain numbers of employees of both agencies in posts around the world are added to their totals, N.S.A. is still larger than C.I.A., making it almost certainly the largest intelligence agency in the free world. (At least a thousand N.S.A. employees are stationed overseas. Several hundred work in each of two branches, N.S.A. Far East in Japan and N.S.A. Europe in Germany. Others serve with N.S.A.’s worldwide intercept net, a few as radio operators, most as supervisors, since nearly all the intercept operators are armed forces personnel.) N.S.A.’s budget has also been reported to be twice as large as the C.I.A.’s.
Outside the agency but attached to it is a Scientific Advisory Board of leading figures in fields related to cryptology, such as mathematics and electronics. These experts are in business or at universities, but they bring outside experience and new insights to N.S.A. problems. The board, in turn, is advised by several panels of specialists. The agency also receives the results of the cryptologic research of an independent research organization. The Institute for Defense Analyses was formed in 1956 by five universities to offer academic evaluation of defense projects; it is supported by government contracts. In its fiscal year ending February 28, 1959, I.D.A. received a two-year contract for $1,900,000 to build and operate a laboratory for basic research into communication theory as it applies to Defense Department responsibilities. The institute created a Communications Research Division and constructed a brick building to house it, complete with a Control Data Corporation 1604 computer, on the campus of Princeton University. The division’s first director was Dr. A. Adrian Albert, then 54, of the University of Chica
go, one of America’s outstanding mathematicians, with a long record of service to his country and his science, who had framed cryptologic concepts in algebraic terms as early as 1941, and who was an N.S.A. consultant. His task seems to have been to get the division off the ground, for he was succeeded by Dr. J. Barkley Rosser, and then by deputy director Dr. Richard A. Liebler, 47, who had worked for N.S.A. from 1953 to 1958 and was an old friend of N.S.A.’s deputy director, Dr. Louis W. Tordella (they had taught mathematics together at Illinois in 1937 and 1938).
The Communications Research Division interests bright mathematicians in the general field of communications and turns them loose on a project that interests them. Sometimes such a project bears directly on advanced practical problems, often dealing with rotor systems; sometimes it is more general, more basic, as how to get a computer to recognize actual English text instead of a collection of letters whose statistics resemble English text. Its policy has been to hire most mathematicians for a year only, to keep bringing fresh minds to bear. The size of the mathematical staff has remained in the neighborhood of the 24 of its first year. The division also encourages what amounts to basic research in its general field. It sponsors symposia, such as one on finite groups held in conjunction with the American Mathematical Society, and one on basic mathematical concepts in linguistics, as well as two summer campus projects, SCAMP and ALP, which introduce the academic world to cryptology. Though I.D.A. contracts with the Office of Naval Research, the cryptologic results are all sent to N.S.A.
Still other cryptologic agencies outside the American government with which N.S.A. cooperates are those of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The main ones are ECSA, the European Communication Security Agency in Paris, EUSEC, the Communication Security and Evaluation Agency, Europe, in London, SECAN, the Communication Security and Evaluation Agency, N.A.T.O., in Washington, EUDAC, the Signal Distribution and Accounting Agency, Europe, in London, and DACAN, the Signal Distribution and Accounting Agency, N.A.T.O., in Washington. In addition, N.A.T.O. has several communication agencies that use the security material provided by the cryptographic agencies.
