by DAVID KAHN
They took separate bachelor apartments in Laurel, Maryland, not far from N.S.A. headquarters. Martin began picking up girls in Washington bars. Both joined the Washington Chess Divan, and Mitchell captained the N.S.A. chess team. Martin’s work was so good that the head of Research and Development gave him a letter of praise and approved him for a N.S.A. scholarship. He later won an extension of this for another year—the first in N.S.A. to get a two-year scholarship. Under this, he went, in September, 1959, to the University of Illinois to take a master’s degree in mathematics, while also studying Russian. Mitchell, in Washington, had an unhappy love affair with a married woman who was separated from her husband.
During this year, both men first expressed strong anti-American political feelings. Martin associated with a Communist at Illinois, and in December, 1959, he and Mitchell traveled to Cuba in violation of N.S.A. directives. It has been reported, however, that they had been members of the Communist party since at least February 4, 1958, when membership cards were allegedly issued to them. Both felt so strongly opposed to the then-secret U-2 flights over the Soviet Union, which they knew about through their work, that they visited Representative Wayne Hayes, an Ohio Democrat, to warn him of the “great dangers.” In May, 1960, Mitchell, who worked out regularly with barbells and had posed for nude color slides seated on a velvet-covered stool, began visiting psychiatrist Dr. Clarence Schilt for intellectual discussions of homosexuality.
In June, soon after Martin had returned from Illinois, the two applied for annual leave for the two and a half weeks from June 24 to July 11. This was approved, and their supervisor also authorized them to extend their leaves to July 18 in case they needed more time to visit their parents’ homes on the West Coast. They never went there. Instead, they purchased one-way tickets to Mexico City on Eastern Air Lines Flight 305, leaving Washington’s National Airport a little before noon on June 25. From Mexico City they flew to Havana on July 1. From there they apparently sailed on a Soviet trawler to Russia. For nearly a month nothing happened. On July 26, their chief tried to reach them at their Laurel apartments and at their parents’ homes, and, when he could not, notified the personnel office. When a quiet investigation turned up the flight to Mexico, the Defense Department on August 1 announced their unauthorized absence, and four days later conceded that “there is a likelihood that they have gone behind the Iron Curtain.”
They stepped back in front of it September 6 in the brightly lit theater of Moscow’s House of Journalists. At a lavishly staged press conference, they read a long statement announcing that they had renounced their American citizenship and had received Soviet citizenship, and giving their reasons for their defection:
Our main dissatisfaction concerned some of the practices the United States uses in gathering intelligence information. We were worried about the United States policy of deliberately violating the airspace of other nations, and the United States Government’s practice of lying about such violations in a manner intended to mislead public opinion.
Furthermore, we were disenchanted by the United States Government’s practice of intercepting and deciphering the secret communications of its own allies. Finally, we objected to the fact that the United States Government was willing to go so far as to recruit agents from among the personnel of its allies.
They chose Russia, they said, because:
In the Soviet Union our main values and interests appear to be shared by a greater number of people. Consequently we feel that we will be better accepted socially there and will be better able to carry out our professional activities.
Another motivating factor is that the talents of women are encouraged and utilized to a much greater extent in the Soviet Union than in the United States. We feel that this enriches Soviet society and makes Soviet women more desirable as mates.
Following which double-talk, they proceeded to reveal American successes in cryptanalysis on an enormous scale. Their revelations caused many nations to change keys and systems, though, astonishingly, some of the very nations named took no action at all. The result was a partial dim-out of United States communications intelligence—and probably of Soviet Russia’s as well. Some N.S.A. cryptanalysts went on double shifts, beginning the complex reconstruction of rotor wirings and lug and pin settings all over again. The first reaction of N.S.A.ers was shock; the second, anger: “The dirty bastards!” President Eisenhower branded them traitors. The Pentagon, stating that one was “mentally sick” and both “obviously confused,” denounced the statements of both as “falsehoods”—itself a falsehood, in view of the Defense Department’s own concession in its bill of particulars in the Petersen case that it had broken the code of its Dutch ally. The House Un-American Activities Committee and a special subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee launched investigations, as did the Pentagon.
No one ever came up with a satisfactory explanation of why the two men had defected. It was suggested that they might have been homosexuals; but if they were, they would not have had to go to Russia to practice their perversion. On the other hand, there seemed no evidence of overt homosexual activities that might have subjected them to blackmail. The report of their being Communists does not say why they joined the party. Some have suggested that the immorality of codebreaking might have revolted them, which is what the pair hinted at in their Moscow statement; but why should this trouble only them so drastically and not other N.S.A.ers? One possible reason: a basic personality imbalance. Another theory for their defection involves the “syndrome of the labyrinth,” in which the secrecy of the work precluded any external recognition. Here, too, this affected only Martin and Mitchell. Least satisfactory of all reasons was one of their own: that the United States spies on its allies. This displays a willful blindness to the duplicity of Soviet espionage and Soviet policy in general. A Freudian hypothesis has never been confuted, but never confirmed either: that the two were in unconscious rebellion against their fathers and had displaced this emotion onto the father figure of the government. The answer will probably never be known.
In its investigation, however, the House Un-American Activities Committee turned up some further violations of security in what it called “the most sensitive and secretive of all agencies established by the U.S. Government to protect the Nation’s security and that of its people in a deadly cold war.” Twenty-six sexual deviates were found to be employed by the agency; these were fired. Personnel procedures were shockingly lax. The agency habitually employed personnel before full clearances had been obtained. This practice, permitted under an emergency regulation, had begun in the manpower-short years of the Korean War, but remained in effect a decade later. N.S.A. often ignored derogatory information uncovered during background investigations. It relied too heavily on lie detector results. In at least one case, it hired a person denied employment by another government agency because he was strongly suspected of both homosexuality and Communist activities.
The most ironic violations involved the agency’s directors of security and of personnel. The general counsel of the Defense Department had said piously: “A system of checks and balances has been established to protect the integrity of the Agency’s security requirements. The authority to hire employees is delegated to the Director of Personnel, but the authority to grant security clearances is delegated to the Director of Security.” When the House committee got through, the arrangement looked more like a mutual cover-up. Maurice H. Klein, the personnel director, admitted that he had stated on his own employment forms that he had been graduated from Harvard Law School when in fact it had been from New Jersey Law School, and that he had tried to conceal this and a few other peccadilloes by retyping and falsely dating his records. The director of security, former F.B.I. agent S. Wesley Reynolds, knew of these discrepancies but concluded that they “did not have security significance.” Both men resigned, Reynolds under a rule banning acceptance of favors from those doing business with the government.
A year after the committee issued its r
eport, a former N.S.A. employee revealed more American cryptologic secrets in a letter in Izvestia. He was Victor Norris Hamilton, an Arab who had become a naturalized American citizen and changed his name from Hindali after coming to the United States with the American woman he had met in Libya and then married. A graduate of the American University in Beirut, he worked as a doorman and bellhop in Georgia because, he said, he was barred from teaching because he was an Arab. A retired American colonel recruited him for N.S.A., and he began work there June 13, 1957, as a $6,400-a-year research analyst—or cryptanalyst—solving the cryptosystems of Arab countries. Hamilton was forced to resign on June 3, 1959. According to him, officials became suspicious when he wanted to reestablish contact with relatives in Syria. According to the Defense Department, he was “approaching a paranoid-schizophrenic break.” Whatever the reason, he sought asylum in the Soviet Union and presumably told that government of his work before writing his letter to denounce America’s espionage practices.
Hamilton’s letter appeared in Izvestia on July 23, 1963. On that very day, an N.S.A. clerk-messenger committed suicide by inhaling carbon monoxide in his car when he realized that the jig was up in his game of selling cryptologic secrets to the Russians. He was Sergeant First Class Jack Edward Dun-lap, a decorated combat veteran with an unblemished record, a family man, an average Joe. He seemed to be an ideal security risk when he was assigned to N.S.A. in April, 1958, as part of an Army Security Agency unit. His first job was as chauffeur to Major General Garrison B. Cloverdale, N.S.A.’s assistant director and chief of staff. Later he was graduated to clerk-messenger duties.
The how and the what of Dunlap’s treason have never been officially revealed. The why, however, has become abundantly clear: $60,000. He spent it on a 30-foot cabin cruiser, a world’s-championship hydroplane skimmer capable of more than 100 miles per hour, a baby-blue Jaguar sports car, two late-model Cadillacs, rounds of drinks for the house at expensive resorts and yacht clubs from New Jersey to Florida, and a blonde mistress. He apparently began peddling his secrets in mid-1960, while Martin and Mitchell were planning their runaway, for in June of that year he bought the cabin cruiser with a $3,400 cash payment. He seems to have smuggled out the top-secret documents under his shirt (guards did not frisk personnel, though briefcases were spot-checked), and turned them over to the Russians, at first once a week, later once a month. His mistress knew only that he visited “the bookkeeper” regularly and returned with a large roll of bills. He told acquaintances various stories to explain his new wealth: that he owned land on which a mineral valuable for cosmetics had been discovered; that he had come into a little inheritance; that his father—actually a bridge-tender—owned a large plantation in Dunlap’s native Louisiana. What he told and gave the Russians is unknown to Americans, but it may have included top-secret American estimates of the capabilities of the Soviet Army and Navy and nuclear forces, together with similar data on North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces.
Despite N.S.A.’s vaunted security programs, none of this was discovered—even though Dunlap drove to work in his Jaguar or one of the Cadillacs, took time off to race his hydroplane, began dating an N.S.A. secretary. Ironically, N.S.A. had sent an Army ambulance to return him to Fort Meade Army Hospital when he injured his back in a regatta, lest the local hospital give him sedatives which might make him talk—yet never once wondered how he could afford the yacht club in the first place. He was trapped, not by alert N.S.A. work, but by his own greed. Fearful that he might be transferred out of N.S.A. at the end of his duty tour, he applied in March, 1963, to leave the Army but keep his N.S.A. job as a civilian. This brought him into contact with a lie detector for the first time; service personnel assigned to the agency are not subjected to a polygraph test, but prospective civilian employees are. Two tests discovered evidence of petty thievery and immoral living.
For two months nothing happened. He continued his job and his thefts. Then further investigations disclosed that he was living beyond his pay, and he was quickly transferred to a routine job in a Fort Meade orderly room with no access to secret information. The investigation dragged slowly on, and it was not until a month after Dunlap killed himself—after two unsuccessful attempts—that the leisurely sleuths discovered that Dunlap’s widow had found a sheaf of highly classified official papers among her husband’s belongings. For the first time the F.B.I. was called in, but Dunlap’s death ended all hope of learning exactly what he had peddled to the Reds. “To be safe,” one authority said, “you have to proceed on the assumption that everything which passed through this section might be resting in a file in Moscow.”
Episodes like these are bad in the short run, but in the long run their effects may be salutory. They shook the National Security Agency out of its smug self-complacency. For the agency had been so sure, so cocksure, so almost arrogantly certain that all cryptologic wisdom resided behind its triple fence, that its secrecy was hermetic, that, while improvement was always possible, there was very little room left for it at N.S.A.
Take, for example, the case of the road signs. When N.S.A. moved to Fort Meade, large white-on-green signs pointing to it blossomed on the Baltimore-Washington Expressway. After employees became familiar with the new location, the signs were removed, presumably as a security measure. One can just hear the security staff congratulating itself for thinking of even that tiny detail. Yet at that moment the agency was harboring Martin, Mitchell, Hamilton, and Dunlap, as well as a dishonest director of personnel, a favor-taking director of security, and a couple of dozen sex deviates.
The agency impressed itself mightily. The Ming telegraphic code, which Petersen had taken, is a case in point. This is a public code which the agency republished with some annotations and classified “secret.” An official explained that “It [the N.S.A. version] identifies it [the public code] with the agency, and therefore, indirectly it implies the work of the agency.” But the legal criterion for classifying information “secret” is that its disclosure could “result in serious damage to the nation.” One wonders whether in so grading the Ming code the agency does not exaggerate its importance a little.
The thick swaddling of secrecy insulated the agency from external examination and cauterization. As the Un-American Activities Committee wrote, “Past efforts by the Defense Department to investigate N.S.A. were ineffective for the most part because, when matters involving irregularities at the Agency were brought to the attention of the Department, it more often than not appointed as the investigators of the irregularities the very N.S.A. officials responsible for their existence.” So strong was the agency’s resistance to outside criticism that, the committee reported, “In 1960, when the investigation began, obstacle after obstacle was placed in the path of the committee.” After Robert S. McNamara became Secretary of Defense in 1961, he co-operated much more closely with the committee than had his predecessor, Thomas S. Gates, Jr.
“The results,” the committee said, “were rewarding.” N.S.A. tightened its employment security practices. For example, it denied conditional employees access to sensitive material until they were fully cleared. It stopped delegating the director’s authority to grant interim clearance for access to top-secret material. It appointed a board of psychiatric consultants to improve its psychological assessment program. It required supervisors to notify the personnel and security offices within two hours of any worker’s unauthorized absence. It alerted supervisors to signs of undue mental strain. The agency also instituted some additional reforms, such as the expansion and reorganization of its Office of Security Services.
But perhaps the most important result was the improvement in N.S.A.’s attitude. It swallowed the bitter pill of Congressional criticism and cured itself of its infallibility syndrome. It discovered that there were things outside Fort Meade that it could learn with profit. Cooperation between the committee and N.S.A. “proved most beneficial to the committee’s investigation and to the Agency’s self-analysis of its programs and practices,” the
committee wrote. “The committee is confident that, through its efforts, N.S.A. has been helped and the national interest and security strengthened. It also believes that the N.S. A. and Defense Department have made a significant contribution to the national security by the manner in which they assisted the investigation and took steps to correct deficiencies pointed up in the course of the inquiry.”
