by DAVID KAHN
Because of this security, the scrambler that the State Department and the Air Force use for their most secret and highest priority messages probably employs PCM. The price tag seems to confirm it: almost $100,000 per installation. This is the KY-9. Developed by the National Security Agency, it resembles a four-drawer file cabinet. State has seven in its headquarters, including one in its Crisis Center, which keeps a round-the-clock watch on world events; it has also installed two each in Paris and Geneva offices and one each in London, Bonn, Berlin, Rome, and the U.S. mission to the U.N. in New York. The Air Force carries KY-9’s in the flying command posts that would control American retaliatory forces if its underground headquarters were wiped out in a nuclear missile attack.
Scrambler work goes hand in hand with speech compression, multiplexing (sending several messages simultaneously over a single channel), narrowing the bandwidth needed for radiotelephone, and spurt communication systems (in which messages are stored on tape or on a fluorescent scope and then read off and transmitted at high speed). Though these systems aim primarily at cramming more messages into the increasingly crowded electromagnetic spectrum, they also provide a measure of security because only special equipment can receive them. One Army system combines both economy and security. It sends teletype signals on a low frequency and voice on a higher one in the same transmission. The harmonics of the teletype signal spill over into the voice frequency, masking it. The result sounds something like a buzz saw with mutterings partly audible beneath it. The receiver uses a feedback circuit to subtract out the teletype, and with it its harmonics, leaving the speech clear.
Compression systems are no proof against real cracking, however; the teletype-voice system was broken by a radio ham. For use in tank battles, front-line combat, or raids on fast-moving guerrillas, actual scrambler equipment, employing transistors to make it lightweight, is probably being built into portable telephone or radio systems. Heavier and more complex scramblers, affording more security, will be incorporated into the extensive communications system of the dispersed command post of the future, in which functions traditionally centralized will be separated by miles to minimize the effects of an atomic strike. The Army is working actively on this problem in the Voice Security Branch of its Fort Monmouth signal laboratories.
One of COMSEC’s chief customers is the Department of State. COMSEC supervises State cryptography and furnishes or approves State’s equipment, but State pays for this equipment, does its own enciphering with its own personnel, composes its own keys, and checks on its own operation.
The cryptographic advances made during World War II, particularly in mechanization, benefited the State Department. The armed forces supplied the diplomats with surplus cipher machines needed for America’s expanding interests. These machines handled larger volumes of traffic than codebooks could—a clerk operating a cipher machine can turn out 10 to 15 times as much work as one using a codebook. Some codebooks remained in use, however, particularly at isolated posts, for economy and brevity. In the postwar period, the Division of Cryptography (established in 1944) remained “responsible for providing for the security of telegraphic communications by means of cryptographic systems.” By 1961, a Cryptography Staff of 31 administered and operated communications security. It was still headed by its first chief, Navy cryptanalyst Captain Lee W. Parke, by then a special assistant to the deputy assistant secretary for operations.
During these years, traffic volume skyrocketed. The telegraphic workload for all of 1930 amounted to 2,200,000 words. By January of 1960, State was sending and receiving that quantity every two weeks; 4,934,000 words were sent in that month alone. The department attempted to keep up with this flood by partial automation at its main communications center in the new State headquarters building. But the backbone communications and cryptographic equipment at the various U.S. embassies and missions remained of World War II vintage, subject to the mechanical problems of age and, in some cases, to suspicions about their security due to cryptanalytic advances. The tide of messages rose faster and faster. June of 1961 saw 6,929,000 words—an increase of 40 per cent in just 18 months.
In October of 1962, the Cuban missile crisis broke in full force upon the department’s antiquated network. It barely coped. While Russian ships bearing missiles steamed toward blockaded Cuba, dispatches that should have passed between President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev in minutes consumed precious hours in transit. Washington heard of some of Moscow’s most important messages through Russian radio broadcasts hours before they were delivered at the White House. The situation glaringly revealed the inadequacies of American communication. That very month the President set up an inter-departmental committee to look into all aspects of the problem. It brought forth the National Communications System. Within the State Department, the communications organization was completely revamped and equipment was replaced in wholesale lots.
Early in 1963, the department established the post of deputy assistant secretary for communications to centralize and streamline all communications, including the diplomatic pouch and courier service. Under him a Communications Security Division
prepares and executes a cryptographic program for the protection of classified and administratively controlled information electrically transmitted. To carry out this program there is involved the participation in the formulation of National Communications Security policy, development, issuance and maintenance of communications security controls, for both domestic and overseas communications facilities, participation in the design and development of cryptographic systems as to suitability for the Department’s needs, determination of quantitative requirements, and ensuring an adequate supply of cryptographic material, maintaining the necessary records therefor, and serves [serving] as a primary point of contact with representatives of other governments on communications security matters.
Starting with seven persons when it was first created, the division nearly doubled to 13 in 1964, and increased to 17 the following year, thereafter staying that size. Its personnel includes cryptographers and cryptanalysts. The cryptanalysts, who may qualify for the job with experience in the physical sciences, presumably evaluate the department’s cryptosystems. William H. Goodman, a former teacher who joined State as a cryptographer in 1945 after wartime cryptanalytic service in the War Department, became the first head of the division. Unlike the former Cryptography Staff, none of its personnel actually encipher or decipher the department’s messages. That work is handled by $90-a-week code clerks in the Code Section of the Telecommunications Operations Division.
At the same time, State was replacing its outmoded cryptographic equipment—a move wholeheartedly approved by N.S.A. It began spending millions of dollars for new cipher machines and scramblers. It asked Congress for a supplemental $3,250,000 for fiscal 1964 for new communications security equipment. For fiscal 1965, its budget request of $4,500,000 for communications improvement made up almost a quarter of the $24,700,000 increase in the State Department budget. The cryptographic replacement program was substantially completed by 1965.
By far the largest part of the $3,250,000 went for 450 HW-28’s. This device became State’s basic cipher machine. It may serve either as a teletype or a “tape coding and decoding” mechanism—a one-time tape device—or, in an on-line capacity, as both. The Teletype Corporation of Chicago sells them to the department at $7,200 apiece, putting a price tag of well over $3,000,000 on the entire installation, which was to be spread over two or more fiscal years. Deliveries began about March of 1964.
To mechanize the manual one-time pad that must be used by consulates and embassies with no Marine guards to protect cryptographic equipment, the department budgeted $221,400 in 1964 for 50 KW-7’s. These on-line transistorized devices, supplied by COMSEC, appear to be small enough to be locked up, like the pads, and so not to require guards. The per-item cost of $4,500 may be due in part to refinements to prevent inductive or galvanic interaction between the key pulses and the plaintext pulses, wh
ich wiretappers could detect in the line pulse and use to break the unbreakable system through its back door.
In 1963, State asked for $82,300 for a secure internal communications system that would replace the manual method of multilithing copies of “eyes-only” incoming telegrams and hand-carrying them to the offices of the Secretary of State and the assistant secretaries for the several geographic regions. Urgent messages were to be teletyped to their offices; ten KW-1’s at $8,000 each provided on-line encipherment and decipherment for secrecy even though the messages never went outside the State Department building. The remaining $2,300 went for terminal switch gear.
In addition, the department spends tens of thousands of dollars each year “for the purchase of variable elements of cryptographic systems, elements which must be changed periodically in all Foreign Service posts to achieve the desired security.” This expense has ranged between $50,000 and $100,000 in recent years.
The State Department employs leased cable circuits between Washington and regional communication centers abroad, such as its partially computerized center in Paris. This enables it to mix volumes of dummy traffic with the real cryptograms (at no extra cost) so that any interceptor will not easily separate the filler from the valid text. Indicators, of course, tell State’s code clerks which is which. So thorough is the department’s encipherment in some of its traffic—presumably the one-time tape systems—that green operators in the cable offices checking the traffic sometimes think the circuit is out of whack! All of this, together with additional personnel, is making it possible for the department to handle its telegraphic message load of 16,200,000 words a month—about three out of every five messages being in code—with speed and security.
More and better scramblers were part of the department’s improvement program. The KY-9’s were ordered before the program got under way, but older scramblers, costing $75,000 each, were to be junked and replaced with better ones. Their voice quality was not good on long-distance circuits, and they could not be used both to talk and listen at the same time: a push-to-talk button was used. As late as 1964, some posts—such as La Paz, Bolivia—had no telephone privacy at all. Presumably this was to be rectified in the $1,000,000 for voice equipment provided in State’s supplemental budget for fiscal 1964. This figure included 48 KY-3’s at $10,500 each (apparently a lower-security scrambler that was used primarily in Washington, including in the homes of a few high officials), ten KG-13’s at $40,000 each, five KY-8’s at $14,000 each, and a KY-9 spare-parts kit for $32,000. All were to be supplied by N.S.A. They would also make possible State’s participation in an interagency system for a worldwide network of protected voice communication.
Another communications result of the Cuban missile crisis was the long-talked-about “hot line” between Washington and Moscow. At Geneva on June 20, 1963, the United States and the Soviet Union signed a Memorandum of Understanding that set up a duplex cable circuit routed Washington-London-Copenhagen-Stockholm-Helsinki-Moscow for primary communications and a duplex radio circuit routed Washington-Tangier-Moscow for service communications and as a back-up.
“In our negotiations,” wrote Brigadier General George P. Sampson, deputy director of the Defense Communications Agency and chief technical member of the American negotiating team at Geneva, “it was obviously recognized early in the game that some steps had to be taken to insure the privacy of the communications; and quite as obviously the technique to be employed would have to be one generally known throughout the world. It was with this background that the method for privacy which was adopted was suggested and, if my memory serves me correctly, its first mention was by the U.S. side although the general subject had been alluded to by both groups.” This method was the onetime tape. Section 4 of the annex to the memorandum stated:
The U.S.S.R. shall provide for preparation and delivery of keying tapes to the terminal point of the link in the United States for reception of messages from the U.S.S.R. The United States shall provide for the preparation and delivery of keying tapes to the terminal point of the link in the U.S.S.R. for reception of messages from the United States. Delivery of prepared keying tapes to the terminal points of the link shall be effected through the Embassy of the U.S.S.R. in Washington (for the terminal of the link in the U.S.S.R.) and through the Embassy of the United States in Moscow (for the terminal of the link in the United States).
As its one-time tape units, the hot line employs at the American end the ETCRRM II, or Electronic Teleprinter Cryptographic Regenerative Repeater Mixer II. One of many one-time tape mechanisms sold by commercial firms, it is produced and sold for about $1,000 by Standard Telefon og Kabelfabrik of Oslo, the Norwegian subsidiary of International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, which installed the American terminal in the National Military Command Center deep within the Pentagon. It has four teleprinters—two with English alphabet and two with Russian—and four associated ETCRRM II’s. The Moscow end is in the Kremlin, near the office of the Premier.
The hot line became operative August 30, 1963. So far, it has transmitted only hourly test messages: sometimes baseball game scores from the American side, excerpts from Ivan Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter from the Russian. No official substantive messages have passed over its wires, but it reportedly was used the day of President Kennedy’s assassination. It remains in readiness, as President Kennedy said when inaugurating it, “to help reduce the risk of war occurring by accident or miscalculation.” The keying tapes that help prevent insinuation of a false message and assure the privacy of delicate negotiations are almost certainly provided by N.S.A.’s Office of Communications Security.
COMSEC probably also supplies cryptographic protection for the one man who heads both the diplomatic and the military arms of American foreign policy. So awesome are the President’s responsibilities that his messages must be concealed under the most profound secrecy. And so quickly can crises erupt in this tinderbox world that communications must accompany him wherever he goes.
The task of providing them falls to the White House Communications Agency, a unit of the Defense Communications Agency. Officers of the agency precede the President and set up communications facilities at his stop-over points. They also provide for him in transit. The presidential plane, Air Force One, is equipped with scramblers and a cipher machine that, with its cover on, resembles a closed typewriter. The President’s automobile, a specially designed Lincoln Continental, has a scrambler attachment for its radiotelephone. A White House communications car follows a few places behind the President’s in motorcades. During President Kennedy’s visit abroad in 1963, a State Department official in Dublin was contacted by a colleague in Washington in the midst of the parade through cheering crowds. The President, of course, has a scrambler in his office—and its need is made clear by West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s report to his Parliament in 1962 that his telephone was being tapped.
In addition, a warrant officer carrying the most important codes in the United States—and perhaps in the world—in a slim black case inside a portfolio shadows the President day and night. Five officers alternate the duty, 24 hours a day, every day. When the President sleeps, they keep vigil in the hall outside his White House bedroom. When he works, they wait nearby. When he travels, they accompany him in civilian clothes. (On John Kennedy’s yacht Marlin, the officer wore a deckhand’s outfit.) They bear the codes that would be used to transmit the presidential command to launch nuclear missiles. Primarily authenticators, they assure the button-pusher that the order is bona fide, that it really does come from the President. So ubiquitous and essential is this warrant officer that when the one on duty merely flew in a separate airplane while accompanying Lyndon Johnson to Detroit on September 7, 1964, it made news.
These codes form part of the elaborate procedure to ensure that the firing command will get through at the critical moment and that no false message will trigger World War III. Robert S. McNamara has declared that he considered providing complete control over nuclear w
eapons to the President alone “my most solemn obligation as Secretary of Defense. I believe this has also been the view of every United States President, every Secretary of State and every Secretary of Defense in the nuclear era.” To get at least one copy of the message through despite the fire, blast, radioactivity, and near-total devastation of an atomic attack, the Air Force disperses its communications centers, “hardens” (fortifies) some, makes others mobile (the flying command posts), multiplies the methods of transmission (solid-wire telephone, radio, teletype, perhaps even radio transmission through deep-rock strata), and provides alternate routes within each form of transmission.
Several layers of codes make sure that only a valid message gets through. On some circuits no messages may be transmitted until the receiver confirms by authenticating codes that the message really comes from the source it purports to be from. Both sides can challenge and counterchallenge by secondary codes. The President would forge the first link in this chain with codes provided by his briefcase-carrying officer. Though these are highly secret, their secrecy does not aim at protecting the content, for the message is, in effect, known. Rather the secrecy validates, assures, certifies.
