Code Warriors

by Stephen Budiansky

  Philby had promptly alerted the Soviets when Klaus Fuchs was identified in the cables, giving Moscow time to warn some of their agents in the atomic spy network to flee to Mexico. He was also passing on developments in Arlington Hall’s reading of the HOMER cables. The immediate result of whatever warnings Moscow gave Maclean, however, was only to reveal how close Maclean was to cracking under the strain of imminent exposure.56 The son of a former cabinet minister, Maclean was another of the Cambridge spies whose place in the British establishment seemed to have put them beyond suspicion, but his behavior was now becoming wildly erratic. He was drinking more than ever, and in May 1950, stationed at the British embassy in Cairo, he went on a completely unhinged spree, tearing up the apartment of two secretaries at the American embassy, shredding their underwear, and smashing a huge mirror into the bathtub. The Foreign Office, with remarkable understanding, merely sent him home for psychiatric treatment—then promoted him to run the American desk of the department in London.

  The NKGB message read by Arlington Hall in April 1951 positively identifying the Soviet spy HOMER (“GOMMER”) as British embassy official Donald Maclean. TYRE was New York; SIDON, London.

  In April 1951 the moment Philby had been fearing arrived: Arlington Hall read a message from June 1944 which mentioned that HOMER was traveling to New York to visit his wife, then pregnant, who was staying with her mother.57

  That narrowed the field to one—positively identifying HOMER as Donald Maclean.

  The information went to London and back to Philby in Washington through official U.S.-U.K. channels; Philby at once informed his Soviet handler in New York and said Maclean had to be hustled out of Britain before he could be interrogated and compromise the entire network. Whether engineered by Philby or just by chance, the British embassy in Washington chose just that moment to send back to London another member of Philby’s circle of Cambridge spies, one whose drunken escapades put all others of the group to shame. Guy Burgess, assigned as the public information officer in the Washington embassy, had been living in Philby’s basement and misbehaving on a spectacular scale, showing up to work in disheveled clothes, drinking like a fish, insulting and picking fights with everyone he met, flamboyantly parading his promiscuous homosexuality, and at one completely out-of-control martini-and whiskey-sodden party at the Philby home, sketching a viciously obscene cartoon of one of the female guests, whose husband, the CIA’s counterintelligence chief William Harvey, then threw a punch at him.

  At the time the crucial evidence against Maclean fell into place, Burgess had just managed to provoke an even more serious diplomatic incident, tearing through the outskirts of Washington in a Lincoln convertible and insolently telling off the patrolmen who stopped him three separate times during his wild progress through the Virginia countryside that he had diplomatic immunity, which prompted an official protest from the State Department.58

  Maclean now was under constant surveillance in London as MI5 hoped to catch him meeting his Soviet handlers. But as Philby correctly calculated, a visit to Maclean by his friend Burgess, who had not yet been implicated, would not arouse suspicion. Philby quickly hatched a plan for Burgess, as soon as he arrived back in London, to make arrangements with the Soviet embassy to spirit Maclean out of England.

  Burgess secretly decided it would be a good idea for him to make an exit too. By the time the Foreign Office realized the men had slipped away and sent an urgent cable to its embassies throughout Europe to have Maclean stopped and brought back “at all costs and by all means,” they were already in Moscow, having traveled with Soviet passports under false names. On June 7 the news of their defection to the Soviet Union became public. Philby—whose close association with Burgess was impossible to hide—was horrified at Burgess’s precipitous flight, which threatened to give away the whole game.59

  Philby was recalled to London shortly afterward and under pressure from Washington dismissed from the service. Bill Harvey wrote up a devastating indictment pulling together all of the evidence pointing to the conclusion that Philby was a Soviet spy, and CIA director Smith made clear that unless Philby was fired, the American intelligence relationship with London was over.

  For a decade Philby avoided arrest by coolly keeping up the boldest of fronts, maintaining he was guilty of nothing worse than an “imprudent association” with Burgess, whom he said he had never suspected of being a Communist. He was more than a little aided in his deception by the utter inability of most of his former colleagues, his faithful CIA drinking companion Angleton included, to believe such a betrayal possible by one of their own. Menzies, the head of SIS, insisted that Philby could “not possibly be a traitor.” Only in 1963, after he was confronted in Beirut with new evidence by an SIS official who told him “the game’s up” did Philby escape to the Soviet Union.60

  The spring of the year before Philby’s departure from Washington, another message read by Gardner and Lamphere identified several Soviet agents who had been gathering information on aircraft and aircraft engines at defense plants on the West Coast in the 1930s and 1940s. James Orin York, an aeronautical engineer who worked at the Northrop and Douglas companies, was interviewed by the FBI and related how in mid-1941 he had been turned over to a new controller, a man named “Bill” who had given him $250 to buy a camera. York used it to copy specifications of the P-61 Black Widow night interceptor, among other classified projects. He was eventually paid $1,500 by Bill, whom he met regularly to hand over information and obtain lists of specific material the Russians were interested in. Bill once let slip that he knew Arabic, and eventually also mentioned his last name, which York recalled was something like “Villesbend.”

  In May 1950, AFSA suspended William Weisband, its linguist adviser on the Russian project who had worked so hard to be helpful and ingratiating to Meredith Gardner and others at Arlington Hall. A few months later, York positively identified Weisband as his handler Bill, pointing him out to two FBI agents on the street outside the federal courthouse in Los Angeles where York had just testified before a grand jury.61

  Notes made by a Russian journalist and former KGB officer, Alexander Vassiliev, who from 1994 to 1996 was permitted to examine files in the KGB archives, later confirmed that Weisband—one of whose code names was ZHORA—was, as many in NSA had long suspected, the source of the leaks that triggered the Black Friday code changes. Following Gouzenko’s defection, Weisband had been deactivated as a precaution along with most of the other Soviet agents in America, but in February 1948 the Soviets reestablished contact, and that was when Weisband passed word to Moscow of Arlington Hall’s cryptanalytic successes against Soviet code systems.

  In August 1948, Weisband asked to be given asylum in the USSR, but the MGB kept him in place, providing a steady flow of payments and vague promises of future assistance: he was too valuable an asset to give up quite yet. At Arlington Hall he continued to supply documents, which he smuggled out under his shirt and passed to Soviet officials at rendezvous points around Washington. In July 1949, Weisband told his handlers he was worried that suspicions might lead to him, and asked that the Russians not be “overly hasty” in introducing cipher security changes that might expose him. In fact, by then the deed had already been done, as a 1949 MGB report noted:

  On the basis of materials received from ZHORA, our state security agencies implemented a set of defensive measures, which resulted in a significant decrease in the effectiveness of the efforts of the Amer. decryption service. As a result, the pres. volume of the American decryption and analysis service’s work has decreased significantly.62

  When first questioned by the FBI in 1950, Weisband denied everything. In 1953 he finally admitted knowing York but refused to either admit or deny that he had engaged in espionage for the Soviets. Convicted of contempt of court for refusing to testify to a grand jury, he served a year in prison, but was never indicted for espionage: NSA officials adamantly opposed a prosecution that risked exposing any of the agency’s cryptanalytic successes.63
It would not be the first or the last time that NSA sought to keep secret from the American public what even the Soviets already knew, or to hide behind the shield of national security its own blunders, scandals, and bureaucratic miscalculations.

  6

  “An Old Mule Skinner”

  The man chosen to put NSA on its feet following the shakeup of the signals intelligence organization in the midst of the Korean War neither asked for nor wanted the job. Lieutenant General Ralph J. Canine, who had succeeded Admiral Stone as director of AFSA in July 1951, had no prior experience in signals intelligence or cryptanalysis and by his outward air had no interest in such esoteric disciplines. Chief of staff of XII Corps under Patton’s Third Army in World War II, Canine was as regular Army as they come. In his five years in charge of the agency the only times he ever missed his weekly Thursday morning nine o’clock haircut were the few occasions when he was out of the country or was summoned to the White House.1 He was an avid golfer and a four-handicap polo player, which placed him just below the professional level. When faced with long technical explanations he would complain about “the long-hairs coming in and giving me a lot of baloney,” or observe that what qualified him to be director of NSA was his long experience in the Army dealing with mules, having commanded pack artillery units in his early days during and after World War I. (He had originally intended to become a doctor, graduating as a premed student from Northwestern University in 1916, but, as he put it, “the First World War rescued me and my future patients.”) He later claimed that William Friedman tried to teach him the elements of cryptanalysis after he became director. “I gave up after the first lesson.”2

  Canine—it was pronounced kuh-NINE, and woe to anyone who got it wrong—had, in his words, been “violently against” the assignment at first. At the time of his appointment he was serving as deputy G-2 at the Pentagon and was fully ready to retire after thirty-five years in the Army. Canine went straight to the Army chief of staff to demand “why in the world he had sent me….I knew a little about managing people after managing a good many soldiers,” Canine said, but “I didn’t have the least idea what this problem was.”3

  But for all of his wisecracks about just being “an old mule skinner,” Canine was a skilled organizer, troubleshooter, and string-puller with few equals in the Army. His year and a half as director under the AFSA system had quickly convinced him of the impossibility of that arrangement and the need to shake up the existing organizational dysfunction that was crippling the agency’s work. But he also saw at once the importance of recruiting and retaining top-level civilian cryptanalysts and having NSA take the lead in developing the newest and most powerful computers, and he made those goals his top priority and most enduring legacy. A CIA officer who had worked in cryptology during World War II and had no particular reason to pay the rival agency any compliments was one of many who later gave Canine full credit for the transformation he effected during his tenure: “He raised NSA from a second-rate to a first-rate organization.”4

  One of the new director’s first acts was to tear down the old Army-Navy divisions within the organization and make it clear to everyone that for the first time they were going to have to do what the director, and not their military services, told them to do—and if they had a problem with that, they needed to take it up with the president of the United States, because that was where the order had come from. If they did not want to make the new system work, he said in his first address to the workforce of the new NSA, delivered from the stage of the post theater at Arlington Hall a few weeks after Truman’s October 1952 directive, “Come in and let me know and I will get you a job with CIA.”5

  Canine had already issued what would become a legendary order requiring that all of the furniture in each office—there was a promiscuous assortment of green and brown filing cabinets that had been inherited from ASA and Op-20-G—match. This, of course, sounded exactly like the kind of Army chickenshit that the many ex-GIs among Arlington Hall’s civilian workforce thought they had escaped with the end of the war, and was greeted with unconcealed derision—someone leaked the story to the Washington Post, which ran a mildly sarcastic item about the redecorating “color scheme decided upon by the top brass”—but it proved to be a shrewd move.

  “I knew that the way you got people to do things was to know the fellow that was giving the order,” Canine later explained. “And I knew if I made them move all their files, that they’d be mad at me and they’d know who issued the order….I had done this before, at G-2.”6

  His other way of getting people to know who he was was by constantly dropping in to their offices and asking about their work. To prevent these informal visits from taking on the stilted air of an official inspection he played a regular cat-and-mouse game with the director of the production section, Brigadier General Woodbury M. Burgess, who would always insist on escorting Canine when he came to talk to the staff. Canine tried to slip out of his office at Nebraska Avenue, show up unannounced at Arlington Hall, and quickly enter A or B Building by a side door. When he discovered that Burgess had left orders with all of the guards to notify him the instant the director appeared, Canine threatened the PFC at the gate on his next visit. “Don’t you dare call Burgess,” he barked, “or you’ll lose that stripe on your arm.”7

  Canine joked that he aimed to run the agency like “a dictator” (“not like DeGaulle, but a reasonable dictator”) and told his staff that everyone had a vote—but he did not have to count the votes. At the party for his retirement in 1956 he was presented with an album of cartoons illustrating some of his favorite hard-ass maxims (“You guys give me a hard time and you’ll wind up on an island so far out that it’ll take you six months to get a message back”; “What did you do today to earn your pay?”; “What does he do for the man who shoots the cannonballs?”), and no one could forget the way he could turn an academic title like “Doctor” or “Professor” into something that sounded like a dirty word.

  But the fact was he was no anti-intellectual, and while he professed to have been apprehensive about managing civilians, something he had no experience with, he went to bat for the civilian workforce repeatedly, having quickly grasped that finding people who were willing to make a normal career out of the peculiar talents required for NSA’s mission was paramount to its effectiveness in the long term. He secured the first “supergrade” civil service positions for the agency, creating a cryptologic career path that could allow nonsupervisory professionals to rise to the GS-16, -17, and -18 levels, earning $12,000 to $14,800 (compared with the average NSA salary at the time of about $4,000); the three top veteran civilian cryptanalysts in the agency, William Friedman, Solomon Kullback, and Abraham Sinkov, received the first three supergrade promotions. Canine similarly made a point of selecting civilians to attend the National War College after fighting to get NSA an annual place in the class. Louis Tordella was the first, Sinkov the second.8

  The new director also did not hesitate to use his Army connections to jettison the useless “military bosses” that the civilian NSA employees chafed under. “I had some military guys around here who were just breathing. That was all—and taking up space,” he recalled. But he had an old World War I buddy at the Pentagon who could make personnel assignments. “All I had to do was call him up and the guy didn’t come to work in the morning. And I was not bashful about calling him up.”9

  His knowledge of how to do an end run around military regulations was equally adroit. When NSA was preparing its move to Fort Meade in Maryland, the base commander, Floyd Parks, called up Canine one day and told him that if he could get the approval of the secretary of defense, he would build a new golf course that NSA employees could use. The catch was that there was an Army rule that no post could have more than one golf course, and Meade already did have one. Canine made an appointment to see the defense secretary, Charles Wilson.

  “Mr. Secretary, I’ve got something here I want you to sign,” he said, and handed Wilson a letter of approval,
already typed on Wilson’s stationery, which Canine had managed to secure a small supply of just for occasions such as this.

  “Why don’t you send it in here the regular way?” Wilson asked suspiciously.

  “I want to be here when you sign it,” Canine said.

  Wilson read the letter, asked a few questions, picked up his pen and said, “Now quit bothering me,” signed it, and started to put it in his out tray. Canine smoothly intercepted the signed approval: “Don’t do that. Let me take it. I’ll deliver it to General Parks.” By the time anyone else in the Army learned about it the golf course was built.10

  His most effective tool was that he had nothing to lose. On his way out the door to a meeting at the Pentagon or Capitol Hill, Canine would regularly tell his secretary, “I may not be director when I come back.” But he always was, invariably returning with the budget increase, personnel policy exemption, or new project he had insisted he needed to do his job. Once at a congressional hearing Canine was grilled by a congressman who demanded to know why the agency was requesting 111 management engineers in its budget. General Motors, the congressman pointed out, had only 10 such positions in its entire huge organization. Canine launched into an impassioned defense of NSA’s needs. The congressman quickly withdrew his objections. Only after the hearing did the agency’s embarrassed comptroller inform his boss that the number was a typographical error: they had actually meant to ask for 11.11