Code Warriors

by Stephen Budiansky

  *2ERA, notably, introduced in 1951 a pioneering commercial machine based on Atlas called the ERA 1101. (The name was an inside joke: 1101 is binary for 13, a reference to NSA’s Task 13 that began the project.) This was followed, after the company’s purchase by Remington Rand and incorporation into its UNIVAC division, with the UNIVAC 1103, a groundbreaking scientific computer that rivaled the IBM 701.

  8

  Days of Crisis

  On September 6, 1960, the English-language broadcast of Radio Moscow began with a very Middle American–accented female announcer introducing “the appearance of two employees of the National Security Agency of the United States” at a press conference in the Soviet capital. Through the crackling atmospherics of the shortwave band, William H. Martin and Bernon F. Mitchell explained their reasons for seeking political asylum in the USSR.

  A page-one story in the New York Times the next day would describe the two men as “appearing in the best of health and spirits,” dressed in “neat American suits.” Martin, twenty-nine years old, with crew-cut hair and a confident, relaxed manner, did most of the talking, reading a long statement that offered an encyclopedic description of NSA, its functions, the names and responsibilities of its major subdivisions, and a detailed and highly accurate explanation of the intrusive ELINT missions conducted by the United States along the Soviet border, including an account of the flight of a U.S. C-130 ferret aircraft shot down over Soviet Armenia in September 1958.

  “We were employees of the highly secret National Security Agency, which gathers communications intelligence from almost all nations of the world for use by the U.S. government,” Martin began:

  However, the simple fact that the U.S. government is engaged in delving into the secrets of other nations had little or nothing to do with our decision to defect. Our main dissatisfaction concerns some of the practices the United States uses in gathering intelligence information. We were worried about the U.S. policy of deliberately violating the airspace of other nations and the U.S. government’s practice of lying about such violations in a manner intended to mislead public opinion. Furthermore, we were disenchanted by the U.S. government’s practice of intercepting and deciphering the secret communications of its own allies. Finally, we objected to the fact that the U.S. government was willing to go so far as to recruit agents from among the personnel of its allies.

  In response to a question from the Izvestia correspondent, Martin stated that the neutral nations whose communications NSA intercepted included “Italy, Turkey, France, Yugoslavia, the United Arab Republic, Indonesia, Uruguay—that’s enough to give a general picture, I guess.”1

  The act of intelligence gathering was supposed to support policy, not be policy, and it certainly was never supposed to drive world events in a headlong stampede by becoming the news itself. But like the Berlin Tunnel and even more the shootdown on May 1, 1960, of one of the CIA’s secret U-2 spy planes over Sverdlovsk—in the very heart of Russia, thirteen hundred miles from the nearest border—Martin and Mitchell’s defection was news in anyone’s book.

  The flip side of secrecy and plausible deniability was that concealment and lies were bound to create a sensation when they became public. The U-2 incident had been the first real test of how the United States could sustain the ethical double standard of engaging in acts of espionage and surveillance that it condemned as illegal and oppressive when performed by totalitarian states like the Soviet Union, and it had dramatically flunked.

  Eisenhower—who once admitted that had the Soviets violated American airspace in a similar manner he would have asked Congress for an immediate declaration of war—had been assured by the CIA’s director that the U-2 flew so high, seventy thousand feet, that were one ever to be shot down neither the plane nor the pilot would survive to tell any tales. And so the president of the United States proceeded to tell a series of lies about the plane, its mission, and his own involvement in approving the flights until Khrushchev triumphantly revealed that the pilot was alive, well, in Soviet custody, and had already admitted everything.2

  As with the Berlin Tunnel, the American public seemed to admire CIA technological know-how more than they were troubled by official government mendacity, but coming as it did just two weeks before a summit of British, French, Soviet, and U.S. leaders that was to resolve once and for all the problems of Berlin, the repercussions on world events were stunning. Khrushchev arrived at the Paris summit, delivered a forty-five-minute opening tirade, shouting out his denunciations of the “treachery” and “bandit acts” of the United States, and withdrew his invitation to Eisenhower to visit the Soviet Union following the summit. The Soviet deputy premier, Anastas Mikoyan, was beside himself over Khrushchev’s “hysterics”; years later he said that by torpedoing the Paris conference, Khrushchev “was guilty of delaying the onset of detente for fifteen years.” KGB chief Alexander Shelepin blandly remarked, “All I know is that there have always been spies and always will be. So there must have been a way for him to find another time and place to tell off Eisenhower.”

  It was not the flights themselves so much as Eisenhower’s deceptions that put the Soviet leader in an impossible situation. “I became more and more convinced,” Khrushchev later explained, “that our pride and dignity would be damaged if we went ahead with the conference as if nothing had happened.” The Soviet leader had tried to give the president an out by initially suggesting that Eisenhower himself had not known about the U-2 incursions. Eisenhower for his part later acknowledged, “I didn’t realize how high a price we were going to have to pay for that lie. And if I had it to do over again, we would have kept our mouths shut.”3

  Martin and Mitchell cited the U-2 flights as one of the more egregious proofs that current U.S. policies had become “dangerous to world peace”—they accurately noted that statements by Vice President Richard Nixon that the flights were aimed only at forestalling a surprise attack by the Soviets was a patently false cover story—but as usual with the labyrinthine psychological story of defection and betrayal the reasons for their jumping sides were not so neat and simple.

  The men had left on vacation together on June 24, ostensibly to visit their parents on the West Coast. On Monday, July 25, a week after they were supposed to return, their supervisor tried to reach them at their local addresses. He then phoned the missing employees’ parents, who reported they had not seen them at all during their leave. At that point NSA’s security office scrambled its entire twenty-two-man staff. By the afternoon of the twenty-eighth they had discovered that Martin and Mitchell had purchased one-way tickets on a flight to Mexico City at Washington’s National Airport on June 25. On July 1 they had continued on to Havana, at which point the trail went cold. A key to a safe-deposit box at the State Bank of Laurel had been left in a prominent spot in Mitchell’s house, and at NSA’s request the Maryland State Police obtained a court order on August 2 to open it. Inside they found a copy of a “Parting Statement to the American People” with a note signed by the men requesting that it be made public.

  Over the next six months the NSA security officers spoke to 450 people who had any association with the defectors, hoping to learn what their motivation had been. There was little or no indication that they were ideologically committed Communists. Both had similar backgrounds, raised in upper-middle-class families: Martin’s father was the former head of the local Chamber of Commerce, Mitchell’s a small-town lawyer. The two men had served together in the Navy in Japan, where they met, and had joined NSA the same day in May 1957 as GS-7 crypt­omath­emati­cians.

  The bespectacled Mitchell seemed more of a loner, insecure and “extremely unsophisticated and naive,” according to the investigators’ findings, but both were socially awkward, arrogant, and bitterly resentful that they had not been accorded the recognition they felt was commensurate with their intellectual attainments. Martin’s mother told an NSA security officer that “her son was a genius, far superior to ordinary men.” His coworkers described him as “an insuffer
able egotist.” Their decision to defect had apparently been an impetuous one. Mitchell left behind a new car and baby grand piano, both fully paid for, and had given his neighboring landlady $100 to pay his rent through August 15. Nor could investigators find any evidence that they had been recruited by the KGB, had tried to enlist other NSA employees to engage in espionage, or had taken any classified documents with them.4

  Little attention was paid in the ensuing maelstrom to Martin and Mitchell’s revelations of NSA spying on U.S. allies or the provocative dangers of the ELINT missions. What made headlines instead was the sensationalistic charge by the chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Representative Francis E. Walter of Pennsylvania, that the defections had exposed NSA as “a nest of sexual deviates.” Newspaper stories alleging that the “two defecting blackmailed homosexual specialists” were part of a “love team” who “recruit other sex deviates for federal jobs” quickly followed in the Los Angeles Times and the Hearst papers.

  In fact, NSA investigators found that though neighbors considered the pair “odd young men who kept to themselves,” there was no reason at all to think that they were homosexual. Their “Predeparture Statement” included a bizarrely incongruous passage praising the Soviet Union’s encouragement and utilization of the talents of women, which “we feel…makes Soviet women more desirable as mates,” an observation that while affirming the picture of the two NSA mathematicians as remarkably naïve and lonely young men did not exactly peg them as “sexual deviates.” A female friend of Mitchell’s told NSA security officers of having “frequent and normal sexual activity with him during the entire period of their acquaintance,” and as for Martin, though he had mentioned to friends certain “sex problems,” including sadomasochism, those problems were similarly confined to women. (Among Martin’s regular companions was a Baltimore stripper who went under the stage name Lady Zorro, who told investigators that she and Martin had had more than forty “dates,” for which Martin paid handsomely in cash.)5

  None of the facts mattered. A flurry of changes in security procedures that followed went after all the wrong but easy targets. Under pressure from Walter’s committee, NSA dismissed twenty-six “sex deviates” whom a reinvestigation of current employees uncovered. The HUAC, in a final report on its own investigation, correctly called attention to the unreliability of the polygraph and the false sense of security it offered, quoting J. Edgar Hoover’s strong skepticism about the device. But NSA’s reaction was to redouble its reliance on polygraph screening and make it even more intrusive and arbitrary, allowing information obtained during polygraph examination to be turned over to the Office of Security Services for further investigation; previously, NSA applicants had been assured that in return for “voluntarily” submitting to the test, anything they told the examiner would be kept confidential.6

  Martin and Mitchell almost immediately regretted their decision, discovering that life in the Soviet Union bore little resemblance to the sunny picture painted in Soviet Life and other glossy propaganda publications that had shaped their image of the country. Both soon married Russian women, but Martin divorced a few years later; neither ever had children. Over the years a number of prominent visiting Americans, including the clarinetist Benny Goodman and several business executives, were approached by the men asking for help to return to the United States. Both ended their lives as alcoholics, Martin confiding to one associate that he was under constant surveillance and had never been permitted to do any meaningful work at the laser research lab where he was employed by the Russian government.7

  —

  The focus on rooting out homosexuals and “deviates” from NSA predictably did nothing to prevent the next spy scandal to hit the agency: even red-blooded, heterosexual, married American men with seven children and expensive blond mistresses to support were not immune to temptation. Staff Sergeant Jack E. Dunlap was the holder of a Purple Heart and Bronze Star for “coolness under fire and sincere devotion to duty” in the Korean War. On July 22, 1963, he was found sitting dead in his car at his home near NSA headquarters, a length of radiator hose from the exhaust pipe running through the right front window and the engine idling.

  A month later his widow turned over to Army investigators a pile of classified documents from the attic of their home. She said her husband had told her that since mid-1960 he had been meeting a member of the Soviet embassy staff at rendezvous around Washington; in exchange for $40,000 he had supplied documents and hundreds of rolls of film containing pictures he had taken of classified material. Dunlap had worked since 1958 as a driver and courier to the NSA chief of staff, Major General Garrison B. Coverdale, and as an analyst in the Soviet section. Although his evaluation described him as “a traffic analytic assistant of limited ability,” he had access to a considerable range of high-level information, having been entrusted with a key to his area and adjoining offices and regularly sent to retrieve materials from the Central Files office.

  Dunlap’s motive was money pure and simple. He had walked into the Soviet embassy to offer his services, and the air attaché, Mikhail N. Kostyuk, had been all too happy to make the deal on behalf of the GRU. Among the documents in Dunlap’s house that he had not yet gotten around to handing to his Soviet contact was an August 17, 1962, report entitled “Use of Radioprinter Scrambler on Soviet Missile Test Ranges,” detailing NSA’s ability to derive from traffic analysis of this apparently otherwise undecodable material indications of when a Soviet missile test was under way, the approximate time the launch would take place, and whether a successful firing or an in-flight failure occurred.8

  Three months before his suicide, after applying for conversion to civilian employment at NSA, Dunlap admitted on a polygraph examination to having had “immoral sexual relations” with women and was moved to a “nonsensitive” position. As in the Petersen case, NSA subsequently pointed to this finding as proof that the polygraph “works” and should be mandatory for all NSA employees, military and civilian alike. They played down the embarrassing fact that had anyone been using their eyes instead of pseudoscientific voodoo machines and obsessive fixations on “sex deviates” to identify security risks, they would have noticed long before that Dunlap had left a blindingly obvious trail. On an Army sergeant’s salary of $100 a week, he owned two Cadillacs, a baby-blue Jaguar sports car, a thirty-foot cabin cruiser, and a world-class racing hydroplane; he told coworkers a series of contradictory and patently fantastic stories to account for his sudden wealth, including that his father owned a large plantation in Louisiana, that he had made a successful investment in filling stations, that he owned land containing a valuable mineral used to make cosmetics, and that he had won the money as prizes in boat races. Nor did it exactly require a polygraph examination to uncover the fact that a married NSA employee who had begun dating an NSA secretary was possibly engaging in “immoral sexual relations.”9

  In the course of HUAC’s investigation, other embarrassing facts had come out about NSA’s security program and more generally its cozy self-assurance that it was accountable neither to the public nor even to Congress. Several former NSA employees told the committee investigators that NSA’s director of personnel, a former Army major named Maurice H. Klein, wielded such power that even though they had left the agency they feared telling what they knew about problems there because Klein would see to it that their clearances were revoked and they would never be able to work in any classified programs again. Further digging revealed that Klein, on joining AFSA in 1949, had originally lied on his application—he thought that Harvard sounded better than the New Jersey School of Law as the source of his law degree—and NSA’s security director, a former FBI agent named S. Wesley Reynolds, subsequently covered up for his colleague when he turned up the inconsistency. Klein had then slipped a new copy of his application into his personnel file, revised to reflect the correct information about his educational credentials. The only trouble was that the substitute form had been printed by the Government Printi
ng Office after the date of his original application. When HUAC investigators requested a copy of Klein’s personnel file, he realized that his attempt to cover his tracks might now be exposed, and pulled yet another switch, locating a blank copy of the older version of the form and filling that out with the true information—but typing it on an IBM electric typewriter that hadn’t existed at the time. All of it came out, and both men were forced to resign.10

  That two senior government officials had succeeded for so long in such a cover-up was a stark demonstration of the impunity that secrecy conferred. During his tenure as director, General Canine had played Congress like an accordion, telling congressmen who tried to ask any substantive questions about NSA’s work, “I don’t think you would want to be burdened with the responsibility of that information,” and hinting that the nation’s very security would be gravely endangered if the agency did not immediately receive the extra tens of millions of dollars he always seemed to be asking for.11 During the HUAC investigation, for the first time, thirty-four senior NSA officials were summoned to testify before Congress, albeit behind closed doors. It would be another decade before Congress or the courts would at last begin to exercise any regular oversight of NSA’s programs. But already it was clear that the blissful era of invisibility of all things cryptologic that a generation of America’s codebreakers had assumed as a virtual birthright was coming to an end.

  —

  Not that they didn’t keep trying. A postmortem of Martin and Mitchell’s defection concluded that the damage they had done was minimal. Nonetheless, in an exercise of doubtful utility, NSA undertook to rename every section of the agency revealed by the pair at their press conference and all of the “Codewords, Nicknames, Pseudonyms, Short Names, and Mythological Designators” they might ever have seen.12 GENS and ADVA, the Soviet-bloc sections of PROD, were merged and renamed A Group; ACOM, dealing with Communist countries outside Moscow’s immediate orbit, which included China, North Korea, North Vietnam, and Cuba, became B Group; ALLCOM, responsible for the entire rest of the world, was now G Group. All other operating and administrative sections of the agency received similar new single-letter designations.