By the same token, there was an element of remarkable historical obtuseness in the public position that NSA and its supporters took in response to the disclosures: U.S. intelligence officials denounced Snowden as a mere “traitor,” insisted that criticisms of the agency were based only on “gross mischaracterizations” of its activities, asserted that grave damage had been done by all of Snowden’s disclosures, and flagrantly exaggerated the effectiveness of the dragnet collection programs.9 After first insisting that NSA’s post–9/11 bulk surveillance efforts had foiled fifty-four terrorist plots, NSA officials were forced to revise that claim to thirteen, then “one or two”—then zero.
The agency’s reputation suffered even more when it became clear that the indignant denials made by NSA officials to Congress about the extent of its monitoring of Internet and telephone communications employed tortuous language to imply the exact opposite of the truth. NSA’s director, General Keith Alexander, repeatedly insisted, for example, that the agency “does not collect information under section 215 of the Patriot Act” on the location of cell phone calls placed in the United States; he omitted to mention that NSA was collecting such information, on a massive scale, but relying upon another legal theory for its authority to do so.
NSA’s director and deputy director likewise repeatedly asserted that NSA was not “targeting” the communications of U.S. nationals “anywhere on earth” without a warrant; it was, however, “incidentally” sweeping up vast amounts of such traffic in its warrantless bulk collection programs and storing it in huge data warehouses for later analysis as needed.10
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The roots of the crisis NSA faced as a result of Snowden’s disclosures reached deep into its own history. The bureaucratic imperatives, habits of mind, and institutional culture that drove the agency to engage in such a breathtakingly comprehensive technological intrusion into private communications, despite manifest questions about its legality and even practical value, and then to instinctively and ineptly attempt to cover it up when details became public, characterized NSA from its very beginnings. Going back even to NSA’s predecessor agencies in the 1930s and 1940s, there had always been a sense that the mission was to collect literally everything possible in the way of signals intelligence, about friends and foes alike, even as the resulting flood of incoming data routinely overwhelmed any ability to analyze the haul. There had always been an obsessive pursuit of technical proficiency that pushed to the side any sober weighing of actual intelligence requirements, which often resulted in vast efforts expended on marginally important sources at the cost of huge human and diplomatic risks. And there had always been an impulse to push to the very limits claims of legal authority under national security necessity and presidential prerogative. NSA inherited those same institutional values from its predecessors (along with many of their top officials) when it was established in 1952.
No habit of mind was more deeply ingrained among signals intelligence professionals than the absolute prohibition on even hinting at the government’s capabilities at intercepting signals and breaking codes; given that even the most trivial disclosure might alert a target to take protective countermeasures, undoing years of painstaking effort and resulting in the loss of a vital intelligence source, NSA for years tried even to keep its very existence a secret. The principle behind the agency’s cult of silence was valid enough as a general proposition but was also self-serving in the extreme in the face of public questions now being raised about the fundamental legality and propriety of NSA’s activities—as well as simply unrealistic at a time when everyone knew not only what NSA was but what it did, and cryptography itself had become a public commodity, no longer the purview of great governments alone. It also ironically deprived the agency of just what it needed most at the moment of Snowden’s disclosures: to be able to explain to the American public the value and success of its legitimate mission.
Nothing had so solidified NSA’s reflexive secrecy and institutional tendencies to keep repeating the same mistakes as the bizarre looking-glass world of the Cold War, the unprecedented four-decade-long peacetime confrontation that began with the swift crumbling of the Grand Alliance of World War II after the briefest period of hope of a safer and saner world following the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, and ended with the astonishing fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The Cold War imperatives of secrecy and “deniability” and its never-ending technological arms race, which encompassed the world of intelligence just as it did the battlefield, only reinforced the sense of impunity and the conviction on the part of NSA officials that no one but themselves could be trusted to know, much less understand or judge, their activities; in a manner all too familiar among political zealots, religious sects, academic departments, and other cults and closed societies, they became convinced of their own virtue.
More deeply, the Cold War clouded moral choices and removed traditional democratic checks on government. Nothing had really prepared the United States to embrace as a permanent necessity the kinds of morally dubious actions that had been accepted hitherto only as the exigencies of war, emergency measures in a kill-or-be-killed fight that—it seemed obvious to nearly all Americans—would be promptly dismantled as soon as the victory was won and peace and normalcy returned. Democracies never could and never would really figure out how to reconcile their democratic values with the employment of methods that were, after all, the hallmarks of totalitarian and police states. Stalin’s Soviet Union used surveillance, deception, secrecy, betrayal, official lies, and the permanent militarization of society as its tools of power; to Americans those were the very evils they were fighting against in the struggle to contain the USSR and the expansion of world Communism. The inherent contradictions and almost insane logical disconnects of the Cold War nuclear standoff, in which a constant war footing became the only way to prevent a war that would have meant the end of human civilization were it actually to occur, ineluctably shaped the institutions that were at the forefront of this shadowy fight, none more than NSA.
NSA continues to this day to be extremely chary of revealing any details of its successes against Soviet cryptology during the Cold War, even though nearly all of the systems it targeted then have long been rendered obsolete by the digital age. Yet throughout the Cold War, signals intelligence would be the primary—often the sole—source of intelligence about Soviet intentions and capabilities; its military, economy, and industry; and the myriad technical specifications of its bomber and missile force and air defenses that the Dr. Strangelovean strategists of Armageddon needed to know in order to constantly recalibrate the credibility of America’s nuclear deterrent and maintain a twenty-four-hour-a-day vigil for signs that the Soviets were about to strike first.
The history-changing significance of “Ultra” and “Magic” intelligence in World War II, the Allies’ breaking of the Nazi Enigma cipher and Japanese high-level diplomatic and military code systems, is now common knowledge. “SIGINT successes during the Cold War,” one former NSA director has acknowledged, “were no less significant in terms of gravity and magnitude for changing world history and for protecting the interests of the United States, our allies, and democracy.”11 Those successes were likewise the product of an intellectual and technical triumph of mathematics, linguists, and engineers whose stories of inspiration, struggle, and insight equal those of their famed World War II predecessors.
Despite NSA’s best efforts to the contrary, it is possible to piece together significant strands of the story of its work in the Cold War from an array of declassified, if highly fragmentary, sources. (I am particularly grateful to Rene Stein of the National Cryptologic Museum Library for doing her utmost, under often impossible circumstances, to help me locate useful materials.) The capabilities and institutional traditions forged during this long chapter of modern intelligence and military history explain much that is both admirable and dysfunctional about NSA today. At its best, the agency galvanized innovation in computing and higher mathematics, deliv
ered vital intelligence on foreign threats available in no other ways, and deftly and brilliantly targeted key sources with technical and espionage wizardry. At its worst, it obsessively pursued the unattainably grandiose scheme of collecting literally every signal on earth, undermined communications and Internet security for everyone, evaded legal oversight, and became the victim of its own secrecy with an unchecked culture of impunity, obfuscation, and byzantine bureaucratic politics. Reconciling the inherently clandestine and often dirty business of intelligence with the principles and ideals of an open democratic society will never be completely possible. But understanding how these things came to be is one place to start.
The human and political story of NSA in this era is inseparable from the technical story of codes and codebreaking, an undeniably fraught subject for the layman. It is impossible to understand the intellectual challenges and triumphs of the men and women who carried out this work, or even the most basic decisions they made, without an appreciation of the scientific problems and goals that drove them. I have tried to capture the essential contours of the technical story and give a sense of what the codebreakers were up against without assuming any specialized knowledge of cryptology or mathematics on the part of the reader; for those who are interested, more detailed technical explanations can be found in the appendixes.
PROLOGUE
“A Catalogue of Disasters”
In the late afternoon of October 31, 1949, two young Latvian émigrés came aboard a fast motorboat in the West German harbor of Kiel and quickly disappeared belowdecks as the boat headed quietly out into the darkening waters of the Baltic Sea. At the helm was a former naval officer of the Third Reich, Kapitänleutnant Hans-Helmut Klose. The vessel under his command, though it now belonged to the British Baltic Fishery Protection Service and flew the Royal Navy’s White Ensign, was one he knew thoroughly. The S208 was a captured German E-boat, the type of fast torpedo boat that Klose had captained while serving in Hitler’s navy. Overhauled in Portsmouth after the war, stripped of its torpedo tubes and armament and fitted with silent underwater exhausts, the S208 was capable of a blazing forty-five knots.
Klose also knew the waters of his destination intimately, for one of his assignments during the war had been to drop Nazi agents behind Russian lines in the Baltic territories. Now he was doing exactly the same job for his new masters, the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).1
Neither the British spymasters nor their counterparts in the newly formed American CIA were very particular about the war records of the men they recruited to try to penetrate Stalin’s Russia in the opening years of the Cold War. Vitolds Berkis, the younger of Klose’s two passengers, was the thirty-one-year-old son of a former Latvian diplomat. He had been a more-than-willing Nazi collaborator during the war, joining an SS intelligence unit in Riga before fleeing the country in 1944 as the Russian armies rolled west. Western intelligence officials, milking émigré organizations and combing displaced persons camps for zealous—or desperate—anti-Communist nationalists who could be induced to return to their Soviet-occupied homelands, plucked Berkis out of an internment camp in Belgium. His fellow recruit had an even more unsavory past. Andrei Galdins had served the entire war in an SS execution squad of Latvian collaborators that was responsible for murdering half of Latvia’s Jews.
Brought to London, the men had received six months’ intensive training in tradecraft while living in a comfortable four-story Victorian house, complete with a cook and housekeeper, in the exclusive area of Chelsea, and provided £5 a week pocket money. They were drilled in Morse code and radio and cipher procedures, the use of invisible ink, arranging letter drops, shaking surveillance, resisting interrogation. On excursions to Portsmouth harbor, and later into the wilds of Dart-moor and the Scottish Highlands, they practiced firing small arms and machine guns, hand-to-hand combat, rowing and swimming silently through the ocean at night, surviving off the land, circling past villages without being detected.
As they boarded the S208, each carried a large brown suitcase. In one was a radio set; in the other two pistols, two submachine guns, ammunition, 2,000 rubles, codebooks, false passports; around their waists they wore money belts crammed with rolls of gold coins.
Landing that night by rowboat on an isolated beach west of Ventspils, about one hundred miles from the Latvian capital of Riga, the men got ashore unseen and made their way to the home of a priest who, according to SIS contacts in the émigré community, was a trusted link to partisans already organizing against the Soviet occupiers. The men explained that they were the first of a wave of British-trained agents on the way, and by the next day they were ensconced in a safe house for the winter with promises that they would be able to make contact with partisans in the forest when the weather improved and it was safer.2
Encouraged by the reports Berkis and Galdins sent back to London, their SIS handlers continued to dispatch new agents at roughly six-month intervals. Some of the earliest agents to make their way into the Baltic states, who had landed from Sweden at the end of the war, were smuggled out on return trips of S208. Brought to London for debriefing and further training, they added their confirmation of the success of the operation. Eager to get into the game, flush with cash, and chafing at occasional hints of British condescension toward them as inexperienced newcomers, CIA quickly organized its own penetration route, in 1949 and 1950 dropping agents by parachute into Ukraine and Lithuania and laying ambitious plans for six or more drops a year. An unmarked C-47 transport plane, piloted by two Czech flyers who had served in the RAF in the war, would take off from the U.S. Air Force base in Wiesbaden, Germany, skimming the treetops at two hundred feet to evade radar as it crossed the Soviet frontier, then at the last minute popping up to five hundred feet—the minimum safe altitude for a parachute jump—just over the drop site.3
In their training, the émigrés had been told to focus their efforts on obtaining information on Soviet military installations and airfields, above all any evidence of developments relating to rocketry and atomic weapons. Yet the actual reports coming back were oddly thin, little more than what was available in newspaper articles and other published sources. When occasionally pressed by their handlers to provide better information, the men brushed it off, indignantly insisting that they were not mere spies but “freedom fighters” dedicated to liberating their homelands; their mission was to “overthrow the Communists,” not gather crumbs of intelligence for the British and Americans. And so the flow of agents, radios, weapons, and money continued.4
Skeptics in Washington and London were just as dismissively brushed off. Determined to prove that the wartime derring-do of SIS and the American OSS was alive and well and relevant in the postwar world, the heads of operations of the British and American intelligence services refused to see the obvious. Stewart Menzies, head of SIS since 1939, was a throwback to the romantic days of cloak-and-dagger espionage, a spymaster from central casting. He was charming and aristocratic and slightly mysterious, had been a star athlete as a boy on the playing fields of Eton, belonged to all the right London clubs, rode to hounds with the Duke of Beaufort’s fox hunt, never missed the Ascot races, and was the principal source of the untrue but widely believed rumor that he was the illegitimate son of King Edward VII. He had acceded to the post of “C” (the traditional designation of the head of the British secret services; it was the actual initial of SIS’s first chief, George Mansfield Smith-Cumming, who signed his memorandums that way in green ink) by beating out two rival candidates; the clinching factor was his producing a sealed envelope containing a letter purportedly written by his predecessor, Admiral Sir Hugh “Quex” Sinclair, who had died in office, endorsing him for the job. As Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby, the master Russian mole who duped Menzies and a generation of SIS colleagues, would later sarcastically observe of his chief, “His intellectual equipment was unimpressive, his knowledge of the world, and views about it, were just what one would expect from a fairly cloistered man of the upp
er levels of the British establishment.” Ironically, Menzies owed most of his internal prestige to having presided over Bletchley Park’s brilliant codebreakers and their astonishing intelligence coups during the war—a new breed of technocratic spies who represented the antithesis of the old world spycraft he embodied.5
On the American side, Allen Dulles, appointed in 1950 to take charge of the new CIA’s operations as deputy director for plans, was the former OSS station chief in Switzerland during the war and something of a romantic himself, enthralled by the image of parachuting in an army of spies to bring down the Communist enemy. By April 1951 it was becoming unmistakably evident that the entire operation had been blown, that the émigré groups were thoroughly penetrated by Soviet intelligence and had been for years, that the agents sent in one after another had in fact all been either killed or turned immediately upon their arrival. CIA director Walter Bedell Smith, an Army general who had served as General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s chief of staff in Europe, and then as ambassador to the Soviet Union after the war, dispatched his old Army comrade General Lucian Truscott to assess the agency’s covert operations. “I’m going over to Germany to see what those weirdos are up to,” Truscott remarked, and it did not take long for him to confirm that the whole operation was a colossal mistake, wasting lives “just to see what happens when men put their feet in the water,” without producing a scrap of useful intelligence.
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