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Trying to make a quotidian job out of spying was rife with incongruities that no amount of support from the top could remove. To put it simply, NSA was a very strange place to work, and it became all the stranger as it grew into a veritable espionage city in the expansion boom that the Soviet atomic bomb and the Korean War set off. Throughout the 1950s the agency’s workforce tripled, from a little over four thousand in 1950 to twelve thousand by the end of the decade. (The service cryptologic agencies, with their ongoing responsibility for operating intercept sites and providing tactical signals intelligence units and secure field communications, expanded even more rapidly, from six thousand to more than sixty thousand in the same period.)12
To be sure, NSAers always viewed themselves more as technocrats than spooks; Thomas R. Johnson, a longtime NSA employee who spent part of his time in the agency’s history office before later doing a tour at CIA, recalled that there was “barely a recognition that what you are doing is part of a foreign intelligence operation” on the part of NSA staffers—who in fact, when Johnson directly put the question to them, flatly refused to accept the idea that what they were doing was even “spying” at all. Their day-to-day activities took place in an atmosphere that resembled “a laboratory or a high-tech clean room” and admitted none of the sordid moral ambiguities of the back-alley world of deception and betrayal into their “sterile” work.13 Allen Dulles offered a wry introduction to the new moral landscape that CIA employees, by contrast, entered the moment they walked through the doors. One new CIA recruit in the 1950s, part of a group of recent college graduates starting together at the agency, arrived two days late for his initial training session owing to an unusual winter storm in the South that delayed his flight to Washington. “Today we are joined by Mr. Calhoun,” the director of central intelligence told the assembled group the next morning, “who says he was unable to be here earlier because of…a snowstorm in Alabama.” He paused significantly. “When we get through with him, he will be able to lie a lot better than that.”14 At NSA, Johnson noted, one always spoke of “techniques”; at CIA, it was “tradecraft.” A CIA officer quoted to Johnson the tried-and-true adage for dealing with embarrassing questions: “Admit nothing, deny everything, and make countercharges.”15
There was another cultural difference between the two spy agencies. CIA had an aura of Ivy League and East Coast sophistication, but NSA was unmistakably Middle America. NSAers were surely the squarest spies on earth, and the NSA personnel newsletter from the 1950s is almost unbelievably hokey, with its reports of employee clubs and events: square dances, talent contests, hobby shows (prizes awarded for best fishing lures, stamp collections, and model trains), the NSA Men’s Glee Club, the NSA Duckpin Team (congratulated for setting a new season record), and an upcoming package trip to New York City (two nights at the Warwick Hotel, dinner and dancing and floor show at the Copacabana nightclub, and a tour of Radio City Music Hall and the United Nations building, all for $42.50; and best of all, “You don’t have to use any annual leave,” as it was taking place over the Veterans’ Day weekend). One issue opened with a large page-one photograph of NSA employees attending the annual meeting of the NSA Federal Credit Union, accompanied by the exciting news that the membership had voted to approve a 4 percent dividend on share deposits.16 A photograph in NSA’s historical files from this period showed the finalists in the annual Miss NSA beauty pageant, the contestants in evening gowns and each wearing a sash bearing the number of the section they worked in.
If it were not for articles bearing titles like “Be On Your Guard Against Espionage” and “List of Subversive Publications” interspersed with the explanations of sick leave and vacation policies, pension options, and adjusted overtime pay rates, there would be nothing to suggest that NSA did anything more exciting for the government than log disability claims or distribute pamphlets containing poultry management tips. But, of course, that was the rub. However outwardly normal NSA’s managers tried to make life for their thousands of employees, the all-pervading secrecy surrounding the work guaranteed that it could never truly be anything of the kind. Canine said he hoped that some of the improvements he made in career opportunities and employee morale “might make them forget for a while that they work like convicts,” having to pass a double row of fences patrolled by armed guards every day, and one of the first things he did was to change the rule forbidding agency employees even to say where they worked.17
But security policies became ever more convoluted, intrusive, pettifogging, self-contradictory, and frequently self-defeating as bureaucratic ossification set it. Along with imposing ever-tighter physical security restrictions involving roving guards, searches of briefcases and bags, partitioned-off areas, and an elaborate system of collecting and disposing of confidential trash in centralized incinerators, NSA’s security office produced multi-hundred-page security manuals detailing procedures in which common sense was routinely trumped by proliferating rules and regulations. Friedman was one who argued in vain for a bit of common sense, noting that it was ludicrous to try to pretend that the very existence of cryptanalysis could still be a secret after the congressional Pearl Harbor investigation in 1945–46 had disclosed American success in reading Japanese codes during the war. As he would later write:
I think it is a bit late to assume that the degree of secrecy about cryptology of any World War II days can be maintained indefinitely. When we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, the nature of warfare was changed forever, and when the Pearl Harbor Investigation bomb was dropped, the nature of crypto-warfare was changed forever. I think we should therefore face up to the facts….Nobody would even dream of attempting to hide the fact that there are such things as nuclear bombs, guided missiles, etc. Why should anybody nowadays think it sensible to try to deny or hide the fact that there are such things as codes and ciphers and that there are ways of making and breaking them—without telling them exactly how?18
Aside from the Pearl Harbor revelations, the burgeoning scope of the postwar signals intelligence empire was simply impossible to keep completely hidden. NSA’s budget was tucked away inside the Army’s appropriations, but it was hardly possible to conceal the construction of a 1.4-million-square-foot building right next to the new Baltimore–Washington Parkway, where ground was broken in July 1954 for the new NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. The expanding network of intercept stations around the world, including the construction (beginning in the early 1960s) of massive direction-finding antenna fields at NSA sites in the Philippines, Turkey, Japan, Thailand, England, Italy, and Germany, were hardly inconspicuous either. These “elephant cage” arrays, designed to provide accurate directional fixes on high-frequency signals from thousands of miles away, consisted of ninety-six 120-foot-high towers arranged in a circle a third of a mile in diameter.
As NSA personnel assigned to these stations immediately learned, their facility was invariably referred to by the locals as “the American spy base.” James V. Boone, who did a tour at an NSA site in Germany, recounted what happened when his wife went to register their children for the local German public school. The German secretary went through the form, asking the American woman the usual questions, including her husband’s place of employment. She replied with the standard answer for NSA employees overseas: “Department of Defense.” The secretary wrote, “NSA.”
“Why did you do that?” the American asked, startled.
“Because,” came the German’s unfazed reply, “if it had been CIA, you would have said ‘U.S. Government.’ ”19
It was hard not to see many of the rote but rigidly enforced security practices as thoroughly beside the point under such changing conditions, but NSA’s security office was if anything becoming more rigid and paranoid in its zeal to plug real or imagined leaks. A 1950 law—whose constitutionality was never definitively tested even six decades after its enactment, although legal scholars have raised considerable doubts as to its validity—made anyone who “knowingly and willfully
communicates, furnishes, transmits, or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes” any classified information concerning codes, code machines, or the communication intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government liable to a fine or imprisonment of up to ten years.20 The fact that it seemed to apply not just to government officials who had been granted security clearances but to anyone who “publishes” this information was a sweeping assertion of the secrecy powers of government, and NSA’s security office began seeing dangerous and possibly Communist-inspired security breaches even in the most innocuous places. The office launched an absurd investigation in 1953 after a TV series, Dangerous Assignment, aired an episode titled “The Venetian Incident” in which a trenchcoat-clad U.S. secret agent flies to Italy to recover the missing parts of a code machine. The histrionically melodramatic plot offered nothing more genuinely secret than the fact that the vital parts were “rotors,” which in the TV version appeared as clear plastic disks not remotely like the wired wheels of any actual cipher machine—not that those were a secret either. But NSA, warning that “the practice of showing films of this type is particularly dangerous to communication security,” proposed that “a full investigation should be conducted into the background of the writer of the screen play and his associates to determine if, in the past, they have been associated in any way with cryptographic operations.”21
NSA’s massive “elephant cage” antenna arrays, designed to intercept and precisely locate HF radio signals from Soviet military forces, were erected at sites ringing the Soviet Union in the 1960s.
In the mid-1950s Friedman discovered to his endless irritation that NSA’s by-the-book security czars were classifying or reclassifying centuries-old material dealing with codes used during the Civil War, even the American Revolution. In 1958, after Friedman’s retirement but while he was still working as a consultant to the agency, two officials from NSA arrived one day at his home on Capitol Hill with a truck and two helpers and proceeded to confiscate dozens of items from his library that they claimed were now classified Confidential—including Friedman’s own lecture on the Zimmermann Telegram of World War I, which NSA had declassified five years earlier; his 1922 published article on the index of coincidence; and the correspondence courses on elementary cryptography he had prepared for the Army, which had never been previously classified.
“I am hampered by restrictions which are at times so intolerable and nonsensical that it is a wonder I am able to retain my sanity,” Friedman wrote a few years later of the classification rules. NSA’s insistence on keeping information about obsolete paper-and-pencil cipher systems classified seemed particularly absurd to him. “Automation in cryptography began more than a dozen years ago,” he wrote one correspondent, and noted that even the “smallest nations” did not “care a fig” about hand ciphers anymore. Overclassification was just as much a threat as underclassification, Friedman observed, when it becomes “a handicap rather than a help in National Defense.”22
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At the same time that NSA’s security office was offering this parody of flat-footed official obtuseness, the number of people throughout the government cleared to know about NSA’s work was expanding on an unprecedented scale. By 1955 there were forty-two thousand people cleared to receive Category III COMINT, the highest security level.23 The fiction that it was possible to keep up the World War II–era practice of cloaking the origins of signals intelligence with such euphemisms as “a usually reliable source” was wearing thin.
To keep up with the thousands of clearances that needed to be processed during the rapid expansion of NSA during the Korean War, Canine took a fateful misstep that even more deeply confused the illusion of security with genuine security. The polygraph, or so-called lie detector, was one of those quack effusions of American turn-of-the-twentieth-century inventors that might understandably have suckered a gullible public in an earlier era of electrical wonders, but that by 1952 was obviously pure bunkum to anyone with even a modicum of scientific knowledge. J. Edgar Hoover refused to allow the machine to be used in FBI investigations, noting its complete unreliability in detecting truth or falsehood. (Repeated studies since, including a review by the National Academy of Sciences, have affirmed the elementary fact that there is no physiologic response unique to lying and that for all of their pseudoscientific poring over squiggly traces recording pulse, respiration, blood pressure, and skin conductivity, polygraphers did little better than flipping a coin in concluding when a subject had been “deceptive.”)24
But the CIA had already become enamored of the polygraph—the agency would also invest embarrassing sums in mediums and clairvoyants who claimed to be able to locate Soviet missile sites by telepathy—and since 1948 had been administering the tests to investigate “major loyalty or security risk matters” in COMINT-cleared personnel. In late 1950, CIA began asking all new job applicants to “volunteer” for a polygraph interview. It was as voluntary as anything else in such a coercive situation: by 1955 only six of the agency’s twenty thousand applicants had declined to submit to the test. The CIA’s arguments for the polygraph were based not on any scientific proof of its validity—there weren’t any—but rather that it was an “extremely valuable aid to any investigation.” That was a roundabout way of saying that people who were wired up to a machine and told by an examiner with a persuasive manner that it had shown they were lying sometimes could be pressured into revealing something they had been concealing.25
Canine became equally captivated by the notion that a gadget could solve NSA’s security problems. The immediate problem was that conducting a thorough background investigation took time: it required sending agents out to interview neighbors and associates and investigate financial records and employment histories. By December 1950, 39 percent of AFSA’s employees were waiting for their clearances, new hires left to cool their heels for months at the agency’s training school, located in a former warehouse at 1436 U Street, NW, in Washington, or perform make-work tasks to fill their time. In January 1951, Canine decided that new employees who passed a polygraph interview would be given an “interim” security clearance that would allow them to start work immediately on classified projects, pending completion of their full background check.
Canine’s faith in the magical device had all the blindness of a true believer. In December 1953 he ordered that all new civilian employees submit to polygraph testing as a mandatory condition for employment at NSA. “The Director has repeatedly emphasized his firm conviction that the polygraph is more reliable and more protective of security than the background investigation,” his deputy for administration wrote in a 1956 memorandum that argued for periodically polygraphing existing civilian employees as well, to probe for “membership in subversive organizations,” “association with known or suspected subversives,” and unauthorized disclosure of classified information. (The military wisely used its authority at this time to bar the administration of the test to any service personnel.)26
The trouble, aside from the abuse of privacy and due process inherent in the whole business, was that conscientious but perfectly innocent people tended to show a “deceptive” response in the standard polygraph examination, while pathological liars sailed through. In their zeal to clear the initial backlog of pending clearances, NSA scoured police departments and private detective agencies around the country to hire supposed polygraph experts to administer the tests, which took place in hastily erected soundproof rooms at the U Street building. NSA examiners frequently asked intrusive or embarrassing personal and political questions—“Did you sleep with your husband before you married?” “Are you now or have you ever been in sympathy with leftist ideas?”—and while the process was certainly speedy for those who “passed,” it became an Orwellian nightmare for the 25 percent whose clearances were held up because of their “unresolved” polygraph results.
Some of the more scientifically knowledgeable NSA officials tried in vain to halt the program. Ho
ward Campaigne warned that it was sure to “get out of hand,” provide a false assurance of security, and “disclose information the Agency does not want to have,” tarnishing the records of capable employees with “minor derogatory data” that had nothing to do with their performance or loyalty. William Friedman’s disdain for the polygraph was apparent in a critical article he clipped and placed in his private files: an investigative reporter who had interviewed several employees about their experiences with “the NSA Chamber of Horrors” quoted a victim of the process saying, “Halfway through, I felt like someone being tried in a Moscow purge.” The article drily observed that the polygraphing unit was located in a “heavily guarded building between a gas station and an undertaker’s parlor”; perhaps the more apropos geographical fact was that the U Street building had begun its life at the turn of the century as the factory for a famous quack patent medicine of the day.27
As subsequent events would make all too clear, the touching faith that a piece of Edwardian pseudoscientific electrical gadgetry could safeguard the nation’s most important secrets would prove farcically mistaken, for almost every one of the real spies to betray NSA in the ensuing years passed a polygraph interview with flying colors, while obvious signs that in retrospect should have set off alarm bells about their behavior were blithely ignored, largely due to such misplaced confidence in hocus-pocus.
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It was thus oddly fitting not only that the first major public disclosures of NSA’s function and activities came from a spy scandal that all of the agency’s obsessive security efforts failed to avert, but that the real damage done by the affair was a result of NSA’s own handling of the matter: the injury was almost entirely self-inflicted. On October 9, 1954, the FBI arrested Joseph S. Petersen Jr. at his modest apartment not far from Arlington Hall. Petersen, a thin, lanky, bespectacled forty-year-old former college physics teacher, had taken the Army cryptology correspondence course in 1941 and joined the Signal Intelligence Service during World War II. At Arlington Hall he gained a reputation as a cryptanalytic troubleshooter and often rotated through various sections that needed assistance.28 In the spring of 1942, while working in the Japanese section, he met a Dutch army colonel and cryptologist, Jacobus A. Verkuijl, who had just arrived in Washington after fleeing from the Netherlands East Indies when Japanese troops marched into the Dutch colony.
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