It’s hard to say what it is, exactly, one learns by collecting and collating the black world’s traces and refuse, the weird unit designation here, the data-masked words there, or the code names that aren’t associated with any known projects. It’s supposed to be that way: The black world is compartmented and cubbyholed, an epistemological maze of special security channels, “need to know” clearances, and obscure code words. Even among those in the highest ranks of the military and intelligence communities, only a few people are allowed to see the whole picture.
Most people are under the impression that security classifications are relatively straightforward: The higher the clearance someone has, the more stuff they get to see. But that’s only part of the story. In fact, security classifications are more like a tree. The standard classifications—Restricted, Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret—form a hierarchical trunk. “Above Top Secret,” however, the system branches off into thousands of arms, which in turn branch off into even more obscure subcategories. Each branch is known as a “Special Access Program” (SAP), and each has its own specialized security “channels.” Every person associated with the program must be “read” into the SAP’s specific information compartments. Even then, they only get access to the information they need to know to do their job. An SAP can split into multiple sub-branches within each information channel. If, for example, an engineer on a classified satellite works on a new infrared imaging capability, she might be read into a compartment like “Top Secret-Byeman-Crystal-Dragon,” where “Top Secret” is the baseline clearance, “Byeman” indicates a general engineering compartment for spy satellites, “Crystal” is the channel for a specific type of satellite (in this case, a KH-11), and “Dragon” refers to the infrared imaging capability of that satellite. The engineer with the Dragon clearance would not be read into the necessary security compartments to see how other parts of the satellite (its propulsion system, for example) were designed.
The more time I spent trying to understand the relationships between different Air Force units and their classified activities, trying to understand the syntax of code names or the difference between data masked flight-test units and Special Forces units, the more I saw RESUMINT as a form of code-breaking, a necessary tool in the dark world. After all, it was code-breaking that first set the black world in motion.
Born in 1889, Herbert Yardley had an early life that compels writers to invoke the cliché “all-American boy.” At his school in Worthington, Indiana, Yardley was class president, editor of the school paper, and captain of the football team. His friends called him “a genius” and “the smartest boy in the country.” As a teenager, he taught himself how to play poker by dealing hands to himself at home, memorizing the odds of different plays, and learning to fold when the cards were stacked against him. Yardley’s father was a railway telegrapher, and Herbert mastered the skill as a youth. When Yardley left Indiana in 1912 to pursue a career as a code clerk and telegrapher at the State Department in Washington, D.C., his combination of skills would come together in the “Black Chamber”—the early prototype of what would become the Pentagon’s black world.
As a telegrapher for the State Department, Yardley developed an interest in cryptology—the science of making and breaking codes—and taught himself the art using Captain Parker Hitt’s Manual for the Solution of Military Ciphers. When work slowed or when he had spare time, Yardley tried to decipher the encrypted messages coming across his desk. After he shared his success, friends started bringing him encrypted diplomatic messages from foreign embassies. One slow night, a communication to President Wilson from Colonel House came over the wire, and Yardley made a copy. “This would be good material to work on,” he reasoned, “for surely the President and his trusted agent would be using a difficult code.” Yardley was shocked to realize that he was able to decipher the message in less than two hours.
Over the following year, Yardley devoted much of his time to completing a one-hundred-page analysis of the American cryptographic system, entitled Solution of American Diplomatic Codes, which he dutifully presented to his superiors at the State Department. When Yardley’s State Department supervisor David Salmon began reading the young code-breaker’s work, he was stunned. Salmon knew that the British employed a team of code-breakers specifically to decrypt diplomatic communications, and when he asked Yardley if he thought that the British were able to read American diplomatic communications as well, Yardley replied with a quote that would become famous in intelligence circles: “I always assume that what is in the power of one man to do is in the power of another.”
On April 6, 1917, Congress declared war on the German Empire after the sinking of the Lusitania and after the British gave President Wilson a copy of the Zimmerman Telegram that the Royal Navy cryptanalytic group had intercepted. In the telegram, the Germans proposed to Mexico that the two countries join forces to attack the United States and reclaim lands lost in the Mexican-American War.
Yardley saw an opportunity. After collecting letters of recommendation from his State Department supervisor and military officers whom he knew, Yardley approached the Army with the idea of establishing an American cryptanalysis unit. By midsummer, Yardley was the head of MI-8—military intelligence, section 8. In lieu of an office, Yardley received a few feet on a balcony in the Army’s War College building and a desk. He was now in charge of the United States’ first cryptologic agency. And so began a project that would one day evolve into the National Security Agency.
As the First World War pounded on, Yardley built up MI-8 to include the Code Compilation Subsection, to develop new and more secure code systems; the Communications Subsection, to provide secure communication with military and intelligence operatives overseas; the Shorthand Subsection, to concentrate on understanding foreign shorthand systems; the Secret Ink Subsection; and the Code and Cipher Solution Subsection, designed to decrypt and decipher foreign messages. By the end of the war, MI- 8 employed 77 people, had deciphered 10,735 pieces of foreign communication, and had solved about 50 codes and ciphers from a handful of foreign governments.
With the end of World War I, Yardley assumed that he would be out of work and resigned himself to “getting some sort of job with the American Code Company.” But there were stirrings of keeping MI-8 around even though its original mission was now over—perhaps it would be useful to maintain such a powerful capacity. Yardley was asked to write a proposal to preserve MI-8 and convert its mission to peacetime purposes, which he readily did. A day later Yardley submitted his proposal, calling for a budget of $100,000 (roughly $1.3 million in today’s dollars), $40,000 to be paid by the State Department and $60,000 by the War Department, and retaining a staff of about fifty people. The following day, May 17, 1919, Frank Polk, acting secretary of state, scribbled “OK” on Yardley’s proposal. Yardley’s Black Chamber—as his outfit would become known—was born.
The budget for Yardley’s Black Chamber was probably the first instance of a secret intelligence budget in U.S. history. The War Department’s share of the Black Chamber’s budget was disguised under the line item “Contingency Military Intelligence Division, General Staff” and was submitted as a “confidential memorandum” not subject to the review of the comptroller general. This early form of the black budget manifested in the space of a four-story brownstone at 3 East Thirty-eighth Street in New York City, whose cover story was the Code Compilation Company.
For the next ten years, Yardley’s Black Chamber cracked Japanese diplomatic codes, and supplied the State Department with a stream of messages that inevitably began with the words “We have learned from a source believed reliable that . . .”
The Radio Communication Act of 1912 guaranteed privacy in communications: The law made intercepting cable traffic illegal without a court order. In spite of this, Yardley made a personal visit to Newcomb Carlton, the president of Western Union. After the meeting, “President Carlton seemed anxious to do everything he could for us,” said Yardley. This too became a p
recedent: black agencies operating outside the law.
Nonetheless, the Black Chamber began to wither away, the victim of budget cuts. By 1925, Yardley was compelled to bring his operation down to a mere seven code-breakers. The final cut to the Black Chamber came with the incoming Hoover administration in 1929.
When Herbert Hoover took control of the White House and named Henry L. Stimson secretary of state, the existence of the Black Chamber remained secret even to the incoming administration. Yardley had asked his liaison at the State Department to remain quiet about the code-breaking operation, hoping not to draw undue attention to his project during the first few months of the government’s transition. After a few months had passed, Yardley decided that Stimson had settled in well enough to be informed and provided the secretary of state with a handful of decrypted Japanese messages. Stimson didn’t take the news of the Black Chamber as well as Yardley would have hoped. Outraged, he famously exclaimed, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” and sought to immediately shut down Yardley’s operation. On October 31, 1929, the Black Chamber closed its doors for good. Or so it seemed. Just as the Black Chamber was shutting down, the Army tapped William Fredrick Friedman to continue its mission under the guise of a secret military unit.
Yardley’s Black Chamber was not only the precursor to the National Security Agency, it was a fledgling prototype of what would swell into an enormous black world over the next sixty years. It employed specialized workers using a legitimate business as a cover; its budget—even its existence—was hidden from Congress; and it commanded a small infrastructure composed of innocuous rooms and buildings in New York, and a clandestine network of relationships to commercial cable companies and selected members of the State and War departments. The capacities the Black Chamber represented were revived on a tremendous scale during the next great war, and like the MI-8 group, whose existence remained in place even after its stated mission during World War I was over, the black projects of the Second World War would remain in place at the end of that conflict as well. Ironically, fifteen years later, the same Henry Stimson who had closed the Black Chamber in a fit of indignation would be responsible for a nascent black project of almost infinitely larger proportions: the atomic bomb.
6
Fiat Lux
Alamogordo, New Mexico
The conversation took place in Eugene Wigner’s office at Princeton University on the evening of March 16, 1939. That night, Leo Szilard was in town from New York to meet with a handful of eminent physicists assembled on the campus: John Wheeler, Leon Rosenfeld, Niels Bohr, and Edward Teller. The topic of discussion was Szilard and Enrico Fermi’s recent discovery of large neutron emissions from a block of beryllium at Fermi’s laboratory at Columbia University, an experiment whose results showed the chances of creating a nuclear reaction to be very real. An atomic weapon might be possible.
A dark cloud hung over Wigner’s office that evening. The day before, the Nazis had invaded Czechoslovakia, and Hitler had declared on German radio that the country had “ceased to exist!” The scientists in the room were particularly attuned to the gravity of events unfolding in Europe. Except for Wheeler, they were all from the Continent, having fled to the United States with the rise of German and Italian fascism. They also realized that if they were able to understand how one might go about building an atomic bomb, then the Nazis were similarly capable. The basic research was already in the open literature. The thought of a Third Reich armed with nuclear weapons terrified them to the core.
Szilard sketched out his findings from the Columbia experiment on Wigner’s blackboard and put three emphatic proposals to the assembled group: One, that the president of the United States and the American armed forces be immediately informed of their discoveries; two, if additional experiments confirmed the Columbia results, they “must start a campaign” to continue fission research with renewed urgency; and finally, Szilard argued for secrecy: “We must induce all physicists to stop all publicity about fission.” His reasoning was clear: By publishing nuclear research in open journals, the physicists would inadvertently assist the Nazis’ own atomic aspirations. Their experiments therefore should be secret, “lest the Nazis learn of them and produce nuclear explosions first,” remembered Teller.
Niels Bohr alone expressed deep reservations about bringing their research under a shroud of secrecy. The Danish scientist was one of the most esteemed researchers in the world and an elder statesman among Nobel Prize winners. In his home country of Denmark, Bohr was considered a national treasure. His reputation for genius and integrity followed him around the world. All of the other men in the room had been fellows at Bohr’s institute for theoretical physics in Copenhagen, which Bohr had used to promote international cooperation among scientists since its founding in 1921. Bohr promoted openness and cosmopolitanism among the visiting international scholars at his institute: The Danish physicist would have nothing to do with the contemporary trend of excluding the Central Powers of the First World War from scientific collaboration and refused to be affiliated with any institutions (such as the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics) that excluded any nations. The atmosphere of cooperation, openness, and humor he cultivated was known as the “Copenhagen Spirit.”
As the physicists contemplated the implications of Szilard’s research and the Nazi army moving across Europe, Bohr remained adamant in his position: “Secrecy must never be introduced into physics.” If science was to progress, absolute openness must prevail. Introducing secrecy into the scientific community, Bohr reasoned, would turn science into a political pursuit, rather than the collaborative, international quest for pure knowledge he had spent much of his career trying to foster. Science conducted in secret would become an instrument of coercion, a power benefiting the selfish, shortsighted, and violent ambitions of whoever controlled its findings, a fact that the rising Nazi state was demonstrating in its own burgeoning secret weapons programs.
Bohr had just as much reason to fear the Nazis as anyone else in the room. He was neither naïve nor a coward. Since 1933, Bohr had been using his institute, his reputation, and the international network of physicists he’d cultivated to help Jewish scientists escape from Hitler and Mussolini. Enrico Fermi, whose experiments with Szilard at Columbia demonstrated the possibility of a bomb, was among them. Moreover, Bohr used his platform as a world-renowned scientist to publicly criticize the Nazi regime. Addressing the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in 1938, Bohr publicly denounced Nazi notions of Aryan supremacy. “Using the word much as it is used in atomic physics to characterize the relationship between experience obtained by different experimental arrangements and visualized only by mutually exclusive ideas, we may truly say that different human cultures are complementary to each other . . . each such culture represents a harmonious balance of traditional conventions by means of which latent potentialities of human life can unfold themselves in a way which reveals to us new aspects of its unlimited richness and variety.” Bohr argued that cultural diversity was extremely valuable to human knowledge and progress, because different peoples were able to see things differently, creating multiple vantage points that complemented one another in unlocking human potential. Contact between cultures, argued Bohr, contributed immeasurably to human progress. The German delegation walked out on him.
Bohr saw in science a model for what an ideal society might look like. Much more than the pursuit of technical knowledge, science was a way of being, of interacting with others; it was a community. To practice science was also a profoundly democratic enterprise. Practicing science meant uncovering and insisting on certain truths, no matter how politically uncomfortable that might be. The tradition of science had gone hand in hand with democratic ideals, a long history going back to modern science’s earliest days.
In the early seventeenth century, Galileo first published his observations of planets and celestial bodies. The early modern astronomer’s nighttime observations had as many soc
ial implications as scientific ones. Reporting in his Sidereus Nuncius that the moon’s surface was cragged and pockmarked with canyons and craters, Galileo insisted that the Aristotelian notion of the “perfection of the heavens” was simply wrong. When he wrote that Jupiter exhibited four visible moons in its orbit, the Copernican implications of his observations were self-evident. Galileo’s empirical truth was blasphemy, an affront to the Church’s geocentric doctrine. But the egalitarian spirit of Galileo’s method was even more revolutionary than his observations. His empirical methods implied that anyone, aristocrat or peasant, with a well-crafted telescope could repeat his observations and come to the same radical conclusions: The earth does, in fact, revolve around the sun. The planet Jupiter does indeed have many moons. Truth was no longer the province of the Church, but of everyone.
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