The Hoodwinking of
Congress by the Intelligence Agencies of the Executive Branch
by Nelson McAvoy
<nelsonmcavoy@gmail.com>
Table of Contents
Introduction
2-5
Chapter 1 Symmetric Codes
6 -18
Chapter 2 The Birth of
NSA
19-35
Chapter 3 NSA
1953 - 1997
36-67
Chapter 4 NSA
1997 - 2010
68-78
Introduction
It is not necessary to be crazy to be a cryptanalysis, but it always helps.
Joseph Rochefort
Once up on a time during the beginning years of the agricultural
era in the fertile basin around the
A
monk leaves his habitat at sunrise and walks all day to his
mountain retreat and arrives that evening. After a few days
of prayer he leaves at sunrise and returns. Explain that it
is trivial and obvious that the monk was at a place on the trail
at exactly the same time of day on the trip up as he was on the
trip back, no matter where and when he stopped to take a rest.
For these and other concepts to become a trivial and obvious part
of the culture takes a long time and an education process. There
are trivial and obvious aspects of our culture today that are
unknown to the people and law makers of our country. There
are some things in our culture that should be trivial and obvious
to all, but are not. Most people would not see right off
how trivial and obvious the solution to the monk problem is.
As soon as you tell them to, in their mind's eye, let the monk go
and come back on the same morning, i.e., move the return tip to
the morning of the ascending trip, it becomes trivial and obvious
that the two monks would have to pass each other on the trip up
and the trip back. Now you easily see that 'the monk
was at a place on the trail at exactly the same time on the trip
up and the trip back, no matter where and when he stopped to take
a rest'. Now this will be just as trivial and obvious to
you as 6x9 = 9x6.
Once I was enmeshed in two separate sports activities, one was training horses and the other was training sheep dogs, Boarder Collies. When I was at a party with the horsy people and wanted to say something funny, I would say I was trying to teach my horse to catch a Frisbee. When I was at a party with the sheep dog people I would say I was trying to teach my collie to trot and cantor on command. This was funny because species have natural inborn inclinations that lend themselves to training. One of the characteristics of human training, according to the findings in the new fields of Cognitive Science and Neuroscience is that what we hear and see over and over again as we grow up becomes our common sense. Here are three areas of common sense shared by practically all Americans that have led us astray and misguides our leaders. These are things that people have learned at their parent's knee that are no longer true, or miss-information from powerful institutions that has duped us all. Unlike foolish ideas that I and most others know, that are shared by part of the people, these three are almost universally believed by Americans:
How did all of this come about? ". . . on October 24,1952 President Harry S Truman scratched his signature on the bottom of a seven-page presidential memorandum addressed to Secretary of State Dean G. Acheson and Secretary of Defense Robert A. Lovett. . . . , the order directed the establishment of an agency to be known as the National Security Agency. It was the birth certificate for America's newest and most secret agency, so secret in fact that only a handful in the government would be permitted to know of its existence" (The Puzzle Palace, ISBN 0-395-31286-8, James Bamford , page 1) Sometime in the spring of 1953, word came down that the Joint Chiefs under our new president, Dwight Eisenhower, has settled on the final arrangement that:
1. NSA will be the intelligence
agency of the
2. NSA will be headed by a three stared general (or admiral) who will answer to a Special Committee of the National Security Council consisting of the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, and the President.
3. Congress has oversight over
CIA and will be told that CIA is the
4. CIA will actually engage in
all activities that result in changing situations directly, e.g.
our Afghanistan arming as in the movie "Charlie's War"
; our secret army in Laos during the Viet Nam war; mining
the harbors of Nicaragua; assassination of Chilean President
Salvador Allende in 1973; Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion;
waterboarding and other torture of Iraqis taken to foreign
countries; buying and controlling foreign news media; et cetera
(see "The Invisible Government" ). For over 60
years this ruse has worked beautifully: Intelligence is getting
information. Assassinating Chilian President Salvador
Allende is not collecting information. Cuban Bay of Pigs
invasion is not getting information. It has been shown that
waterboarding Iraqis was not to get information, it was done to
get them to say that Iraqis was involved in the 9/11 plot. Mining
the harbors of
5. The specific duties of NSA were not delineated, were not approved by congress. NSA has no congressional oversight, but they would include all passive intelligence gathering, including infiltration.
How do I know this? CIA
was formed two years before NSA to replace the Office of
Strategic Service of WW II fame. NSA was to include the
signal intelligence duties of the three services, Army Security
Agency, located at Arlington Hall Station of WW II code breaking
fame; the Navel Security Service, located in DC at
· It was blatantly realized that withdrawing Congress's right of oversight was unconstitutional. It was strongly held, though, that the end justified the means because the recent history of WW II had shown that years and millions of lives were saved by code breaking and the secrecy thereof. It was imperative that there not be even a hint that an advisory's messages were being decrypted. NSA employees were not allowed to tell outsiders that they worked for NSA or No Such Agency, as we used to say. No contract personnel were used and all NSA employees were either career civil servants or career military personnel.
· There has to be some kind of cover system for the dissemination of NSA's end product, information that would be used by other parts of the Government; so CIA was a natural for the 'cut out'.
· NSA has a cadre of people versed in all main languages and dialects in the world. Not only that, they are versed in the customs, slang, dress, and politics of each country. They are comprised of military and civilians from age 20 to 70 of both gender and international heritage. Where else in the US Government would you have such a pool of talent for surreptitious entering and snooping in other countries? There is a saying in ELENT (electronic intelligence), "sometimes the cheapest way to break a strong cipher is by greasing" -the palm by infiltration. In general, NSA people are just not the kind of people who would want to be associated with programs of assignation, torture and such aggressive behavior. The aggressive and passive functions would just not mix under the same recruitment and administrative organization. And there would be no way to keep the 'left brain' from knowing what the 'right brain' does. So separation on the bases of aggressive and non-aggressive was a very natural and prudent thing to do.
But now there is no such activity of deciphering encrypted messages by the government or anyone else. Just as the invention of airplanes made the use of battleships obsolete, the invention of the RSA public key encryption algorithms in 1977, by three MIT professors, Ron Rivest, Adi Shemir, and Leonard Adleman; has eliminated the practicality of deciphering the origin or context of email messages today. NSA's reasons for not having congressional oversight have vanished. By downloading software from <www.pgp.com> (or preferable from <http://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/sales/index.html>); and by signing up for re-mailing your email at <www.ultimate-anonymity.com> or a similar place; any two world citizens with laptop computes can email each other completely privately and securely with no possibility of NSA or anybody else being able to discern the sender, content, or receiver (at least for 5000 years). Further more, when the laptops are closed, there is no way confiscators can find out the content of the laptops if the owner has Universal PGP software in it. This fact negates the justification for NSA to be exempt from congressional oversight. To quote from Tom McCune's web page <http://www.mccone.cc/PGP2.htm#Why> ,
"It is important for all internet users to
understand that regular email offers no privacy, and can actually
be read by many people other than who it is sent to. Your
internet service provider (ISP) probably keeps a copy on its
computers, copies of emails sent from a network computer (such as
at work or school) are probably kept behind, and all of the
Internet computers the email goes through on it way to the
recipient can keep a copy. The administrators of all these
computers can read your email if they choose to, and they can
send it to anyone they might want to. The
As to the protection from
NSA, William Crowell, Deputy Director of NSA said on
"If all the personal computers in the world - 260 million - were put to work on a single PGP-encrypted message, it would still take an estimated 12 million times the age of the universe, on average, to break a single message."
Pathetically,
Congress is still being hoodwinked by NSA and the Executive
branch of the
Living systems must categorize. Since we are
neural beings, our categories are formed through our embodiment (author's
note, another word for embodiment is brain circuits) . What
that means is that the categories we form are part of our
experiences! They are the structures that differentiate
aspects of our experience into discernible kinds. Categorization
is thus not a purely intellectual matter, occurring after the
fact of experience. Rather, the formation and use of
categories is the stuff of experience. It is part of what
our bodies and brains are constantly engaged in. We cannot,
as some meditative traditions suggest, 'get beyond' our
categories and have a purely uncategorized and unconceptualized
experience. Neural beings cannot do that.
We, and our parents grew up
with exciting stories lived by our grandparents and their
parents--the breath-taking stories of wars and spies and battles
that hinged on the making and breaking of ciphers. You
might say, "How can Nelson McAvoy set himself up as knowing
more than the rest of us? He, like everybody else
grew up with the ideas of the all-powerful government code
breaking apparatus. He did not. In this book I hope
to share with you some of the "categories that are the
stuff of my experiences" This book provides
a detailed explanation of these ideas. Hopefully, you will
be able to get a glimpse through 'my categories'. We will
walk you through the concepts of traditional cryptography, thence
to public key cryptography. Then we explain how
cryptography moved from the government-only purview to
predominately a commercial endeavor. This is a gripping
story of how NSA tried to squelch public key cryptography. Thanks
to Phil Zimmerman, the folk hero of the modern era, they could
not. Had they been successful, there would be no internet
as we know it. No "e-commerce". Trust
is the essence of commerce and trust is brought to the internet
by public key crypto. I sent my credit card number to
I am not implying that NSA
has ever done anything that is not honorable and proper. I
am proud of and agree with their every activity. My work
there was always with loved compadres. It is now time
for Congressional oversight. The days are gone when
withholding Congressional oversight was reasonable and justified.
In 1997 NSA went from all civil service employees to 70% contract
employees. There ceased to be a reason for the ultra
secrecy obsession. Protecting the constitutional rights of
citizen privacy today is much more important than it was in the
past. Today everyone in the world could have a three inch
(7 cm) long and one-half inch wide "thumb" drive with a
USB port to plug into any computer and have a dossier of every
American. They hold 128 Gigabits of information and cost
little of nothing. Personal privacy is part of the business
of Congress and Article IV of the Constitution of the
Chapter 1
Symmetric Codes
A
symmetric code is one where the sender and receiver have the same
code book for encryption and decryption. It is what one
typically thinks of as crypto. During the Civil War the
newly formed Signal Corps under Brigadier General Albert Myer was
in charge of communications for the Union Army. Secretary
of War, Edwin Stanton dismissed General Myer as Chief Signal
Officer Nov. 10, 1863, and reassigned him to duty in
21-year-old
Anson Stager hired in to telegraph in 1846. A line was
constructed between
Figure 1.1 Elements of the code book used by
General Grant's cipher clerk for messages to Headquarters
in
ciphers in their telegraphic
messages. More often than not, the telegraph operators themselves
devised these early ciphers and so were this nation’s
cryptographic pioneers. Stager developed a very simple
cipher system, yet it was never broken by the Confederacy. In
fact, the Confederacy was so baffled by Stager’s ciphers
that intercepted messages were often placed in Southern
newspapers in hopes that someone could decipher them. For
example using a Stager cipher, here’s a possible message
that Gen. Ulysses Grant could have sent to Gen. William Sherman
in November 1863 during the battle of
To General Sherman,
Your division will cross the
General Grant,
The telegraph operator would then look in the USMT codebook and put the appropriate “arbitraries” into this message. The arbitraries from the codebook are listed in Figure 1.1.
The message with the corresponding arbitraries would be:
To
BLACK your WHARTON will cross GODWIN at MARY and WAFER and WALDEN
QUADRANT SAGINAW then WAYLAND JASMINE. Please advise on WHIST,
WALRUS,
The message then was broken down into a division of five lines and six columns, Figure 1.2 Thus Grant’s message would be enciphered going up the sixth column, down the fifth, up the fourth, down the third, up the second and down the first. This zigzag route was code named Congress. The telegraph operator would then append CONGRESS as the first word in the message. The resulting message would then be sent over the telegraph as:
CONGRESS JENNIE RANDOLPH JASMINE AND CROSS WILL WAFER WAYLAND WALRUS BANGOR RAMSAY WHIST THENAND WHARTON YOUR MARY SAGINAW ON AND RATIONS ADVISE QUADRANT AT BLACK TO GODWIN WALDEN PLEASE RICHARD.
Figure 1.2 The message written out before commutation.
Col. Anson Stagers had designated only 14 individuals access to this cipher. Only one cipher clerks under Gen. Grant's command and a cipher clerks at the War Department Headquarters. Not President Lincoln, not General Grant or any of their staff. General Grant learned this the hard way to the chagrin of one of his cipher clerks, Corporal Samuel H. Beckwith. As General Grant tells it in his memoirs:
“I
ordered the cipher operator to turn over the key to Captain Cyrus
B. Comstock of the Corps of Engineers, whom I had selected as a
wise and discreet man who certainly could be trusted with the
cipher if the operator at my headquarters could, The operator
refused point blank to turn over the key to Comstock as I
directed, stating that his orders from the War Department were
not to give it to anybody – the commanding general or any
one else. … He said that if he did, he would be punished. I
told him if he did not, he most certainly would be punished. When
I returned from
Figure 1.3 Typical Civil War communications wagon. It would be connected to a telegraph line at an army headquarters.
What really happened was as follows:
From
his headquarters in
I
have ordered the cipher operator to give the Washington cipher to
Colonel Comstock [of Grant’s staff]. The necessity of
this I felt whilst in
Halleck responded to Grant by telegram the same afternoon:
The
Secretary of War directs that you report by telegraph the facts
and circumstances of the act of Lieutenant-Colonel Comstock, in
requiring A.C. [sic: Samuel H.] Beckwith, telegraphic cipher
clerk, to impart to him (Colonel Comstock) the secret cipher,
entrusted to said Beckwith for use exclusively in your
correspondence with the War Department and Headquarters of the
Army.
Grant replied the next day:
I
ordered Beckwith to give Colonel Comstock the key to
Colonel Stager’s apologetic explanation to General Halleck is also dated 21 January:
The
information furnished me led me to believe that the request of
the staff officer for a copy of the cipher was without General
Grant’s authority, and as a new cipher had been arranged
expressly for Mr. Beckwith’s use at General Grant’s
headquarters, with the order of the Secretary of War recently
issued that the operators for this duty should be held
responsible for strict privacy in its use, I indited the message
referred to, not thinking that it would come in conflict with
General Grant’s orders or wishes, the general having
recently expressed his entire satisfaction with Mr.
Beckwith’s services. I am exceedingly mortified at the
result, as my only desire was to furnish the most reliable means
of communication to General Grant with the War Department. The
new cipher was arranged with a view of being used by telegraph
experts, and it is believed cannot be used with any success by
others than telegraphers. A great number of errors have
been made by staff officers working ciphers, owing to their lack
of experience in telegraphic characters, and it is believed that
greater accuracy can be secured by placing ciphers in the hands
of experts selected for this duty. The new cipher differs
in many respects from those formerly used, and the one arranged
for General Grant should not be known to any other party, hence
my anxiety to keep it in Beckwith’s hands. I sincerely
regret that General Grant is led to believe that it is willful
interference on my part.
Halleck
informed Grant on
It was known that the contents of telegrams communicated by means of existing ciphers have been made public without authority. As these ciphers have been communicated to a number of persons the Department was unable to discover the delinquent individual. To obviate this difficulty a new and very complicated cipher was prepared for communications between you and the War Department, which, by direction of the Secretary of War, was to be communicated to only two individuals, one at your headquarters and one in the War Department. It was to be confided to no one else, not even to me or any member of my staff.” Mr. Beckwith, who was sent to your headquarters, was directed by the Secretary of War to communicate this cipher to no one. In obeying Colonel Comstock’s orders he disobeyed the Secretary and has been dismissed. He should have gone to prison if Colonel Comstock had seen fit to put him there. Instead of forcing the cipher from him in violation of the orders of the War Department, Colonel Comstock should have reported the facts of the case here for the information of the Secretary of War, who takes the personal supervision and direction of the military telegraphs. On account of this cipher having been communicated to Colonel Comstock the Secretary has directed another to be prepared in its place, which is to be communicated to no one, no matter what his rank, without his special authority.
The Secretary does not perceive the necessity of communicating a special cipher, intended only for telegrams to the War Department, to members of your staff any more than to my staff or to the staff officers of other generals commanding geographical departments. All your communications with others are conducted through the ordinary cipher. It was intended that Mr. Beckwith should accompany you wherever you required him, transportation being furnished for that purpose. If by any casualty be separated from you, communication could be kept up by the ordinary cipher till the vacancy could be supplied.
It is to be regretted that Colonel Comstock interfered with the orders of the War Department in this case. As stated in former instructions, if any telegraphic employee should not give satisfaction he should be reported, and, if there be a pressing necessity, he may be suspended. But as the corps of telegraphic operators receive their instructions directly from the Secretary of War, these instructions should not be interfered with except under very extraordinary circumstances, which should be immediately reported.
P.S.
Colonel Stager is the confidential agent of the Secretary of War,
and directs all telegraphic matters under his orders.
Grant responded to Halleck on 4 February:
Your
letter of the 22nd, inclosing copy of Colonel Stager’s of
the 21st to you, is received. I have also circular or order,
dated
I
will state that Beckwith is one of the best of men. He is
competent and industrious. In the matter for which he has been
discharged, he only obeyed my orders and could not have done
otherwise than he did and remain. Beckwith has always been
employed at headquarters as an operator, and! have never thought
of taking him with me except when headquarters are moved. On the
occasion of my going to
Beckwith desired to telegraph Colonel Stager on the subject before complying with my direction. Not knowing of any order defining who and who alone could be entrusted with the Washington cipher, I then ordered Beckwith to give it to Colonel Comstock and to inform Colonel Stager of the fact that he had done so. I had no thought in this matter of violating any order or even wish of the Secretary of War. I could see no reason why I was not as capable of selecting the proper person to entrust with this secret as Colonel Stager: in fact, thought nothing further of the, than that Colonel Stager had his operators under such discipline that they were afraid to obey orders from any one but himself without knowing first his pleasure.
Beckwith has been dismissed for obeying my order. His position is important to him and a better man cannot be selected for it. I respectfully ask that Beckwith be restored.
When Colonel Stager’s directions were received here the cipher had already been communicated. His order was signed by himself and not by the Secretary War. It is not necessary for me to state that I am a stickler for form, but will obey any order or wish of my superior, no matter how conveyed, if! know, or only think it came from him. In this instance I supposed Colonel Stager was acting for himself and without the knowledge of any one else.
Having
satisfied
A
similar incident happened to me at Arlington Hall Station, the
center for code breaking for the US Army in WW II. Officer
of the Day (OD) was in charge evenings and weekends. All
field grade officers were rotated into this duty about
once-a-month. The NCO to the OD each night took a locked
briefcase to the code room of the Pentagon, just three miles
away. For those of you who know the area, from Arlington
Hall one goes down
The history of crypto has been centered round the protection of code books and machines used for encryption and decryption keys. Only symmetric codes were used prior to 1977. The code book, the protocol, the cipher machines, the algorithms, are identical and hopefully, only in the possessions of both the senders and receivers. In contradistinction, an anti-symmetric system, also known as public key crypto, which is used exclusively today, has no code book and there is no intrigue or precarious or surreptitious aspect. Everyone who uses crypto has a number published just as a phone number in a phone book is. This public number (confusingly called the public key) is used to encrypt the key for the message sent. No more code books, no more intrigue, game over. Associated with the public number (public key) is a private number generated by the receiver and kept secret by him. This number (confusingly called the private key) is never passed, or even written down, or given to anyone (The word "key" causes confusion because a key in crypto also means the procedure used as described above with the Civil War example). The private key is in the receiver's computer and can be pulled up by a pass-phrase known only to the receiver. It is the responsibility of each person to take care of her own pass phrase for her private key. The pass phrase is more than just a pass-word used commonly in computers. It is a long phrase chosen from the receiving person's long-term memory. In addition, everyone used the same procedure to encrypt and decrypt messages, be they national governments or ebay purchasers, friend and foe alike. This is such an important distinction and the difficult adjustment for lay people to make, we bring it up now and will later go into details. Before going into an explanation of public key crypto, we give another example of a classic symmetric cipher.
World War II Symmetric Code JN-25
In order to explain the attack on a symmetric code we use this example of a system used in World War II by the Japanese Naval Command. The famous JN-25. Unlike the telegraph code of the American Civil War, this code was broken by a combination of traffic analysis and deciphering.
The Japanese katakana syllabary (similar to syllables) were derived from abbreviated Chinese characters used by Buddhist monks to indicate the correct pronunciations of Chinese texts in the 9th century. At first there were many different symbols to represent one syllable of spoken Japanese, but over the years the system was streamlined. By the 14th century, there was a more or less one-to-one correspondence between spoken and written syllabary.
Figure 1.4 Japanese katakana syllabery
The word katakana means "part (of kanji) syllabic script". The "part" refers to the fact that katakana characters represent parts of kanji. The katakana syllabary consists of 48 syllables. In each column below the romaji (roman) or sound appears on the left, the katakana symbols in the middle and the old Chinese kanji from which the symbols were derived, on the right. We include the janji only for completeness.
 |
 |
Figure 1.5 The Japanese katakana syllabary as used in Morris code telegraphy.
Just
as the Latin alphabet had the Morris Code for radio messages,
e.g., a • - , b -•••
, c -•-•, d -••, e
•, f ••-• , g - ••, h
••••, i••, j•--- , k
-•- , l •-•• , m -- , n - • , o--- , p
•--•, q --•- , r •-• , s
••• , t - , u ••- , v
•••- , w •-- , x -••- , y -•--
, z --•• . Japanese had a 
code.
The
katakana "Morris equivalent" was used for messages in
the plane text. For example if they wanted to send the word
katakana, in the table above, ka is 
or 
and so on. They would send 
. Each telegrapher has his own
fist, or "accent". The bottom line is that the
Japanese telegraphers used a different "Morris code"
than we did. It was not until 1928 that the U.S.Navy had
any operators that could receive this. Then Chief Radioman
Harry Kidder, stationed in the Philippians took it upon himself
to learn. With the help of the Japanese wife of a shipmate,
he learned the Katakana syllabary, taught himself the telegraphic
equivalents of all the Katakana characters, and began to
intercept Japanese messages. He ended up in 1928 as
director of school in
I
use to listen to the war stories and reminiscence of the old NCOs
at the "rocker clubs" in the area. One argument
was over a Japanese shipboard heavy handed operator whom they
swore sent out messages sometimes with his foot and sometimes by
hand. They associated the two by mannerisms other than his
fist. They had names for the operators to whom
they listened a lot. Names like the "Hornpiper" ,
"Waltzing Moose", "Skip to me Glue",
"Speedy Gonzales", and my favorite was "Rubber
Astoll" whose ship hung around the Atolls. As we will
see, this fun and games was really serious business. There
would have been no breaking of the Japanese naval code JN-25 with
out traffic analysis. Radio direction finding bearings
taken at the same time as message reception; knowing an
enemy operator's work shift schedule and the exact time of the
message; all helped. As we will see, up to 
and radio operators.
The WACS and WAVES will win the war, parole vous,
The WACS and WAVES will win the war, parole vous,
The WACS and WAVES will win the war,
So what the heck are we fighting for?
Inkie dinkie stinkie parole vous.
Well at least one WAVE I know helped win the war. It was Agnes Driscoll (neé Meyer)
Figure 1.5
Agnes
Meyer Driscoll's work as a navy cryptanalyst who broke a
multitude of Japanese naval systems, as well as a developer of
early machine systems, marks her as one of the true
"originals" in American cryptology. She was born in
1889, and, in 1911, she graduated from
In June 1918 Agnes Meyer enlisted in the United States Navy. She was recruited at the highest possible rank of chief yeoman and was assigned to the Code and Signal section of the Director of Naval Communications. In 1918 women all went into the Navy as Yeoman(F). Mrs. Driscoll broke Japanese Navy manual codes -- the Red Book Code in the 1920s, the Blue Book Code in 1930, and, in 1940, she made critical inroads into JN-25. When her name was mentioned by the NCO's in the Rocker Club, they would laugh and say, "shit a mighty". She tried to learn to cuss like a sailor but always got it all wrong. They just loved her. When she found out the five number code groups for numbers were 00000 00102 for 1, 00204 for 2, 00306 for 3 and so on, she said, shit a might. We'll tell you about that later.
Red was a Japanese naval code created during World War I and used until the outbreak of World War II. The Red code used the additive encryption method. The code assigned everything, words, syllables, and numerical values to a five digit number, in a dictionary-like code book. Before transmissions, these 5-digit number groups were encrypted a second time using an additive codebook. The book contained a series of numbers that were added to the original numerical message in sequence. The adding and subtracting was called "fulse addition" by the crypto clerks. Each message contained a key that told the receiver where to begin the additive sequence in the book to decode the message. Cryptologists named the code Red after the color of the folder in which deciphered codes were bound.
In
1923, a United States Navy intelligence officer located a copy of
the 1918 Imperial Japanese Navy secret operating code in the
luggage of a visiting Japanese attaché. The codebook was
clandestinely photographed and a special cryptology unit, known
as the Research Desk, was created to begin the task of monitoring
and deciphering intercepted messages. At the time, U.S. Navel
Intelligence monitored only ship-to-ship communications and some
radio transmissions in
Cryptologists
worked for five years to fully translate and break Red, the
additive cipher that the 1918 codebook contained. Intercepts
continued to use the aging code, facilitating the work of
The
Japanese replaced Red with a more sophisticated code on
On
Figure 1.6 Encrypted message sent from the aircraft carrior Kaga to port giving time of arrival
The additive entry is a random number taken from the 300 page book of random numbers. Note that
Figure 1.7 The message as decypted by the cypher clerk at the port.
The
addition and subtraction is done without carrying, hence
"false adding". This is really modular arithmetic
which we learn about in Appendix A where we learn to do the RSA
encryption. In other words, 5+6=1(mod 10) and 8-9=9(mod
10). Think of (mod 10) arithmetic as moving the hand on a
clock with 10 hours as shown below. On the clock, 2+11=3.
2-3=9, 2-5=7, 6+6=2, 6+35= 1 . 
If the cipher clerk who prepared the message would start at page one and tear out that page after using it for the additives of one message, tear out the page and no one ever use it again, the code could not ever be broken, no how, no way, by no one. In crypto this is know as the "one-time-pad" But this would never work because, say, the above message sent by His Imperial Majesty's Ship Kaga used page 60 from the additives book, there was no way for other cipher clerks on other ships to know that if they used page 60 after that, the good ship Kaga could not decode-- a logistical nightmare. So they did the next best thing, an OK procedure theoretically, randomly pick a page from the 300 page additives book each time. Cipher clerks were given strict orders to do that. The security of the system depended above all on not reusing any one stretch of the additive book too often. The Italians used a one-time-pad for each day of the year and their codes were never broken. I cannot stress this too much, because we will find that in modern day asymmetric cryptography, code books are not used so the equivalent of the "one time pad" in the selection of random numbers is epso facto built in. At the beginning of Chapter 2 we will use this particular message as if it were sent using the RSA asymmetric cypher.
Only through the laziness of Japanese code clerks did the Navy's cryptanalysts make their first crucial break. Throughout the summer of 1939 the codebreakers in Washington, under the direction of Commander Laurence Safford, punched every intercepted message onto IBM cards and began groping for even the slightest irregularity that would give them a toehold. If you do not know what cc means on your email, you will not know what IBM cards are either. They were about the size of a dollar bill. There were holes along the edge so they could be carried on cog wheels or conveyer belts. The cards were covered with a grid of 1mm x 3mm printed boxes where the punch machine would punch holes to designate numbers. You had a paper punch to manually punch holes in these wee marked rectangles also. The cleverness of the IBM cards they could be sorted into any arrangement you wanted. Sort of like playing the card game "go fishing". Give me all your 2's? I don't have any, go fishing.
After searching every way they could imagine, they found one vague unevenness, so slight as to be almost invisible. If the cipher clerks really had done their jobs, the code groups of five digit numbers would be random. They were not. When the code breakers printed out a complete catalog of the five digit numbers in each day's traffic, they found that the numbers tended to bunch up. In other words, the clerks were tending to use the same additive pages over and over. Not surprisingly, these pages corresponded to the front of the additive book, the easiest place to flip open a book. That was a small toehold indeed. But to a code breaker it meant everything; it meant the theoretical possibility of beginning to tease apart the underlying code groups from the additive decipherment that concealed its true value. The trick was to find, among the thousands of messages, two that overlapped, two that had been enciphered with the same stretch of additive. If it was the cryptanalyst's lucky day, a pair of these overlapping messages might contain identical pairs of code groups that had been enciphered by one additive in one spot, another additive in another. Or better still would be the same message relayed to a third or forth ship, each one using new additives. From such slender reads the cryptanalysts—one year and hundreds of thousands of IBM cards later—had identified the numerical values of a few dozen code groups and a few dozen additives.
The real break in JN-25 came on a single day in early fall 1940, and when it came it proved a remarkable blend of absolute brilliance, combined with sheer doggedness and just a touch of thievery. To start, IBM runs had found another curious bunching. The only place where enough overlaps occurred to allow additives to be recovered were in the first four groups of messages. The IBM searches revealed that the same code groups were being used at the start of some messages. That led immediately to the hypothesis that these code groups stood for numerals: It was natural to begin a message by saying something such as "Reference your message 1234."
Suddenly, someone remembered the code for numbers in the old 1918 four-digit code book. Agnes Meyer Driscoll no doubt, being in crypto since 1918. This old code was dug out of the files, and sure enough: the numerals followed a set formula. Zero was 0000; one was 0102; two was 0204; three was 0306; and so on. The few dozen code groups that the Navy cryptanalysts had pulled out of JN-25 had been assigned tentative values. But these were only relative values. One code group that appeared often was 13343; other frequent groups were 13445 and 13547. But the true values of these groups in the actual Japanese code books might just as well have been 13342, 13444, and 13546; or 13000, 13102, 13204; or any other constant difference from them. No mechanism allowed the analysts to anchor them to an absolute value. The discovery of the old stolen code book provided that missing anchor. Immediately, the codebreakers noticed that the groups 13343, 13445, and 13547 differed from one another by exactly 00102. If 13343 stood for "one," then 13241 ought to be "zero." The tentative group 13241 had in fact been recovered in a few messages. From there the code split wide open: subtracting 13241 from each of the tentative groups, the sequence 00000, 00102, 00204, 00306 fell right out, shit a mighty.
In a single day, the code groups for all numerals from zero to 999 had been cracked—a full 3% of the entire JN-25 book. Moreover, the codebreakers recognized another bonanza: In every one of these true code groups for numerals, when their digits were summed, the total was a number divisible by three. When the Navy codebreakers subtracted the 13241 from other code groups that had been tentatively recovered, the resulting values had this same property. In other words, if you start with 00102 and use only numbers skiping two for the code groups to put in your dictionary, e.g. 00102, 00105, 00108, 00111, 00114, and so on, the numbers are all divisible by 3 and the sum of their digits is a multiple of 3. Go back and look at the example above giving the estimated time of arrival of the good ship Kaga. Note that the sum of all digits in a code book entry is always a multiple of 3. This makes the attack much easier. Some such built-in pattern is standard in all book codes; it serves as a "garble check" so the Japanese cipher clerk can make sure he has sent the message correctly. The Navy cryptanalysts had been tearing their hair out looking for the garble check feature in JN-25. This was it, shit a mighty. From that point, IBM sort card runs could be far more efficient; the only valid additives to search for were ones that, when subtracted from an enciphered message group, yielded a number the sum of whose digits was divisible by three, a property known as "scanning."
| 11 | were | found | and | 23 | were | missing | |||
| 01122 | 02346 | ||||||||
| 41005? | 57366? | ||||||||
| 42127 | 32751 | 01623 | 37762 | 59602 | 94620 | 06481 | 20469 | 02474 | 84965 |
In other words, if the analyst knows that the first and fifth code groups to be 11 and 23 from traffic analysis and they receive 42127 and 59602 for the two groups; then they have established 41005 and 57366 as two additives separated by 3 other additives . Of course the analyst does not know yet what page and location in the additive book. With enough traffic they can start "growing" the code book and additives.
| torpedoes | misfired | often | when | they | were | deep | ||
| 06969 | 55119 | |||||||
| 41005 | 57366 | |||||||
| 48398 | 95673 | 47964 | 94571 | 46732 | 02475 | 42756 | 38602 | 45961 |
With enough traffic and, especially if the cipher clerks use the same page often, and if you know the context of the message, we can try 41005 and 57366 additives and make a good guess at where "torpedoes" and "when" are in the message. Then you assume that 06969 is torpedoes and 55119 is "when" in the code book.
The Japanese appreciated the need for completely random numbers for their additive book, they introduced a new additive book every few months; by the fall of 1940, version number five was already in effect. The Research Desk decided that rather than try to read current traffic, it would gain the most ground by piecing together the first two additive books, which it already had started to do. Once they pieced together the old additive book from old traffic; then they would have the old code book. The old code book was the same as the current code book. Only the additive book of the random numbers was changed. To periodically change the code book would have been a mammoth logistic nightmare. A mass of back traffic had been accumulated, and no attempt was made at this point to read current messages. U.S. Navy in fall 1940 had a cryptanalytic staff that totaled only 36 people; most of those were busy with other tasks, including the all-important MAGIC traffic, and only two to five could be spared to tackle JN-25. MAGIC was the Japanese Diplomatic Code machine. (Agnes Meyer Driscoll also was a major contributor to building this machine, did she never sleep, shit a mighty.)
Within a few months, nonetheless, enough progress had been made
with back traffic that the underlying code was being read with
comparative ease. In late fall orders went out to the JN-25
codebreakers in
Those
hopes went up in a puff of smoke on
But once again, a Japanese blunder prevented the setback from
being irrecoverable. Although the Japanese had changed the code
book, they did not change the additive ciphers at the same time.
Able-5 had been replaced by Baker-5, not Baker-6. For two full
months, the messages were sent in a new code but using the same
additives that
Figuring out the meanings of code groups was aided by some highly patterned features of the Japanese messages. Codes for numerals already had provided one break. Codes for frequently used terms such as "stop" opened the door wider. Messages that contained some of the same code groups were like a huge interlocking crossword puzzle in Japanese. At this point, the Navy's Japanese linguists were called upon increasingly; it was a matter of trying a likely word in one message and seeing if it made sense where the same code group appeared in another.
Meanwhile, in the spring of 1941, a highly secret collaboration
between
By August 1941 about 10,000 additives had been recovered in book number 5 and about 2,000 code groups were being read in Baker. But on 1 August, the additive book changed again. The work progressed at the same dogged pace as before, steadily and surely, yet nowhere nearly fast enough, given what lay ahead. But all was not lost. With an ocean full of ships some messages will be sent once using the old code book and again using the new code book. Traffic analysis can ferret out when this is likely to happen. By 1 November only about 3,000 code groups had been assigned meanings out of the 30,000 or more in the new Baker code book. By 1 December the figure had grown to about 3,800. But only about 2,500 additives of the 50,000 in the new additive book had been recovered.
The
actual reading of current Japanese messages before
But
Midway was also one of these moments that concentrate forces of
history, that in one intense burst crystallize what might have
otherwise taken years to coalesce from the fog of events. Midway
decisively announced the end of the age of the battleship. The
battleship's brawn was simply no match for the long reach of the
carrier. Of even further-reaching consequence, the American
victory at Midway moved code breaking and signals intelligence
from an arcane, little-understood, and usually unappreciated
specialty to the very center of military operations. ("
Similar
stories that have shaped the course of history, can be told about
the intriguing, enraging, enticing quest for cryptographic keys
of semetric cryptography. See for example, Code Breakers,
The Inside Story of Bletchley Park, by F.E. Hinsley and Alan
Stripp, 1993, ISBN 0-19-280132-5. These stories will be no
more because of the invention of public key crypto in 1977.
Chapter 2
The Birth of NSA
Army Security Agency
April Fools Day, 1952.
I sat down on a stone wall. Retainer wall for the dugout
road behind the Science Hall at Fairmont State College just 20
miles from where I went to high school in
You would think I would have thought about what would happen next, after graduating, but I had not, at least not in the particular. Work wouldn’t really be work any more. When I was seven, I went door to door selling Saturday Evening Post. When I was eight, I graduated to Ladies Home Journal. I never did get any money because I could not keep the money straight. This man came around in a big fancy car and collected the money. Magazines were a nickel. So if he gave me ten, I sold seven. Had to give him 4 cents for at least eight. Always lost track of one or two. I wanted to get out of that door-to-door stuff in the worse way. “Want to buy a Saturday Evening Post?” “I told you yesterday kid, quit coming around here with those god dammed Saturday Evening Post.” Then it was the Grit. Then the glory days of a real paper route. So I thought. Always someone who said, “I’ll pay next week, kid.” I knew he wouldn’t. So I cut down from 35 to 34 and skipped him. “Mr. Jumjagger called and said you skipped him, did na deliver his paper", the editor said. “He didn’t pay last week”. “He’ll pay, deliver.”
I
had red cards about the size of a dollar bill on a ring for each
customer. The dates were around the edge. When they
paid, I punched out the date with a hole puncher. A bag, a
hole puncher, and a ring of cards were the stalk and trade of a
paper boy. I had lots of problems. One was, that
about two-thirds paid on time. But the newspaper made the
delivery boy pay at the window when they got their papers. I
aspired to be a paperboy because that was what the big boys did.
Little did I know that I would lose more than I did on The
Saturday Evening Post and that I would have to get jobs cutting
grass to pay the difference. Another problem was that I
would sing, whistle and daydream and walk right by customers.
Especially after a movie, with arias like
I couldn’t resist stopping at the swimming hole along my paper route where all my buddies were. I couldn't resist doing a flip off that swing and swimming under water where your eyes didn’t burn. I loved swimming under water. To this day, as an 80 year old, I routinely swim 40 meters or more under water to start my day. As often as not, money got taken from my paper bag by the big boys, and there went two extra days of cutting grass to pay for going swimming. Then there was this crazy kid that wanted to trade me my paper route for a job inside the newspaper office. All you had to do was print addresses off these dog-tag-looking things that ran through a machine and printed addresses on a half sheet of paper. You rolled a newspaper into the half sheet and glued it. You carried a canvas mailbag, bigger than you were, to the depot for the train. Cold hard cash, even if I made mistakes. A step up was my next job of delivering groceries in a wagon for a mom-and-pop grocery store. That was cold hard work but fun. Some customers were two or three miles from the store but I got to go in their kitchens. Sometimes they gave me cake and pie. Mostly these housewives wanted someone to talk to. The way I saw it, I got paid just to be their friend. It would have been a perfect joy had they let me tune the radio off the stupid drug-store-cowboy music and on to some Broadway stuff or folk music by local performers.
Jobs
got easier, janitor in a local movie house, stock boy in a
clothing store. Then a sporting goods store where I could
talk to all the hunters and fishermen. Cut right-of-way for
the power company in college, that was hard physical work but
fun; much like it is fun to play ball but hard physical work.
Then a plush job in my senior year of boat dock attendant and
life guard on the
On that April Fool’s Day 1952, sitting on the wall, it dawned on me; no asking 50 people for a job this summer! Maybe I could get paid for doing what I did anyhow for nothing—making radios and antennas, or antennae as they still said then. Maybe I could get paid for moving up the spectrum to microwave. That started a long climb up the spectrum to heterodyne radios of one-one hundredth of a millimeter wavelength where the smallest hair is a long wave antenna.
My first antenna was 40 meters wavelength. This was my second year in high school and the boys were coming home from the war. One teacher was Lt. J. G. Lynn Faulkner. Later I found out that he had worked at the MIT Radiation Laboratory—the American contribution to radar, catching up with the famed radar home-chain along the White Cliffs of Dover during the 1940 Battle of Britain. I worked there later myself when it was part of MIT. He knew everything. He showed us how to build radios from scratch, even blow glass for homemade vacuum tubes. In my own little world, I thought everyone knew math. I went to trigonometry class like a feminist in the 70’s went to a consciousness-raising meeting. Just to share exciting things that they all knew about. No one told me you were suppose to wait until you went to class to learn it. No one told me, either, that you had to learn to read and write to graduate from high school. One afternoon I bugged out of class and went to the dinner down the street. I was in a booth enjoying a cup of coffee and a cigarette. Oh, shit. Mr. (aka Shorty) Clayton was in a booth doing the same thing. He was too short for me to see over the booth so I missed him. Had I the nose of my hound dog, I would have smelled him out before ordering my coffee. I always had a job so I had money for cigarettes and coffee. As he got up to pay the casher, he saw me, not my cigarette, I slipped it on the floor. He said, "Nelson, what will you ever do when you get out of school?
I said, "Be a mathematician." He didn't say, You're truant. You shouldn't be here or anything. He just stared at me for a while and then walked out. Again I thought, oh shit, I'm in for it now. And I was.
That afternoon after school in our radio room, Mr. Faulkner told me. "You are not going to graduate. Miss Batten (the English teacher) told me you could not read and write, is that right?” "No that's not right."
"Then tell me what that says." He pointed to some words. I faked reading, “Yes sir, I can read and write, that says the imaginary part of the impedance, shows the phase relationship.” “Which word is impedance and which word is imaginary?” “Well it wouldn’t say the impedance part of the imaginary." The next day Miss Batten stuck the script of a play, Dear Ruth, in my hand and said, “You have the lead part. Have act one memorized by this weekend."
Now
I was in deep shit. We lived in a large three story old
wood house. No furnace. In the down stairs parlor
there was a coal burning grate. They put out a lot of heat,
but the bedrooms were cold. The four boys, Rogers, Jim, me,
and Dick, had the biggest bedroom and it had a gas fire place.
Our bedroom was the only cozy place in the house in winter except
for the parlor and kitchen. When I was a senior Dick
was a freshman. He was the pride of the whole family.
He took operatic voice lessons every Saturday in
So this was the back ground one evening when I came home with the script to Dear Ruth. "Dick, what is this word: s i t u a t i o n?" , I spelled. "You don't know what that word is?" "If I did, I wouldn't ask", I said.
"Look it up in the dictionary." "That's crazy", I said. "Why? he ask. "That's about the stupidest thing I ever heard anyone say". "Why"?, I insisted. OK", I found it in the dictionary and pointed to it. "I got it right here in the dictionary", (Webster's Collegiate Dictionary 1936): sit'u-a'tion (-a ' shûn), n, 1. Manner in which an object is placed; location; also, a locality. 2." I say to Dick, jabbing my finger to the word in the dictionary. "I'm looking at it, that doesn't tell me how to say the word." "Now read that and tell me what 'sisen' (trying to pronounce it) means, go ahead read to me what it means". Dick reads, "Manner in which an object is placed." "OK, that just tells me everything about 'sisen' , doesn't it?", I raved like a preacher.
"How to say it and what it means? I'm go'na put my fist down easy, I'm "sisen it? Now I'm going to slam it down and bust it, is that "sisen" it? That is exactly what everyone says to me if I ask them how to say a written word, look it up in the dictionary", I say mocking the sanctimonious revival preacher. "OK, I'll read it to you", Dick said. Next evening, same thing. Next evening, same thing. "I'm not reading to you any more. I'm sick and tired of spending my evenings reading that stupid play over and over."
"But I can read it myself now, the first four pages. Listen to this. "I don't want to listen to that. I'm sick of that." I went up the third floor balcony and started taking apart the matching network for the rhombic antenna. "You can't do that", Dick said, he was beside himself. "All I need is two more nights and Act I will be finished." That is how I learned to read.
The
play was a smash. I was a smash and graduated from high
school. Four years later in 1952 I was setting at home on the
balcony by my rhombic antenna transmission line. My
revelation while sitting on the Science Hall wall a few weeks
before, that morning in May, where this story starts, had come
true. I could go down to the YMCA and shoot pool or play
ball. I could take a boat and row for hundreds of miles in
the
"You
got to go, you know that." "OK Uncle Joe, you
make the choice. (1) I go and get killed and
"It
doesn't make any difference, you got to go. That's not the
real choice. The real choice is either you go to jail or
take a risk of not coming back; which is pretty small. You're
going to be making choices all your life between taking one risk
or another. What happens in
So down to the post office I went.
"Hi Serg." "Hi Nelson, lets go get a hotdog." He always tried to bribe recruits with hotdogs so he was a potbellied recruiting sergeant and he always did his homework and knew who was up for the draft.
"You been fishing"? "No, I'm going to take a sack of grub and boat and stay out on the lake for a few days. I got lots of time and don't have a job." There is this cave with a hangover, you pull your boat under the hangover and the cave mouth is just four feet above the water line. There are rocks that make steps up to the cave. The water drips constantly from a place in the roof of the cave about 10 feet in from the mouth. Someone has put a big bolder with a basin under the drip and there you have a basin of clean water all the time, summer and winter. The best time is when it is raining. You can set a trot line to get your fish, have a cook fire next to the water basin. Just bring a few candles and snooze during the rain and do what you want. "You don't have all that much time, the draft will get you", the Sergeant said.
"How'd you know that?"
"I know everything about all the draftees."
"You like killing people, Serg?" "No, why would you ask a question like that?" "That's your job. That's what George Patton used to say, the job of a solder is to kill people as fast as he can. I'm not like you, I don't want to kill people." "I don't want to kill people either, I'm not like you either. I don't have a big house with a mom and dad that both work and a college degree and can't loaf around go up the lake. You're a college boy, you ought to know what Charles Dickens said, only rich people can afford high morals."
"Thanks for the hotdog and coke Serg", starting to get up from the booth. "Wait a minute, wait a minute I might have what you are looking for. We just got this good deal for college graduates or anyone with two years of college who can pass a certain test. If they have specialized in electronics or languages or math, they can join this new branch of the Army called ASA."
"Do I have to kill people?", I said.
"This branch of the Army broke off from the Signal Corps. It has to do with coded messages I have been told but I'm not supposed to give that information out to recruits."
"You just did"
"Like Charles Dickens said, I got to meet my quota."
"If I join up, I'll have to join for four years. My two brothers had to join the Navy for four years." "No no, you can join for three years."
"Why only three years", I said. "I don't know, I don't run the Army. Maybe they need people bad."
I took my bag of grub, candles, books, a boat and a trot line and went out to my cave. I only stayed a few days. I guess I was the original hyperactive kid, I get bored real fast.
Joining ASA was probably a good choice because, as you will see, I was involved in the setting up of the new federal agency decreed by congress in 1952, NSA. In addition, most of the third year, I was allowed TDY (temporary duty) to go to graduate school, free from any Army duties at a full Sergeant's salary. After my tour was up, I went on to graduate school on the GI bill, consulting for NSA at times, and then right back into NSA.
The summer of 1952 went fast. Basic training was a breeze.
I was called in and asked if I wanted to go to OCS (
"You can't hear out of one ear and you can't see out of one eye and an officer has to take responsibility for his men; and you can't do that." No one knew I had those maladies outside the family and I resented him trying to restrict my life because of them, as he always did. But I knew that his real resentment was brewing for years because I had stopped him from abusing my mother when he was drunk. I turned down OCS because I did not want to increase the probability of having to kill people. I had better chances of not having to do that in ASA. I suppose at heart I was a conscientious objector.
It
had nothing to do with religion. I had already acquired a
religious philosophy after studying anthropology, mythology,
Saint Thomas Aquinas, other philosophers. My philosophy
went something like this. When a child in Western culture
is about six years old, if they are astute, it occurs to them at
Christmas times that Santa Clause is a myth. No way could
he get around the World in one night with a 7 reindeer powdered
machine. Likewise, when astute Christians reach adulthood,
they see Christianity as a myth. No mater how valid
the tenets of the faith are, it is a myth. No way could
Noah's
"I'm Gudu, nice to meet you Nelson."
"When did you get here Gudu?"
"I been here for 231,816 years, 2 months and 13 days."
"How can you keep that straight?"
"That's easy to keep in my head, I'm good at math, but I'm not human. I got a bum rap. They had a review 1700 years ago. I had been in Purgatory before that, you know. My cell mate during the review was Saint Peter's grandmother. She told me she said, 'Peter, I took care of you when you were born and had I not, you wouldn't be here today. I was good to everybody all my life and now I have had to spend all these years in Purgatory and then Hell, just because I never heard of Christ, never got saved, you were not up here when I died. Why didn’t you tell me about Jesus Christ so I could have been saved also?' " Gudu went on, "I keep telling them, I'm not human! My mother was Homo Erectus. Now its true that my dad was a Cro-Magnon but that only makes me half Human. Besides, there are all these jurisdictional problems. I keep telling Saint Peter, the racial designation goes with the mother, not the father. There was also this guy, if you can call a non-Human that, Homer was his name, in the cell with me and Saint Peter's grandmother. He was only 1/8th Human and that was because this Human came in and raped his great-grandmother. Not only that, but the family of the human who raped her said they did not think it was right for her to get an abortion. These Homo Erectus has lots of good portents for abortion, you know. Homer said, "Look Saint Peter, The Humans insisted that my great-grandmother not get an abortion, even in case of rape and incest. He was a smooth talker and Saint Peter let him through. The last thing he said to me, he was crying, he said I really don't want to go to Heaven either. I am a pre-Human. There have been billions of us. Most of them are a much bigger part human than I am. I just want to be dead like any other animal. Why do the humans insist on us part humans going to Heaven or Hell, why! Why did we have to stay in Purgatory until Christ came? Why? What's with these Christians? How could they be so self righteous? Worse than burning women at the stake by the thousands, they insist that a billion of us half humans have to go to Heaven of Hell."
So the reason I did not want to kill people was because I didn't understand these things. If I shot someone, as he sat there and watched the blood run out, I knew he was not thinking about the platitudes either. So I chose not to go to OCS.
I was surprised by the cold
The quasi-awol-repo-depot-recruits at the PX round table were
sure we could work out definite answers to the problems of the
World? At the round table most every day were John
Katz, a recent graduate of Harvard Business School, his family
ran the Katz Clothing Store in Baltimore and his buddy Sean
Degnan from N.Y.City, Bob Powell, a UCLS physics graduate. Bob
Powell was 6 feet, 2 inch and another UCLA graduate, Moon Cha,
was a Linguist who has done a thesis on the Chang Dynasty. Moon
came up to Bob Powell's belt. He got pissed when we patted
him on the head. Another was Bill McKinney, a black
electrical engineer, and about four or five others. We all
wanted to get stationed at Arlington Hall Station in
Gudu,
Homer, and Saint Peter's Grandmother were attacked mercilessly by
some, for their sacrilege attitudes. Another popular
subject was the Brown vs Board of Education trial that was going
on. I thought, boy, we are going to get the answer to
all the world's problems and especially the race problem in the
"Nigress,
nigress" Bill kept repeating. "You son of a
bitch, you don't refer to John's sister as a Jewess. Moon
Cha, is your wife a Chinkess"? By that
time Bill's voice was up 20 decibels and all the customers in the
PX lounge were entertained. Probably the NCO at the PX
called the 1st Sergeant at the repo-depot. I really had the
feeling that the cadre didn't care what the recruits did as
long as there was an image of everybody doing structured things
on Post. After the details marched back and were
dismissed it was safe to come back to the company area because
there was lots of random walking around, we would come back from
the PX, then go to chow, then fall in for evening formation.
One of the announcements at the evening formation on the same day
that Bill McKinney's negress was discussed was, "Private
McAvoy , Private McKinney, . . . report at 0900 tomorrow to
the First Sergeant. Another was, "We are
required to announce (as if to say, but don't pay any attention
to it) that the Inspector General will be available in the
morning for interviews.
"To see the IG."
"What's your complaint?"
"Nothing Sergeant, I just want to let him know that I can do more for ASA as a research physicist than if they assign me as a radio operator." Just then the IG, a Major, walked out to the CO's office and started out the door. "Major Johnson, sir", the sergeant said and the major stopped dead in his tracks with the door half open.
"Yes, sergeant,"
"There is a solder here who wishes an appointment." The Major looked at me for a few seconds and reversed his steps and walked into a side office.
"In here soldier", he said as he seated himself behind the plan small beat up desk and through his briefcase on it. I came in and saluted and said, "Request permission to speak to the IG, sir."
"Be seated."
"Sir,
when I took the battery of test I know I did well on the radio
operators test because, as an 
amateur radio operator I
receive 20 words a minute."
"I have a station too, what's your call sign?",said the Major.
"W8UOE",
I lied, that was my teachers call sign. I would have had to
go to
"Yes sir (the 8 in the call sign was for WV).
"If ASA has use for someone who can do advanced microwave antenna design, I might serve my country better."
"I see. Write that information along with your name, rank, and serial number on this form and leave it with the Sergeant."
"Yes sir."
"Dismissed",
he said as he was writing without looking up. I saluted and
left. No one was in the Company area and all the details
were out so I headed for the PX. The next morning I was up
at
In
a few days I got orders to report to Hq. & Hq. Company,
Arlington Hall Station,
Hq. & Hq. Company was composed of the cooks, motor pool, base maintenance, MPs and ASA operative enlisted men. ASA operatives and cooks lived in one barracks and the MPs in another. There were more MPs than any others personnel because everyone who was on the base who was not a permanent staff has to be escorted at all times by an MP. The permanent buildings of Arlington Hall were a beautiful old girls prep school that has been requisitioned during WW II and was the place where code breaking
Arlington Hall Station,
during WW II was centered. I had a second set of orders the second day and was escorted to the offices of a civilian, Neil Ganzert. Neil was a Virginia Military Institute graduate and was an Army major (or maybe a Colonel) in radio intelligence during WW II. He was the only person remotely close to a father figure that I ever had. My first week at work he wrote orders to give me the MOS (military occupational specialty) of a Traffic Analyst.
Settling
into the bachelor life of a young adult in
"Don't do what?"
"Don't pick a ball up when it is rolled to you,", he said. I looked at him with a smirk and said, "Don't roll it to me if you don't want me to pick it up?"
"I see you're so slow witted you'll flunk out in no time."
I
didn't want to flunk out in the worst way, the whole place was
sunshine, palm trees, beaches, and gorgeous girls. Talk
about culture shock, the easy ways of
"I'm assigned here."
"What you teaching".
"I can't tell you."
"Moon Cha, what the hell you mean, you can't tell me?", I laughed
"You don't have any need to know" , he said seriously.
"Moon
Cha, you're carrying that, need to know, thing a little too far
aren't you?" When I said, what are you teaching, you
didn't say I'm not teaching. Here we are at the
"I
teach", he finally said and I knew not to ask any more
questions. In ASA they took the 'need to know' seriously.
It caused mix ups sometimes. The Company Commander at
Arlington Hall had no idea what the solders under him did during
the day. That is probably why I was assigned to the
Commanding General of ASA, General Rikeldorffer under Neil
Ganzert with an MOS of Traffic Analyst, arranged by the IG in the
repo-depot in
Back to Moon Cha. I followed him around in the evenings because Chinese food was so wonderful and such a novelty for me. I remember in school one time the teacher asked a girl what the four main food groups were, she said, beans, tomatoes, corn and potatoes. Chinese food was more than beans, tomatoes, corn, and potatoes. Dinner was a social thing and free at all the Chinese restaurants when I was with Moon Cha. The help huddled around Moon Cha and he did not order from the menu.
"What do you tell those people to get them all to huddle around the table and give you free food, Moon Cha?"
"In
"You rascal Moon Cha."
"Don't say my name to loudly, I'm How Long, this is the Long family."
"How long is a china man, get it?", he grinned.
"He's not very long, short, right?"
The best part for me was the girls. No mater what color their hair was, the hair on their tan legs was white, from either bleach or sun bleached, probably the later. They hung out in clusters. I would just go up to a cluster and stand there with them and they would start talking to me. That had only happened to me with hometown girls.
"What's your name?"
"Nelson."
"Nelson Eddie", she giggled. "You look like Nelson Eddie" (which I did). I was not sophisticated enough not to stare at their boobs in the skimpy bathing suit tops. "You like what you see?" one girl said. "If you stare at them enough my nipples will get hard. You want that?" A couple of others said, lets see who can get hard nipples from Nelson Eddie staring at them. It seemed so natural, I don't think I blushed at all. The next evening they started it again. "You want to see more, you're making them hard looking at them again." "How Long wants to see them", I leaned on his shoulder to jester that he was my buddy. They were all taller than Moon Cha. He came up to about nipple height. They all clustered around him. I couldn't even see him inside the tight giggling circle. Oh God, what a wonderful life this army is, Chinese food; giggly, white peach fuzz covered, tan, unattached, uninhibited, girls; soccer; learning a language; beaches; balmy winter. To good to be true.
The next afternoon I was called out of class to report to the Company Commander. "Private McAvoy reporting as ordered, sir", as I saluted .
"You're not a private anymore, you are a sergeant, and congratulations."
"Yes sir"
"And I also have orders for you to report forthwith back to Headquarters and Headquarters Company at Arlington Hall Station. That's all pri . . , I mean, Sergeant."
"But, Sir, I am stationed here and want to graduate with m . ."
"Dismissed." He cut me off with a smirk.
"I don't like it either when they pull students out and stick them in a class in the middle of a program. Dismissed."
"Yes sir", I saluted did an about face and went out devastated. As I went out of the Orderly Room the Sgt. Major said, "Here's your orders.", as he slid them across the desk.
"Why would they want to make a snot nosed kid like you a sergeant. I was in the Army seven years before I made sergeant". I was so upset about having to leave, I vented it on him. I stared at him for a pause and said, "It's because I like killing people faster and better than you, Serg." I did not go back to class, took my last long walk on the beach with tears running down my face. When I came back, "Moon Cha, let's not eat chow, let's go get some Chinese food."
"I can't I got'a study." He knew something was wrong.
"What's up?"
"What do you mean, you got to study. You're the teacher."
"I'm not a teacher yet. I'm going in front of a board first to see if I am good enough to teach." My feelings were hurt that he was not going to spend my last evening with me and the Chinese restaurant, and the girls with peach fuzz covered tan legs and hard nipples.
"I thought you were not going to tell me anything because I had no 'need to know'? He just stared quizzically.
"Well I don't like it here too much, I'm going back to Arlington Hall. And on my way out I'll stop by the restaurant and tell them your name is Moon Cha and you been lying just to get free meals." Then I walked out, checked out of the post, packed my duffle bag, went to the Greyhound Station and got a ticket to an Air Force Base for a MATS (Military Air Transport) flight.
It
was September 1st. I had to report on/or about the fourth.
I was home in two days. The next morning, it was crisp, I
was on the porch looking down the
"Hi Uncle Joe."
"What are you doing here. You just joined the Army. Every time I turn around, you're home again. You just came home for your Grandpa's funeral and now you're home again. Did you go AWOL?" I ignored that. "Do you know why the geese fly in a V instead of one behind the other?
It's easier going or they wouldn't do it." "Why", I queried.
"I don't know why, I'm no goose. Your whole life you been going around asking, why, every time someone says something".
"Well I know why on this one, I just wanted to know if others commonly knew it. It's because they are in the slip stream of the one in front and the slip stream pushes them along just like the surf pushes a surfer along. That saves them a lot of gas."
"Well if that's so then why didn't the pilots fly to their target in a geese formation to save gas? God knows they needed to save gas", Uncle Joe ask.
"It's because the pilot can't stay in the right place of the slip stream. The surfer, she has to constantly be adjusting and a goose can do that to."
With a big grin Uncle Joe said, "Why you been saying 'she', you been out surfing with some shes?" "For the same reason you been saying goose instead of gander." I said as I started singing,
"Rooster's crowing on
Hi de um de doodel o day.
So many pretty girls, you can't count them,
All the remi necon dinecen day.
Old Gray Goose went down the river,
Hi de um de doodel o day.
If I'd a been a gander, I'da gone with her,
All the remi necon dinecen day.
Old man Newman can I have your daughter
Hi de um de doodel o day.
To bake my bread and fetch my water.
All the remi necon dinecen day.
No Sir young Sir you can't have her.
Hi de um de doodel o day.
She won't work and do what she oughter.
All the remi necon dinecen day.
I
couldn't tell him anything about
Two
days to get to
I was right back in the same bunk at Arlington Hall. First thing I did was to sew on one set of Sergeant stripes. Next weekend I could hitchhike to Grafton and let my Mum sew the rest on (I should write sew on the rest--no preposition at the end of the sentence. My English teacher in college told me that when editors tried to de-Anglo-Saxonize Winston Churchill's prepositions at the end of a sentence, he said, "That is the kind of nonsense up with which I will not put.") The next thing I did was to report to Neil Ganzert, my civilian boss. At the gate of the big old brick building where General Rikelforfer and his staff were, the MP said, "Your badge isn't for this building, Sergeant?" It felt good someone calling me sergeant.
"I just checked in last night, I have to pick up my permanent badge today. I want to see Mr. Ganzert on the General's Staff."
"Not without a badge." He picked up the phone, glanced in the phone book and dialed, "There is a Sergeant McAvoy at the gate to see you, sir. I can't, he has no badge. Mr. Ganzert will be right out," he said to me. I started pacing. Each pace was farther away in my concentration about what had gone on there before I had left. "Where are you going, Sergeant," the MP said?
"No where, just pacing."
"Well, please don't pace too far. Regulations say that if you call someone out of Headquarters, you cannot leave until they get here."
"OK, OK."
"Hi Niel."
"Hi", we shake hands. "I see you're a sergeant now, how did that happen?" He had a sparkle in his eye, I knew he had something to do with it. "I hear you been all over the country. Out on the beach. Did you like the palm trees?"
"Loved them, and the girls, and the beach, and the whole scene."
"Let's take a little walk", as he headed out.
"Why didn't you tell me you had orders?", he asked.
"Well, there is the 'need to know' thing so I didn't know whether I was supposed to or not. Besides, I thought the General's staff got all the info", I lied.
"Your
RTOP (research and technology operating plan) went through."
What he was talking about was the work I did during the time I
was first at Arlington Hall Neil Ganzert had the RDF, radio
direction finding, part of Traffic Analysis. In
other words, suppose there was a transmitter in
"Getting you back here was a mess. First we had to find you. The Adjacent's office got your assignment from the Fort Devon Testing Officer. Then the Adjacent wanted to know why I wanted you, a recent recruit. I had to explain that you helped write the RTOP and were needed to carry out the study."
"That's
what I have to do? I have to give up
"No,
you could go to
I
settled into the barracks. In the barracks at Arlington
Hall Station, the cryptographers, linguist, and experts of the
enlisted ranks, mostly draftees and three year regular army,
lived in the upstairs of the barracks. They had arranged
wall units in ways that make private rooms while the cooks and
motor pool personal lived downstairs with rows of bunks. I
think the more resourceful soldiers upstairs went to the wood
working hobby shop on post and made the petitions with wardrobes
and chest of draws. The barracks houses all had the
same pattern. There was a cast system. There was a
large MP contingency because veryone other than permanent
employees had an MP escort at all time. They had their own
quarters. Another unique thing was that the upstairs
soldiers, a tight knit bunch went together and rented a large
suite just off post on Columbia Pike. It was walking
distance. It was not so much for their use but usually
there would be some friends coming into
We
will come back to this situation later. Up stairs were
young men of very diverse backgrounds. Remember, except for
basic training I had never been out of
In the barracks we shared the bathrooms and showers with the cooks. Many were amazed and curious about the cooks. That was their first time to have the opportunity to be around working class people. All young people were included in the draft. They must have sent only those that tested low to the cooks school. I am ashamed now that I used to manipulate the cooks to get them to talk about the kikes, niggers, wops, hunkies, dagos, spicks, and polock's. For example, when I was alone with the cooks I would rant and rave and teach them that Franklin Roosevelt was the culprit that gave women suffrage. Then, when the up stairs gang was around, I would get them to tell how F.D.R. was the perpetrator of women winning suffrage. It looked like innocent fun then and saw these hate mongers and racist as innocuous. Little could I have imagined that in 40 years, many of the quaza-AWAL-repo-depo and "upstairs gang" would become part of the business and conservative political movement that would hook up with those from the "downstairs gang" who were the hate mongers and racist; and champion the "Reagan Revolution".
I put my issued kit in the foot locker and locked it, to be opened only if there was an inspection, all except two wool o.d. uniforms (Ike jacket types) that I kept on hangers. From the PX I bought 12 white dress shirts; five khaki pants; 5 khaki short pants; two two-piece sets of wool long underwear; five pairs of heavy wool o.d. socks; cotton underwear and light socks and a Sheaffer white-dot-Balance, 14 K gold fine point nib, fountain pen, and a 6 inch long "toad sticker" pocket knife that weighed 5 ounces (the weight of a baseball, I could stick it into the side of a hay bale at baseball pitching distances). From a clothing store I bought a light weight navy blue blazer; one light and one heavy wool sweater; a heavy Harris Tweed wool sports coat; a pair of brown loafers; a pair of white tennis shoes; a few white handkerchiefs; a brown fedora hat; and five white cotton (two inch brim all around) tennis hats.
The
only other worldly possession I had was a
No
other worldly possessions did I want or need. Khaki short
or long pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up were
perfect summer clothes for casual or sport ware. For cooler
weather I had a light wool sweater (I also has a nice wool o.d.
issued sweater). Colder weather, I had two sets of
longjohns and a heavy sweater and tweed jacket if need be. For
more formal ware, I had white shirts, tie and blazer or tweed
jacket. For even more formal ware, a uniform is always
appropriate, a tux could always be rented.
My wardrobe was designed around the Fort Meyer Quartermaster
laundry service.
I
ate free in the mess hall, ink for my pen was at the Post Office,
the orderly room, or at my desk at work. Never before or
since have I had such a worry free logistic arrangement to take
care of my personal needs. One might think this
preoccupation implies obsession with an organized life, just the
opposite is true. If they had invented Attention Deficit
Disorder, I would have been the original member of the disorder.
I leave things around and forget where I put things. I had
to be a world traveler on this job. I was off to
I
did nicely, as would the kids today with ADD, if the parents
cared enough about them not to require them to stay in a
structured mold of parental convenience and if the parents quit
listening to TV advertisement for hours every day. The
parents of ADD children have SCD, stupid conformance disorder.
Stupid because the idea that the children will miss out on
academics if their ass is not tied to a chair all day. Stupid
because the SCD parents march to the tune of the drug corporation
drummer. I missed out on formal learning when growing
up but I have read all the classics and mastered all the
sciences. If an ADD child is bright (usually the case) they
will learn while not in a barbaric arrangement of sitting in a
classroom all day with structured sedentary activities and being
zombie by medication and labeled with a disorder. If an ADD
child is slow (uncommon) they have no business sitting in a
classroom all day. Because of my ADD, I have been
distracted, where was I? My pen, my watch, my orders,
and a simple kit of civilian and military clothes minimized
discombobulating. I unconsciously combated my absent
mindedness. I did not at the time know I was absent minded,
or had ADD. But I could keep things straight if I had to.
I learned, I realize now, little tricks. Fifty years hence,
and I still wake up from a dream in a cold sweat. I dream that I
am eating breakfast in a dinner at the counter with a locked
briefcase clutched between my feet. The next thing I know,
in my dream, is that I am walking down the street and forgot the
briefcases! It was an exciting life, full of culture shock.
A 22 year old young man who never knew a stranger and who had
ridden in a car only two times in his life; traveled all
over the world by himself and had ivy leaguers as bosom buddies.
In the winter of 1953 I bought a car and a State Policeman friend
in
I
had already been told that a new agency, National Security
Agency, was going to take over the combined work of the Army
Security Agency, located at Arlington Hall Station; the Naval
Security Service, whose headquarters was at
Because of the intelligence fiasco re the Chinese invasion of November 1950, one of his task was to work out procedures to be more quantitative. That, we thought at first could be done by calculating the radiation pattern of the Crossed-U-Adcock antenna used and working out an angle spread in which the transmitter was likely to be. In other words, a graph of 10,20,30, . . 60 degrees verses probability, or likelihood that the transmitter was within that spread. Two receivers 90 degrees apart would give you an interception area verses probability. I pointed out that in addition a field study would have to be made because our received bearings from know targets did not agree with the theoretical predictions. In some cases they were better and some cases they were worse. There were too many variables for Neil Ganzert to stick his neck out and just give the ideal theoretical results. Signal strength, multiple ionosphereic conditions, operator ability, reflections, and many other things required field studies. This was especially true if bearings were to be from ships, planes, and on the ground. It was my job to put all this together.
Chapter 3
NSA 1953 - 1997
There
was one staff meeting in the spring of 1953 that sticks out in my
memory and has haunted me every sense. Some times I would
go along with Niel Ganzert to meetings where questions about our
improvements in direction finding (DF) assessments and how
we were going to coordinate the DF of the three services with
NSA. This was during the time of negotiations
for a peace settlement in
So
Neil took me along to this staff meeting because he thought there
might be detailes they wanted to know about One Hung Lo's PRC
deployment. It was not about that at all. The meeting
was about introducing the signal intelligence community to the
newly formed NSA. This is one of the most memorial days of
my life. I go over it and over it. General Harry
Reicheldorfer the Arlington Hall Commandant and ASA
Commander introduced guest from the Joint Chiefs and the White
House. He then said, in effect, I cannot quote him,
gentlemen, there has been a lot of talk and misinformation about
the newly formed National Security Agency, that was set up by
President Truman just before he left office. (See Appendix
C for the Executative Order signed by President Truman).
Many of you will be involved with, and indeed become part of,
this new agency. We have set up plans for peacetime
collection, analysis, and distribution of intelligence.
It includes the services organizations, Army Security Agency,
Airforce Security Service and the Navy Security Service. This
structure is an adoption to the new peacetime situation we find
ourselves in as well as the looming
Under
the Eisenhower administration we have begun to solidify plans for
the detailed operation of the NSA and CIA and other intelligence
organizations. This conflict with
In the questions and answers session it kept being emphasized that the name Central Intelligence Agency was chosen to misdirect. It was pointed out that CIA was set up by an act of Congress and, therefore, Congress had oversight. NSA was set up by Executive Order, was commanded by a three star general (they all wanted to know about this) and had a (classified) budget inside DoD, although they are a separate agency and not under DoD auspices. There is no Congressional oversight of NSA.
It will be very difficult, probably impossible, for me to explain why this lack of Congressional oversight, indeed even deception of Congress and everyone outside the "intelligence community", was assumed to be imperative. What I am saying here is that it was generally agreed that it was imperative to violate the United States Constitution by deceiving and intentionally misleading Congress about the spending of enormous amounts of federal treasure and illegal activities. First off, a nation cannot build up an intelligence apparatus directed at an advocacy in the same manner as one does the armed forces. The recent Korean war history just screamed this fact out at us.
As a
short review of the Korean War, when it became clear in
mid-August 1945 that
The
Finally,
in the early hours of
On
The
war ended in August 1953, after more than three years of combat,
with the signing of a truce agreement and the exchange of
prisoners. During the war and in postwar investigations,
there were many charges that
When
we got involved, there were no Korean linguist, no maps, no
Korean typewriters, no dictionaries and no way of knowing who in
Then
along comes William Weisband. Weisband was born in
It was
clear to us after the Korean War what was needed. The process was
started by a memorandum to the National Security Council, dated
10 December 1951, General Walter Bedell Smith, Director of
Centeral Intelligence (DCI) recomending an overall review of
United States intelligence activities. The proposal was
forwarded to President Truman. Three days later, on
On
Within six months, the
Brownell Committee completed its report. It stressed the
need for the unification of
In conclusion, the directive
established clearly the national rather than the solely military
character of NSA. It greatly expanded administrative and
operational controls over all
Great pains were taken to obscure the NSA budget in the overall DoD budget by making it top secret and to restrict Congressional oversight by, for the first and only time in U.S. history, establishing an Agency by Presidential Edict.
In other words, at this meeting at Arlington Hall Station, where I was a lowly sergeant and a fly on the wall, it was explained that NSA would:
· Be a perminate piecetime civilian intelligance agency with perminate "sections" for the dress, language, customs, history, and culture of each possible advocacy.
· Infiltrate the institutions of these countries solely for non-disruptive information gathering.
· Foster personal ties with influential people in each of the countries.
· Maintain NSA employees in industrial and educational organizations in order to have a knowledge base and technically keep abreast. Especially computer expertise.
· Develop a unique and clandestine way to bring information back from all parts of the world (e.g. NSA satellite system).
· Non-interventionist policy to facilitate clandestineness.
· A
"cut-out" organization to insulate the source when
information is provided to proper
This
seems outlandish to everyone I know; and all that I know who were
involved in this planning are either dead or senile. You do
not need to know what the original planning stages of NSA were to
see that these things are true. All you have to do is
notice the history of these two agencies from 1952 to, as least
2010. All one has to do is look at the highlights of
publicized activities of these two agencies over this 58
years. Some of the outstanding activities of the CIA during
these 58 years are delineated in William Blum's encyclopedic
work, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since
World War II,
Operation
PAPERCLIP
While other American agencies are hunting down Nazi war criminals
for arrest, the
Gehlen
inflates Soviet military capabilities at a time when
1947:
CIA created
President Truman signs the National Security Act of 1947,
creating the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security
Council. The CIA is accountable to the president through the NSC
-there is no democratic or congressional oversight. Its charter
allows the CIA to "perform such other functions and duties
as the National Security Council may from time to time
direct." This loophole opens the door to covert action and
dirty tricks.
1947:
President Truman requests military aid to
1948:
Covert-action wing created
The CIA recreates a covert action wing, innocuously called the
Office of Policy Coordination, led by Wall Street lawyer Frank
Wisner. According to its secret charter, its responsibilities
include "propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct
action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and
evacuation procedures; subversion against hostile states,
including assistance to underground resistance groups, and
support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened
countries of the free world."
The CIA corrupts democratic elections in
1949:
Radio Free
The CIA creates its first major propaganda outlet, Radio Free
Europe. Over the next several decades, its broadcasts are so
blatantly false that for a time it is considered illegal to
publish transcripts of them in the
1953:
CIA overthrows the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in a
military coup, after he threatened to nationalize British oil.
The CIA replaces him with a dictator, the Shah of Iran, whose
secret police, SAVAK, is as brutal as the Gestapo.
Operation
MK-ULTRA
Inspired by
1954:
CIA overthrows the democratically elected Jacob Arbenz in a
military coup. Arbenz has threatened to nationalize the
Rockefeller-owned United Fruit Company, in which CIA Director
Allen Dulles also owns stock. Arbenz is replaced with a series of
right-wing dictators whose bloodthirsty policies will kill over
100,000 Guatemalans in the next 40 years.
1954-1958:
CIA officer Edward Lansdale spends four years trying to overthrow
the communist government of
1956:
Radio Free Europe incites
1957-1973:
The CIA carries out approximately one coup per year trying to
nullify
1959:
The CIA helped "Papa Doc" Duvalier become
dictator of
1961:
The
The CIA sends 1,500 Cuban exiles to invade Castro's
The CIA assassinates the democratically elected Patrice Lumumba.
However, public support for Lumumba's politics runs so high that
the CIA cannot clearly install his opponents in power. Four years
of political turmoil follow.
1963:
The CIA-backed military forces the democratically elected
President Jose Velasco to resign. Vice President Carlos Arosemana
replaces him; the CIA fills the now vacant vice presidency with
its own man. A CIA-backed military coup overthrows
President Arosemana, whose independent (not socialist) policies
have become unacceptable to
1964:
A CIA-backed military coup overthrows the democratically elected
government of Joao Goulart. The junta that replaces it will, in
the next two decades, become one of the most bloodthirsty in
history. General Castelo Branco will create
1965:
The CIA overthrows the democratically elected Sukarno with a
military coup. The CIA has been trying to eliminate Sukarno since
1957, using everything from attempted assassination to sexual
intrigue, for nothing more than his declaring neutrality in the
Cold War. His successor, General Suharto, will massacre between
500,000 to 1 million civilians accused of being
"communist." The CIA supplies the names of countless
suspects.
1966:
The Ramparts Affair
The radical magazine Ramparts begins a series of unprecedented
anti-CIA articles. Among their scoops: the CIA has paid the
1967:
With the CIA's backing, the king removes George Papandreous as
prime minister. Papandreous has failed to vigorously support
Operation
The CIA helps South Vietnamese agents identify and then murder
alleged Viet Cong leaders operating in South Vietnamese villages.
According to a 1971 congressional report, this operation killed
about 20,000 "Viet Cong."
1968:
Operation CHAOS
The CIA has been illegally spying on American citizens since
1959, but with Operation CHAOS, President Johnson dramatically
boosts the effort. CIA agents go undercover as student radicals
to spy on and disrupt campus organizations protesting the Vietnam
War. They are searching for Russian instigators, which they never
find. CHAOS will eventually spy on 7,000 individuals and 1,000
organizations.
A CIA-organized military operation captures legendary guerilla
Che Guevara. The CIA wants to keep him alive for interrogation,
but the Bolivian government executes him to prevent worldwide
calls for clemency.
1969:
The notorious CIA torturer Dan Mitrione arrives in
1970:
The CIA overthrows Prince Sihanouk, who is highly popular among
Cambodians for keeping them out of the Vietnam War. He is
replaced by CIA puppet Lon Nol, who immediately throws Cambodian
troops into battle. This unpopular move strengthens once minor
opposition parties like the Khmer Rouge, which achieves power in
1975 and massacres millions of its own people.
1971:
After half a decade of CIA-inspired political turmoil, a
CIA-backed military coup overthrows the leftist President Juan
Torres. In the next two years, dictator Hugo Banzer will have
over 2,000 political opponents arrested without trial, then
tortured, raped and executed.
"Papa Doc" Duvalier dies, leaving his 19-year old son
"Baby Doc" Duvalier the dictator of
1972:
The Case-Zablocki Act
Congress passes an act requiring congressional review of
executive agreements. In theory, this should make CIA operations
more accountable. In fact, it is only marginally effective.
Congress votes to cut off CIA funds for its secret war in
Watergate
Break-in
President Nixon sends in a team of burglars to wiretap Democratic
offices at Watergate. The team members have extensive CIA
histories, including James McCord, E. Howard Hunt and five of the
Cuban burglars. They work for the Committee to Reelect the
President (CREEP), which does dirty work like disrupting
Democratic campaigns and laundering Nixon's illegal campaign
contributions. CREEP's activities are funded and organized by
another CIA front, the Mullen Company.
1973:
The CIA overthrows and assassinates Salvador Allende,
CIA
begins internal investigations
William Colby, the Deputy Director for Operations, orders all CIA
personnel to report any and all illegal activities they know
about. This information is later reported to Congress.
Watergate
Scandal
The CIA's main collaborating newspaper in
CIA
Director Helms Fired
President Nixon fires CIA Director Richard Helms for failing to
help cover up the Watergate scandal. Helms and Nixon have always
disliked each other. The new CIA director is William Colby, who
is relatively more open to CIA reform.
1974:
CHAOS exposed
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh publishes a story
about Operation CHAOS, the domestic surveillance and infiltration
of anti-war and civil rights groups in the
Angleton
fired
Congress holds hearings on the illegal domestic spying efforts of
James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's chief of counterintelligence. His
efforts included mail-opening campaigns and secret surveillance
of war protesters. The hearings result in his dismissal from the
CIA.
House
clears CIA in Watergate
The House of Representatives clears the CIA of any complicity in
Nixon's Watergate break-in.
The
Hughes Ryan Act
Congress passes an amendment requiring the president to report
non-intelligence CIA operations to the relevant congressional
committees in a timely fashion.
1975:
The CIA helps topple the democratically elected, left-leaning
government of Prime Minister Edward Whitlam. The CIA does this by
giving an ultimatum to its Governor-General, John Kerr. Kerr, a
longtime CIA collaborator, exercises his constitutional right to
dissolve the Whitlam government. The Governor-General is a
largely ceremonial position appointed by the Queen; the Prime
Minister is democratically elected. The use of this archaic and
never-used law stuns the nation.
Eager to demonstrate American military resolve after its defeat
in
"The
CIA and the Cult of Intelligence"
Victor Marchetti and John Marks publish this whistle-blowing
history of CIA crimes and abuses. Marchetti has spent 14 years in
the CIA, eventually becoming an executive assistant to the Deputy
Director of Intelligence. Marks has spent five years as an
intelligence official in the State Department.
"Inside
the Company"
Philip Agee publishes a diary of his life inside the CIA. Agee
had worked in covert operations in
Congress
investigates CIA wrongdoing
Public outrage compels Congress to hold hearings on CIA crimes.
Senator Frank Church heads the Senate investigation ("The
Church Committee"), and Representative Otis Pike heads the
House investigation. (Despite a 98 percent incumbency reelection
rate, both Church and Pike are defeated in the next elections.)
The investigations lead to a number of reforms intended to
increase the CIA's accountability to Congress, including the
creation of a standing Senate committee on intelligence. However,
the reforms prove ineffective, as the Iran/Contra scandal will
show. It turns out the CIA can control, deal with or sidestep
Congress with ease.
The
Rockefeller Commission
In an attempt to reduce the damage done by the Church Committee,
President Ford creates the "Rockefeller Commission" to
whitewash CIA history and propose toothless reforms. The
commission's namesake, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, is
himself a major CIA figure. Five of the commission's eight
members are also members of the Council on Foreign Relations, a
CIA-dominated organization.
1979:
The Shah of Iran is a longtime CIA puppet. His brutality
helped cause the rise of Muslim fundamentalists who were furious
at the CIA's backing of SAVAK, the Shah's bloodthirsty secret
police. In revenge, the Muslims take 52 Americans hostage in the
CIA
Trains Phalangists on how to bomb civilians
An idealistic group of young military officers, repulsed by the
massacre of the poor, overthrows the right-wing government.
However, the
Anastasios Samoza II, the CIA-backed dictator, falls. The Marxist
Sandinistas take over government, and they are initially popular
because of their commitment to land and anti-poverty reform.
Samoza had a murderous and hated personal army called the
National Guard. Remnants of the Guard will become the Contras,
who fight a CIA-backed guerilla war against the Sandinista
government throughout the 1980s.
1980:
The Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, pleads with
President Carter "Christian to Christian" to stop
aiding the military government slaughtering his people. Carter
refuses. Shortly afterwards, right-wing leader Roberto
D'Aubuisson has Romero shot through the heart while saying Mass.
The country soon dissolves into civil war, with the peasants in
the hills fighting against the military government. The CIA and
U.S. Armed Forces supply the government with overwhelming
military and intelligence superiority. CIA-trained death squads
roam the countryside, committing atrocities like that of El
Mazote in 1982, where they massacre between 700 and 1000 men,
women and children. By 1992, some 63,000 Salvadorans will be
killed.
1981:
Iran/Contra Begins
The CIA begins selling arms to
1983:
The CIA gives Honduran military officers the Human Resource
Exploitation Training Manual - 1983, which teaches how to torture
people.
1984:
The Boland Amendment
The last of a series of Boland Amendments is passed. These
amendments have reduced CIA aid to the Contras; the last one cuts
it off completely. However, CIA Director William Casey is already
prepared to "hand off" the operation to Colonel Oliver
North, who illegally continues supplying the Contras through the
CIA's informal, secret, and self-financing network. This includes
"humanitarian aid" donated by Adolph Coors and William
Simon, and military aid funded by Iranian arms sales.
1986:
Eugene Hasenfus
Iran/Contra
Scandal
Although the details have long been known, the Iran/Contra
scandal finally captures the media's attention in 1986. Congress
holds hearings, and several key figures (like Oliver North) lie
under oath to protect the intelligence community. CIA Director
William Casey dies of brain cancer before Congress can question
him. All reforms enacted by Congress after the scandal are purely
cosmetic.
Rising popular revolt in
1989:
The U.S. invades
1990:
Competing against 10 comparatively wealthy candidates, leftist
priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide captures 68 percent of the vote.
After only eight months in power, however, the CIA-backed
military deposes him. More military dictators brutalize the
country, as thousands of Haitian refugees escape the turmoil in
barely seaworthy boats. As popular opinion calls for Aristide's
return, the CIA begins a disinformation campaign painting the
courageous priest as mentally unstable.
1991:
The Fall of the
The CIA fails to predict this most important event of the Cold
War. This suggests that it has been so busy undermining
governments that it hasn't been doing its primary job: gathering
and analyzing information. The fall of the
1992:
Economic Espionage
In the years following the end of the Cold War, the CIA is
increasingly used for economic espionage. This involves stealing
the technological secrets of competing foreign companies and
giving them to American ones. Given the CIA's clear preference
for dirty tricks over mere information gathering, the possibility
of serious criminal behavior is very great indeed.
1993:
The chaos in
2001:
World Trade Centre, 9/11
2001:
Continuous history of torture and violation of Genevia
Convention.
2002-2010
Continuation under the Obama Administration of operating torture
facilities in other countries.
So you see that CIA activities are not intelligence in the sense of covertly gathering information for the Executive Branch and the military to make informed decisions. Then what part of the government does our real intelligence work? NSA of course. There is no other branch to do it.
I was part of the Army Security Agency from July 1952 to July 1955. While still in the Army in January 1955 I went to graduate school full time and returned as a civilian to NSA in July 1957. The other engineers and scientist that came to NSA that summer are shown in the picture below. They were mostly electrical engineers with a few physicists and chemist scattered among us. They were sent to graduate Electrical Engineering school at Catholic University of America until 1958 while their security clearances were being processed. That year began the biggest computer program (aka Lightening) ever funded. Much bigger than all other computer programs put together.
But
as far as direct attacks on foreign cryptosystem was concerned,
the good news in 1957 was that solid state electronic circuits
and magnetic tape storage was beginning to be reliable and
faster. NSA was frantic for higher speed circuits. This
is why. Let's first consider the mechanical encryption
mechains like the World War II type used by both the Axis and
Allied forces. They were used by at least 130 countries
from 1945 to 1970. These machines had up to six wheels for
setting a session key (we explain this later). If each
wheel had 26 letters and 10 numbers, this is 36 possible digits.
There are 
possible keys. If our
computer and storage is fast enough to try one million keys per
second, then it would take 2176 seconds or 2176/60 = 36
minutes to put the machine encrypted message into plaintext.
Let's say we have a key of eight digits. We have an eight
digit lower case letter or number, 8 of 36 possible digits, 26
letters of the English alphabet plus 0 through 9 numerals. There
are 
possible keys. If our
computer and storage is fast enough to try one million keys each
second, it will take about 2821109 seconds or 33 days to try all
the numbers as the key. So from 1958 on a large portion of
the NSA personnel were evolved in electronics or computes. Between
1956 and 1996 when personal computers became commonplace, we went
from one million operations per second to a million million (
) operations. So the time to find
the key of 8 digits above went from 33 days in 1958 to 3 seconds
in 1997. This is why, starting in 1957 there was a big push
to hire electrical engineers to keep up with this fast changing
computing speed.
After 1958 NSA recruiters did
the college rounds. Prime recruitees were electrical
engineers and linguist, primarily those with Chinese, Slavic,
Near Eastern and Asian skills. An additional feather in a
recrutee's hat was knowledge of exotic languages e.g. an
Indonesian dialect called
NSA Recruts These engineers and scientist were
brought on board NSA in the summer of 1957. FRONT Left to
Right: John Porter, Bob Brugess, Bruno Reich, Nelson McAvoy, Ray
Newlin, Vince Delousa, Luther Smith, Jim Lally. CENTER Left
to Right: Bruce Middlesworth , Joseph Gray, Robert Schmidt,
Donald Blouch, William Chadwell, Douglas Paden,
Joseph Jepsen, Tom Mock. BACK Left to Right: William
Buckley, Joe Clark, Jack Cohn, Robert Cain, John Peaslee, James
O’Neil, Herb McCoy, Robert S. Powell
The
recruiters were hamstrung by not being able to give details about
the work. One aspect of working at NSA,
On I-95 between Baltimore and Washington the ramp leading to NSA has triple fences, armed guards, motion detectors, observation towers, the likes of a high security prison. From James Bamford's book Body of Secrets, ISBN 0-385-49907-8, page 4:
The land behind the
steel-and-cement no-man's-land is a dark and mysterious place,
virtually unknown to the outside world. It is made up of
more than sixty buildings: offices, warehouses, factories,
laboratories, and lining quarters. It is a place where tens
of thousands of people work in absolute secrecy. Most will
live and die without ever having told their spouses exactly what
they do. By the dawn of the year 2001, the Black Chamber (of
1930) has become a black empire and the home to the National
Security Agency, the largest, most secret, and most advanced spy
organization on the planet.
Not mentioned is that NSA has their own complete satellite system and a larger (secret) budget than CIA, FBI and all other intelligence organizations put together.
On
Asymmetric Codes PGP and the Internet
From its beginning with telegraphy crypto was the sole purview of the government until 1976. After World War II until 1970 there was a steady increase in the need for secret communications in the private sector. This was fueled by international banking, McCarthyism, popular resistance to the Vietnam War, the advent of computers as communications devices, and a general concern with First Amendment rights. Consequently crypto was increasingly being studied as a specialty in the mathematics departments of universities. Yet the NSA publicly, openly, and emphatically alleged that no private citizen had the right to send encrypted messages to another if the cipher was too strong for the government to break.
During the Cold War in 1959,
one of the concerns of the military was that an attack on the
In the Beginning, ARPA created the ARPANET.
And the ARPANET was without form and void.
And darkness was upon the deep.
And the spirit of ARPA moved upon the face of the network and ARPA said, 'Let there be a protocol,' and there was a protocol. And ARPA saw that it was good.
And ARPA said, 'Let there be more protocols,' and it was so. And ARPA saw that it was good.
And ARPA said, 'Let there be
more networks,' and it was so."
Danny Cohan, 1962
For example, the authors of The ARPA Completion Report (1978) wrote:
"Concurring
about the importance of the development of e-mail, The largest
single surprise of the ARPANET program has been the incredible
popularity and success of network mail. There is little doubt
that the techniques of network mail developed in connection with
the ARPANET program are going to sweep the country and
drastically change the techniques used for intercommunication in
the public and private sectors." This
is a necessary background for the understanding a need for the
invention and perfection of public key cryptography. To
understand why NSA or any one else cannot decipher encrypted
messages and why public key crypto has resulted in the
flourishing of internet business, we first have to understand the
RSA encryption algorithm invented in 1977. I paraphrase
from the book Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the
Government--Saving Privacy in the Digital Age, by Steven
Levy, 2001, ISBN 0-670-85950--8. The story begins with Marty
Hellman. Born in 1945, his father taught physics in
the
Why had Diffie's once-intermittent interest become such a consuming passion? Behind every great cryptographer, it seems, there is a driving pathology. As Joseph Rochefort of the Battle of Midway fame said it, it is not necessary to be crazy to be a cryptanalysis, but it always helps. Whitfield Diffie was not crazy. Though Diffie's quest was basically an intellectual challenge, he had come to take it very personally. He had an unusual drive for getting at what he considered the bedrock truth of any issue. This lead to the fascination with protecting and uncovering secrets, especially important secrets that were desperately held. "Ostensibly, my reason for getting interested in this was its importance to personal privacy," he now says. "But I was also fascinated with investigating this business that people wouldn't tell you about" It was as if solving this conundrum would provide a more general meaning to the world at large. "I guess in a very real sense I'm a Gnostic," he said, "I had been looking all my life for some great mystery . . . I think somewhere deep in my mind is the notion that if I could learn just the right thing, I would be saved".
And then, Diffie's quest to discover truths in cryptography became intertwined with another sort of romance: His courtship of Mary Fischer. It has not been Whit Diffie's original intention to fall in love with a Jewish Brooklyn-born animal trainer who was already married. Up to the day when she upbraided him on the phone for ignoring her, he had in fact hardly thought of her. But her outburst struck a nerve, perhaps more so because his own longtime relationship was on the wane. When he bid goodbye to Mary on his way across the country, and told her he'd see her in a year, he meant it. With about $12,000 he had saved from his salary at Mitre and an intention to live "low on the hog," as he later put it, he was out to learn all he could about crypto--and maybe do something about it. That deemed like a solitary mission.
But
in August 1973, when he stopped by Fischer's New Jersey house for
a visit, he found that her marriage was falling apart and that
she was finding relief by going to charismatic prayer meetings.
It was not the type of thing she felt comfortable talking about
to mathematical types like Diffie, but when she came out with it,
his reaction took her aback. "You know, Mary," he
said, I've always had a soft spot for mystics." They
began to spend time together. Fischer didn't drive, and
Diffie fell into the habit of escorting her to zoos--especially
to locate a King cobra--and then on longer trips to view
architecturally interesting churches. At one point, on a
Both Diffie and Hellman firmly believed that the advent of digital communications made commercial cryptography absolutely essential. All of these huge computer and telephone networks made life incredible easy for eavesdroppers--it was going to be possible to fully automate spying. At least with radio broadcasts, snoopers had to monitor numerous points in the channel band; with a network it was as if everyone were broadcasting on the same channel. A spy agency like the NSA could--and would--simply turn on the vacuum cleaner and inhale gigabytes of data.
After
a year's work together, the below article made Diffe and Hellman
famous. Not immediately. In fact the reaction by the
old-boy network was, "Who in the hell do these
whippersnappers think they are. Anyone who knows anything
about cryptography, knows that the most sacred and time proven
thing about crypto is, you have to keep your keys secret!
That is what General Grant painfully learned in the Civil
War. That is what the Germans painfully learned in World
War II with their enigma machine. These snott-nosed
academic types did not know that key information killed
people! Diffei and Hellmen knew. It was just that
in 1976 the time was ripe for people in non-government domains to
use crypto. But really, everyone just laughed it off.
After all there was no way in hell to come up with a scheme for a
public key cryptosystem!
New
Directions in Cryptography W. Diffie and M. E. Hellman, IEEE Transactions on
Information Theory, vol. IT-22, Nov. 1976, pp: 644-654.
Abstract
Two kinds of contemporary developments in cryptography are examined. Widening applications of teleprocessing have given rise to a need for new types of cryptographic systems, which minimize the need for secure key distribution channels and supply the equivalent of a written signature. This paper suggests ways to solve these currently open problems. It also discusses how the theories of communication and computation are beginning to provide the tools to solve cryptographic problems of long standing.
1 INTRODUCTION
We stand today on the brink of a revolution in cryptography. The development of cheap digital hardware has freed it from the design limitations of mechanical computing and brought the cost of high grade cryptographic devices down to where they can be used in such commercial applications as remote cash dispensers and computer terminals. In turn, such applications create a need for new types of cryptographic systems which minimize the necessity of secure key distribution channels and supply the equivalent of a written signature. At the same time, theoretical developments in information theory and computer science show promise of providing provable secure cryptosystems, changing this ancient art into a science. . . .
The best known cryptographic problem is that of privacy: Preventing the unauthorized extraction of information from communications over an insecure channel in order to use cryptography to insure privacy, however, it is currently necessary for the communicating parties to share a key which is known to no one else. This is done by sending the key in advance over some secure channel such as a private courier or registered mail. A private conversation between two people with no prior acquaintance is a common occurrence in business, however, and it is unrealistic to expect initial business contacts to be postponed long enough for keys to be transmitted by some physical means. The cost and delay imposed by this key distribution problem is a major barrier to the transfer of business communications through large teleprocessing networks.
Section III proposes two approaches to transmitting keying information over public (i.e., insecure) channels without compromising the security of the system. In a public key cryptosystem enciphering and deciphering are governed by distinct keys, E and D, such that computing D from E is computationally infeasible (e.g. requiring 10100 instructions). The enciphering key E can thus be publicly disclosed without compromising the deciphering key D. Each user of the network can, therefore, place his enciphering key in a public directory. This enables any user of the system to send a message to any other user enciphered in such a way that only the intended receiver is able to decipher it. A private conversation can therefore be held between an two individuals regardless of whether they have ever communicated before. Each one sends messages to the other enciphered in the receiver's public enciphering key and deciphers the message he receives using his won secret deciphering key.
We propose some techniques for developing public key cryptosystems, but the Problem is still largely open (author's emphasis, not the journal's).
The idea that you could send an encrypted message to any stranger in the world; and the stranger be guaranteed that it was sent by you; and both you and the recipient could be guaranteed that no one else could read it; was almost ludicrous. I repeat, the reaction by the old-boy network was, "Who in the hell do these whippersnappers think they are. Anyone who knows anything about cryptography, knows that the most sacred and time proven thing about crypto is, you have to keep your keys secret and that identical keys have to be in the possession of the sender and recipient. That is what General Grant painfully learned in the Civil War when he was reprimanded by the Secretary of War. That is what the Germans painfully learned in World War II with their enigma machine. That is what turned the tide at the Battle of Midway in the Pacific. These snott-nosed academic types did not know that key information killed people! Diffie and Hellmen knew. It was just that in 1976 the time was ripe for people in non-government domains to use crypto. But really, everyone just laughed it off. After all there was no way in hell to come up with a scheme for a public key cryptosystem!
Imagine how exciting it was when just a year later "the problem that was still largely open" was open no more. A method of finding the D and E spoken of above was simple, beautiful, functional: has been used successfully by governments, military, and business world wide since 1980; has the only software (PGP) that comes with complete instructions to make your own (source code) so that you can guarantee there is no trap door; has never been compromised: has, as Diffie and Hellman predicted, resulted in a commerce and business paradigm, called the Internet, that will change the world in unimaginable ways in the 21st century. It was published in 1978 by Rivest, R.; A. Shamir; L. Adleman, "A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems". Communications of the ACM 21 (2): pp.120–126. It will go down in history as one of the great documents. It is know as the RSA encryption system after the inventers. Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman. They will go down in history along with other great scientific inventers such as Clark Maxwell, Isic Newton, and Albert Einstein. These days, unlike it was before all this happened, if you want to find out about any of this, you can just 'google' these guys (or me) to your heart's content, thanks to them.
Let's first take the algorithm in its simplest form. Any one or any company that wants to receive encrypted messages has their public key published on the internet at a key server site, such as <http//keyserver.pgp.com> . This is a key server that gives the public key for the PGP encryption software program. Lets suppose John Doe want to send a secure message to the Chocolate Factory, to order a chocolate pig with lipstick. For simplicity we will also assume that his email messages are out there for all to intercept. His credit card number is in his order message. John Doe can look up the public key for the Chocolate Factory and email the order. Of course he does not have to look up the public key on <http://keyserver.pgp.com> if he downloads the Chocolate Factory web page; the number is embedded in their software for ordering. The public key for the Chocolate Factory are the numbers 1271 and 7. So when John Doe wants to order a chocolate pig with lipstick for $19.95 including postage, he just sends his credit card number 3521 2576 0623 1844 and address for shipping. Let's show the encryption of the first two digits, 35, of his credit card number. The RSA algorithm goes like this,
,
where 7 and 1271 are the
public key. To get 791, go to the desktop of your PC or
laptop computer and bring down the calculator. Enter 35 and
then click on the 
tab, which means x to the y
power. Then enter 7 and click on the = tab. Read
64339296875 as the answer. Then click on the 
tab and enter 1271 and read 791.
791 is sent as the encrypted 35. What this means in plane
arithmetic is that you have divided 64339296875 by 1271 long
division and gotten some number (we don't care about) and a
remainder of 791. In other words
So means that 791 is the remainder when
dividing 1271 into 35 multiplied by itself seven times.
When John Doe sends out 791 for the first two digits of his
credit card number, there is no way an interceptor can trace 791
back to 35 because there are a zillion numbers when divided by
1271 will give a remainder of 791. But the Chocolate
Factory clerk can. That makes it just as safe for John Doe
as if he came to the Chocolate Factory and gave them the credit
card number or 'swiped' it in the Chocolate Factory credit card
machine. How does the Chocolate Factory's computer "go
backwards", i.e., decipher 791 back into 35 ? The
Chocolate Factory's computer is the only one that knows the
secret key, their private key, 343. With this secret number
I can go backwards, watch,
.
Try it on your computer
calculator, just as you did the encryption. Go to the
desktop of your PC or laptop computer and bring down the
calculator. Enter 791 and then click on the tab, which means x to the y power. Then
enter 343 and click on the = tab. Read
1.1872272047538132424325349208222e+994 as the answer. Then
click on the tab and enter 1271 and read 35.
The Chocolate Factory computer does that and reads out 35 as the
first two digits of John Doe's credit card number. Why is
this safe? Why is it that the Chocolate Factory knows the
secret number 343 and no one else in the world does? Because
they generated it from the RSA algorythm. It goes
like this. First they chose three prime numbers. A
prime is a number that cannot be evenly divided by another
number. They chose, (or rather their computer chose) 31 and
41, and 7. The Chocolate Factory
computer multiplied 31x41=1271 and sent this and 7 out to
<www.pgpkeyserver.com> as their public key for the rest of
the world to know. These two numbers will be used by anyone
who wants to order, as our example above shows. Next, how
does the Chocolate Factory's computer establish their private key
(343)? The algorithm goes like this: Subtract 1
from each of the two original prime numbers 31 and 41. Then
plug them in the equation,
.
k has to be a whole
number. There is a procedure for getting the lowest value
of k. Goggle pgp explaination if you want to know
the formal procedure for large numbers. For this simple
case, 
. Try it. 7 x 343 =
2(1200) + 1. 30 and 40 were used because they are 31-1
and 41-1. So if a message interceptor wants to decipher the
message 791 and get John Doe's credit card number, all they have
to know is that the Chocolate Factory's public key, 1271, was the
product 31 x 41 =1271, right? That is right. So the
Chocolate Factory uses bigger prime numbers. For
example, if the public key is 109849382951333 and 7. Now
to find the private key, what are the two primes that were
multiplied together to get 109849382951333? It will take
your computer a few minutes to get the two primes. They are
15426319 x 7120907 = 109849382951333. From this information
one can get the private key. But what if 7 and
188198812920607963838697239461650439807163563379417382700763356422988859715234665485319060606504743045317388011303396716199692321205734031879550656996221305168759307650257059
are the public keys?. Now how long will it take a hacker or
NSA computer to find the two primes, when multiplied together,
that gives you this number? It will take a months
using the best and fastest computer. But my computer
at the Chocolate Factory multiplied two primes together and got
this number in no time. And so if someone wants to find the
first two digits of your credit card number (35), it will take
them a month of a dedicated computer. No one will
ever know what the two primes were that the Chocolate Factory
used to generate their public key. Don't spend months
trying different primes to fine out, I'll tell you. One was
398075086424064937397125500550386491199064362342526708
406385189575946388957261768583317 and the other was
472772146107435302536223071973048224632914695302097116459852171130520711256363590397527.
This
is the essence of public key crypto. It takes a long time
to factor two prime numbers that can be multiplied together in no
time. Copy and paste these two prime numbers into your
desktop calculator and see if you don't get the public key number
above. These two primes are about 32 digits long. Count
them and you will see. There are about
1357170255947661961409777871614 primes smaller than these two.
For round numbers lets say there are 
respectable size
primes smaller than these. Let's say the very, very fastest
computer could try a million, million, million, million of these
primes every second, i.e. 
primes could be tried per
second. How long would it take to try them all? It
would take 
about two weeks.
This is the essence of public key crypto. It takes a long time to factor two prime numbers that can be multiplied together pronto. Maybe you say, "Well NSA has many of the fastest computers in the world." Bull shit. Look up Nelson McAvoy's public key on <http://www.pgpkeyserver.com> and you will see that it is:
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
=Fg0Q
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
This
key is 
bits long. So go ask your
congressman, "Congressman, can NSA ever decrypt a message
sent by PGP with an RSA public key of 2048 bit?" Or,
"Congressman, do you think the terrorist up in the hills of
Afghanistan or setting in an outdoors cafe in Washington DC, are
too stupid to use encryption with a 2048 bit key?" Or
better still, "Congressman, sense NSA or anyone else can
never decrypt email in less than a few thousand years, don't you
think that they, like all other government agencies should have
congressional oversight?" Don't waste your breath,
I'll tell you what he will say. He'll say, "Well you
know, you never know what technology will bring. Maybe they
can break codes and, of course, they would not tell
anybody." But Congressman, in 1997 William Crowell,
Deputy Director of NSA said that "If all the personal
computers in the world - 260 million - were put to work on a
single PGP-encrypted message, it would still take an estimated 12
million times the age of the universe, on average, to break a
single message.” The Congressman will say,
"Well if they can decipher messages, they wouldn't admit it,
would they?" The congressman gets away with this
because the public, the news analysis, and people in general, do
not trust a mathematical analysis. Probably in a generation
or so after millions of email messages have been successfully
sent and received securely, people will begin to trust. Remember
what George Lakoff and the Cognitive Scientist are saying,
"Our common sense is what we see and hear over and over
again as we grow up."
Enter now the sixth and last of the main contributors to what is now common place computer software for world-wide message privacy--the folk hero, the Tom Paine of the 20th century, Phil Zimmermann. From 1980 to 1995 the NSA did everything in their power to destroy Phil Zimmermann's invention of a software package that was free-ware and compatible with the mushrooming of personal computers. After 2007 all personal computers and laptops come new with Phil Zimmermann's PGP software instilled and it is used for the most sensitive of messages inter, and intra governments.
Phil Zimmermann, like
Whitfield Diffie, was interested in crypto at an early age.
Unlike Whitfield Diffie he was not born with a silver spoon in
his mouth. Born in 1954, his father was a truck driver.
Both his father and mother were alcoholics. As a forth
grader, he watched a TV show called M.T.
The upward creep of postal rates accompanied by the
deterioration of postal service is a trend that may or may not
continue, but as far as most private communication is concerned,
in a few decades it probably will not matter. The reason is
simple. The transfer of information will probably be much
faster and much cheaper by "electronic mail" than by
conventional postal systems. Before long it should be
possible to go to any telephone, insert a message into an
attachment and dial a number. The telephone at the other
end will print out the message at once.
Government agencies and large business will
presumably be the first to make extensive use of electronic mail,
followed by small businesses and private individuals. When
this starts to happen it will be come increasingly desirable to
have fast, efficient ciphers to safeguard information from
electronic eavesdroppers. A similar problem is involved in
protecting private information stored in computer memory banks
from snoopers who have access to the memory through
date-processing networks.
It is hardly surprising that in recent years a number of mathematicians have asked themselves: Is it possible to devise a cipher that can be rapidly encoded and decoded by computer, can be used repeatedly without changing the key and is unbreakable by sophisticated cryptoanalysis? The surprising answer is yes. The breakthrough is scarcely two years old, yet it bids fair to revolutionize the entire field of secret communication. In deed, it is so revolutionary that all previous ciphers, together with the techniques for cracking them, may soon fade into oblivion. . .
Leonard
Adleman found out in short order the impact of this
article. He was in his old stamping grounds in
And
what was the reaction inside the Fort George Meade,
I don't know if Phil Zimmermann's hands were shaking but he was probably much more excited than I was. He immediately called Ron Rivest at MIT and a long conversation followed re the implementing of RSA on a computer. Ron told him that they were already doing that on a grandiose scale at MIT. It was a natural for anyone in the new field of personal computers and/or crypto to see a software program for email security. Between 1978 and 1992 there were three main efforts in this area:
"But everything changed (for Phil) with a
single phone call from a programmer in
Marritt
and Zimmermann became so entwined that the families has a week
long two-man conference in
It is the sense of Congress that providers of
electronic communications services and manufacturers of
electronic communications service equipment shall ensure that
communications systems permit the government to obtain the
plaintext contents of voice, data, and other communications when
appropriately authorized by law.
That
did it. The internet crypto guys found out about this
language in Bill 266 in April. Kelly Goen, a friend of
Charlie Merritt and Zimmermann, according to an article in the Micro
Times by Jim Warren, "He (Goen) was driving around
the Bay Area with a laptop, acoustic coupler, and cellular phone.
He would stop at a pay phone, upload a number of copies for a few
minutes, then disconnect and rush off to another phone miles
away. He said he wanted to get as many copies scattered as
widely as possible around the nation before the government could
get an injunction and stop him." Of course Kelly Goen
made sure that the sites to whom he uploaded were in the
But in the end he was exonerated as these emails show.
Date:
From: "Philip L. Dubois"
Subject: News Release
"Yesterday
morning, I received word from Assistant
Keane's letter to me:"
"The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California has decided that your client, Philip Zimmermann, will not be prosecuted in connection with the posting to USENET in June 1991 of the encryption program Pretty Good Privacy. The investigation is closed."
The
"Michael
J. Yamaguchi, United States Attorney for the Northern District of
California, announced today that his office has declined
prosecution of any individuals in connection with the posting to
USENET in June 1991 of the encryption program known as
"Pretty Good Privacy." The investigation has been
closed. No further comment will be made by the
Assistant
On receiving this news, Mr. Zimmermann posted this to the Cypherpunks
list:
"My
lead defense lawyer, Phil Dubois, received a fax this morning
from the Assistant
This brings to a close a criminal investigation that has spanned the last three years. I'd like to thank all the people who helped us in this case, especially all the donors to my legal defense fund. Apparently, the money was well-spent. And I'd like to thank my very capable defense team: Phil Dubois, Ken Bass, Eben Moglen, Curt Karnow, Tom Nolan, and Bob Corn-Revere. Most of the time they spent on the case was pro-bono. I'd also like to thank Joe Burton, counsel for the co-defendant.
There are many others I can thank, but I don't have the presence of mind to list them all here at this moment. The medium of email cannot express how I feel about this turn of events."
Philip Zimmermann
Phil Dubois later that day wrote:
I'd like to add a few words to those of my client. First, I thank Mr. Keane for his professionalism in notifying us of the government's decision. It has become common practice for federal prosecutors to refuse to tell targets of investigations that the government has decided not to prosecute. I appreciate Mr. Keane's courtesy.
Let me add my thanks to the other members of the defense team-- Ken Bass in Washington D.C. (kbass@venable.com), Curt Karnow in San Francisco (karnow@cup.portal.com), Eben Moglen in New York (em21@columbia.edu), and Tom Nolan in Palo Alto (74242.2723@compuserve.com). Bob Corn-Revere in
D.C. (rcr@dc1.hhlaw.com) was a great help on First Amendment issues. These lawyers are heroes. They donated hundreds of hours of time to this cause. Each is outstanding in his field and made a contribution that nobody else could have made. It has been an honor and a privilege to work with these gentlemen.
Mr.
Zimmermann mentioned a lawyer named Joe Burton (joebur@aol.com)
of
exemplifies the finest traditions of the Bar and the highest standard of integrity. I am proud to know Joe Burton.
The warriors at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)-- Marc Rotenberg, David Sobel, and David Banisar-- and at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR), and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) provided financial, legal, and moral support and kept the public informed. They continue to do so, and we all owe them thanks for it.
Those members of the press who recognized the importance of this story and told the world about it should be commended. Undeterred by the absence of sex and violence, these reporters discussed the real issues and in so doing served the public well.
Many
other people, lawyers and humans alike, made invaluable
contributions. My assistants Alicia Alpenfels, Suzanne
Turnbull Paulman, and Denise Douglas and my investigator Eli
Nixon kept us organized. Rich Mintz, Tom Feegel, and
Nathaniel Borenstein of First Virtual put up a Web site and
aggressively supported the Zimmermann Legal Defense Fund. Another
site was built by Michael Sattler of
Finally, I offer my thanks to everyone who contributed to the Zimmermann Legal Defense Fund. People all over the world gave their hard-earned money to support not only Phil Zimmermann's defense but also the cause of privacy. It is impossible to be too pessimistic about our future when there are so many of you.
Now,
some words about the case and the future. Nobody should
conclude that it is now legal to export cryptographic software.
It isn't. The law may change, but for now, you'll probably
be prosecuted if you break it. People wonder why the
government declined prosecution, especially since the government
isn't saying. One perfectly good reason might be that Mr.
Zimmermann did not break the law. (This is not always a
deterrent to indictment. Sometimes the government isn't
sure whether someone's conduct is illegal and so prosecutes that
person to find out.) Another might be that the government
did not want to risk a judicial finding that posting
cryptographic software on a site in the
There
are forces at work that will, if unresisted, take from us our
liberties. There always will be. But at least in the
Phil Zimmerman did not export PGP to other countries. He put it on the "bulletin board". One of the new concepts that the prosecution would have to face in a Phil Zimmerman trial was, what constitutes exporting? As they say, on the internet, national boundaries are just speed bumps.
This
was a terrible blow to NSA. Not for the reasons people
thought. Not because terrorist, and criminals, and private
citizens, and banks, and the whole private world would have
privacy outside the prevue and control of NSA, as people thought,
but because NSA had an "inside track" to read the
private messages of practically all the countries in the world;
and had since their creation a half contrary ago. Another
way to say this is that, not as people thought, NSA was not
interested in controlling crypto, they were concerned that
another industrial entity, in the
For
half a century, Crypto AG has sold to more than 130 countries the
encryption machines their officials rely upon to exchange their
most sensitive economic, diplomatic and military messages. Crypto
AG was founded in 1952 by the legendary Swedish cryptographer
Boris Hagelin. During World War II, Hagelin sold 140,000 of his
machine to the US Army and Navy. The machine was know as
the M-209 and was used by the US Navy and Army up through the
Korean War as their main stay for encrypting messages. Ironically,
it was vary similar to the German Inigma machine that was the
central contraption whose messages were broken in the famous
drama of World War II at
The story of the company
Crypto AG and its continued influence from 1941 to 1997, when PGP
became the "weapon or choice" in the cryptography
world, is so central that we have to pause and give the
background of this company, just as we did PGP.
Boris Caesar Wilhelm Hagelin
was born in 1892 He was a Swedish businessman and inventor
of encryption machines. He was born of Swedish parents in
His father Karl Wilhelm
Hagelin worked for Nobel in
At the beginning of World War
II, Hagelin moved from Sweden to Switzerland, all the way across
Germany and through Berlin to Genoa, carrying the design
documents for the company's latest machine, and re-established
his company there (it still operates as Crypto AG in Zug). That
design was small, cheap and moderately secure, and he convinced
the
Figure4.1 The M209 encryption machine.
140,000 of these were made in the US military during WW II and
the Korean conflict. They were also sold to at least 130
small countries up to 1970 by AG Crypto Company of Switzerland.
The encrypted message was printed out on paper tape.
After
the war small countries were naturally impressed with the machine
and electronic savy of the USA and the Crypto AG products
indorsed by them The became the leading industry to supply
encryption equipment to over 130 countries. Wheither NSA
was able to break the Crypto AG supplied machines, no one
will ever know. However, according to Omny News
International,
<http://english.ohmynews.com/ArticleView/article_view.asp?no=381337&rel_no=1>
"In the meantime, the Crypto AG has built up
long standing cooperative relations with customers in 130
countries," states a prospectus of the company. The home
page of the company website says, "Crypto AG is the
preferred top-security partner for civilian and military
authorities worldwide. Security is our business and will always
remain our business."
And for all those years, US eavesdroppers could read
these messages without the least difficulty. A decade after the
end of WWII, the NSA, also known as No Such Agency, had rigged
the Crypto AG machines in various ways according to the targeted
countries. It is probably no exaggeration to state that this 20th
century version of the "Trojan horse" is quite likely
the greatest sting in modern history.
In effect,
In the aftermath of the Islamic revolution,
The Swiss reputation for secrecy and neutrality lured
Iranians to Crypto AG, an old and venerable company. They never
imagined for a moment that, attached to the encrypted message,
their Crypto machines were transmitting the key allowing the
description of messages they were sending. The scheme was
perfect, undetectable to all but those who knew where to look.
Crypto AG, of course, denied the allegations as
"pure invention." In 1994, the company issued a message
in the Swiss press, stating that "manipulation of Crypto AG
equipment is absolutely excluded."
On the Wikipedia page of Crypto AG, one can read:
"Crypto AG rejected these accusations as pure invention,
asserting in a press release that in March 1994, the Swiss
Federal Prosecutor's Office initiated a wide-ranging preliminary
investigation against Crypto AG, which was completed in 1997. The
accusations regarding influence by third parties or
manipulations, which had been repeatedly raised in the media,
proved to be without foundation."
However, meetings between a NSA cryptographer and
Crypto AG personnel to discuss the design of new machines have
been factually established. The story was also confirmed by
former employees and is supported by company documents. Boris
Hagelin is said to have acted out of idealism. What is certain is
that the deal for Crypto AG was quite juicy. In return for
rigging their machines, Crypto AG is understood to have been
granted export licenses to all entities controlled by the NSA.
A book published in 1977 by Ronald Clark (The Man Who
Broke Purple: The Life of Colonel William F. Friedman) revealed
that William F. Friedman, another Russian-born genius in the
field of cryptography (he deciphered the Japanese code in World
War II) and onetime special assistant to the NSA director, had
visited Boris Hagelin in 1957. Friedman and Hagelin met at least
on two other occasions.
Despite these very obvious hints, countries such as
In 1987, ABC News Beirut correspondent Charles Glass
was taken hostage for 62 days in Lebanon by Hezbollah, the
Shi'ite Muslim group widely believed to have been founded by Ali
Akbar Mohtashemi, when he was Iranian ambassador to Syria in the
early 1980s.
After the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian Airbus
over the
Once more, NSA intercepted and decoded a
communication of Iranian Interior Minister Ali Akbar Mohtashemi
linking
One intelligence summary, prepared by the
"Mohtashemi is closely connected with the Al
Abas and Abu Nidal terrorist groups. He is actually a long-time
friend of Abu Nidal. He has recently paid 10 million dollars in
cash and gold to these two organizations to carry out terrorist
activities and was the one who paid the same amount to bomb Pan
Am Flight 103 in retaliation for the
Moreover, Israeli intelligence intercepted a coded
transmission between Mohtashemi in Teheran and the Iranian
Embassy in Beirut concerning the transfer of a large sum of money
to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General
Command, headed by Ahmed Jibril, as payment for the downing of
Pan Am 103.
The Iranians were now at a loss to explain how
Western and Israeli intelligence agencies could so easily defeat
the security of their diplomatic traffic. The ease with which the
West was reading Iranian coded transactions strongly suggested
that some may have possessed the decryption keys.
In April 1979, Shahpour Bakhtiar was forced to leave
Two of them fled to
On the day of his assassination and one day before
his body was found with his throat slit, the Teheran headquarters
of the Iranian Intelligence Service, the VEVAK, transmitted a
coded message to Iranian diplomatic missions in London, Paris,
Bonn and Geneva. "Is Bakhtiar dead?" the message asked.
The NSA interception and decoding of the message led
to the identification of the murderers before the murder was
discovered. From the Swiss and French press reports, Iranians now
knew that British and American SIGINT operators had intercepted
and decoded the crucially embarrassing message. Something was
definitely wrong with their encryption machines.
Hans Buehler was a top Crypto AG salesman who had
worked at the Zug company for 13 years. In March 1992, Buehler, a
strongly built cheerful man in his 50s, was on his 25th trip to
Iran on behalf of Crypto AG. Then, on March 18, he was
arrested. Iranian intelligence agents accused him of spying for
the
Back to Zug, Buehler began to ask some embarrassing
questions about the Iranian allegations. And the answers tended
to back up Iranian suspicions. Soon, reports began to appear on
Swiss television and radio. Major Swiss newspapers and German
magazines such as Der Spiegel picked up the story. Most, if not
all, came to the conclusion that Crypto AG's equipment had been
rigged by one or several Western intelligence services.
Buehler was bitterly disappointed. He felt nothing
short of having been betrayed by his former employer. During all
these years, Buehler never thought for a second that he had been
unknowingly working for spies. Now, he was sure that he had done
so. Buehler contacted several former Crypto AG employees.
All admitted to him, and eventually to various media, that they
believed that the company had long cooperated with US and German
intelligence agencies.
One of these former engineers told Buehler that he
had learned about the cooperation from Boris Hagelin Jr., the son
of the company's founder and sales manager for North and
Stunned by the revelation, the engineer decided to
take this matter directly to the head of Crypto AG. Boris Hagelin
confirmed that the encryption methods were unsafe.
"Different countries need different levels of
security. The
The NSA-Crypto AG Collaboration
A Crypto AG official document describes an August
1975 meeting set up to demonstrate the capacity of a new
prototype. The memorandum lists among the participants Nora L.
Mackebee, who, like her husband, was an NSA employee. Asked about
the meeting, she merely replied: "I cannot say anything
about it."
During the '70s, Motorola helped Crypto AG in making
the transition from mechanical to electronic machines. Bob Newman
was among the Motorola engineers working with Crypto AG. Newman
remembers very well Mackebee but says that he ignored that she
was working for the NSA.
Juerg Spoerndli left Crypto AG in 1994. He helped
design the machines in the late '70s. "I was ordered to
change algorithms under mysterious circumstances" to weaker
machines," says Spoerndli who concluded that NSA was
ordering the design change through German intermediaries.
"I was idealistic. But I adapted quickly …
the new aim was to help Big Brother
"It's still an imperialistic approach to the
world. I do not think it's the way business should be done,"
Spoerndli adds.
Ruedi Hug, another former Crypto AG technician, also
believes that the machines were rigged.
"I feel betrayed. They always told me that we
were the best. Our equipment is not breakable, blah, blah, blah.
Crypto AG vs. Buehler
Crypto AG called these allegations "old hearsay
and pure invention." When Buehler began to suggest openly
that there may be some truth to them, Crypto AG not only
dismissed him on the spot, but also filed a legal case against
him.
Yet Crypto AG settled the case out of court, in
November 1996, before other former Crypto AG employees could
provide evidence in court that was likely to have brought
embarrassing details to light. No one has heard from
Buehler since the settlement. "He made his fortune
financially," whispers an insider.
The ownership of Crypto AG has been to a company in
Several members of Crypto AG's management had worked
at Siemens. At one point in time, 99.99 percent of the Crypto AG
shares belonged to Eugen Freiberger, the head of the Crypto AG
managing board in 1982. Josef Bauer was elected to the managing
board in 1970. Bauer, as well as other members of Crypto AG
management, stated that his mandate had come from the German
company Siemens.
The German secret service, the
Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), is believed to have established
the Siemens' connection. In October 1970, a secret meeting of the
BND had discussed how the Swiss company Graettner could merge
with it. "The Swedish company Ericsson could be influenced
through Siemens to terminate its own cryptographic
business," reads the memo of the meeting.
A former employee of Crypto AG reported that he had
to coordinate his developments with the "central office for
encryption affairs" of the BND, also known as the
"people from Bad Godesberg."
American "watchers" demanded the use of
certain encryption codes and the "central office for
encryption affairs" instructed Crypto AG what algorithms to
use to create these codes.
Bakhtiar Murder Trial
"In the industry everybody knows how such
affairs will be dealt with," says a former Crypto engineer.
"Of course such devices protect against interception by
unauthorized third parties, as stated in the prospectus. But the
interesting question is: Who is the authorized fourth?"
On
"Justice has not been entirely served for
reasons of state," complained Bakhtiar's widow.
It appears indeed that
In 1991, the
To many observers, justice was not served at the
Lockerbie trial. Could it be that the
The author, Ludwig De Braeckeleer has a Ph.D. in
nuclear sciences. He teaches physics and international
humanitarian law. He blogs on "The GaiaPost."
Chapter 4
NSA 1997 - 2010
. . . . I wrote PGP from
information in the open literature, putting it into a convenient
package that everyone can use in a desktop or palmtop computer.
Then I gave it away for free, for the good of democracy. This
could have popped up anywhere, and spread. Other people could
have and would have done it. And are doing it. Again and again.
All over the planet. This technology belongs to everybody.
PGP has spread like a prairie fire, fanned by
countless people who fervently want their privacy restored in the
information age.
Today, human rights organizations are using PGP to
protect their people overseas. Amnesty International uses it. The
human rights group in the American Association for the
Advancement of Science uses it. It is used to protect witnesses
who report human rights abuses in the Balkans, in
Some Americans don't understand why I should be this
concerned about the power of government. But talking to people in
I want to read you a quote from some E-mail I got in
October 1993 from someone in Latvia, on the day that Boris
Yeltsin was shelling his own Parliament building:
"Phil I wish you to know: let it never be, but
if dictatorship takes over Russia your PGP is widespread from
Baltic to Far East now and will help democratic people if
necessary. Thanks."
From
the time of this hearing it had been only five months since the
Attorney General had announced that they would not prosecute Phil
Zimmerman for exporting a terrorist weapon. Two major
changes in the intelligence activities around the world took
place gradually between 1997 and
1. After 1997 private and
national entities (including NSA) were no longer in the code
breaking business. PGP was freeware and secure. It
has not been broken in the last 25 years and will not be. Even
the
2. The World has seen the proliferation of tens of thousands of religious fanatics who strap explosives on their bodies, and otherwise commit suicide, taking from thousands to dozens of infidels with them. NSA with their experts in the language, culture, history, dress, and customs of hundreds of nations and tribes, is uniquely equipped to combat them. They are additionally well equipped for their new emphasis in human intelligence by having been out of the limelight since their inception.
As an
example, I quote a conversation over the radio and TV between
interviewer Charlie Rose and his guest interviewees.
CHARLIE ROSE: We begin tonight
with an ongoing look at the
suicide attack in
after President Obama acknowledged security missteps
that led to Al Qaeda’s attempt to bring down a
In addition, the military’s highest-ranking
intelligence officer in
fundamental questions about the war."
Joining me now from Washington, David Ignatius,
he’s a columnist for the "
officer. In
DAVID IGNATIUS: The CIA, Charlie,
is still piecing together the details of this, but at this point
they have a fairly clear picture. This was a classic case
of deception. This Jordanian, al-Balawi, was well known
publicly as an Islamic radical.
After he was arrested by the Jordanian intelligence
service and, it was thought, was flipped, was turned to become a
cooperating double agent, was sent into
So on the day that he came to this CIA base in Khost
in eastern Afghanistan, there was a large group of Americans and
one Jordanian waiting for him with greatest excitement because it
was hoped that this Jordanian double agent could take them, could
give them information that would allow the targeting of Ayman
al-Zawahiri, the number two official in Al Qaeda.
He arrives in a car. The car is taken to a
place the agency says where he was going to be patted down.
As he’s getting out of the car with three CIA security
officers near him, he reaches into his jacket. The CIA
officers tell them to stop that, and at that point the bomb
detonates. The bomb was so powerful, so sophisticated, that
CIA people who were there waiting for him 50 feet away, some
distance away, were among those killed. The three security
officers closest to him were obviously immediately killed. What’s
disturbing as you look at this, I think, are two things. First,
the breakdown in basic trade craft, the basic ways in which the
CIA tries to secure itself against the dangers of this kind of
double agent who turns out to be a triple agent coming back
against you. And, secondly, what it shows us about the
sophistication of Al Qaeda.
This was an incredibly well-planned and subtle
operation. The notion that Al Qaeda is so much on the run
now that it can’t operate, it can’t hit us, which you
were hearing over the last year from some intelligence officials,
clearly has been shown to be wrong.
CHARLIE ROSE: Bob?
BOB BAER: Oh, I think it was a
serious mistake on the part of the CIA. You do bring
informants behind the wire, but only to bring them through metal
detectors first, through a scanner. The CIA’s
established procedure over the years -- I used to use in the
They’re clean. If they’ve got any
metal on them it’s picked up and they’re patted down by
the local employees.
The fact that there were 13 people standing around
waiting for an informant breaks all the rules. Informants
are met one on one. I have a series of problems with the
fact that there were linguist, no case officers that spoke
Pashtun, Dari, or Arabic. I have a problem with outsourcing
our intelligence to
So you put the Michael Flynn report that comes a
couple days after this in context, and we have a real problem in
CHARLIE ROSE: So what do you say
about Leon Panetta’s op-ed piece?
BOB BAER: Oh, he absolutely had
to say that. I’m so pessimistic about the CIA,
I’m just wondering whether it shouldn’t be reorganized,
you know, take it down the studs and rebuild it. It’s
in bad shape.
CHARLIE ROSE: What would you do
to rebuild it?
BOB BAER: You know, you’re
going to have to get back to basics. The British taught us
intelligence in World War II, and we’re going to have to go
back to those basics which every intelligence service in the
world runs by them and we just don’t anymore. The
service was de-professionalized over the years, and right through
the Bush years as well, too.
CHARLIE ROSE: So it’s just
gone from one administration to the other. I guess back to
-- I don’t know what point you would suggest it started.
BOB BAER: You know, I’m a
bit of an old-timer. I hate to say that, but when I was in
the CIA we had people that went through the operational training
course working in high-threat areas. There was a mentoring
system
that people went through.
But never would we ever consider letting people who
had not had training and experience meet an important informant
like this. It would never have happened. It would
have been impossible. I think people on the seventh floor
should be fired that let this happen.
CHARLIE ROSE: David, you wrote
the CIA needs better trade craft with this conflict and that the
inescapable conclusion is that the CIA and its allies need to
lift their game. So you and Bob seem to be saying the same
thing.
DAVID IGNATIUS: Well, I think Bob
said it well. I think that over the years, in part because
the CIA has been so battered by public criticism, both parties
seem to agree it makes sense to take apart our intelligence
services for some reason. But it’s had an effect.
The one good thing that I learned today is that Director Panetta
at the CIA is gathering a high-level group within the agency to
look at what went wrong. They’re going to look at
three things.
One, who was this Jordanian double or triple agent?
What do we know about when he went bad, how this deception
worked?
Second, what do we know about what went wrong at
security on the base? Bob went through the basics, but the
agency is going to do that much more thoroughly.
Third, and really most important, what can the agency
learn about trade craft in these war zones in
of trying to learn some lessons from this.
CHARLIE ROSE: I’m going come
back to what General Flynn said in just a second, but let me go
to this issue. Who, tell me what you know: (a) about the
man who set off the bomb, the double agent and (b) the CIA
operatives and officials that were killed and the significance of
their loss.
MARK MAZZETTI: The person who set
off the bomb, as David said, is a Jordanian doctor who had
developed a persona on the web. He was known as one of the
sort of top five Jihadi web writers, a very influential
character. He worked in some of the Palestinian refugee
camps in
CHARLIE ROSE: OK, talk about who
those people were and what they did and how central they were to
the present CIA effort against Al Qaeda.
MARK MAZZETTI: It’s a mix of
people as you would see at any kind of CIA base. You had
security guards, some CIA security guards, some...
CHARLIE ROSE: Private
contractors.
MARK MAZZETTI: ... private
contractors, Blackwater, now known as Z
Corporation. You had analysts, who would be the
ones who would sort of get some of the intelligence report,
analyze them, sort of run it through the systems, and then send
it back to Washington. You had the base chief, the person
in charge out in Khost, who was a woman in her 40s, a mother of
three, a CIA veteran who had been part of the CIA’s bin
Laden unit before September 11, known as Alex Station, and was
sent to Afghanistan last year as part of this sort of surge the
CIA has had in Afghanistan, to sort of do the type of thing, to
find the type of people that they were hoping to find on December
30 at that meeting.
CHARLIE ROSE: It is said that she
knew more about Al Qaeda than anybody else in the CIA or at least
was in that level.
MARK MAZZETTI: She had the sort
of institutional knowledge that she’d been studying these
names, studying these connections, studying these networks for at
least a decade. And so it was an institutional loss to the
CIA in the sense of their knowledge about Al Qaeda. There
were some other fairly senior people as well who were lost in the
blast.
CHARLIE ROSE: Bob, pick up on
that. What’s the CIA lost because of this tragedy?
BOB BAER: It’s lost the
expertise, there’s no doubt about it. Let’s
don’t mistake about this -- people are heroic serving in
Khost. But it’s going cause the CIA to pull back.
The CIA in
CHARLIE ROSE: David -- go ahead,
David, comment on that, but also, David, the Jordanians lost, who
was also killed by the bomb, someone who was close to the king,
as I understand it.
DAVID IGNATIUS: He was a member
of the royal family, I think a cousin of the king. He was,
in effect, the case officer handling the doctor, al-Balawi.
CHARLIE ROSE: Didn’t the
king meet his body when it came back?
DAVID IGNATIUS: He did. The
king and queen both attended the funeral, something that was very
unusual. One thing I would just note. I think over
the next several months, without any announcement, any notice,
you’re going to see some operations by the Jordanians, by
their intelligence service to avenge this. They feel
embarrassed, they’re angry, and they’re pretty
effective in these battlegrounds. I hope Bob is wrong about
the agency pulling back even more. And part of why this
happened was that the agency doesn’t like to meet sources in
these war zones outside the wire. It has people come into
the green zone in
Maybe, maybe people will look at this and say we do
need to lift our game. We need to take this more seriously.
We need the country to back it more than the country does now.
Panetta’s people are talking about being more
aggressive. Certainly in the last week you’ve seen
very, very aggressive predator strikes in the tribal areas
against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. I assume that’s
meant to be read as striking back hard. But if -- Bob knows
that place better than almost anybody, and if his diagnosis is
that it’s going to contract even more, move even more into a
shell, that’s scary.
CHARLIE ROSE: Mark, can you add
more to that?
MARK MAZZETTI: Well, at least
publicly and privately the CIA is saying we’re not pulling
back, it’s pedal to the metal. We will see, time will
tell what actually happens. But as David just said about
the predator strikes, we’ve seen since the attack alone at
least, I think, five predator strikes, which is even by
the rate of the last year or so is a pretty
accelerated rate. And so they are going after targets.
Whether it’s just for retribution or whether they just all
of a sudden got good intelligence, who knows?
But this is -- I mean, this is CIA war right now.
It’s one of these things you have to keep -- you just keep
shining a light on it to some extent, because the CIA is running
a war in
CHARLIE ROSE: It was said David,
or Bob, that this particular doctor was motivated by the death of
the Taliban leader in
DAVID IGNATIUS: It’s a
remarkable video in which the Jordanian doctor, the suicide
bomber, is sitting with the current head of the Pakistani Taliban
in which this man speaks of his desire to avenge the
death by drone attack of Baitullah Mehsud.
It has been believed that the predator attacks have been
extremely successful in putting these people on the run, taking
out key leaders. The Obama administration, whatever else
you would say about their foreign policy, has been extremely
aggressive in using the predators in
I saw today in the Pakistani press for the first time
a very aggressive defense of the predator attacks written by a
Pakistani journalist. That amazed me. So if you see
more of that, that might be important.
CHARLIE ROSE: And you think that
was reflective of what, a change of mind about the Pakistanis?
DAVID IGNATIUS: The Pakistanis
are suffering suicide bomb attacks every other day in one of
their cities. They are facing a real problem. And
they’ve sent their army into the
sent their army into south Waziristan in the west.
But they’re still getting pounded. And I think
ordinary Pakistanis are really getting afraid of this threat, and
they’re looking for ways to deal with it.
BOB BAER: David, I think to add
something. You’re absolutely right, but what scares me
CHARLIE ROSE: Bob, let me
understand. Are you saying they should not have killed
Meshud?
BOB BAER: You know, he’s
killed a lot of Pakistanis, but is that our war?
CHARLIE ROSE: Including --
he’s charged with the responsibility of killing Benazir
Bhutto, right?
BOB BAER: Yes, but is that our
war, though? That’s the question. Are we going
to fight in the tribal areas in
CHARLIE ROSE: Let me just put
back on the table here what General Flynn said, which was -- who
I understand to be as close to General McChrystal, so that this
is what he said, "Eight years into the war in Afghanistan,
the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to
the overall strategy. Having focused overwhelming majority
of collection efforts and analytical brain power on insurgent
groups, the vast intelligence apparatus is unable to answer
fundamental questions about the environment in which
DAVID IGNATIUS: I think he is
saying that. I think that there’s a real debate now
about missions of the CIA. The core mission is to collect
foreign intelligence, to have spies who steal secrets. There’s
an additional role, which we call covert action, which ranges
from paying off political parties, bribing politicians, to the
kind of paramilitary covert action that you see with the predator
strikes and other operations. And the CIA, I think, is
being pulled in two different directions. What Flynn was
saying is that the thing you look to an intelligence agency for,
the texture, the feel for a place, the balanced judgment, the
linguistic and culture understanding, really is not forthcoming
here. It’s kind of broken down.
And what I see when I go to Afghanistan, and I went a
number of times last year, is that the military, interestingly,
is developing those skills that Flynn says are lacking in our
intelligence agency. There’s an interesting imbalance
now. The military has people who are knowledgeable, who
increasingly have that feel on their fingertips.And I think that
the military is increasingly frustrated that its intelligence
partner, the CIA, isn’t at the same level of sophistication
or intensity.
BOB BAER: He’s absolutely
right. The problem is the CIA’s locked up behind the
wire, and you’ve got military patrols going out, and they
are collecting on-the-ground intelligence, which is really
putting the CIA in a disadvantage. And it’s become in
a sense a minor player in
MARK MAZZETTI: Well, one -- I mean, one other aspect of this, though, which we saw at Khost w