National Security Agency (NSA)

For its first two decades the National Security Agency had no statute, no public charter and, as far as most Americans knew, no existence. It was created by a Top Secret presidential memorandum, and people in the intelligence community joked that the initials stood for "No Such Agency." When Senator Frank Church's committee examined it in 1975, NSA's general counsel told investigators that no existing statute controlled, limited or defined its signals intelligence activities^4,7.

From the Black Chamber to AFSA

American codebreaking began in April 1917 with a small Army section, MI-8, later run by Herbert Yardley. After the First World War, Yardley's "Black Chamber" in New York read foreign diplomatic traffic until Secretary of State Henry Stimson closed it in 1929^7,3. In the Second World War the Army's Signal Intelligence Service at Arlington Hall and the Navy's Op-20-G broke German and Japanese systems and began the long attack on Soviet messages known as Venona^3,7.

Peace left the work split among the services. On 20 May 1949 they were brought together under the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), which answered to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It did not work well. In December 1951 Truman ordered a review, and the committee under the New York lawyer George Brownell reported on 13 June 1952 that the four existing organizations duplicated each other and that the US Communications Intelligence Board lacked the authority to fix it^2,7.

A secret birth

On 24 October 1952 Truman signed a memorandum to the Secretaries of State and Defense on "Communications Intelligence Activities." It opened:

The communications intelligence (COMINT) activities of the United States are a national responsibility.

That is from¹. The memo made the Secretary of Defense executive agent for the whole government in COMINT, removed the Joint Chiefs from the chain of command, and provided for a Director of NSA. A revised National Security Council Intelligence Directive No. 9 issued the same day. The National Archives dates the agency's establishment from 4 November 1952^1,2,3. NSA inherited AFSA's resources but not its weaknesses: its director reported to the Secretary of Defense and could act on his own judgment except where the intelligence board had voted¹.

The agency later moved from Washington and Arlington Hall to Fort Meade, Maryland, between Washington and Baltimore. Its nine-story headquarters building opened there in 1963⁷.

Cold War collection

NSA's raw material came from intercept stations, ships and aircraft around the Soviet bloc, many of them manned by the service cryptologic agencies under NSA's technical control, and from partnership with Britain's GCHQ^4,6,7.

The work was dangerous. An NSA history commemorates 90 Navy men lost in aerial reconnaissance alone, beginning with a Privateer patrol plane shot down by the Soviets over the Baltic on 8 April 1950. In 1967 Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats attacked the intelligence ship USS Liberty during the Six-Day War. On 23 January 1968 North Korea seized USS Pueblo, killing one crewman and holding 82 men, many of them Naval Security Group cryptologists, for almost a year. On 15 April 1969 North Korean fighters shot down a Navy EC-121 with 31 men aboard⁶.

Tonkin Gulf and the limits of SIGINT

In August 1964 NSA reporting played a central part in the decision to retaliate against North Vietnam for a second attack on US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin on 4 August. That attack did not happen. An NSA historian, Robert Hanyok, later concluded that the agency's reporting had misread and selectively presented the intercepts. NSA released his study, with chronologies, intercepts and oral histories, in two installments on 30 November 2005 and 30 May 2006^5,7.

Exposure

In the 1970s Congress learned how far NSA's collection had reached into American life. The Church Committee's 1976 report described three programs. Under SHAMROCK, from August 1945 to May 1975, the agency and its predecessors received copies of millions of international telegrams from RCA Global, ITT World Communications and Western Union International. From the early 1960s until 1973, under watch lists formalized in 1969 as MINARET, NSA intercepted the international communications of Americans named by other agencies, including antiwar and civil rights activists. A third program monitored telephone links to South America for the narcotics bureau. No warrants were obtained⁴.

NSA's director, General Lew Allen Jr., had suspended MINARET in 1973 after the Justice Department called the watch lists of "questionable legality," and he testified in public on 29 October 1975⁴. See Operation Shamrock and Project Minaret. The reaction led to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, signed on 25 October 1978, which set procedures, including a special court, for foreign-intelligence surveillance inside the United States⁷.

Operations in these files

1 February 1943 – 1 October 1980 The Venona project The US Army codebreaking program that, from 1943 to 1980, read parts of some 2,900 wartime Soviet intelligence cables and exposed Fuchs, the Rosenbergs and Donald Maclean. 1944 – 1 May 1946 TICOM The 1945 Anglo-American hunt for Germany's codebreakers, their machines and files, which showed how far the Germans had read Allied traffic and handed the West a working Soviet intercept system. OPERATION · 1945 August 1945 – 15 May 1975 Operation Shamrock For thirty years, from August 1945 to May 1975, three American telegraph companies handed the government copies of international cables: the largest interception program affecting Americans, the Senate said. 20 October 1967 – October 1973 Project Minaret From 1967 to 1973 the NSA searched international communications for the names of Americans supplied by the FBI, CIA and Secret Service, among them Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali and two sitting senators. October 1971 – 1981 Operation Ivy Bells From 1971 US Navy divers working from submarines tapped a Soviet military cable on the floor of the Sea of Okhotsk. Former NSA analyst Ronald Pelton sold the secret to the KGB, and the Soviets removed the tap in 1981.

Operations against the NSA

May 1981 – April 1989 Operation RYAN The KGB–GRU intelligence alert launched in May 1981 to detect a feared American nuclear first strike, its indicator lists, and the long argument over whether Moscow's fear was real.