Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (3 page)

In their
Spartan offices the eclectic band of mathematicians, linguists, and English
professors molded their intellects into what was possibly the deadliest weapon
of the war against Germany. As the final TICOM report makes clear, the German
high-level cryptography "was brilliantly conceived," but the
cryptanalytic breakthroughs of the British and American codebreakers were
"more brilliantly conceived."

So good
was the Allied ability to eavesdrop on a wide range of German communications
that it has recently led to troubling questions about how early in the war the
Allies discovered evidence of the Holocaust. "Allied Comint agencies had
been exploiting a number of French codes and ciphers from the beginning of the
war," NSA historian Robert J. Hanyok recently told a gathering in the
agency's Friedman Auditorium. "They soon found reflections of the
anti-Jewish laws in their intercept of both Vichy diplomatic and colonial radio
and cable traffic." Pressured by the German occupation authorities, France
in 1942 began rounding up Jews for shipment to "resettlement sites,"
a euphemism for concentration camps.

According
to a comprehensive NSA study undertaken by Hanyok, Allied communications
intelligence would have picked up indications of this roundup from the cable
lines and airwaves linking Vichy France with foreign capitals. The
communications lines would have been buzzing with pleas by worried relatives
for information on loved ones interned in various French camps. But in the end,
Hanyok noted, only a fraction of the intercepts were ever distributed and the
principal focus was always on strategic military traffic, not routine
diplomatic communications. "Intelligence on the Holocaust was NOT critical
to Allied strategy," said Hanyok [emphasis in original]. "Did Comint
reveal the Holocaust, and, especially, its final aim?" he asked. "The
real problem," he concluded, "was not interpreting the intelligence,
but the attitude by the Allies, and the rest of the world, that the unthinkable
was actually happening."

In March
1945, as the damp chill of a long English winter began to fade, TICOM teams
began to fan out across Germany in search of codebreakers and their books and
equipment. "One day we got this frantic call," said Paul E. Neff, a
U.S. Army major assigned to Bletchley Park. "They had run across these
people, Germans, in this castle . . . [who] had been in the cryptographic
business, signals intelligence, all of them. Bongo. Quickly Bletchley sent
me." Within a few days, Neff was at the castle, in the German state of
Saxony.

"The
war was still going on and we were pretty far forward," Neff said.
"We sorted the people out, interrogated, tried to find out what they were
working on, where they had stood with it, tried to get our hands on all the
papers that were left. . . . But my problem became, What are we going to do
with them? Because they apparently had a lot of good information. . . . These
Germans, as you might know, had been working on the Russia problem too."
Neff had stumbled into a gold mine, because not only had the codebreakers
worked on Russian codes and ciphers, but the castle contained a German Foreign
Office signals intelligence archive. Neff's dilemma was the location of the
castle, which was located in territory assigned to the Soviets—and Russian troops
were quickly moving into the area. Neff needed to get the people and
codebreaking materials out fast.

Neff
contacted Colonel George Bicher, in charge of the American TICOM unit in
London, and suggested shipping the documents—and the German codebreakers—to
England. But the issue of transporting the prisoners across the English Channel
became very sensitive. "Apparently they had a hard time when this thing
hit London because they couldn't decide what to do. They had to clear it [up
to] the attorney general or whatever he's called over there. Is it legal to
do?" Eventually the British agreed to have the Germans secretly
transferred to England. "We got a plane one day," said Neff,
"escorted this crowd down to the airfield, put them on the plane, and flew
them over to London. The British picked them up over there and gave them a
place to stay, fed them, and interrogated the hell out of them. Now, what
happened to those TICOM records I don't know." Two days later, Russian
troops overtook that same area.

The May
morning was as dark as black velvet when Paul K. Whitaker opened his eyes at
4:45. Short and stout, with a thick crop of light brown hair, the American Army
first lieutenant slowly began to wake himself up. For two years he had been
assigned to Hut 3, the section of Bletchley Park that specialized in
translating and analyzing the decrypted Enigma Army and Air Force messages.

At
thirty-eight, Whitaker was considerably older than his fellow junior officers.
For more than a decade before joining the Army in 1942 he had studied and
taught German in the United States as well as in Germany and Austria, receiving
his doctorate from Ohio State. While doing graduate work at the University of
Munich in 1930 he often dined at a popular nearby tavern, the Osteria Bavaria.
There, at the stark wooden tables, he would frequently see another regular
customer enjoying the
Koniginpastete
and the
russische Eier.
Seated
nearby, always at the same round table and surrounded by friends and
associates, was a quiet but ambitious local politician by the name of Adolf
Hitler.

The first
dim rays of light illuminated a fresh spring snow, surprising Whitaker as he
stepped out of his quarters. Like dusting powder, the snow lent a certain
beauty to the tired estate, gently filling in the cracks on the red brick walls
and softening the dark blemishes caused by years of chimney soot.

Rather
than head for Hut 3, Whitaker went straight to the bus stop at Bletchley Park.
Also waiting there was First Lieutenant Selmer S. Norland, who had traveled to
England with Whitaker several years earlier. Raised in northern Iowa, Norland
had the solid, muscular features of a farmer and a serious face with deep-set
eyes. Before entering the Army in 1942 he taught history and German in a local
high school for three years and now worked as a translator in Hut 3 with
Whitaker.

At
precisely 6:00 A.M. the special bus arrived, coughing thick diesel fumes and
cutting neat brown lines in the virgin snow. About a dozen officers and
enlisted men, both British and American, climbed aboard. Seated near Whitaker
was another American Army officer shipped over several years earlier, Arthur
Levenson, a tall, lean mathematician from New York who worked in Hut 6 as a
cryptanalyst. Like Whitaker and Norland, Levenson, who also doubled as the
secretary of the Bletchley Park Chess Club, had spent time working on code
problems before his transfer to England. In July 1943 Whitaker, Norland,
Levenson, and seven other cryptologic officers boarded the huge British liner
Aquitania
as it set sail for Scotland. A few weeks later they became the first U.S.
Army codebreakers to be assigned to Bletchley.

A soldier
in the sentry box snapped a salute as the heavy bus pulled out through the
park's intricate iron gate. Like cenobite monks leaving their monastery for the
first time, the newest TICOM team had little idea what to expect. Since the
Enigma project's beginning, British policy had forbidden sending anyone who
worked on it into combat areas. For years the Bletchley staff had been closeted
voyeurs, reading about the war through newspapers and purloined messages.

The
snow-covered fields began merging into an endless white comforter as the bus
hurried through the Midlands toward London. Sitting near the window, Howard
Campaigne certainly felt the excitement. As a young instructor at the
University of Minnesota with a Ph.D. in mathematics, he sent the Navy a
homemade design for an encryption device. Although Navy officials turned down
the invention, they did offer him a correspondence course in cryptanalysis,
which he passed. "I eventually got my commission and it was dated 5
December 1941," Campaigne recalled. "So two days later the balloon
went up and we were in the war."

Now as the
bus pulled up to Croydon Air Field for the flight to Paris on the first leg of
their mission, Campaigne was about to lead the hunt for a mysterious German
cipher machine nicknamed the Fish.

Although
Bletchley Park had conquered the Enigma machine, the Germans had managed to go
one better. They developed a new and even more secret cipher machine, the
Geheimschreiber,
or secret writer, which was reserved for the very-highest-level messages,
including those to and from Hitler himself. German cryptographers called an early
model Swordfish. The Americans and British simply called them the Fish. Unlike
Enigma, the Fish were capable of automatically encrypting at one end and
decrypting at the other. Also, rather than the standard 26-letter alphabet, the
Fish used the 32-character Baudot code, which turned the machine into a
high-speed teleprinter.

TICOM's
goal was to capture a working model intact and thus learn exactly how the
Germans built such a complex, sophisticated encryption device. Especially, they
needed to discover faster and better ways to defeat such machines in the future
should they be copied and used by the Russians.

The Royal
Air Force flight to Paris was mostly smooth, reminding Paul Whitaker of sailing
in a boat through gentle swells. Along with a number of the other men on the
flight, he was on a plane for the first time. "The impressions were
amazingly lacking in strangeness," he jotted in his small black notebook,
"probably because one sees so many films taken from aircraft. It seemed
completely normal to be looking down on tiny houses and fields a mile
below."

Within a
few days the team, packed into an olive-green, 2
½ -ton U.S. Army
truck and an open jeep, pushed into Germany. Their target was a suspected major
Air Force signals intelligence center in the southern Bavarian city of
Kaufbeuren, a market center of medieval towers and crumbling fortifications on
the Wertach River. Fresh from their secret monastery in the English
countryside, many on the TICOM team were unprepared for the devastation they witnessed.
"The roads were lined with burned-out and shot up tanks and vehicles of
all sorts," Whitaker jotted in his journal as he bounced along the road
from Heidelberg, "and many villages, even small ones, were badly smashed
up and burned."

Around
midnight, they arrived at Augsburg, a city that would soon become one of NSA's
most secret and important listening posts in Europe. The next morning, having
spent the night in a former German Air Force headquarters, the team discovered
a communications center in the basement. In some of these buildings the Allies
had moved in so fast that the ghosts of the former occupants still seemed to be
present. The Germans had departed with such haste from one facility that when
the Americans arrived the teleprinters were still disgorging long thin message
tapes.

Other
teleprinters provided insight into the private horror of defeat. "How are
things down there?" read one tape still dangling from the machine.
Whitaker saw it was from a soldier in the cathedral town of Ulm to a colleague
in Augsburg. "Reports here say that the Americans are in Augsburg
already." "No," the soldier replied, "everything here is
O.K." But suddenly he added, "My God, here they are, auf Wiedersehen."

Within a
few days the team struck gold. They came upon an entire convoy of four German
signal trucks, complete with four Fish machines, a signals technician, German
drivers, and a lieutenant in charge. Arthur Levenson and Major Ralph Tester, a British
expert on the Fish, escorted the whole lot, including the Germans, back to
England. Once at Bletchley Park the machines were reverse-engineered to
determine exactly how they were built and how they operated. (Levenson would
later return to Washington and go on to become chief of the Russian
code-breaking section at NSA.)

With
enough Fish and other equipment to keep the engineers busy for a long time at
Bletchley, the team began a manhunt for key German codebreakers. On May 21,
1945, Lieutenant Commander Howard Campaigne and several other TICOM officers
interviewed a small group of Sigint personnel being held in Rosenheim. They had
all worked for a unit of the Signals Intelligence Agency of the German Abwehr
High Command, a major target of TICOM. What the prisoners told Campaigne would
lead to one of the most important, and most secret, discoveries in the history
of Cold War codebreaking. Their command, they said, had built a machine that
broke the highest-level Russian cipher system. The machine, now buried beneath
the cobblestones in front of a building nearby, had been designed to attack the
advanced Russian teleprinter cipher—the Soviet equivalent of the Fish.

If this
was true, it was breathtaking. For over six years U.S. and British codebreakers
had placed Japan and Germany under a microscope, to the near exclusion of
Russia and almost all other areas. Now with the war over and with Communist
Russia as their new major adversary, the codebreakers would have to start all
over from scratch. Rut if a working machine capable of breaking high-level
Russian ciphers was indeed buried nearby, years of mind-numbing effort would be
saved.

The
Germans, eager to be released from prison, quickly agreed to lead TICOM to the
machine. Campaigne wasted no time and the next day the twenty-eight prisoners,
dressed in their German Army uniforms, began pulling up the cobblestones and
opening the ground with picks and shovels. Slowly the heavy wooden boxes began
to appear. One after another they were pulled from the earth, until the crates
nearly filled the grounds. In all there were a dozen huge chests weighing more
than 600 pounds each; 53 chests weighing nearly 100 pounds each; and about 53
more weighing 50 pounds each. It was a massive haul of some 7 ½
tons.