Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (94 page)

Seventy-two
percent of NSA employees who visit EAS are "self-referred"; others
are sent by their supervisors. A person's boss may call the psychology office
to verify that the employee kept an appointment, but cannot probe into the
problems discussed. To ensure confidentiality, all EAS files are kept separate
from normal NSA personnel and security files. Nevertheless, the Office of
Security is made aware when a person visits the office. And if it is determined
that "national security is threatened," the confidentiality of the
sessions can be broken.

Ironically,
while one group of senior managers at NSA is searching for ways to reduce the
employment rolls, another group, in the Information Security Directorate, is
attempting to stem the brain drain caused by big-bucks offers from private
industry. As computers take over more and more segments of society, so does the
demand grow for highly experienced computer and information security
specialists to protect that data. At the top of the list of places to which
corporate headhunters are now turning is NSA. "It's a real worry,"
said one senior NSA executive. "If the issue is salary, we're in a
noncompetitive position."

"Our
hiring program skims off the cream from the available hiring pool year after
year," said Terry Thompson. "And so we have a very, very high-quality
workforce. All of that says that when you go out, shopping yourself around for
a job, if you have NSA on your resume, it's worth more than the ten thousand
dollars or whatever the amount [the increase in salary] is for having a TS/SI
[Top Secret/Special Intelligence] clearance. There's a brand-name recognition
that goes above that for people who work at NSA."

According
to a study by the U.S. Department of Commerce, "While average starting
salaries [in the private sector] for graduates with bachelor's degrees in
computer engineering grew to more than $34,000 in 1995, the federal
government's entry-level salary for computer professionals with bachelor's
degrees ranged from about $18,700 to $23,000 that year." To help overcome
the disparity, NSA in 1996 raised the pay of its mathematicians, computer
scientists, and engineers.

Agency
officials, however, say it is not the money that attracts many NSA employees
but "the unique nature of our work." In an effort to find new talent,
NSA set up its own recruitment web page, which has been responsible for
bringing in about 20 percent of its applicants. The agency also began posting
job openings on employment web sites like Job Web and Career Mosaic.

By the
mid-1990s NSA had scaled back hiring to only about 100 new employees a year. A
commission established to look into the intelligence community saw problems
down the road in consequence of such drastic cutbacks in hiring. "This is
simply insufficient to maintain the health and continuity of the
workforce," the report said. It went on to warn that if the pattern
continued, NSA would face a future in which large segments of its workforce
would leave "at roughly the same time without a sufficient cadre of
skilled personnel to carry on the work."

NSA's
decade-long diet had left it nearly a third lighter at the start of the new
century. "Our budget has declined by almost thirty percent over the last
ten years," said Thompson in late 1999. "And our workforce has gone
down at a commensurate rate. But our requirements [the work assigned to NSA]
have gone up and we have a hard time saying no, so it's hard for us to stop
doing things."

Thompson
believes that Congress neglected NSA for many years because it had fewer
high-cost defense contractors on its payroll than some other agencies, and thus
far fewer lobbyists to pressure Congress for more money for NSA. "One of
the reasons we
don't get more support on the Hill for the budget,"
he said, "is we don't have a strong lobby in the defense industry. You
know the NRO has a seven-billion-dollar budget. And anytime somebody talks
about taking a nickel away from them there's people from Lockheed and
Boeing—well, especially Boeing . . . and other big, big defense industrial
contractors that are down there saying, 'You can't cut this because it's jobs
in your district, Senator or Congressman. . . .' "

"The
point is," continued Thompson, "they [other agencies] have a very
effective defense-industrial lobby because they spend a lot of money in the
contract community. We don't have that. We used to have, ten or fifteen years
ago. But we don't anymore, because we spend our money on four hundred or four
thousand different contracts and it's hard to get a critical mass of people who
want to go down and wave the flag for NSA when budget deliberations are going
on."

Speaking
to a group of military communications officials, Kenneth Minihan once summed up
NSA's budgetary problems with an old pilot's saying: "The nose is pointing
down and the houses are getting bigger."

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It would
be one of the most delicate operations ever performed. The doctors and
technicians would gather early and work late into the night. Any mistake could
be extremely serious. The patient's memory could be lost forever, or the
ability to function severely damaged. Crypto City was about to undergo its
first brain transplant. According to the director, nothing less than "the
continued success of the agency's Sigint mission largely depended on
this." The planning had taken years. NSA would create the largest, most powerful,
and most secret electronic brain on earth.

But first
it would have to build a specialized facility to house the new center. Then it
would need to carefully transplant tons of massive and delicate
supercomputers—more than 150—from the cavernous basement of OPS 1 to their new
home, out of sight in a wooded corner of the secret city nearly a mile away.
Whereas most government offices and large corporations measure in square feet
the space taken up by their computers, NSA measures it in acres. "I had
five and a half acres of computers when I was there," said Marshall
Carter, director in the late 1960s. "We didn't count them by numbers; it
was five and a half acres." Even though modern computers have more
capacity and smaller footprints, one NSA employee more than a decade later
commented, "It's double that today."

Once in
place, the computers would be brought back to life and linked by a secure fiber
optic spinal cord to the Headquarters/Operations Building complex—all without
disrupting NSA's critical operations. When it was finally completed, in 1996,
NSA's Supercomputer Facility held the most powerful collection of thinking
machines on the planet.

Standing
in front of the new building on the afternoon of October 29, 1996, Kenneth
Minihan held a pair of scissors up to a thin ribbon of red, white, and blue. No
press releases had been issued, and even the invitations to the event gave no
hint where the ceremony would actually take place. But then, that was precisely
how the man in whose name the Tordella Supercomputer Facility was about to be
dedicated would have wanted it. This would be the first NSA building to be
named for a person. As the scissors sliced through the colorful ribbon, a
handheld machine of elegant simplicity opened the way to a building of infinite
complexity.

The
history of modern codebreaking and the history of computers are, to a large
degree, coterminous. Yet because of its "policy of anonymity," NSA's
role has been almost totally hidden. When the Association for Computing
Machinery sponsored a commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of its
founding, NSA simply stayed away. Likewise, when computing pioneers gathered at
the quarter-century anniversary meeting of the Institute of Electrical and
Electronic Engineers' Computer Society, NSA again exhibited an advanced case of
shyness.

But NSA's
role in computer development has been, and continues to be, enormous. The man
responsible for much of that work—as well as for the thick shroud of secrecy
that still surrounds it—was Dr. Louis W. Tordella, NSA's keeper of the secrets.

By the
outbreak of the Second World War, the importance of machines to aid in
codebreaking was known but their use was limited. At that time the Signal
Security Agency had only fifteen machines and twenty-one operators. But by the
spring of 1945, the SSA was employing 1,275 operators and supervisors to work
on 407 keypunch machines.

Besides
its off-the-shelf tabulating machines, the agency had specialized machines
custom built for codebreaking. Known as Rapid Analytical Machines (RAMs), they
employed vacuum tubes, relays, high-speed electronic circuits, and
photoelectrical principles. They were the forerunners of the modern computer,
but they were expensive and overspecialized. A number of them were built to
attack a specific code or cipher, so if a cipher system was changed or
abandoned, the machine was of little value.

The Navy's
Op-20-G contracted with Eastman Kodak, National Cash Register, and several
other firms to design and build its RAMs. The Army's Signal Security Agency, on
the other hand, worked closely with Bell Laboratories. Another major contractor
during the war was IBM, which built a specialized attachment for its IBM
tabulator, thereby increasing the power of the standard punch-card systems by
several orders of magnitude.

Two of the
SSA's cryptanalytic machines were immense. Costing a million dollars apiece, an
extraordinary sum at the time, they were capable of performing operations
which, if done by hand in the old Black Chamber, would have required over
200,000 people. By the end of 1945 another monster machine was nearing
completion; it had power equivalent to 5 million cryptanalysts.

Tordella
hoped the development by outside contractors of new, sophisticated cryptologic
equipment would continue. But with no war to fight he found the contractors
less willing to undertake the research. The rigorous security clearances, the
oppressive physical security, and the limited usefulness of the equipment in
the marketplace made many companies shy away from the field. Because of this, a
group of former Navy officers, familiar with cryptography and signals
intelligence, banded together to form Engineering Research Associates, which
took on some of the Naval Security Group's most complex assignments.

At about
the same time, a group of engineers and mathematicians at the University of
Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering completed an electronic
marvel named ENIAC (for "electronic numerical integrator computer"),
and thus gave birth to the computer era. ENIAC was an ungainly giant whose body
was a good deal larger than its brain. Its total storage capacity was only
twenty numbers, yet its 18,000 electron tubes took up the better part of a room
thirty feet by fifty. Nevertheless, the machine offered tremendous
possibilities in speed.

The
development of ENIAC led to a series of lectures on the theory of computers,
presented at the Moore School and sponsored jointly by the Office of Naval
Research and the Army's Ordnance Department. Among those attending the
lectures, given between July 8 and August 31, 1946, was Lieutenant Commander
James T. Pendergrass, a colleague of Tordella's in the Naval Security Group,
whose assignment was to assess the potential of computers in cryptography and
signals intelligence.

Pendergrass
came away from the lectures excited. Computers appeared to offer the
flexibility that RAMs lacked. Whereas many of the RAMs were designed to handle
one particular problem, such as breaking one foreign cipher system, computers
could handle a whole range of problems. "The author believes that the
general purpose mathematical computer, now in the design stage, is a
general
purpose cryptanalytic machine, "
wrote Pendergrass. "A computer
could do everything that any analytic machine in Building 4 can do, and do a
good percentage of these problems more rapidly."

Soon after
Pendergrass submitted his favorable report, negotiations began between the
Security Group and Engineering Research Associates for the design and
construction of the signals intelligence community's first computer. But what
to name it? A yeoman overheard Tordella and his colleagues discussing ideas and
suggested "Atlas," after the mental giant in the comic strip
"Barnaby." Atlas lived up to its namesake. When it was delivered to
the Security Group in December 1950, Atlas had an impressive capacity of 16,384
words; it was the first parallel electronic computer in the United States with
a drum memory. A second, identical computer was delivered to NSA in March 1953.

A key
component of the machine was the vacuum tube. "We had the biggest
collection of vacuum tube circuitry anyplace in the world there at one
time," said former NSA research chief Howard Campaigne. "And we knew
more about the life of vacuum tubes and the kinds of vacuum tubes that were
used and how they should be maintained than just about anybody else." The
vacuum tubes, he said, were as big as lightbulbs. "And then you get a lot
of lightbulbs together and you have to have air-conditioning to cool them off.
And so we were having fifteen tons of air-conditioning per machine."

Tordella
was not the only one impressed by the Pendergrass report. About the same time
that he received it, a copy also landed on the desk of Sam Snyder at Arlington
Hall, headquarters of the Army Security Agency. "A copy of this report hit
my desk in November 1946," Snyder later recalled, "and my reaction
was explosive. I immediately ran into the office of Dr. Solomon Kullback, my
boss, and said something like, 'We have to get a machine like this. Think what
it could do for us!' " Kullback assigned Snyder to investigate the
possibilities; Snyder spent the next year meeting with experts such as John von
Neumann, at Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study, and visiting
institutions and private companies involved in computer research. "In the
agency at that time," Snyder said, "money was no object; we could get
whatever we wanted."