Everybody knows about the CIA--the cloak-and-dagger branch of the U.S. government. Many fewer are familiar with the National Security Agency, even though it has been more important to American espionage in recent years than its better-known counterpart. The NSA is responsible for much of the intelligence gathering done via technology such as satellites and the Internet. Its home office in Maryland "contains what is probably the largest body of secrets ever created."

Little was known about the agency's confidential culture until veteran journalist James Bamford blew the lid off in 1982 with his bestseller The Puzzle Palace. Still, much remained in the shadows. In Body of Secrets, Bamford throws much more light on his subject--and he reveals loads of shocking information. The story of the U-2 crisis in 1960 is well known, including President Eisenhower's decision to tell a fib to the public in order to protect a national-security secret. Bamford takes the story a disturbing step forward, showing how Eisenhower "went so far as to order his Cabinet officers to hide his involvement in the scandal even while under oath. At least one Cabinet member directly lied to the committee, a fact known to Eisenhower." Even more worrisome is another revelation, from the Kennedy years: "The Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government. In the name of anticommunism, they proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba."

Body of Secrets is an incredible piece of journalism, and it paints a deeply troubling portrait of an agency about which the public knows next to nothing. Fans of The Sword and the Shield will want to read it, as will anybody who is intrigued by conspiracies and real-life spy stories. --John J. Miller


From Publishers Weekly
The National Security Agency (NSA), writes Bamford, has made the United States an "eavesdropping superpower," capable of capturing, deciphering and analyzing "signal intelligence"communicationsin whatever form it may exist and from whatever nation it may be transmitted. Yet with a budget ($4 billion a year) and staff (numbering in the tens of thousands) that dwarf its more famous cousin, the CIA, and with a headquarters, known as "Crypto City," that is its own self-contained community, little is known of NSA among the public and, more troublingly, even within other parts of government. Uncovering the secrets of NSA, its history and operations, has become Bamford's life's work, first begun in his now classic The Puzzle Palace (1982) and continued in this significantly revised and expanded present volume. With remarkable access to highly sensitive documents and information, Bamford takes the reader from the beginnings of NSA during the early cold war, through its roles in such watershed events as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War, to the amazingly sophisticated developments in information technology taking place within NSA today. What Bamford discovers is at times surprising, often quite troubling but always fascinating. In his conclusion, he is at once awed and deeply disturbed by what NSA can now do: ever more sophisticated surveillance techniques can mean ever greater assaults on the basic right of individual privacy. In a computer system that can store five trillion pages of text, anyone and everyone can be monitored. Writing with a flair and clarity that rivals those of the best spy novelists, Bamford has created a masterpiece of investigative reporting. (On-sale date: Apr. 24)Forecast: Bamford will be doing national media, including NBC's Today show and NPR's Fresh Air. This is the stuff spy thrillers are made from: The Puzzle Palace was a bestseller, and this will be, too.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


Review
“A magnificent achievement and a compelling read for anyone interested in espionage.” —The Baltimore Sun

“Extraordinary. . . . A galvanizing narrative brimming with heretofore undisclosed details.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Crisply written and prodigiously researched, Body of Secrets . . . is the most detailed picture yet of the activities of the world’s largest intelligence-gathering operation.” —The Washington Post Book World

“Part history, part expose, the book offers an ‘anatomy’ of the NSA, seeking to strip away the myth surrounding it. . . . [An] authoritative and engaging book.” –The Wall Street Journal

“Body of Secrets is one fascinating book…chock-full of juicy stuff…. Interesting to read, well-written and scrupulously documented.”–Salon

“An engaging and informed history…. Bamford weaves a narrative about the NSA that includes…many heretofore undisclosed tidbits of information.”–The Nation

“James Bamford, who wrote one of the really good books about American intelligence twenty years ago…has now done it again…. Body of Secrets has something interesting and important to add to many episodes of cold war history…[and] has much to say about recent events.”–The New York Review of Books

“At times surprising, often quite troubling but always fascinating…. Writing with a flair and clarity that rivals those of the best spy novelists, Bamford has created a masterpiece of investigative reporting.”–Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Body of Secrets adds fresh material about the world’s nosiest and most secret body…. Will fascinate anyone interested in the shadow war.”–The Economist


Review
?A magnificent achievement and a compelling read for anyone interested in espionage.? ?The Baltimore Sun

?Extraordinary. . . . A galvanizing narrative brimming with heretofore undisclosed details.? ?The New York Times Book Review

?Crisply written and prodigiously researched, Body of Secrets . . . is the most detailed picture yet of the activities of the world?s largest intelligence-gathering operation.? ?The Washington Post Book World

?Part history, part expose, the book offers an ?anatomy? of the NSA, seeking to strip away the myth surrounding it. . . . [An] authoritative and engaging book.? ?The Wall Street Journal

?Body of Secrets is one fascinating book?chock-full of juicy stuff?. Interesting to read, well-written and scrupulously documented.??Salon

?An engaging and informed history?. Bamford weaves a narrative about the NSA that includes?many heretofore undisclosed tidbits of information.??The Nation

?James Bamford, who wrote one of the really good books about American intelligence twenty years ago?has now done it again?. Body of Secrets has something interesting and important to add to many episodes of cold war history?[and] has much to say about recent events.??The New York Review of Books

?At times surprising, often quite troubling but always fascinating?. Writing with a flair and clarity that rivals those of the best spy novelists, Bamford has created a masterpiece of investigative reporting.??Publishers Weekly (starred review)

?Body of Secrets adds fresh material about the world?s nosiest and most secret body?. Will fascinate anyone interested in the shadow war.??The Economist


Book Description
The National Security Agency is the world’s most powerful, most far-reaching espionage. Now with a new afterword describing the security lapses that preceded the attacks of September 11, 2001, Body of Secrets takes us to the inner sanctum of America’s spy world. In the follow-up to his bestselling Puzzle Palace, James Banford reveals the NSA’s hidden role in the most volatile world events of the past, and its desperate scramble to meet the frightening challenges of today and tomorrow.

Here is a scrupulously documented account–much of which is based on unprecedented access to previously undisclosed documents–of the agency’s tireless hunt for intelligence on enemies and allies alike. Body of secrets is a riveting analysis of this most clandestine of agencies, a major work of history and investigative journalism.


From the Inside Flap
The National Security Agency is the world’s most powerful, most far-reaching espionage. Now with a new afterword describing the security lapses that preceded the attacks of September 11, 2001, Body of Secrets takes us to the inner sanctum of America’s spy world. In the follow-up to his bestselling Puzzle Palace, James Banford reveals the NSA’s hidden role in the most volatile world events of the past, and its desperate scramble to meet the frightening challenges of today and tomorrow.

Here is a scrupulously documented account–much of which is based on unprecedented access to previously undisclosed documents–of the agency’s tireless hunt for intelligence on enemies and allies alike. Body of secrets is a riveting analysis of this most clandestine of agencies, a major work of history and investigative journalism.


From the Back Cover
“A magnificent achievement and a compelling read for anyone interested in espionage.” —The Baltimore Sun

“Extraordinary. . . . A galvanizing narrative brimming with heretofore undisclosed details.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Crisply written and prodigiously researched, Body of Secrets . . . is the most detailed picture yet of the activities of the world’s largest intelligence-gathering operation.” —The Washington Post Book World

“Part history, part expose, the book offers an ‘anatomy’ of the NSA, seeking to strip away the myth surrounding it. . . . [An] authoritative and engaging book.” –The Wall Street Journal

“Body of Secrets is one fascinating book…chock-full of juicy stuff…. Interesting to read, well-written and scrupulously documented.”–Salon

“An engaging and informed history…. Bamford weaves a narrative about the NSA that includes…many heretofore undisclosed tidbits of information.”–The Nation

“James Bamford, who wrote one of the really good books about American intelligence twenty years ago…has now done it again…. Body of Secrets has something interesting and important to add to many episodes of cold war history…[and] has much to say about recent events.”–The New York Review of Books

“At times surprising, often quite troubling but always fascinating…. Writing with a flair and clarity that rivals those of the best spy novelists, Bamford has created a masterpiece of investigative reporting.”–Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Body of Secrets adds fresh material about the world’s nosiest and most secret body…. Will fascinate anyone interested in the shadow war.”–The Economist


About the Author
James Bamford is the author of The Puzzle Palace. Until recently, he was Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. He lives in Washington, D.C.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER ONE MEMORY

kvziebcen ckyiecdvg dbcoovk hn ckycfeufj eczhikucf mibevg fhohfd nqxvwxiv nwqfwqg hg ihf fh eqf ab ewhb xi gaeexd wjp jzpwc abcadl wp tya riw —dypj ypwboys— xl axlb apytiowl entojxgcm fvmmcd nd enjbmd fgxmd vgxm og bmdo rpi ekfskrpjv qxuvazpj qxshjxsavp hjxhxvke lxj z.q. jplxjsv

His step had an unusual urgency to it. Not fast, but anxious, like a child heading out to recess who had been warned not to run. It was late morning and the warm, still air had turned heavy with moisture, causing others on the long hallway to walk with a slow shuffle, a sort of somber march. In June 1930, the boxy, sprawling Munitions Building, near the Washington Monument, was a study in monotony. Endless corridors connecting to endless corridors. Walls a shade of green common to bad cheese and fruit. Forests of oak desks separated down the middle by rows of tall columns, like concrete redwoods, each with a number designating a particular workspace.

Oddly, he made a sudden left turn into a nearly deserted wing. It was lined with closed doors containing dim, opaque windows and empty name holders. Where was he going, they wondered, attempting to keep up with him as beads of perspiration wetted their brows. At thirty-eight years old, the Russian-born William Frederick Friedman had spent most of his adult life studying, practicing, defining the black art of codebreaking. The year before, he had been appointed the chief and sole employee of a secret new Army organization responsible for analyzing and cracking foreign codes and ciphers. Now, at last, his one-man Signal Intelligence Service actually had employees, three of them, who were attempting to keep pace close behind.

Halfway down the hall Friedman turned right into Room 3416, a small office containing a massive black vault, the kind found in large banks. Reaching into his inside coat pocket, he removed a small card. Then, standing in front of the thick round combination dial to block the view, he began twisting the dial back and forth. Seconds later he yanked up the silver bolt and slowly pulled open the heavy door, only to reveal another wall of steel behind it. This time he removed a key from his trouser pocket and turned it in the lock, swinging aside the second door to reveal an interior as dark as a midnight lunar eclipse.

Disappearing into the void, he drew out a small box of matches and lit one. The gentle flame seemed to soften the hard lines of his face: the bony cheeks; the pursed, pencil-thin lips; the narrow mustache, as straight as a ruler; and the wisps of receding hair combed back tight against his scalp. Standing outside the vault were his three young hires. Now it was time to tell them the secret. Friedman yanked on the dangling cord attached to an overhead lightbulb, switched on a nearby fan to circulate the hot, stale air, and invited them in. "Welcome, gentlemen," he said solemnly, "to the secret archives of the American Black Chamber."

Until a few weeks before, none of the new recruits had had even the slightest idea what codebreaking was. Frank B. Rowlett stood next to a filing cabinet in full plumage: blue serge jacket, white pinstriped trousers, and a virgin pair of white suede shoes. Beefy and round-faced, with rimless glasses, he felt proud that he had luckily decided to wear his new wardrobe on this day. A high school teacher from rural southern Virginia, he received a degree in math the year earlier from Emory and Henry College, a small Virginia school.

The two men standing near Rowlett were a vision of contrasts. Short, bespectacled Abraham Sinkov; Brooklynite Solomon Kullback, tall and husky. Both were high school teachers from New York, both were graduates of City College in New York, and both had received master's degrees from Columbia.

Like a sorcerer instructing his disciples on the mystic path to eternal life, Friedman began his introduction into the shadowy history of American cryptology. In hushed tones he told his young employees about the Black Chamber, America's first civilian codebreaking organization. How for a decade it operated in utmost secrecy from a brownstone in New York City. How it skillfully decoded more than 10,000 messages from nearly two dozen nations, including those in difficult Japanese diplomatic code. How it played the key role in deciphering messages to and from the delegates to the post–World War I disarmament talks, thus giving the American delegation the inside track. He told of Herbert Osborne Yardley, the Black Chamber's hard-drinking, poker-playing chief, who had directed the Army's cryptanalytic activities during the war.

Then he related the story of the Chamber's demise eight months earlier. How the newly appointed secretary of state, Henry Stimson, had become outraged and ordered its immediate closing when he discovered that America was eavesdropping on friends as well as foes. Friedman told of the firing of Yardley and the rest of the Chamber's employees and of how the government had naively taken itself out of the codebreaking business.

It was a troubling prospect. If a new war were to break out, the United States would once again have to start from scratch. The advances achieved against Japan's codes would be lost forever. Foreign nations would gain great advantage while the United States clung to diplomatic niceties. Standing in the vault containing the salvaged records of the old Black Chamber, Friedman told his three assistants, fresh out of college, that they were now the new Black Chamber. The Army, he said, had given its cautious approval to secretly raise the organization from the ashes, hide it deep within the bureaucracy, and rename it the Signal Intelligence Service. The State Department, they were sternly warned, was never to know of its existence.

In late June 1930, America's entire cryptologic body of secrets—personnel, equipment and records—fit comfortably in a vault twenty-five feet square.

On the southbound lane of the Baltimore—Washington Parkway, near the sleepy Maryland hamlet of Annapolis Junction, a restricted, specially constructed exit ramp disappears quickly from view. Hidden by tall earthen berms and thick trees, the ramp leads to a labyrinth of barbed-wire fences, massive boulders placed close together, motion detectors, hydraulic antitruck devices, and thick cement barriers. During alerts, commandos dressed in black paramilitary uniforms, wearing special headgear, and brandishing an assortment of weapons including Colt 9mm submachine guns, quickly respond. They are known as the "Men in Black." Telephoto surveillance cameras peer down, armed police patrol the boundaries, and bright yellow signs warn against taking any photographs or making so much as a note or a simple sketch, under the penalties of the Internal Security Act. What lies beyond is a strange and invisible city unlike any other on earth. It contains what is probably the largest body of secrets ever created.

Seventy-one years after Friedman and his three new employees gathered for the first time in their vault, with room to spare, the lineal descendant of the Black Chamber now requires an entire city to contain it. The land beyond 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 living 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 had become a black empire and the home to the National Security Agency, the largest, most secret, and most advanced spy organization on the planet.

Known to some as Crypto City, it is an odd and mysterious place, where even the priests and ministers have security clearances far above Top Secret, and religious services are held in an unbuggable room. "The NSA Christmas party was a big secret," recalled one former deputy director of the agency. "They held it at Cole field house but they called it something else." Officials hold such titles as Chief of Anonymity, and even the local newsletter, with its softball scores and schedules for the Ceramic Crafters Club, warns that copies "should be destroyed as soon as they have been read." Crypto City is home to the largest collection of hyperpowerful computers, advanced mathematicians, and language experts on the planet. Within the fence, time is measured by the femtosecond—one million billionth of a second—and scientists work in secret to develop computers capable of performing more than one septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) operations every second.

Nearby residents can only guess what lies beyond the forbidden exit ramp. County officials say they have no idea how many people work there, and no one will tell them. Traffic planners from the county planning department, it is said, once put a rubber traffic-counting cord across a road leading to the city, but armed guards came out and quickly sliced it. "For a long time we didn't tell anybody who we were," admitted one agency official. "The focus was not on community activity. [It was] like everyone outside the agency was the enemy."

In an effort to ease relations with its neighbors, officials from the city gave Maryland's transportation secretary, James Lighthizer, a rare tour. But the state official was less than overwhelmed. "I didn't get to see a darn thing," he said.

At a nearby gas station, owner Clifford Roop says the people traveling into and out of the city keep to themselves. "They say they work for the DoD [Department of Defense]. They don't talk about their work at all." Once, when a reporter happened into the station and began taking a few notes, two police cruisers from the secret city rushed up to the office and demanded an ID from the journalist. This was not an unusual response. When a photographer hired by real estate developers started up a hill near Crypto City to snap some shots of a future construction site, he was soon surrounded by NSA security vehicles. "They picked him up and hauled him in and asked what he was doing," said Robert R. Strott, a senior vice president at Constellation Real Estate, which was a partner in the project. During interrogation the photographer not only denied attempting to take a shot of Crypto City, he said he had never even heard of NSA. Worried that occupants of an eleven-story office building might be able to look into the city, NSA leased the entire building before it was completed.

To dampen curiosity and keep peace with the neighbors, NSA director William O. Studeman, a three-star admiral, once gave a quiet briefing to a small group of community leaders in the area. "I do this with some trepidation," he warned, "because it is the ethic of the agency—sometimes called in the vernacular the supersecret NSA—to keep a low profile." Nevertheless, he gave his listeners a brief idea of NSA's tremendous size. "We're the largest and most technical of all the [U.S. intelligence] agencies. We're the largest in terms of people and we're the largest in terms of budget....We have people not only here at NSA but there are actually more people out in the field that we have operational control over—principally military—than exist here in Maryland....The people number in the tens of thousands and the budget to operate that system is measured in the billions of dollars annually.

A decade ago, on the third floor of Operations Building 1 at the heart of the sprawling city, a standing-room-only crowd packed a hall. On stage was Frank Rowlett, in whose honor an annual award was being established. As he looked out toward the audience in the Friedman Auditorium, named after his former boss, his mind no doubt skipped back in time, back to that hot, sticky, June afternoon in 1930 when he walked into the dim vault, dressed in his white suede shoes and blue serge jacket, and first learned the secrets of the Black Chamber. How big that vault had grown, he must have marveled.

For most of the last half of the twentieth century, that burgeoning growth had one singular objective: to break the stubborn Russian cipher system and eavesdrop on that nation's most secret communications. But long before the codebreakers moved into the sterile supercomputer laboratories, clean rooms, and anechoic chambers, their hunt for the solution to that ultimate puzzle took them to dark lakebeds and through muddy swamps in the early light of the new Cold War.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The National Security Agency is the biggest -- and most secretive -- intelligence agency in the world. It makes the CIA look tiny in comparison. What is it up to, and what has it already done that we don't know about? James Bamford, who first alerted us to the machinations of the NSA in his bestselling The Puzzle Palace, now offers new details about the agency's behind-the-scenes doings, including its undercover involvement in Vietnam, European economic espionage, and the chilling possibility of eavesdropping on private and personal communication here at home.

ANNOTATION

2002 Finalist for The New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The NSA is the largest, most secretive, and most powerful intelligence agency in the world. With a staff of thirty-eight thousand people, it dwarfs the CIA in budget, manpower, and influence. Recent headlines have linked it to economic espoinage throughout Europe and to the ongoing hunt for the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.

James Bamford first penetrated the wall of silence surrounding the NSA in 1982, with the much-talked-about bestseller The Puzzle Palace. In Body of Secrets, he offers shocking new details about the inner workings of the agency, gathered through unique access to thousands of internal documents and interviews with current and former officials. Unveiling extremely sensitive information for the first time, Bamford exposes the role the NSA played in numerous Soviet bloc Cold War conflicts and discusses its undercover involvement in the Vietnam War. His investigation into the NSA's technological advances during the last fifteen years brings to light a network of global surveillance ranging from online listening posts to sophisticated intelligence-gathering satellites. In a hard-hitting conclusion, he warns that the NSA is a two-edged sword. While its worldwide eavesdropping activities offer the potential for tracking down terrorists and uncovering nuclear weapons deals, it also has the capability to listen in on global personal communications.

Like the breakout bestsellers on Cold War espionage, The Sword and the Shield and Blind Man's Bluff, Body of Secrets is must-reading for people fascinated by the intrigues of a shadowy underworld. As one od the most important works of investigative journalism to come out of Washington in years, it should be read by everyone concerned about the inevitability of Orwell's Big Brother.

SYNOPSIS

Body of Secrets takes the reader into a world few have ever seen. It is a world where computer systems are measured by the acre. Where massive listening posts, like moon-bases, eavesdrop on foreign governments and terrorists￯﾿ﾽincluding suspected bomber Osama bin Ladin talking over the telephone to his mother. Where crewmembers on risky eavesdropping missions fly close to hostile lands, and sometimes never return. In his new book, James Bamford, for the first time, explores the vital role played by America's eavesdroppers and codebreakers during the tension-filled years of the Cold War. He also looks into whether the new telecommunications revolution is causing NSA to suddenly go deaf. And he addresses the issue of Echelon, the worldwide NSA operation that, many charge, is illegally eavesdropping on innocent citizens. Finally, he takes his readers on the first tour of the NSA's hidden, city-size complex, nicknamed Crypto City, and introduces them to the unique men and women who occupy that shadowy land.

FROM THE CRITICS

Wall Street Journal

Part history and part expose, the book offers an anatomy of NSA, seeking to strip away the myth surrounding it...authoritative and engaging.

Joseph Finder - New York Times Book Review

Not only is this the definitive book on America's most secret agency, but it is also an extraordinary work of investigative journalism, a galvanizing narrative brimming with heretofore undisclosed details.

Publishers Weekly