Privacy Digest

Spy History Leaves Out Successes - WSJ.com: Via Wall Street Journal Online

Agency Tells Story but Keeps Victories Secret; The Day the Soviets Changed Their Codes

For much of its history, the government's most-secretive intelligence agency sought to conceal its very existence.

So it was a surprise last year when university researchers persuaded the National Security Agency to hand over a top-secret, 1,000-page account of its Cold War spying.

George Washington University plans to release the report today, giving historians a rare look inside the agency that gathers intelligence through eavesdropping. But one thing appears to be missing: Many of its biggest successes.

Not wanting to reveal too much, NSA blanked out sensitive chunks of the account that, according to intelligence experts, appear to chronicle espionage breakthroughs. What remains makes it appear that the world's largest ear has been a bit deaf.

According to the declassified report, government eavesdroppers generated half of their intelligence reports just after World War II from listening in on the French. Code breakers missed a key tip-off in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The report also suggests that, for the most part, the government couldn't crack high-grade Soviet communications codes between World War II and the 1970s.

"This was a perfect opportunity for NSA to put its best foot forward," says Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian who pressed the agency to release the report and plans to publish his own NSA history next year. "Instead what you're left with is a fair to middling picture of this agency."

The report's author, Thomas R. Johnson, declined to say how the edited history compares with the original version. But intelligence experts say it's common for failures to become more public than successes because such breakthroughs can be too good to reveal. Even making older successes public may reveal sources, hint at continuing intelligence efforts, or hurt diplomatic relations. When NSA declassified the government's World War II code-breaking activities, it faced criticism from State Department colleagues who were upset the U.S. had spied on allies, says Mr. Aid, a visiting fellow at the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

NSA, once dubbed "No Such Agency," was created in a secret executive order in 1952 to intercept electronic communications through eavesdropping. It wasn't until 16 years later that its power to eavesdrop on foreigners was established in public law.

On three separate occasions, the agency set out to write its history, but it aborted each effort because it was too overwhelming. In 1992, NSA tapped Mr. Johnson to take another crack at it.

"Even when I came to the agency in 1964, there was this culture that we were so secret that no one would ever get into our affairs," Mr. Johnson said in an interview that NSA officials arranged and attended.

He spent more than six years writing the report, divided into four intelligence eras, that draws on his 34 years in government eavesdropping around the world. When friends asked him when they would read it, the 68-year-old would say: "We'll all be dead before this is declassified."

In 1998, he completed the report before retiring from NSA the next year. All of its pages were stamped "TOP SECRET UMBRA," using agency jargon that signified it was particularly sensitive.

The most revealing portions of the history hint at U.S. failures to crack Soviet communications after a day in 1948 the agency dubbed "Black Friday," when the Soviets changed their communications codes. The following year, the NSA's predecessor, the Armed Forces Security Agency, inherited from the military services "a Soviet problem that was in miserable shape," Mr. Johnson wrote, in reference to cracking Soviet codes.

U.S. intelligence agencies were surprised to discover the Soviets exploded a nuclear device in September 1949, the history says. They were again caught off guard four years later when the Soviets detonated a hydrogen bomb. Some government officials believed the effort to decode Soviet communications "was hopeless and should not be funded," Mr. Johnson wrote.

NSA also fought internecine battles with its sister agencies, especially the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA didn't inform NSA Director Lt. Gen. Ralph J. Canine about its effort in the mid-1950s to tap East German and Soviet cables, dubbed the Berlin Tunnel, the history says.

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