Portland Public Library

Code warriors, NSA's codebreakers and the secret intelligence war against the Soviet Union, Stephen Budiansky

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 359-372) and index

platesillustrations

index present

non fiction

Code warriors

bibliography

922630824

Stephen Budiansky

NSA's codebreakers and the secret intelligence war against the Soviet Union

"A sweeping history of the NSA and its codebreaking achievements from World War II through the Cold War shares insights into the challenges faced by cryptanalysts and their role in some of the most complicated events of the twentieth century, "--NoveList"A sweeping history of the NSA and its codebreaking achievements from World War II through the Cold War shares insights into the challenges faced by cryptanalysts and their role in some of the most complicated events of the twentieth century. The National Security Agency was born out of the legendary codebreaking programs of World War II that cracked the famed Enigma machine and other German and Japanese codes, thereby turning the tide of Allied victory. In the postwar years, as the United States developed a new enemy in the Soviet Union, our intelligence community found itself targeting not soldiers on the battlefield, but suspected spies, foreign leaders, and even American citizens. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, NSA played a vital, often fraught and controversial role in the major events of the Cold War, from the Korean War to the Cuban Missile Crisis to Vietnam and beyond. In Code Warriors, Stephen Budiansky--a longtime expert in cryptology--tells the fascinating story of how NSA came to be, from its roots in World War II through the fall of the Berlin Wall. Along the way, he guides us through the fascinating challenges faced by cryptanalysts, and how they broke some of the most complicated codes of the twentieth century. With access to new documents, Budiansky shows where the agency succeeded and failed during the Cold War, but his account also offers crucial perspective for assessing NSA today in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations. Budiansky shows how NSA's obsession with recording every bit of data and decoding every signal is far from a new development; throughout its history the depth and breadth of the agency's reach has resulted in both remarkable successes and destructive failures. Featuring a series of appendixes that explain the technical details of Soviet codes and how they were broken, this is a rich and riveting history of the underbelly of the Cold War, and an essential and timely read for all who seek to understand the origins of the modern NSA."--Provided by publisher

Prologue : "A catalogue of disasters" -- The Russian problem : Arlington Hall, 1943 ; Assembly-line cryptology ; "Getting everything" ; The Soviet one-time-pad systems ; Future of the special relationship ; Spying in peacetime ; ;"Like a deserted barn" -- Unbreakable codes : A defector in Ottawa ; Reading depths ; Russian teleprinters ; TICOM and the Karrenberg Party ; Caviar and Longfellow ; "Low pay and too many military bosses" ; Cable intercept and moral murkiness -- Learning to lie : NKGB messages and Soviet spycraft ; A Russian genius for conspiracy ; "Plausible deniability" ; The perils of prosecution ; Soviet rotor machines ; Who interprets signals intelligence? -- Digital dawn : Computers for cryptanalysis ; ERA's Task 13 ; Special-purpose comparators ; Abner, Goldberg, Demon, and Swish ; "Black Friday," October 1948 ; Russian plaintext on "the plantation" -- Shooting wars : Ferret flights ; Shootdown in the Baltic ; Traffic analysis and ELINT ; Looking the other way in Korea ; MacArthur's SIGINT blindness ; Low-level intercept and the air war ; The birth of NSA ; Philby, Maclean, and Weisband -- "An old mule skinner" : "Reasonable dictator" Ralph J. Canine ; Square spies, obtuse security ; Inquisition by polygraph ; A Dutch mole ; Intercept overload ; The move to Fort Meade -- Brains versus bugs : Improving on enigma ; Theremin's "thing" ; The Berlin tunnel ; TEMPEST ; Hungary, Suez, and the chaos of 1956 ; Harvest, lightning, and IBM hegemony ; Information theory, and the changing of the cryptanalytic old guard -- Days of crisis : Martin and Mitchell ; Glimmers of accountability ; The "Boris deal" and cryptographic innocents abroad ; SIGINT in space ; Cuban Missile Crisis ; Critics and Bullmeese -- Reinventing the wheel : Lyndon Johnson's SIGINT fascination ; Gulf of Tonkin, 1964 ; Learning to fight, again ; Tet and the "ultra syndrome" ; USS Pueblo ; Growing spectrum, shrinking resources -- Brute force and legerdemain : SIGINT sclerosis ; "Disreputable if not outright illegal" ; Battle of the bugs, continued ; The Inman era and the last hurrah of the codebreakers, 1979 ; Pelton, Walker, and the "year of the spy," 1985 -- Epilogue : The collapse of the wall, and a verdict -- Appendixes : Enciphered codes, depths, and book breaking -- Russian teleprinter ciphers -- Cryptanalysis of the Hagelin Machine ; Bayesian probability, Turing, and the Deciban -- The index of coincidence