Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 ½tons.
    Over the
next several days the dark gray equipment was carefully lifted from its crates
and set up in the basement of the building. Then, like magic, high-level
encrypted Russian communications, pulled from the ether, began spewing forth in
readable plaintext. Whitaker, who pulled into the camp a short time later, was
amazed. "They were working like beavers before we ever arrived," he
scribbled in his notebook. "They had one of the machines all set up and
receiving traffic when we got there."
    The
Russian system involved dividing the transmissions into nine separate parts and
then transmitting them on nine different channels. The German machines were
able to take the intercepted signals and stitch them back together again in the
proper order. For Campaigne and the rest of the TICOM team, it was a once-in-a-lifetime
discovery. Back in Washington, Campaigne would eventually go on to become chief
of research at NSA.
    Once the
demonstration was over, Campaigne had the German soldiers repack the equipment
and the next day it was loaded on a convoy, completely filling four heavy
trucks. Two TICOM members, including First Lieutenant Selmer Norland, who would
also go on to a long career at NSA, accompanied the equipment and soldiers back
to England. There it was set up near Bletchley Park and quickly put into operation.
It, or a working model, was later shipped back to Washington. The discovery of
the Russian codebreaking machine was a principal reason why both the U.S. and
British governments still have an absolute ban on all details surrounding the
TICOM operations.
     
    All told,
the TICOM teams salvaged approximately five tons of German Sigint documents. In
addition, many cryptologic devices and machines were found and returned to
Bletchley.
    Equally
important were the interrogations of the nearly 200 key German codebreakers,
some of which were conducted at a secret location codenamed Dustbin. In
addition to the discovery of the Russian Fish, another reason for the enormous
secrecy surrounding TICOM may be the question of what happened to the hundreds
of former Nazi code-breakers secretly brought to England. Were any of the war
criminals given new identities and employed by the British or American
government to work on Russian codebreaking problems? Among those clandestinely
brought into the United States was the top codebreaker Dr. Erich Huettenhain.
"It is almost certain that no major cryptanalytic successes were achieved
without his knowledge," said one TICOM document.
    Among the
surprises to come out of the interrogations was the fact that the Germans knew
all along that Enigma was not totally secure. "We found that the Germans
were well aware of the way the Enigma could be broken," recalled Howard
Campaigne. "But they had concluded that it would take a whole building
full of equipment to do it. And that's what we had. A building full of
equipment. Which they hadn't pictured as really feasible."
    In
Washington, the TICOM materials were of enormous help in determining just how
secure, or insecure, America's own cryptographic systems were. The picture
painted by the documents and interrogations showed that while a number of
lower-level systems had been read by German codebreakers, the most important
ciphers remained impenetrable. "European cryptanalysts were unable to read
any U.S. Army or Navy high-level cryptographic systems," the highly secret
report said.
    The
Germans were never able to touch America's "Fish," a machine known as
the SIGABA. Like the Fish, SIGABA was used for the Army and Navy's most
sensitive communications. In