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NKGB’s
New York rezidentura on December 13, 1944, which showed that an agent within the U.S. Army General Staff in Washington had provided the Soviets
with highly classified military information. Unfortunately, Gardner was not able to deduce anything further as to the agent’s
true identity from the fragmentary decrypt. By August 1947, new decrypts provided the first evidence that an extensive Soviet
spy ring was operating in Australia during World War II, which set off alarm bells in both Washington and London. Gardner
was able to report that the decrypts contained the cryptonyms of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Soviet agents operating in the
United States, Australia, and Sweden during the war. But the report also clearly showed that Gardner had only made partial
headway into the Soviet codebook, and that the results of his work were still very fragmentary. 42
    Taken together, these decrypts opened up a wide array of Soviet military and civilian targets for exploitation by the information-starved
intelligence analysts in both Washington and London. An NSA historical monograph notes, “ASA in the post–World War II period
had broken messages used by the Soviet armed forces, police and industry, and was building a remarkably complete picture of
the Soviet national security posture.” 43 This is confirmed by material obtained by researchers from the former KGB archives in Moscow, which reveals that the Anglo-American
COMINT organizations were deriving from these decrypts a great deal of valuable intelligence about the strength and capabilities
of the Soviet armed forces, the production capacity of various branches of Soviet industry, and even the super-secret work
that the Soviets were conducting in the field of atomic energy. 44
    Former NSA officials have stated in interviews that the first postwar crisis in which COMINT played an important role was
the 1948 Berlin Crisis. 45 Ultimately, it was COMINT that showed that the Soviets had no intention of launching an attack on West Berlin or West Germany.
The initial stage of the Berlin Crisis was actually a Russian feint. 46 COMINT also provided valuable data during the second part of the crisis, when on June 26, 1948, the Soviet’s cut off all access
to West Berlin, forcing the United States and Britain to begin a massive airlift to keep West Berlin supplied with foodstuffs
and coal for heating. Careful monitoring of Soviet communications indicated that the Russians would not interfere with the
airlift. 47
    Black Friday
    During President Truman’s October 1948 nationwide whistle-stop train tour in his uphill battle for reelection against Governor
Thomas Dewey, the U.S. government was at a virtualstandstill. On the afternoon of Friday, October 29, just as Truman was preparing
to deliver a fiery campaign speech at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City, the Russian government and military
executed a massive change of virtually all of their cipher systems. On that day, referred to within NSA as Black Friday, and
continuing for several months thereafter, all of the cipher systems used on Soviet military and internal-security radio networks,
including all mainline Soviet military, naval, and police radio nets, were changed to new, unbreakable systems. The Russians
also changed all their radio call signs and operating frequencies and replaced all of the cipher machines that the Americans
and British had solved, and even some they hadn’t, with newer and more sophisticated cipher machines that were to defy the
ability of American and British cryptanalysts to solve them for almost thirty years, until the tenure of Admiral Bobby Ray
Inman in the late 1970s. 48
    Black Friday was an unmitigated disaster, inflicting massive and irreparable damage on the Anglo-American SIGINT organizations’
efforts against the USSR, killing off virtually all of the productive intelligence sources that were then available to them
regarding what was going on inside the Soviet Union and