The Secret Sentry Read Online Free PDF

rendering useless most of four years’ hard work by thousands of American
and British cryptanalysts, linguists, and traffic analysts. The loss of so many critically important high-level intelligence
sources in such a short space of time was, as NSA historians have aptly described it, “perhaps the most significant intelligence
loss in U.S. history.” And more important, it marked the beginning of an eight-year period when reliable intelligence about
what was occurring inside the USSR was practically non exis tent. 49
    The sudden loss of so many productive intelligence sources was not the only damage that can be directly attributed to the
Black Friday blackout. In the months that followed, the Anglo-American code breakers discovered that they now faced two new
and seemingly insurmountable obstacles that threatened to keep them deaf, dumb, and blind for years. First, there was far
less high-level Soviet government and military radio traffic than prior to Black Friday because the Russians had switched
much of their military communication to telegraph lines or buried cables, which was a simple and effective way of keeping
this traffic away from the American and British radio intercept operators. Moreover, the high-level Russian radio traffic
that could still be intercepted was proving to be nearly impossible to crack because of the new cipher machines and unbreakable
cipher systems that were introduced on all key radio circuits. The Russians also implemented tough communications security
practices and procedures and draconian rules and regulations governing the encryption of radio communications traffic, and
radio security discipline was suddenly rigorously and ruthlessly enforced. Facing potential death sentences for failing to
comply with the new regulations, Russian radio operators suddenly began making fewer mistakes in the encoding and decoding
of messages, and operator chatter disappeared almost completely from the airwaves. It was also at about this time that the
Russian military and key Soviet government ministries began encrypting their telephone calls using a newly developed voice-scrambling
device called Vhe Che (“High Frequency”), which further degraded the ability of the Anglo-American SIGINT personnel to access
even low-level Soviet communications. It would eventually be discovered that the Russians had made their massive shift because
William Weisband, a forty-year-old Russian linguist with ASA, had told the KGB everything that he knew about ASA’s Russian
code-breaking efforts at Arlington Hall. (For reasons of security, Weisband was not put on trial for espionage.)
    Decades later, at a Central Intelligence Agency conference on Venona, Meredith Gardner, an intensely private and taciturn
man, did not vent his feelings about Weisband, even though he had done grave damage to Gardner’s work on Venona. But Gardner’s
boss, Frank Rowlett, was not so shy in an interview before his death, calling Weisband “the traitor that got away.” 50
    Unfortunately, internecine warfare within the upper echelons of the U.S. intelligence community at the time got in the way
of putting stronger security safeguards into effect— despite the damage that a middle-level employee like Weisband had done
to America’s SIGINT effort. Four years later, a 1952 review found that “very little had been done” to implement the 1948 recommendations
for strengthening security practices within the U.S. cryptologic community. 51
    The Creation of the Armed Forces Security Agency
    At the same time that the U.S. and British intelligence communities were reeling from Black Friday, several new institutional
actors shoved their way into the battered U.S. cryptologic community. On October 20, 1948, the newly in dependent U.S. Air
Force formally activated its own COMINT collection organization, the U.S. Air Force Security Service (USAFSS). 52 It immediately became responsible for COMINT coverage of the entire Soviet air force and air defense