The Secret Sentry Read Online Free PDF Page B

system, including the
strategic bombers of the Soviet Long Range Air Force. But the ability of USAFSS to perform this vital mission was practically
non existent at the time owing to a severe shortage of manpower and equipment, largely because the U.S. Air Force headquarters
staff in Washington was slow to provide the necessary resources that the COMINT organization so desperately needed. As a result,
by the end of 1949, USAFSS was only operating thirty-five COMINT intercept positions in the U.S. and overseas, which was far
short of what was expected of it. By December 1949, the situation was so serious that the chief of USAF Intelligence was forced
to report that USAFSS’s COMINT capability was “presently negligible and will continue to be negligible for an unwarranted
period of time unless immediate steps are taken to change the present low priority on equipment and personnel assigned to
the Air Force Security Services.” 53
    Seven months later, on May 20, 1949, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson issued a Top Secret directive creating the Armed Forces
Security Agency (AFSA), which was given the responsibility for the direction and control of all U.S. communications intelligence
and communications security activities except for tactical cryptologic activities, which remained under the control of the army, navy, and air force. 54
    AFSA was a fatally flawed organization from its inception. Its funding was grossly inadequate when compared with the significantly
higher level of funding given to the CIA, which had been created two years earlier in 1947. 55 The military services then systematically stripped AFSA of virtually all of the authority that it had originally been granted.
As a result, by the summer of 1950, AFSA found itself powerless and completely dependent on the military for all of its money,
radio intercept facilities, personnel, equipment, communications, and logistical support. 56 Then, taking full advantage of AFSA’s weakened state, the military services got key portions of their COMINT missions exempted
from its authority. With no means of compelling the other services to comply, including no control over the budgets of the
three military SIGINT units, AFSA was forced to humble itself and negotiate on bent-knee agreements with the services that
gave even more power away to them. 57
    It is clear now that many of AFSA’s problems can be traced directly to its first director, Rear Admiral Earl Stone, who did
not possess the combative personality desperately needed to force the branches of the military to cooperate in order to make
AFSA work. By the time he left office in July 1951, astanding joke among his subordinates was that Stone’s authority extended
only as far as the front door of his office, and even that was subject to debate. 58 Looking back on Stone’s sad two-year tenure as director of AFSA, one of his senior deputies, Captain Wesley Wright, said that
the decision to give the job to Stone in the first place “was a horrible thing to do.” 59
    Jack Gurin’s War
    Declassified documents make clear that AFSA’s legion of internal management woes, although serious, were the least of its
problems. From the moment it was born, AFSA inherited, as a declassified NSA history puts it, “a Soviet problem that was in
miserable shape.” 60
    AFSA had only one source of intelligence left that offered any insight into what was going on inside the Soviet Union: intercepts
of low-level, unencrypted Soviet administrative radio traffic and commercial tele grams, which were generally referred to
as “plaintext” within the Anglo-American intelligence communities. A declassified NSA historical report notes, “Out of this
devastation, Russian plaintext communications emerged as the principal source of intelligence on our primary Cold War adversary.” 61 Outside of plaintext, the only other source for information on what was going on behind the iron curtain came from Traffic
Analysis, where analysts studied the