The Secret Sentry Read Free Page A

last-minute efforts to convince the best and the brightest of the departing staff to stay on were to no avail. America’s
SIGINT establishment would need many years to make up for the loss of so much talent and intellectual firepower.
    The same evisceration was taking place at all of the army’s and navy’s listening posts. By December 1945, the army’s and navy’s
radio intercept efforts had shrunk to skeleton crews whose operational accomplishments were deteriorating rapidly. Even more
worrisome, the radio traffic that the two U.S. COMINT organizations could access plummeted, since most of the foreign military
communications traffic that the United States had been listening to was shifted from radio to landlines, and the volume of
foreign diplomatic message traffic dropped back to normal peacetime levels. 8
    There was now much less raw material for the few remaining American cryptanalysts to work on, which in turn led to a dramatic
decline in the number of foreign code and cipher systems that were being exploited. In particular, work on South American,
Balkan, and Chinese diplomatic codes and ciphers fell off sharply because of a lack of intercepts. Without the assistance
of the British, U.S. efforts to maintain continuity coverage of Middle Eastern and Near Eastern communications traffic would
have collapsed. By the end of 1945, the supply of radio intercepts had fallen to a point where code-breaking work had almost
come to a completestandstill, including the joint Anglo-American operation code-named Bourbon, the intercepting and decoding
of Soviet communications. 9
    The Customers Complain
    During the months after the end of the war, the U.S. Army and Navy COMINT organizations were not producing much in the way
of useful political intelligence. Among the few sensitive materials produced during this troubled time were decrypted telegrams
concerning foreign work on atomic energy, such as a September 27, 1945, French message mentioning Norwegian heavy water supplies
and a November 27, 1945, Chinese diplomatic message concerning Russian nuclear weapons research efforts; decrypted French
foreign intelligence service message traffic; and messages that revealed secret U.S. diplomatic activities around the world
that the British and other allies were not meant to be privy to, such as a December 2, 1945, Chinese diplomatic message concerning
the planned construction of an American air base in Saudi Arabia. 10
    Then there was the super-secret intercept program known as Operation Gold. In May 1946, two years before the creation of the
state of Israel, the U.S. Navy COMINT organization began intercepting the international telephone calls and international
cable traffic of Jewish agents in the United States and elsewhere who were engaged in raising money and buying arms for the
Jewish underground in Palestine. According to a former army intelligence official, the Gold intercepts proved to be highly
informative. “We knew who was shipping the arms, who was paying for them, who was being paid in this country, every illegal
thing that was going on in this country.” But the official added, “Because of politics, very little was ever done with [this
intelligence].” 11
    COMINT was also producing very little meaningful intelligence on foreign military targets. As of 1946, the Army Security Agency
(ASA) was reading the encrypted military communications of Argentina, Czechoslovaki a, France, Romania, Spain, and Yugo slavia.
Decrypts of Soviet military traffic were notable by their absence. 12
    By January 1946, the quantity and quality of the intelligence reporting coming from COMINT had fallen to such a low level
that the director of naval intelligence, Rear Admiral Thomas Inglis, wrote that “we have been getting disappointingly little
of real value from [communications intelligence] since VJ day.” 13
    Complaints from intelligence consumers about the dearth of intelligence coming from COMINT were rampant. For example, on