The Secret Sentry Read Free Page B

December
22, 1945, former U.S. Army chief of staff General George Marshall went to China in a foredoomed effort to broker some sort
of deal between Chiang Kaishek and Mao Tse-tung. No useful decrypts were available to offer any insight into the thorny problems
confronting Marshall, and only months later did the army begin producing the first useful translations of intercepted Chinese
Nationalist and Chinese Communist communications. 14
    Yet the harshest criticism coming from customers was over the paucity of intelligence about what was going on inside the Soviet
Union. A Senior U.S. Army officer who visited Eu rope in the spring of 1946 was told that it was unlikely that Washington
would get any kind of meaningful advance warning of a Soviet attack on Western Eu rope because of a near total lack of reliable
intelligence about “the main enemy.” 15
    The BRUSA Agreement
    Thus the American COMINT establishment desperately needed help from somewhere in order to remain a viable intelligence provider.
As it turned out, relief for the battered U.S. COMINT community was to come from across the Atlantic.
    On March 5, 1946, former prime minister Winston Churchill, at Truman’s invitation, delivered his famous speech in Fulton,
Missouri, in which he warned, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across
the continent.” The “informal” war time arrangements for cooperation between American and British COMINT organizations were
formalized on the same day. At almost the exact same time that Churchill was delivering his memorable speech, in a heavily
guarded conference room in downtown Washington, D.C., a group of Senior American and British intelligence officials were signing
a seven-page Top Secret intelligence-sharing agreement called the British–United States Communication Intelligence Agreement,
which was referred to within the U.S. intelligence community as the BRUSA Agreement. This may be one of the most important
and longest-lasting agreements among foreign intelligence services ever conceived. The product of six months of intense and
often acrimonious negotiations, the agreement recognized that given the “disturbed” condition of the world, the American and
British COMINT organizations needed to continue to work together in order to monitor the broad array of new threats, especially
the Soviet Union. 16
    In its final form, rather than being a blueprint for action, BRUSA was a general statement of principles meant to “govern
the relations” of the United States, Britain, and the British Dominions “in communication intelligence matters only.” 17 Contrary to what has previously been written about it, it was strictly a bilateral agreement between the United States and
Great Britain thatstandardized the day-to-day collaboration between the two countries’ SIGINT organizations. There was to
be a complete and free exchange of all forms of communications intelligence “product” between the U.S. organizations and the
British cryptologic organization, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). Both the U.S. Army and Navy COMINT organizations
were required under the terms of the BRUSA Agreement to send one copy of every finished COMINT report (excepting those deemed
to be specifically exempt from the intelligence-sharing agreement) to GCHQ, and vice versa. There was also a sidebar agreement
between the Americans and the British for cryptanalytic cooperation on selected intelligence problems, such as the continuation
of the joint efforts involving Russian and French ciphers. Other key provisions of the BRUSA Agreement established procedures
governing the two nations’ handling, safekeeping, and exchange of COMINT. 18
    America’s other English-speaking war time SIGINT allies— Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—were referenced, but not included
as signatories. BRUSA recognized that thesenations, as British Dominions, would continue to operate under the overall