NSA museum now open, if you can find it

[Joe Thomas <jthomas@access.digex.net>]

A long article from today's paper -- I hope nobody minds the length.

From The Washington Post, Monday, January 24, 1994, page A1:

Only Sleuths Can Find This Museum

By Ken Ringle
Washington Post Staff Writer

In the shadowy world of U.S. intelligence agencies, the National Security
Agency has always been the most clandestine of all.

Some 20,000 people work at the mirror-windowed complex at Fort Meade south
of Baltimore-Washington International Airport, but until 1989 there wasn't
even a sign in front of the buildings.  The 1952 executive order that
created the agency was itself classified.  For years it was a federal
crime even to say it existed.

Next to the NSA, the CIA is Geraldo Rivera.

Therefore, as might be expected, when the NSA opened its own museum
recently, it did things a little differently.  It held the first opening
in July and didn't tell the public.  It held a second ribbon-cutting last
month for the public but didn't tell the press.  (Officials reportedly
worried that news photos might de-anonymize some NSA cryptographer snapped
nosing around the exhibits.)

When a reporter heard of the museum recently from a source close to the
NSA, he was able to locate it only after an extended series of calls to
the agency, all fielded by people answering with their telephone extension
number and who, when asked for a given person, would reply firmly the "the
name does not compute" or "we do not provide directory assistance."

"People tend to be a bit sensitive around here," said Stephen J.
McAnallen, a surprisingly good natured man finally located under the
oxymoronic title of NSA public affairs officer.  "It sort of comes with
the territory."

With McAnallen's help, the National Cryptologic Museum was ultimately
discovered in a defunct motel at the end of a crumbling road behind a
Shell station just off Route 32 from the Baltimore-Washington Parkway.  It
would be a highly anonymous location were it not surrounded by a high
chain-link fence with barbed wire on top.

The museum is the latest step in the gradual demythologizing of the agency
-- a process former director and until last week Defense
Secretary-designate Bobby Ray Inman started more than 10 years ago, said
David A. Hatch, 51, a Vandyke-bearded NSA historian waiting inside.  "Some
fairly detailed books and articles" about the long-secret agency had
appeared by then, and while many in the agency remain almost pathological
in their passion for anonymity, "people have discovered the world won't
crumble if the words 'cryptology' or 'sigint' appear in print."

Sigint -- intelligence gleaned from the interception and decryption of
government and military signals -- is, of course, what the NSA is all
about.  And as exhibits in what once was the motel's bar indicate, its
origins are as old as coded writings and invisible ink.

The museum displays two books on cryptography dating from the 16th
century, as well as a small but elegant wooden cipher machine, found in
West Virginia and dating from around 1800, that may have originated in the
fertile mind of Thomas Jefferson.

Other exhibits show how sigint multibled during the Civil War, when Union
and Confederate signal corpsmen read each other's wig-wagged troop
movement signals and tapped each other's telegraph lines.  But the bulk of
the museum is devoted to sigint's boom years -- those between World War I
and 1974, when publication of F. W. Winterbotham's book, "The Ultra
Secret" finally disclosed the greatest and most closely held secret of
World War II.

An improbable combination of Polish foresight, British genius, American
technology and German hubris permitted the Allied forces to read German
and Japanese radio signals for most of the war.  It was a process so
secret it remained unmentioned by historians a generation after the
surrender of the Axis forces.  But it was so vital that most historians
now recognize it as the key ingredient in the Allied victory, particularly
at such crucial moments as the Battle of the Atlantic against German
U-boats; the Battle of Midway, which halted Japan's advance in the Pacific;
and the invasion of Normandy.

At the heart of the code-breaking struggle was the storied Enigma cipher
machine, an ingenious electro-mechanical typewriter fitted with a system
of adjustable rotors designed to produce a cipher so complex it would defy
human solution.

The Germans considered their Enigma-based codes unbreakable.  And so they
might have been had not some Polish cryptologists managed to reproduce an
Enigma machine from documents sold them by an embittered German
aristocrat whose fortunes had reduced him to a signal clerk.

After the invasion of Poland, the replica Enigma was smuggled to England,
where British code-breakers at Bletchley Park, laboring round-the-clock
under the legendary mathematical genius Alan Turing, managed to devise a
pioneering electronic computer called "the bombe," designed to exhaust and
therefore solve the mathematical possibilities of Enigma rotor settings. 
The rest is, quite literally, history.

Museum curator Earl J. Coates, 54, a Civil War buff who bears an unnerving
resemblance to Robert E. Lee, appears mildly miffed that NSA's own bombe
was loaned to the Smithsonian's "Information Age" exhibit before his own
museum was up and running.  The NSA museum, however, is awash in in Enigma
machines -- Luftwaffe Enigmas, U-boat Enigmas and even an Enigma that
visitors can try themselves, turning "The quick brown fox jumped over the
lazy dog's back" into something like "kcq rnfzk jhjyb ecl wvdimo psta vxd
uerg ybwe kcfx."

Also on display is the U.S. Sigma machine, the only cipher machine of
World War II whose codes were never broken.

Intriguing as the hardware of cryptology is, the human stories of sigint
inevitably steal the show -- for, as the exhibits relate, the NSA's
forefathers had a wonderful weirdness about them.

Take William F. Friedman, dean of American cryptologists.  A 1914 graduate
of Cornell with a major in genetics, he was recruited after college by a
wealthy eccentric named George Fabyan who had a 500-acre estate near
Geneva, Ill., devoted to private research in acoustics, chemistry,
genetics and ciphers.

As a geneticist, Friedman was supposed to be working on the improvement of
the estate's livestock, but instead he kept drifting over the the cipher
department, which was hip-deep in researching whether Francis Bacon had
really written the works of William Shakespeare.

During World War I, Friedman entered the U.S. Army, where his genius with
codes quickly became apparent and where over the next 50 years he led the
evolution of cipher technology from pencils to machines and helped found
the NSA.

One of his colleagues for a time was Herbert O. Yardley, a former Indiana
railroad telegrapher commissioned during World War I to head the first
formally organized cryptographic unit in the Army.

After the war, during which his unti in 18 months read some 11,000
messages in 579 cryptographic systems, he argued successfully that the
nation's new-found code-breaking expertise should be retained.  The result
was an NSA predecessor called "the Black Chamber," funded by the Army and
State Department to monitor diplomatic and military messages from other
countries.  The Black Chamber was disbanded in 1929; according to legend,
Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson had decided the "gentlemen don't read
each other's mail."

Embittered by what he considered the ingratitude of his government,
Yardley retaliated by publishing a book about the Black Chamber in 1931
that created a diplomatic sensation and alerted the Japanese that we'd
been reading their codes.  A second Yardley book was seized by the
government before publication.  Undeterred, Yardley went on writing,
authoring a spy novel called "The Blonde Countess" -- made into a movie
starring Rosalind Russell -- and a how-to-win book called "The Education
of a Poker Player," which sold 100,000 copies in 14 printings.  But he was
never forgiven by his former colleagues in the government for going public
about sigint.

There is inevitable regret in learning at the museum that such characters
as Friedman and Yardley have been largely succeeded in the code business
by less colorful cryptologic individuals like the 1983 Cray XMP-24
mainframe supercomputer on display.  It has two processors, each of which
is capable of 210 megaflops, plus it boasts eight megabytes of main
memory, a 9-5 nanosecond clock cycle time and 45 miles of internal wiring
--- but somehow it just isn't the same.

Actually, the Cray XMP was itself retired last year after a mere decade of
service, superseded by electronic whiz boxes of ever greater and, need we
say it, darker ambition and capability.

"It's no secret that computer security is a growth industry," Hatch sort
of explains.

Coates says the artifacts on display are merely the tip of the NSA
iceberg, history-wise, and others will be rotated onto and off the museum
floor from time to time.

"As NSA historians, it's natural for us to want to tell our story," he
says.  "Now that some of these constraints are off, we'll get to tell it."

But not all of it, of course.  "You're not going to learn any current
secrets here," Hatch says.

He and Coates concede reluctantly that the sigint business may appear to
have lost some of its luster with the Cold War over and the Evil Empire
dead.  But they point out, as Hatch says, that "the same people are still
out there" in the world and, they believe, need to be monitored.  Indeed,
one of the museum's missions appears to be a quiet reminder the danger
isn't always found in obvious places.

Prominently displayed among the exhibits is a carved wooden seal of the
United States presented to Ambassador Averrell Harriman for his office in
the U.S. Embassy in Moscow by grateful Russian schoolchildren.  Years
later it was found to have a microphone hidden inside.

The National Cryptologic Museum, reached by exiting the
Baltimore-Washington Parkway east on Route 32 and heading behind the Shell
station, is open from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday.  Some at NSA
say you can reach it at 301-688-5849.  Others at NSA deny that number exists.

[end article]

I'll try to get out there some time and give my impressions of it.  Wish
it were open weekends, though.

Joe
--
Joe Thomas <jthomas@access.digex.net>           Say no to the Wiretap Chip!
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