NSA Oil

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NYT, 5 April, 1996

Pentagon Spy Agency Bares Some Dusty Secret Papers

By Tim Weiner

Washington, April 4 -- The National Security Agency, the
Pentagon spy service that eavesdrops on global
communications, said today that it had declassified more
than 1.3 million pages of secret documents, some from
before World War I.

All the declassified material is more than 50 years old,
older than the agency itself, and represents a tiny
fragment of the billions of pages of Government documents
that have been kept secret on the grounds that their
release would damage national security. Agency officials
were at a loss to explain why these documents, now at the
National Archives, had remained secret for so long.

Among the documents declassified today is a January 1919
memorandum from CoL A. W. Bloor of the Army, a commander
in the American Expeditionary Force in France, explaining
the origin of the "code talkers," American Indian
soldiers who spoke in their native tongues to confound
enemy code breakers in World War I and World War II.
Their languages were largely unwritten and largely
unstudied by foreigners, and so constituted an instant
code translatable only by the speakers.

"The German was a past master at the art of 'Listening
In,' " on radio transmissions, the memorandum says. "It
was therefore necessary to code every message of
importance and coding and decoding took valuable time."
Then, Colonel Bloor wrote, he remembered that he had a
company of Indians in his regiment who among them spoke
26 languages or dialects, and that "there was hardly a
chance in a million" that the Germans could translate
them.

David Hatch, the National Security Agency's historian,
said Choctaws, Navajos, Comanches, Winnebagos, Pawnees,
Kiowas and Cherokees served as code talkers. In World War
II, he said, the Marine Corps used more than 400 Navajos
as communicators in the Pacific campaign. That story has
been popularized by Hollywood films, documentaries and
books.

Mr. Hatch said he could not explain why the documents
stayed secret for so long. The agency's archives run into
the billions of pages, and the agency, loath to disclose
anything concerning codes, has only begun to consider
declassifying documents in the past four years.

"We have so many pages and we've only been at it for a
few years," Mr. Hatch said. "The interesting thing to me
is that this is coming out. What was known only to
insiders is now becoming known to historians and
outsiders."

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WSJ, 5 April, 1996

Secret Cables of '43 And the Hiss Case

May I offer a distinction that may clarify a point in
Eric Breindel's March 14 editorial-page piece "New
Evidence in the Hiss Case?"

The matter deals with the newly released Soviet cables
dated from 1943 to the early Cold War, and intercepted
and solved by the National Security Agency and its
predecessors in a project called Venona. As Mr. Breindel
states, "The single most interesting document in the new
Venona batch is a March 30,1945, Washington-to-Moscow
report on an agent whose cover name was 'Ales.' The cable
was decrypted on Aug. 8, 1969, and the NSA glossary ...
explains that 'Ales' is 'probably Alger Hiss.' "

A distinction must be made between the test of the cables
and the identification of the individuals mentioned in
the text only by code name. The cables were
cryptanalyzed. The internal cross-checks in this work
make the likelihood of their being incorrectly solved all
but zero. This means that the code names are almost
certainly right. But the determination that a particular
code name represents a particular individual did not come
from cryptanalysis. It came from FBI field
investigations. I have no reason to question their
accuracy, but they stand on a different basis than
codebreaking. This is why NSA qualified the Ales=Hiss
identification with a "probably."

David Kahn, Great Neck, N.Y.

(Mr. Kahn was scholar in residence at the National
Security Agency in 1995.)

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