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! PGP key available by request, finger, or pgp-public-keys@io.com keyserver PGP key fingerprint: 1E E1 B8 6E 49 67 C4 19 8B F1 E4 9D F0 6D 68 4B