1-16-96. NYPaper: "Louis W. Tordella, 84, Who Helped Break Cerman Military Code in World War II." A mathematician who helped break Enigma, and later spent 16 years as the deputy director of the National Security Agency. An intelligence visionary who had helped create and shape NSA even before he became its deputy director in 1958, Dr. Tordella was regarded both as a pioneer in the development of ever more powerful and sophisticated computers to break enemy codes and as a master administrator who established a combined code-breaking operation and then ran it. Since decryption devices did not exist, he and his colleagues simply designed and built them, not only breaking the enemy codes but helping to lay the theoretical and practical groundwork for what has become a vast computer industry. TOR_del [For more on Tordella, see Bamford's "The Puzzle Palace."]