Code Warriors: NSA's Code Breakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union

by Stephen Budiansky

A sweeping, in-depth history of NSA, whose famous “cult of silence” has left the agency shrouded in mystery for decades

The National Security Agency was born out of the legendary codebreaking programs of World War II that cracked the famed Enigma machine and other German and Japanese codes, thereby turning the tide of Allied victory. In the postwar years, as the United States developed a new enemy in the Soviet Union, our intelligence community found itself targeting not soldiers on the battlefield, but suspected spies, foreign leaders, and even American citizens. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, NSA played a vital, often fraught and controversial role in the major events of the Cold War, from the Korean War to the Cuban Missile Crisis to Vietnam and beyond.

In Code Warriors, Stephen Budiansky—a longtime expert in cryptology—tells the fascinating story of how NSA came to be, from its roots in World War II through the fall of the Berlin Wall. Along the way, he guides us through the fascinating challenges faced by cryptanalysts, and how they broke some of the most complicated codes of the twentieth century. With access to new documents, Budiansky shows where the agency succeeded and failed during the Cold War, but his account also offers crucial perspective for assessing NSA today in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations. Budiansky shows how NSA’s obsession with recording every bit of data and decoding every signal is far from a new development; throughout its history the depth and breadth of the agency’s reach has resulted in both remarkable successes and destructive failures.

Featuring a series of appendixes that explain the technical details of Soviet codes and how they were broken, this is a rich and riveting history of the underbelly of the Cold War, and an essential and timely read for all who seek to understand the origins of the modern NSA.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Espionage, Politics, Science, Technology, Audiobook

416 pages, Hardcover

First published June 14, 2016

About the author

Historian and journalist Stephen Budiansky is the author of twelve books about military history, science, and nature.

His latest book is The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox, which chronicles the struggles of five courageous men in the post-Civil War South as they battled a rising tide of terrorist violence aimed at usurping the newly won rights of the freedmen.

Reviews

[Igor Ljubuncic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another excellent book by Mr. Stephen.

He is truly the finest (military) historian, and it shows. Stephen also happens to have a strong love for cryptography, and he continues his earlier works here. In fact, you should read his earlier works, which include Battle of Wits, the complete story of WWII codebreaking, as well as Blackett's War, on U-boats and science.

Here, the story picks up where the previous two books ended. Even early on during WWII, the Americans and the British decided that they should extend their espionage and codebreaking efforts against the Soviets. We get a glimpse of the pioneer efforts, which touch on the Bletchley Park project and legendary Alan Turing, but then we also get introduced to Friedman, Sinkov, Rosen, and other giants of this era.

Then, the Cold War stars in earnest, and the early signal intelligence collections work eventually become the big and powerful organization that is NSA today. It is fascinating reading into its birth and early history, the colorful battles of bureaucracy and politics, the internal scheming, and how different leaders of the agency shaped its future. As always, Stephen weaves a beautiful tale, full of anectodes, personal stories, and cool factoids. Like the fact IBM charged bazillions for its consultancy services, which isn't at all different from the IT sector today. Or the hundred little ways the Soviets used their (inferior) technology to fight the West, mostly by resorting to ingenuity and tricks that a technologically superior adversary like the USA does not naturally embrace.

Stephen focuses on the history - although the bulk of declassified documents allow him to paint only a partial picture of the 50-60s, with focus on the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the delusions of military and political leaders, and the vital importance of real-time information in the air supremacy battles against the Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Soviet pilots. Then, of course we also have the Berlin War and the Cuban missiles crises, and how these were difused through smart use of intelligence. In general, the main focus on SIGINT shifts from codebreaking, which soon proven out to be remarkably impossible (even the 50s Soviet ciphers were foolproof), but more around preventing nuclear blunders due to political posturing. WWIII was mostly averted by NSA providing the American leaders with timely information of whether the Soviets had genuine military intentions or they were just bluffing. Cool stuff.

But then, a mathophille that he is, Stephen also tells us about the concepts of language higher statistics, probabilities, messages in depth, and many other fancy ideas that make this field so engaging. The book has five appendices, each giving you a teaser of the enormous scientific background behind cryptography.

I just wish the book was longer...

Anyway, yet another gem. You can't go wrong with Budiansky. And if you love science and mathematics, you will enjoy this work even more.

Splendidsky.

Igor

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review originally posted at Book of Bogan

I guess when reading any non-fiction work one needs to consider whether there are any hidden agendas going on behind the scenes, and evaluate the material being presented accordingly. I guess with a book about the classified world of the NSA one can only expect some sort of shenanigans.

Looking at the cover the book promises to be a look at NSA's code breakers and the intelligence war against the Soviet Union. I suppose with a lionising title like that, I should have been wary of the author's point of view.eedless to say, the hand-wringing diatribe against the actions of Edward Snowden at the start of the book does an excellent job of revealing the author as something of an NSA apologist.

Budiansky does a thorough job of tracking the history of the organisation, including its roots in the Second World War's code-breaking efforts against the Japanese and Germans... and a few other countries besides. He then exhaustively covers the - apparently largely unsuccessful efforts at code breaking during the Cold War period.

If you used this book as your sole source of information, you may get the idea that the NSA is a poor little agency who can do no wrong, is beset on all sides by rival agencies, budget problems, technical problems, spies, liberal politicians... Sure there were intelligence failures, but ultimately it was someone else's fault, or a resourcing issue, or a litany of other reasons.

Now I enjoy a good spy story as much as the next person, particularly real stories... but this is far from an interesting tale, and while it may be of interest with a particular interest in the history cryptography, and how the little intelligence agency that could would come to be responsible for some of the most horrendous warrantless wiretapping, and mass surveillance of the American public and the world at large...

No, wait, you don't get that, because apart from its early swipe at the NSA's critics in the beginning, the author conveniently ends the tale with the fall of the Soviet Union. I get that this is the stated timeframe for the book, but given that it was released in 2016, a more holistic look may have been warranted.

Code Warriors is a problematic book to be sure. One for fans of cryptography, and or those with an interest in history, just remember to keep a critical mind.

[John Devlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The great triumph of breaking the enigma code is here. The brilliance of men like Alan Turing is on display.

What comes next is some interesting takes on code breaking, some tit for tat one ups man ship between the US and the Soviets but what is most striking is the parallels with Edward Snowden.

The NSA is a govt agency and as such is prone to the sclerotic, power seeking, and cover your ass mentality that inevitably develops.

Snowden’s laments are that the spy agencies are hacking firmware and scooping up all the phone calls, while using the cover of declaring everything top secret to protect the Intel agencies from accountability.

Code breakers shows that these same considerations were present forty years before. NSA was placing back doors in the creation of code machines sold to other countries, was reading all the intl telegrams that came through the US, and using the cover of need to know to dodge blame.

It was an astounding bit of history repeating itself.

Far more ironically, in ‘78 in response to the Church committee’s revelations of widespread abuse in the Intel community, the Fisa courts are set up.
Today, a man is on trial bc the fbi used his unsupported allegations to get several fisa warrants. These fisa warrants were lies paid for by democrats, weaponized by the fbi, and then lied about to the courts, the media, and the American people.

Finally, code breakers analyzes the conflict or contradiction between an open, free society engaging in deep skullduggery.
There’s no answer to this conundrum but the latest fbi infamies demonstrates that a domestic police force should not be given intl responsibilities that inevitably clashes with cherished freedoms at homes.
Tie this to the deepstate, msm, and politics and it’s a recipe for error and terror.

[Scott Hitchcock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative. If I had to do it again I would have read not listened to this. The narrator was good but there were a lot of times I wished I was reading so I could re-read a line and/or look something up on the net quickly.

[Jerome Otte · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dense but nuanced and well-written history of the NSA during the Cold War. Budiansky’s gasp of the story is firm and his writing is clear and witty.

Budiansky starts with a look at the state of code breaking from 1943 and ends with the late 1970s, when computer and satellite advances began to dominate. He covers various intelligence successes and failures, the NSA’s role and difficulties within the US intelligence community, and the agency’s transformation from an academic “Sleepy Hollow” to a more established frontline agency. Budiansky, of course, covers the NSA’s aggressive and successful effort against Soviet targets, and shows how heavily NSA efforts were targeted against Berlin, an effort that remained even after the Cold War officially ended. Budiansky is great at covering the human element. At the same time, his work is dispassionate and doesn’t romanticize or embellish any of the stories he has to tell. He is also great at explaining the technology in ways that don’t bore the reader, and how the NSA’s product was utilized (or ignored) by policymakers.

Budiansky contrasts the agency’s success at uncovering the state of the Soviet Union’s internal affairs with the inefficiency produced by its huge budget and limited oversight. He covers the effect of turf wars and the NSA’s struggle to analyze the huge amounts of data it collected. He also discusses the NSA’s irregular oversight and details the agency’s more controversial episodes, such as SHAMROCK, MINARET, the interception of international telegrams from America, its involvement in the Huston Plan, its surveillance of civil rights leaders, reporters, Muhammad Ali, and members of Congress, and how all of these excesses led to the creation of FISA. Budiansky also describes the cover-up intelligence that disproved the Johnson administration’s account of the Tonkin Gulf incident.

NSA’s ultimate Cold War achievement, Budiansky argues, was its ability to provide accurate and timely intelligence on the whereabouts of Soviet conventional and nuclear forces, while its greatest failure was apparent in US policymakers’ over reliance on SIGINT. Budiansky also notes how NSA often bought into the fiction that SIGINT was information rather than intelligence, and how it often passed on raw SIGINT to policymakers who did not always understand it.

The book’s only problems are minor. At one point, during the section on Korea, Budiansky writes that “Truman had become so concerned by intelligence pointing to possible Chinese intervention that on October 15 he flew to Wake Island to personally meet with his commander and discuss the situation.” In reality, of course, the entire meeting was basically just a political stunt cooked up by Truman’s aides, and one that neither Truman nor his cabinet liked. Neither Truman or MacArthur took the meeting seriously.

A lively, well-researched and interesting work.

[Paul Conroy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inside look at the formation of the NSA, it’s growth and rivalry with the CIA, and the fact that most successful espionage was not via enemy decryption, but via bugging and development of enemy informants.

[Byrne · Rating 3 out of 5]

First half is great. The second half is a catalogue of high-profile disasters and bureaucracy. I guess we need to wait another couple decades for the juicy stuff to get leaked and declassified.

Probably the right policy is: don't bother reading a history of spying unless it was written after everybody involved has wrapped up their deathbed confessions.

[Mohd · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yes it give immense knowledge about code encryption and decryption. How a silent war happening within the public domain and no one knows what the hell is going on in that giant building.

[Luke Paulsen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Every geek worth the name must have some awareness of World War II's rich code-breaking history-- Enigma, Bletchley Park, and Alan Turing in England, the U.S.'s similar cracking of Japanese codes in the Pacific, and the origin of primitive "computers" as code-breaking aids. It's a classic tale of the triumph of ingenuity creating a massive advantage. In Code Warriors, Stephen Budiansky asks if similar stories can be told about U.S. signals intelligence efforts during the Cold War. It's a promising question-- after all, the Cold War was if anything even more dependent on information, intrigue, and espionage-- but unfortunately, after several hundred pages, the answer turns out to be "No." That's partly because the US agency responsible, the famously secretive and invasive NSA, won't say exactly what it did or didn't do during those years; but it's also because Budiansky doesn't succeed in making the available information into a compelling story.

The most interesting chapters of Code Warriors are the first few-- recapping the World War II code-breaking successes and some initial success breaking Russian diplomatic codes in the late 1940's. After that the narrative gets bogged down in tales of bureaucracy, inter-agency politics, technical frustration, and the occasional embarrassing exposure of NSA secrets. (Edward Snowden, as it turns out, was merely the latest in a long series of traitors who ended up working with the Russians.) The appendices that describe the actual code-breaking process in more detail are decently interesting to those with a bit of math background, like me. But codebreaking is hard-- nearly impossible, if the enemy is doing things right-- and the last chapter reveals that between 1950 and 1980 the NSA only cracked one major Soviet code, and it still won't say what it was or how it was accomplished.

Otherwise the book mostly chronicles a series of expensive failures, institutional calcification, and the decline of mathematical codebreaking as a major intelligence resource. It's not the riveting techno-spy tale that the title would suggest, and even what story there is falls victim to Budiansky's undisciplined writing. (He often slips into moralizing about the US's and NSA's bad behavior during the Cold War, rather than actually describing what happened and why.) In the end I found Code Warriors to be somewhat informative, but never all that interesting. Too bad.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

Budiansky does a good job explaining NSA's role in America's intelligence-gathering effort, giving us a fair mixture of the historical successes and failures. It would be good if the clear successes exceeded by orders of magnitude the clear failures, but that seems not the case. And we look here, really, only at some murky history of the agency as its secretiveness keeps us from gaining insights into more modern failures. The more recent "Snowden failure" would be one that the agency has probably papered over to the extent it could due to its nature.

The opacity of the agency's funding picture ought to be of further concern, along with the personalities who have run the agency and kept the public at a distant remove from even the most mundane of its operation. This work was somewhat friendlier to the agency than others where I have been convinced that crimes were often committed in our names.

[Russell · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Code Warriors" gives a well-researched and -written history of the explosive growth of cryptanalysis during World War II by both the British and US militaries. After a brief lull following war's end, both agencies continued to grow, especially the NSA, which by 1970 had close to 100,000 employees supported by a $1 billion a year budget. Budiansky points out that while, as far as we know, NSA never again had the capability to routinely read encrypted Soviet communications, the shift to signals intelligence and traffic analysis yielded important results that both stabilized Cold War tensions, but resulted in multiple large errors, in particular America's increased involvement in Vietnam in the 1960's, and the invasion of Iraq by George W. Bush's administration, both of which were based on mistaken, perhaps deliberately misconstrued, intelligence products. A nicely done book if you are interested in the development of cryptological technology.

[Ken Mattes · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating account of how the “signals intelligence” efforts in World War II, the breaking of German and Japanese encoded communications, evolved into the National Security Council (NSA).
It describes the bureaucratic battles between the Branches of the military fore control of information and influence in the political halls of power. It describes the major errors of the attempts to break the codes used by Russia.
A nice overview of how coded messages an are created and broken.
Worth the effort.

[George Siehl · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a detailed history of American code breaking in the 20rh century from World War I through the collapse of the Soviet Union. The focus of the book is the National Security Agency which holds the primary responsibility for protecting America's secure communications and seeking to crack those of other nations, particularly, though not exclusively, those hostile to American interests. The story includes outstanding historic successes, frustrating failures, dominating personalities, the rise of technology, and the expenditure of lots and lots of money. The questions it raises focus on the costs versus the benefits of cryptology now that it is long past the time of pencil and paper solutions to breaking codes, but also the ethical and moral factors involved in a government program veiled in secrecy. That secrecy versus an enemy is necessary to be successful, but here the lack of internal government knowledge and control is highlighted as an issue. The several American security institutions, the Defense and State Departments, CIA, NSA, individual military service branches, and others are shown here as highly competitive bureaucracies placing their own interests above a unified, cooperative intelligence effort.

Computers have given the code makers a disproportionate advantage over the code breakers so that current high security systems essentially cannot be read. This has led to finding alternate windows into enemy capabilities and actions. These include interception of conversations and other uncoded communications, the identification of origins and destinations of coded communications (traffic analysis), emissions by electronic devices ranging from electric typewriters to radars (Elint). The several security units are depicted as competing to exploit these opportunities, often duplicating efforts in the process. The book provides numerous examples.

The author has researched his topic extensively, citing both internal and external critical studies and reports of shortcomings over the years. He also identifies a number of instances of treason and successful Soviet espionage that caused greater or lesser damage to American cryptology. He notes several times that the driving force behind the efforts he describes is the haunting concern to avoid another Pearl Harbor, the need to know what threats other nations may pose to our safety.

Given this rationale, the book is critical of NSA, but not irrational in its argumentation.

[Maria · Rating 3 out of 5]

National Security Agency became infamous recently because of the leaks of Edward Snowden. If you want to read more about that... this isn't your book. This is a history of the NSA from World War II to the Fall of the Berlin Wall. The problem with classified agencies is that a lot of the history is still classified, except for the huge breaches and black eyes that come to light when they are hacked, their employees defect or some other news crisis arises.

Why I started this book: Cool title, plus the Spy Museum in Washington D.C. was one of my favorites and I was eager to learn more about trade craft, etc.

Why I finished it: Okay, turns out that the NSA has been around longer than I thought. And like most professions they are faced with the quantity vs. quality question. They tried for both, and just for spice added legal and illegal. It was very interesting to learn about their funding of IBM, but it was super frustrating to see their silo-ed information and unaccountability. I want to know how this changed post 9/11... if it changed.

[Reid · Rating 3 out of 5]

While informative and interesting on the whole, this book runs into a (retrospectively) obvious challenge with writing a history of the NSA: there's not a lot of public information out there to work with. While Budiansky doesn't come out and admit it, it does seem clear that most of his material is drawn from the NSA's failures during the Cold War because those are the only public NSA records available. You get the impression reading this book that Russians were far outmatching the American intelligence apparatus, but only because most publicly-known stories about the NSA's activities were, by definition, failures of the agency to keep its own secrets.
That all being said, there are some good explanations of mid-century, pre-digital cryptography here, complete with more technical appendices for those who want them. The anecdotes regarding the lengths American and Soviet spies went to in order to collect and analyze SIGINT alone make the book an enjoyable read.

[Drew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Certainly a fine piece of work by a talented researcher and writer. That said, it could be called Bureaucracy Warriors with all the time the author spends describing the structure of the various organizations involved. This is really more of a history of the NSA and some of the key players more than an account of tradecraft or would-be espionage. As a result, there are many boring sections describing the pitfalls of policy, and fewer parts with interesting stories of Cold War spy craft.

[Stephen Harrison · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting history of the NSA. It gets bogged down in the math and technology, which isn't surprising, but was difficult to follow for a non-STEMer like me, but overall it does a good job of showing how the NSA grew in stature and what problems it faced in fulfilling its mission, drawing in good personnel and navigating DC politics. It's main point is that the NSA wasn't particularly effective during the Cold War because of technical limitations, politics and how it fit into the intelligence community, but it did its main job of keeping the USG informed of Soviet capabilities, which helped prevent WW3.

The strength of the book is showing how, after a "golden age" of code breaking in WWII, the NSA struggled with new unbreakable codes that the USSR was using. It almost gave up on actually breaking codes and relied on uncoded message and signal traffic analysis. Nevertheless, that became quite effective at understanding procedures of foreign governments, which helped understand, and occasionally predict, their actions.

The book also looks at how the NSA with the politics of Washington. It grew from just providing information to providing its own analysis, a prerogative that the CIA guarded jealously. In addition, the DOD, under whose umbrella the NSA worked, tried to keep SIGINT as its own territory and so minimized NSA programs. The fact that most NSA leaders were ex-military only promoted the Pentagon's power to undermine the NSA.

It also showed that its information was often misused politically. Nixon wanted to use it to spy on his political enemies. This didn't happen, not because of scruples in NSA, but because J. Edgar Hoover thought domestic spying was the sole purview of the FBI. The Reagan administration straight up doctored some intercepts of a Soviet fighter just before it shot down a passenger jet. The doctored version were released to the media to make it seem like the Soviets didn't try to communicate but cold-bloodedly murdered everyone on the plane.

He details several failures of the NSA, usually because of the political situation in DC. It had conclusive information that the Gulf of Tonkin incidents in 1964 were being substantially inflated in importance, but was restricted from offering its own analysis to the Secretary of Defense, who thought he could serve as his own analyst and had already made up his mind on the issue. He also details a spy boat captured by the North Koreans, causing serious harm to NSA's efforts to spy on North Korea and the Soviets. The ship was captured mainly because SIGINT was given such a low priority by the navy. It had an incompetent captain, muddled chain of command and no support, which allowed the North Koreans to take the ship and crew relatively easily.

While the failures seem to outweigh the successes, he does show that there were substantial successes. Most important was being able to track MiGs by their communication, giving US pilots more warning of an impending clash. Also, as mentioned earlier, it was largely successful at understanding Soviet military capabilities, including the fact that the "missile gap" was actually in the US favor rather than the Soviets.

My only major criticisms of the book are: 1) it goes into much too much detail on the math of code-breaking (at least for me). 2)You can't see the forest for the trees. He tells some good stories, but I didn't get a lot of his main ideas until the conclusion because I didn't see how they fit together in themes. The conclusion, however, is very good at fixing that.

[John Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Code Warriors, by Stephen Budiansky; Alfred A. Knopf: New York; $30.00



The arts and sciences needed for codes and code breaking are as old as man himself. The secret world they augur is one of mystery, but as Stephen Budiansky points out, one of law as well. America's secret intelligence war against the Soviet Union was fought not by lawless agents behind the scenes, but by a disciplined, dedicated agency, the National Security Agency, or NSA. Budiansky is especially qualified to present this case, because he was foreign and security correspondent for no less than US News and World Report magazine, not to mention author, speaker, and academic cryptologist himself.

We follow the NSA through decades of its history, beginning in the midst of World War II, before it was organized from the various services' signals intelligence units. Significant events such as early codes broken in post war Europe, to monitoring techniques and their evolution over the years, will satisfy the most arcane student of this subject. But he also writes with a verve and true enthusiasm for his subject which comes across in a lively, thought provoking, and informative manner for the layman.

We find for instance a remarkable panoply of secret activities detected as a result of the NSA's efforts. Of curse, because the agency is so powerful and helpful in the defense of the United States, it was itself targeted by espionage. Several of its personnel were targeted, little surprise in the intelligence personnel 'population boom' in the era shortly after the Korean War and subsequent Cold War confrontations. The story of the incredible Walker 'family of spies' is just one of the astounding tales revealed here. On a strategic scale, it was able to provide factual information to our Presidents on a host of questionable conflicts...from the Soviet Union's missile program, to middle eastern conflicts, to Asian flare ups, and many others. This broad, world based activity was needed to prevent war, as war could mean the end of civilization. Budiansky is not only a reporter of successes. He tells in great depth how the Tonkin Resolution, which led to our involvement in Vietnam, came about. We follow from the aspect of what information was available for LBJ to use in his decision making, to how that information impacted the national decisions which came about.

All in all, a good book for anyone interested in the technical world of electronic intelligence. Here is how it worked and what it means. ln light of the revelations by Edward Snowden, which Budiansky also addresses, we learn how such an agency can be a factor for our future as a nation of laws, not men. Informative, thoughtful, and wise, Budiansky makes the NSA understandable.

[Jurij Fedorov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pro

It's a very detailed and well-researched study/audiobook of codebreakers in mainly USA. But England is also brought up quite a bit and Nazi and USSR codebreakers are described also. There are a ton of anecdotes, stories and especially many mini biographies. The whole book is just a ton of small stories one after another up to about the 70's. After that there are a few stories but we don't hear much about the computer age or post USSR NSA spying. Just the modern NSA spying alone could have been 10 books by itself. And once you learn the history of NSA you will understand how utterly disgusting and immoral the agency is. It's not like any typical Western government agency. They have a corrupt and destructive story where human lives were considered cheap and even today they seem to have this mean essence and strive. I don't trust them one bit after reading this book. CIA also had a negative history too, though not nearly as bad. At least they seemed more goal oriented and their negative outcomes were largely failures or missteps. NSA was just constantly striving for power destroying everything in its way. They often didn't even produce good info. Yet they constantly told the politicians that they were essential but couldn't reveal more and then demanded more money.

It's a book full of failures. This is the focus. All agencies constantly screwed up. USSR seemed way better at the spy game than Americans. USSR easily got spies and double spies into USA and even often paid them very little or nothing. USA on the other hand largely didn't use extremely functional spies but instead used various technologies that all constantly failed or were easily uncovered. Technological spying is very expensive and hard. So technological spying seems much more expensive and often pointless and dysfunctional. One single American FBI agent handing info to USSR could supply them more info than hundreds of machines could for Americans. Overall all this machinery focus in USA was largely just agencies demanding more money and were never required to produce concrete results. Today the NSA technology at least produces some results as it's used in Americans they can't defend their own info. But I'm not sure Americans are winning the spy war against Russians and the Chinese. As they have a more direct approach to it.

Con

Overall this is not an easy, simple or always engaging read. I get that this is spectacular work by the author. But the jump through periods makes it hard to get into. Then it has hundreds of characters and tons of small stories. And constantly the machines are explained in detail so that we know what each codebreaking machine does and how. But I have no chance of understanding how this stuff actually works. There is no visual video illustration so he just explains a ton of codes and numbers but yet I'm more perplexed now than before I read the book. I understand no codebreaking machine at all. I need to see it. Maybe play around with it in 3D.

With all these technical explanations and jumping between agencies, countries and years it makes it a hard read. It's still fascinating for sure but I've already forgotten like 95% of the book just after reading it. After a month I'll remember 1% because there is no one story to remember. Maybe a focus on one single period would have been better? Or one single agency? At any rate it needs a documentary and a ton of videos explaining each codebreaking machine.

It's between 3 and 5 stars. I definitely don't want to read this one again because the technical stuff is just boring. But if you remove the technical stuff it's a collection of cool stories that are pretty much always fun and action focused. Lots of war, deaths, imprisonments, and conflicts.

Conclusion

It's a fine book to read. But the technical details and period jumps make it hard to remember and understand fully. It's for all people but it will be a bit hard to get through at times even though it's never boring. I just don't feel like it has one single plot.

I think that by far the best part about it is the focus on USSR and Stalin. It's direct and brutal in how is describes the regime and the USSR spying game is truly impressive and way less clunky and expensive than what Americans were trying to do. So just for that alone it's more than worth a read. You seldom see such direct depictions of evil socialist regimes.

[Walter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Secrets! It is a curse that nations need secrets to achieve their national goals.

Secrets! It is a curse that nations need secrets to achieve their national goals.

This book explores SIGINT (signal intelligence) in the United States from World War II to the NSA in the Vietnam War... it is limited to what is current state because that information has not been declassified yet.

My mother was a Code Breaker at Arlington Hall during World War II largely because she spoke Slavic languages fluently. It became an obsession with her: she could never let it go after World War II and it greatly influenced my and my siblings childhood. If you know the story of Thimas Nash, you know the story of my mother's life. So I took particular interest in this book because the hype for the book said that it would explore Arlington Hall: it failed in my estimation in this hype BUT it was successful in describing the growth of SIGINT from WWII to the Vietnam War.

Cracking codes is not an easy business as I learned from my mother. Intelligence gathering violates the basic principles of democratic nation's and certainly those of the United States. Yet, without this information, we risk major loss of lives, resources and perhaps the nation itself. As this book more than adequately describes, it is a nasty business. It corrupts the people involved and leads to disputes in what should be collected, how it should be collected, how it should be processed and how the results should be disseminated to people responsible for operations. It invites parochialism and the hiding of failure. Information is power and every bureaucracy wants to have its intelligence. Worst yet, it invites the distribution of intelligence that fits what political leaders want to hear.

And yet, there is hope. There is hope that intelligence can save the nation, that intelligence can prevent the loss of lives and that intelligence can save us.

A good book, very readable and worthwhile to consider for thinking about!

[Anthony Collette]

Made the points that “continuity” is extremely important, that the NSA is much like a cult, that the Venona-era GRU codebook was one-part, that Soviet code clerks had used One-Time Pads twice – once in normal order and then in reverse order, that only 10 codegroups per month were added to the broken codebook, a second round of work on Venona material was launched in the mid-1950s, in 1948 many Soviet codebooks changed from one- to two-part. NSA went dark suddenly and across the board on Soviet coded communication on Monday, November 1, 1948 – and stayed dark until 1979 with the introduction of the first CRAY-1 computer and a new approach to mathematics provided by the Princeton University-based Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA). NSA resorted to collecting massive amounts of internal, plain-language transmissions in Soviet Russia, as many as 1.3 million per month were collected.

In 1954 the NSA began a secret plan to weaken the encryption products of Crypto AG, the world's foremost supplier of encryption technology to governments worldwide. They tried to bribe the owner, but then agreed to approve a line of equipment and send massive purchase orders his way, in exchange for creating backdoors into the encryption equipment that only the NSA would be aware of, and only they could exploit. The company feigned “business as usual,” while it lied to its customers as it knowingly peddled defective encryption equipment.

On page 264 is an interesting story from the Vietnam era about US encryption being compromised, but no one did anything about it.

Page 290 about NSA freak-out concerning the release of David Kahn's The Codebreakers.

On page 300 the story of the CRAY-1 breakthrough, which may have resolved the One-Time Pad problem.

Page 314 says that having a copy of the codebook enabled the NSA to decrypt most of the 1943 messages from the NKGB. ###

[Feng Ouyang · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book told a fascinating story about NSA’s effort of code breaking. It is not very technical in cryptography. It stresses the human factors in the “code war.” Human factors include not only the talents in code design and code breaking but also the spies and defectors that operate beyond the technical arena. What’s more, a majority of the code-breaking achievements are credited to the sloppiness and mistakes committed by the communication operators. The book also talks about the evolution of NSA, its bureaucratic organization and its culture conflicts between innovation and secrecy, which are the other human factors.
The history of NSA is a complicated story to tell, as it involves many threads and many driving forces in the nation and world during different eras. The book did an excellent job of organizing and presenting the story. It strikes a balance between following the chronological order and the development of a particular thread. It maintains a neutral tone in recounting the achievements and failures of the NSA, enhancing the readability of the book.
As the subtitle implies, the narrative ends in the 1990s, when the cold war is over. I am sure there are more intriguing stories after that period. Unfortunately, they are not in this book.
The ending of the book offers an interesting observation. The most significant contribution of the code breakers is not what they found, but what they showed not exist. They showed that during the Copa missile crises the Soviet was not ready to call the bluff. They also showed that in the 1970s and 1980s the Soviet did not mobilize its nuclear force. For the code breaker to fulfill such a role, it must be very reliable in not missing information. And that is, to me, a very impressive accomplishment.

[Scott Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid overview of the early history of US Intelligence efforts against the Soviet Union during the Cold War (would rate this a 3.5, but I don't think this is strong enough for a 4). Budiansky offers a good combination of history and technical overview of US SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) tradecraft. He also offers some interesting insight into the early days of US SIGINT, particularly the first couple of Directors of NSA (DIRNSA), noting their strengths and weaknesses. However, the strength of the work is the earlier days, as more of that information has been declassified. After the 1960s, the work starts to lose a bit of steam, as the detailed information that is the strength of the earlier part of the work is less available. Perhaps in 20-30 years, a new work will offer more information about the later stages of the Cold War and the respective SIGINT capabilities. I think that there are some other works that are a bit stronger about the history of NSA and US SIGINT (see Body of Secrets), but still, this work is a good read and offers the reader some good insight into the early history of US SIGINT.

[Skuli Saeland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Þokkalegasta lesning. Tyrfin á köflum þegar Budiansky útskýrir helstu dulkóðanir og leiðir til að brjóta kóðana en hann útskýrir ágætlega brösótta fæðingu NSA, stofnanavæðingu og klúður. Þrátt fyrir að Bandamenn gætu brotið alla helstu kóða Öxulveldanna í Seinni heimsstyrjöldinni reyndust þeir brátt óbrjótanlegir í Kalda stríðinu. Sovétmönnum gekk að mörgu leyti betur gegn tæknilega öflugri andstæðing með njósnurum og árangursríkum gamaldagsaðferðum. Besti árangur njósnastofnana stórveldanna var kannski að sýna forystumönnum ríkja sinna að þrátt fyrir hættuna á kjarnorkustríði væru engin skref tekin til virkja kjarnorkuflaugarnar og þannig minnka óttan við gagnkvæma eyðingu.

[Rick Presley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Budiansky seems to have a burr under his saddle regarding the NSA. Not sure why. Unlike The Puzzle Palace, this book is a scathing history comprised mostly of missteps, arrogance, inept management, and a host of other faults that he claims plagues the agency and keeps it the red-headed stepchild of the intelligence services. While he grudgingly credits the NSA for their part in keeping the superpowers from blowing one another to smithereens in a nuclear holocaust, he pretty much lists one blunder after another.

As a corrective to the glowing narratives of others, it's probably needed, but a more balanced book would have been appreciated.

[Hoolia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very detailed history of the NSA's development from the early WWII years to the height of the Cold War. While its explanations of codes and the personalities behind policies are fascinating, it turns out there's very little that can make sheer bureaucracy exciting. Unfortunately a good chunk of this book was about funding, office politics, and mind-numbing government work. The appendices, however, are extremely interesting for the cryptologically-inclined reader.

[Whitteney Shakespier · Rating 3 out of 5]

great book and was fascinating to learn about
how cryptography very much parallelled the cold
war rise of computation systems prevalent in all
walks of military operations.

highly technical, informative with perhaps only
a few suspicious references to unclassified
materials. I guess I was hoping for more of a
spy book about duplicitous Russian double agents
charming the pants off clever bartenders but
mainly it was the Enigma vs the cryptographic
primitives, shaken not stirred.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting information that seemed to drag through some sections and did not go in depth enough in others.

I did enjoy learning more about some incidents from my childhood that made much more sense with the information that has since been declassified.

It is a good overall history that has led me to want to read more about some of the incidents.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not too bad, not as good as the CIA book i just read but still enjoyable to read the utter chaos that is the intelligence community. Does a good job up to the late 50s early 1960's but seem to miss a lot from their on in, which is a shame. It just seems to reaffirm that the russians were the best at the spy game.

[Daniel Heneghan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very detailed history of the signals intelligence portion of the US intelligence apparatus. Abbreviations and a number of different organizations and coded project names can make this a bit of a challenge to get through. Very light on the mathematical aspects of various codes, but that can and should be forgiven for a history book. Quick and interesting read.