Aid, Matthew M.

Schindler, John R.

English

U.S. Naval War College Digital Commons

Naval War College ReviewVolume 63Number 4 Autumn Article 132010Uncovering No Such Agency—The Secret Sentry:The Untold History of the National SecurityAgencyJohn R. SchindlerMatthew M. AidFollow this and additional works at: https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-reviewThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at U.S. Naval War College Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion inNaval War College Review by an authorized editor of U.S. Naval War College Digital Commons. For more information, please contactrepository.inquiries@usnwc.edu.Recommended CitationSchindler, John R. and Aid, Matthew M. (2010) "Uncovering No Such Agency—The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of theNational Security Agency," Naval War College Review: Vol. 63 : No. 4 , Article 13.Available at: https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol63/iss4/13REVIEW ESSAYSUNCOVERING NO SUCH AGENCYJohn R. SchindlerAid, Matthew M. The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of theNational Security Agency. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009.432pp. $30The National Security Agency (NSA) has been for decades America’s largest,best-funded, and most secretive intelligence service. Since its establishment in1952 as an independent agency under the Department of Defense (DoD),charged with providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information securityfor the U.S. government, NSA has operated essentially in silence.The wall of secrecy surrounding nearly all that the agency does has deterredmost scholarly inquiry. While it has been generally known that the NSA providesthe lion’s share of intelligence to the DoD, details have been lacking by design.Before the publication of James Bamford’s The Puzzle Palace in 1982 there wasno monograph available, and that gossipy tome, culled largely from NSA unclas-sified newsletters, left unanswered most questions about what the agency reallydoes. For historians and anyone wishing to assess NSA’s effectiveness as theworld’s most powerful SIGINT collector and analyst,the knowledge gap has been yawning.Along comes Matthew Aid, a first-rate researcherwho some years ago took upon himself the large taskof telling a story that his subtitle describes as “untold.”There is a bit of cheek in this, as in the entire Aid en-terprise, since the story he tells has already been toldin great detail by the NSA itself—specifically, by itsCenter for Cryptologic History (CCH), which hasJohn R. Schindler is professor of national security affairsat the Naval War College and a senior fellow at BostonUniversity’s International History Institute. He holds aPhD in modern history and has published widely on in-telligence, terrorism, and security studies. Prior to join-ing the NWC faculty in 2005, he served with theNational Security Agency as an intelligence analyst andcounterintelligence officer. The opinions expressed hereare his own.Naval War College Review, Autumn 2010, Vol. 63, No. 4NWCR_Autumn2010-RE.psC:\Documents and Settings\john.lanzieri.ctr\Desktop\NavalWarCollege\NWC_Review_Autumn2010\NWCR_Autumn2010.vpThursday, August 19, 2010 1:28:36 PMColor profile: Generic CMYK printer profileComposite  Default screen1Schindler and Aid: Uncovering No Such Agency—The Secret Sentry: The Untold History oPublished by U.S. Naval War College Digital Commons, 2010produced hundreds of historical studies, mostly classified, recording and ana-lyzing virtually everything of note that the U.S. Cryptologic System has pro-duced. The cryptologic history publications stand out in the U.S. IntelligenceCommunity for their customarily impeccable honesty about the agency’s suc-cesses and failures. In recent years, NSA has declassified and released numerousCCH monographs, in whole or in part; in the last five years what is available inthe public domain about NSA and its operations has expanded unprecedentedly,and these newly available CCH books and articles are the cornerstone of Aid’swork.That said, the author is to be applauded for his years of digging in archivesand tracking down virtually everything published in English about the NSA. Noone can fault Aid for lack of thoroughness—his basic history is clear and ringstrue. If the story he recounts is not exactly untold, it should nevertheless be ofhigh interest to any student of modern military or diplomatic history, and thereis plenty of fodder for both lovers and haters of the agency. The reporting is notgenerally acid etched, and Aid is not attempting especially to disparage the NSA(as Tim Weiner did to the Central Intelligence Agency in his absurdly biased Leg-acy of Ashes, 2007). The NSA saga, as handed down by CCH through Aid to thereader, is meandering and complex.Upon its foundation, NSA had little access to high-grade Soviet cipher sys-tems, thanks to the compromising in 1948 of a briefly successful programknown as BOURBON by the Soviet spy Bill Weisband, who told Moscow about it.Thereafter, NSA spent years and millions of dollars recovering from this setback,slowly and with difficulty. Seldom during the Cold War was NSA able to providethe timely, detailed, and high-grade intelligence on the Soviet Union that Amer-ican and British SIGINT agencies had gathered on Germany and Japan duringWorld War II. The author admits that this had less to do with NSA’s shortcom-ings than with very good Soviet encryption and communications security, in ad-dition to persistent espionage compromisings of U.S. SIGINT programs fromthe 1940s through the 1980s. What the code breakers achieved, with great effort,was too often undone by traitors.NSA support to American war fighters presents a similarly mixed bag. Tacti-cal support to deployed units by national-level agencies, which is taken as a giventoday in Iraq and Afghanistan, hardly existed during the Korean War and wasstill in its infancy during Vietnam. Aid correctly praises NSA for its outstandingSIGINT support to American soldiers and Marines battling insurgents in Bagh-dad and Kandahar, but he is otherwise starkly critical of the agency’s efforts inrecent years. He paints in unduly harsh terms a “lost decade,” 1991 to 2001, whenthe NSA, like so much of the Department of Defense and the intelligence com-munity, struggled for relevance and redefinition after the Cold War victory.R E V I E W E S S A Y S 1 4 5NWCR_Autumn2010-RE.psC:\Documents and Settings\john.lanzieri.ctr\Desktop\NavalWarCollege\NWC_Review_Autumn2010\NWCR_Autumn2010.vpThursday, August 19, 2010 1:28:36 PMColor profile: Generic CMYK printer profileComposite  Default screen2Naval War College Review, Vol. 63 [2010], No. 4, Art. 13https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol63/iss4/13However, that portrayal is charitable and balanced compared to Aid’s depictionof NSA’s war on terror.According to The Secret Sentry, NSA has become a profound threat to Ameri-can freedoms and civil liberties that, in its spare time, does SIGINT and infor-mation assurance. This would be news to anyone who has worked in the U.S.Cryptologic System since the mid-1970s. The overarching need to protect civilliberties even at the expense of intelligence collection and production is hammeredinto the heads of all junior analysts: “We have a frightful number of lawyers,” ex-plained General Mike Hayden, NSA director from 1999 to 2005 (and CIA direc-tor from 2005 to 2009) and an impressive leader and manager who is profiledtoo critically in Aid’s work.In the last chapter the book veers into current events in a polemical fashionthat is at odds with the scholarly tone that mostly prevails. There is so little avail-able regarding supersensitive SIGINT counterterrorism operations since 9/11(the operations are so tightly compartmented that even most NSA analystsknow little if anything about them) that any unclassified conclusions seem pre-mature at best.At bottom, The Secret Sentry offers a detailed, if selective, analysis of the NSAand its coverage outside the post-9/11 era, one that is generally fair if not alwaysbalanced. Aid seems to want to find fault with the NSA, deeming it throughoutits history as either “going deaf ” or unable to analyze the information it collectsin such abundance, or both—although he frequently offers praise for theagency’s many intelligence successes since 1952.This subtle bias leads to the most curious fact of this curious book. The dogthat fails to bark, here, is Aid’s own history with the NSA, a salient story that theauthor fails to disclose, even though it was reported by the Washington Post in2006. Twenty-one years earlier, Matthew Aid, as an Air Force analyst and Russianlinguist assigned to an NSA field site in the United Kingdom, was arrested,court-martialed, and convicted of unauthorized possession of classified infor-mation and impersonating an officer. Sergeant Aid had been taking top secretcode-word materials home with him, which earned him over a year in prisonand a dishonorable discharge. When one knows his past, the author’s detailedunderstanding of SIGINT and detectable bias against NSA become lessmysterious.While Aid’s disreputable personal history with the National Security Agencydoes not discredit his scholarship, it does raise questions of agendas and mo-tives. At a minimum, the facts ought to have been disclosed by the author. Onewonders why his publisher did not consider such a sensational backstory to haveany relevance, particularly for an author professing to reveal hidden truths.1 4 6 N A V A L W A R C O L L E G E R E V I E WNWCR_Autumn2010-RE.psC:\Documents and Settings\john.lanzieri.ctr\Desktop\NavalWarCollege\NWC_Review_Autumn2010\NWCR_Autumn2010.vpThursday, August 19, 2010 1:28:36 PMColor profile: Generic CMYK printer profileComposite  Default screen3Schindler and Aid: Uncovering No Such Agency—The Secret Sentry: The Untold History oPublished by U.S. Naval War College Digital Commons, 2010The Secret Sentry is a serviceable and generally readable “biography” of theNSA, written by a determined researcher whose feelings about the agency can becharitably described as complex. Readers, however, would be better served by re-ferring to the original, now declassified, CCH publications from which so muchof this book is derived.On grounds of full disclosure, this reviewer wishes to note that he too servedwith the National Security Agency for nearly a decade, as an intelligence analystand counterintelligence officer. During my time of service I had no involvementwith the Aid case.R E V I E W E S S A Y S 1 4 7NWCR_Autumn2010-RE.psC:\Documents and Settings\john.lanzieri.ctr\Desktop\NavalWarCollege\NWC_Review_Autumn2010\NWCR_Autumn2010.vpThursday, August 19, 2010 1:28:36 PMColor profile: Generic CMYK printer profileComposite  Default screen4Naval War College Review, Vol. 63 [2010], No. 4, Art. 13https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol63/iss4/13

Uncovering No Such Agency—The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency

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Uncovering No Such Agency—The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency

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