Free Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency by James Bamford

exerted by the United States, Russia, and the international
community had become too great. A cease-fire was agreed to, thus ending one of
the most serious confrontations America had faced since the end of World War
II.
    The Suez
crisis had a profound effect on NSA. It marked a dismal entry into the world of
crisis intelligence. An internal analysis of the agency's performance was
harshly critical: "As for crisis response, all was chaos. The cryptologic
community proved incapable of marshalling its forces in a flexible fashion to
deal with developing trouble spots. The events of the year did not demonstrate
success—they simply provided a case study to learn from."
    In a
highly unusual move, Canine enlisted the help of an outside management firm to
examine the agency's problems. Suddenly consultants from McKinsey and Company
began crisscrossing NSA's hallways, going over NSA's highly secret
organizational charts, and studying the flow of intercepts from NSA's worldwide
network of listening posts. Canine's key concern was whether the agency would
function more effectively if its organization was based primarily on
function—traffic analysis, cryptanalysis, and so on—or on geography. And how
centralized should NSA become?
    The
consultants recommended a complete change. The repercussions, according to a
later NSA report, lasted more than thirty years. Soon after he arrived, Canine
had reorganized the new agency along functional lines. Now McKinsey proposed a
"modified geographical concept." Signals intelligence would be
organized according to target—the Soviet Union and its satellite countries;
China and Communist Asia; and so on. Each of those sections would include specific
disciplines, such as cryptanalysis and traffic analysis.
    Thus
NSA-70, which was responsible for all high-level cryptanalysis, was replaced by
ADVA ("Advanced Soviet"), which focused exclusively on new ways to
attack high-level Soviet cipher problems. GENS ("General Soviet")
concentrated mainly on mid- and lower-level Russian crypto systems, as well as
on analysis of content. ACOM (Asian Communist) attempted to exploit the systems
of China, North Korea, and the rest of Communist Asia. Finally, ALLO ("All
Others") analyzed the systems belonging to the nations making up the rest
of the world, including America's allies. ALLO-34, for example, was responsible
for Middle East traffic analysis. Three other divisions were primarily for
support: MPRO ("Machine Processing") was responsible for computer
number crunching; TCOM ("Telecommunications") controlled the
worldwide flow of signals; and Collection managed the NSA's far-flung network
of listening posts.
    On
November 23, 1956, Ralph Canine walked out of NSA for the last time as
director. "Canine . . . stands out as the guy who everybody respected in
the agency," recalled Howard Campaigne. "I was surprised to learn
later that the people above him didn't think nearly as much [of him] as we did.
He made a tremendous impression."
     
    In a
restricted corner of a remote air base in Peshawar, Pakistan, Francis Gary
Powers sat shoehorned into the narrow cockpit of U-2 Number 360. At twenty
minutes past six on the morning of May 1, 1960, the scorching sun had already
pushed above the tallest peaks of the western Himalayas. In the low, fertile
plain known as the Vale of Peshawar, rippling heat waves created the impression
of an endless lake. Powers was locked in a white space helmet and a tightly
tailored pressure suit. Beads of sweat flowed down from his short brown hair
and passed across his broad forehead and cheekbones in thin streams. His long
underwear was soaked with perspiration.
    The first
U-2 had been launched from West Germany four years earlier, on Independence Day
of 1956. Shortly before, NSA had detected a possible mobilization by Moscow in
response to a series of riots in East Germany, thus making the mission more
urgent. But hope that the U-2 would be able to slip across the Soviet Union
undetected