Free The Secret Sentry by Matthew M. Aid Page B

rest of the U.S. intelligence
community. Truman also ordered that the new agency’s powers be clearly defined and strengthened through the issuance of a
new directive titled National Security Council Intelligence Directive No. 9 “Communications Intelligence.” 10 The creation of NSA got in just under the wire. November 4, 1952, was Election Day in America. That evening, Dwight Eisenhower
won in a landslide, decisively beating Adlai Stevenson to become the next president of the United States.

CHAPTER 4
    The Inventory of Ignorance
    SIGINT During the Eisenhower Administration:
    1953–1961
    In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
    —DESIDERIUS ERASMUS
    The Unhappy Inheritance
    Dwight Eisenhower was sworn in as the thirty-fourth president of the United States on Tuesday, January 20, 1953. As supreme
allied commander in Europe and a top customer for Ultra decrypts during World War II, he understood more about the value of
intelligence (and its limitations) than any president since Ulysses S. Grant. But nothing could have prepared Eisenhower for
what he confronted when he took office.
    Five weeks after his inauguration, on March 4, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin suddenly died. Eisenhower was not happy that
the first news that he got of Stalin’s death came from Associated Press and United Press International wire service reports
from Moscow. Like the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, NSA had provided no indication whatsoever that Stalin was ill.
In fact, in the month before Stalin’s death NSA had sent to the White House decrypted messages from the Argentinean and Indian
ambassadors in Moscow detailing their private audiences with the Russian dictator, which tended to suggest to the intelligence
analysts that the Russian dictator’s health was good. In the chaotic days after Stalin’s death, the only SIGINT that NSA could
provide the White House with were decrypted tele grams concerning the reactions of Western leaders and a number of foreign
Communist Party chiefs to the death of Stalin. All in all, it was not a very impressive per formance. 1
    Concern inside Washington about NSA’s per formance mounted when on June 16, rioting broke out in East Berlin as thousands
of civilian protesters took to the streets en masse to register their pent-up anger at the continued occupation of their country
by the Russians. Within twenty-four hours, the rioting had spread to virtually every other city in East Germany. NSA’s performance
during the early stages of the Berlin Crisis was viewed in Washington as disappointing because most of the early intelligence
reaching the White House about what was transpiring in East Berlin came from the CIA’s Berlin station and from wire service
news reports, with very little coming from NSA. 2
    Trying to Peer Behind the Iron Curtain
    Regrettably, the reason SIGINT provided no warning was because Soviet high-grade ciphers remained “an unrevealed mystery.” 3: p. 367. Despite the commitment of massive numbers of personnel and equally massive amounts of equipment to this critically important
target, there is little discernible evidence that any progress was made in this area. And as the years passed and the Russian
ciphers continued to elude NSA’s ability to solve them, the pressure on the agency inexorably mounted to do whatever it took
for a breakthrough. A Top Secret report sent to Eisenhower in May 1955 recommended, “This is of such great importance that
monetary considerations should be waived and an effort at least equal to the Manhattan Project should be exerted at once.”
But Frank Rowlett, who was now the head of the CIA’s own SIGINT organization, Staff D, was not impressed with the increasingly
urgent recommendations coming out of the multitude of blue-ribbon panels, study groups, review panels, and committees created
during the 1950s to find a solution to NSA’s code-breaking problems, telling an interviewer decades later, “Most of the people
on these