The Other NSA…
Shortly after Costa Rica's then-President Oscar Arias won the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize, I found myself in his San Jose office interviewing him for Playboy magazine (though it eventually wound up in Penthouse). Midway through the prolonged dialogue my collaborator, Greg Goldin, and I surprised Arias with some photocopies of pages taken from the personal notebooks of one Lt. Col. Oliver North.
The passges we showed Arias were quite disparaging. And the Costa Rican President was visibly taken back -- left to wonder why an American official would show such wrath toward a pro-U.S. moderate.
Arias also wondered how it was that two American journalists were able to see these notebooks fragments before he had.
Answer: Before I headed for Costa Rica, I had the good sense to drop by the Washington offices of the National Security Archive.
The non-profit Archive was only a few years old at that point. But it had already established a reputation as the most aggressive channel for declassifying secret U.S. government documents. Archive researcher and analyst, Peter Kornbluh, handed me those just declassified North notebook pages. And it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship that still flourishes today.
This week marks the 20th anniversay of the Archive. For two decades its staff has fought the good fight of opening up secret government files from Washington D.C. to Santiago to Eastern Europe. It has become the best of friends and allies to reporters, researchers and average citizens committed to transparency, honesty and accountability in government.
It has also become a crucial factor in reconstructing several chapters of history that would otherwise be buried in official secrecy.
Over the years the Archive and its tenacious staff have filed more than 30,000 Freedom of Information requests; secured more than 7 million pages of once-classified documents and its staff has produced more than fifty books. Their work has been on the cutting edge of exposing the full background behind the Iran-Contra scandal, the covert wars in Central America, the U.S. complicity in the case of Chile, and the machinations of Henry Kissinger among a long list of dirty deeds.
I'm proud to know these folks and grateful for their invaluable work. I join with my friends Doug Ireland and David Corn in zealously celebrating this anniversary of the Archive.
I also urge you to visit the NSA website where its staff has compiled a showcase of the twenty of the most important government records its has exposed over the last twent years, including:
* Hundreds of photos of flag-draped coffins containing the remains of US troops killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, which the Pentagon fought to keep secret.
* The January 25, 2001 memo that terrorism czar Richard Clarke sent to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, warning that top Bush administration officials needed to immediately come up with a plan for dealing with al Qaeda.
* The briefing notes for Donald Rumsfeld's 1984 meeting with Saddam Hussein, when Rumsfeld, acting as an envoy for the Reagan administration, was to tell Saddam that the Reagan administration's public criticism of Iraq for using chemical weapons would not interfere with Reagan's effort to forge a closer relationship with Saddam.
* An August 6, 1986 entry from Oliver North's notebook that indicated North had met with then-Vice President George Bush in the midst of the Iran-contra affair.
* The log book of a US Navy destroyer that revealed that on October 27, 1962--in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis--this ship dropped depth charges off the Cuban coast and almost hit the hull of a Soviet submarine carrying a nuclear warhead. The crew of the sub, believing war was at hand, considered firing the nuclear weapon but did not.
* Documents from CIA and FBI files that showed that Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban militant who has sought US asylum, was at two planning meetings for the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner that killed 73 people.
* Guatemalan army intelligence documents and US intelligence documents that indicated that the CIA was assisting the Guatemalan military in the 1980s as that military was killing thousands of civilians.
* Documents that revealed that Henry Kissinger, as secretary of state in 1976, supported the Argentine military dictatorship's crackdown of dissent that led to the deaths of tens of thousands.
* The CIA inspector general's scathing review of the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, which was kept secret for nearly four decades and which blasted CIA secret operations as "ludicrous or tragic or both."
* A 1967 CIA memo that revealed that the CIA had tried to implant listening devices in cats and train them to approach targets. The memo noted that the "work done on this problem over the years reflects great credit on the personnel who guided it," but that "the environmental and security factors in using this technique in a real foreign situation forces us to conclude that for our...purposes, it would not be practical." The first wired and trained cat had been released near a park and ordered to eavesdrop on two men sitting on a bench. On its way to the target, the cat was run over by a taxi.
At a time when "journalism" has come to be represented by figures as grotesque as Rita Cosby or as superficial as Anderson Cooper, the work of the National Security Archives reminds us what it really means to defend the public trust, hold government accountable and, in the best traditions of a vigorous media, afflict the comfortable.
December 9th, 2005 at 11:18 pm
Amen, Marc. I’ve been on their e-mail list for years, have the NSA on my blog’s resource list and cite them frequently. I’ve certainly taken rather bitter pleasure in linking to this page.
Who says liberals have no sense of humor (thankyouverymuch).
Somebody when you look up the words dogged and intrepid, you’ll see Peter Kornbluh’s picture in the dictionary.
December 9th, 2005 at 11:34 pm
I’m sorry that should have read “Someday when you look up the words dogged and intrepid, you’ll see Peter Kornbluh’s picture in the dictionary.”
December 10th, 2005 at 1:25 am
Can only endorse what Marc says about the National Security Archive. A wealth of information. Sometimes the awful truth is buried away in the official documents themselves, straight from the horse’s mouth.
December 10th, 2005 at 1:26 am
The NSA has been an incredible resource, and its founder Scott Armstrong should be mentioned and thanked for the tireless work he did in creating it and putting it on the map.
December 10th, 2005 at 1:45 am
Training cats to deliver eavesdropping devices? How ingenious. It ranks right up there with the plot to kill Castro by leaving an attractive (but booby-trapped) conch shell out on one of his favorite beaches.
Cats CAN be trainable, however. For example, mine are Japanese-English bilinguals. I know this from observing of how studiously they ignore me regardless of which language I speak.
It’s amazing what keeps floating up over the years. Recently, the Tonkin Gulf incident was thoroughly disambiguated (though it was no surprise to learn that it had been hyped and even fabricated in important details.) But it’s also dismaying. As Dubya said, when asked how history would judge the Iraq adventure, it’s hard to say, because we’ll all be dead by then. He might as well have said “safely dead.”
The NSA is a great concept, but it’s too bad that it’s mainly been a rear-view mirror in which to view events that happened twenty light years behind us on the road — and further in some cases. It’s only as good as what’s been declassified recently.
December 10th, 2005 at 6:46 am
Excellent! Now that’s what journalism is all about.
December 10th, 2005 at 8:33 am
Thanks for the tidbit about wired cats. Surely, the CIA was inspired by an incident in the Ramayana, where one of the gods assumes the form of a cat, because it can go anywhere practically invisible, to scout out the enemy in the great war against the demon king Ravana.
Leave no epic unturned.
December 10th, 2005 at 10:25 am
The handwritten not from Elvis to Nixon is priceless…
(see Randy’s “no sense of humor” link and click on “the documents”)
December 10th, 2005 at 11:36 am
Marc, thanks very much for the reminder of NSA’s important work.
Aside from the politically significant documents, for those of you who are following the links, do go to the Elvis and Nixon link as Randy and reg have suggested. After reading the note from Elvis to Nixon, click on the memo from Dwight Chapin to H.R. Haldeman regarding a proposed Elvis visit. (The small hand written note back from Haldeman on the memo alone is worth the price of admission.)
Actually all the Elvis documents read in sequence qualify as some sort of truly high art in the Theater of the Real category.
December 10th, 2005 at 12:55 pm
It’s simply amazing that the documents that the NSA found and were disclosed by Marc go against the U.S. You have to decide if the U.S. is evil or if George Washington University and its NSA are out only to discredit the U.S. It’s so typical of the left.
Below is a link to the originating description in Wikipedia of the organization, which has, not surprisingly, been sanitized the left–apparently believing that harmful disclosures are only appropriate for America but not for themselves. Such hypocrisy. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=National_Security_Archive&oldid=7808947
It’s too bad that theirs and similar resources aren’t used to help the country that gives them their opportunities and freedoms.
December 10th, 2005 at 1:23 pm
It’s much worse that our government has chosen to engage in these activities in secret, damaging our democracy and soiling our reputation. Learning from one’s mistakes certainly help our country. Continuing to repeat them damages us.
Facts are troublesome things, Woody.
December 10th, 2005 at 2:38 pm
And so stereotypical of you Woody to offer this parallel thesis. You know when just about everyone says something’s wrong there’s a good chance it is. Except to the blind. I suppose there should be an archive of all of the good results of bad subversive policies to balance things out. None are so blind as those who won’t see.
December 10th, 2005 at 3:00 pm
OMG… engaging in activities in SECRET? OMG… how extraordinary!
I wonder how many of us have little “secrets” we wouldn’t want exposed? Ahh, you say, but we are not governments!
To that, I can say thank God!
December 10th, 2005 at 3:07 pm
None of my little secrets have resulted in wars, the overthrow of demiocratically elected governments and supproting insurgents in violation of congress.
You just don’t get it, do you?
December 10th, 2005 at 3:17 pm
Admirable work but it’s kind of sadly revealing that you lead with this:
* Hundreds of photos of flag-draped coffins containing the remains of US troops killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, which the Pentagon fought to keep secret.
Oh, thank God someone facilitated the news media’s if-it-bleeds-it-leads visuals-driven mentality, because of course no one would have understand that there were US soldier deaths in the middle east, just by listening to the newsreaders go on and on about “the grim milestone of 2000 deaths” and so on. Yeah, that’s way more important than:
* The log book of a US Navy destroyer that revealed that on October 27, 1962–in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis–this ship dropped depth charges off the Cuban coast and almost hit the hull of a Soviet submarine carrying a nuclear warhead. The crew of the sub, believing war was at hand, considered firing the nuclear weapon but did not.
December 10th, 2005 at 4:28 pm
Randy wrote: “It’s much worse that our government has chosen to engage in these activities in secret, damaging our democracy and soiling our reputation.”
Randy, like it or not, the left cooperates with our enemies and undermines the best interests of our nation when it goes on hunting trips to find any sign of us doing something that goes against OUR standards even if those somethings are acceptable activities for other nations or terrorists. They don’t go to our government and say, “Here’s what we found. Can you explain it or try to change it?” Instead, they provide this information to our enemies, directly and indirectly, and clink their champagne glasses together with each piece of harmful information that they expose. That, to me, is much worse.
The NSA and the left does not care one iota about “damaging our democracy and soiling our reputation.” On the contrary, they take great pride and glee in exposing anything that does that.
The NSA and those who support it do that for their “greater purpose” of bringing about the type of country that they think that we should have (socialist and European) rather than appreciate what we do have and for what the majority voted. It’s arrogance, completely unearned; and, their activities, supported by taxpayers by allowing not-for-profit non-taxable status, do the jobs for our enemies who profit from intelligence information and, primarily, propaganda.
I have no admiration, but complete disgust, for these people who work with our enemies to achieve their personal ambitions and further their national goals rejected by the voters.
December 10th, 2005 at 4:47 pm
“Randy, like it or not, the left cooperates with our enemies and undermines the best interests of our nation”
This is false on its face. Like it or not. What self-serving shills.
December 10th, 2005 at 4:52 pm
Last call: “On the contrary, they take great pride and glee in exposing anything that does that.”
“Doc it hurts when I do that. The don’t DO that!”
If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, did it not still fall?
Game, set, match.
December 10th, 2005 at 5:04 pm
Woody, I LIVED in Guatemala and saw the carnage, the bloody corpses, caused by a military supported both directly and indirectly by a lying U.S. administration. This is and was WRONG. An injustice, and I, as a Christian, responded to it and called attention to it as loudly as possible in order to STOP it. And YOU are calling ME “arrogant”? Accusing me of supporting “our” enemies? I supported victims of torture and killing, and attempted to change it. Who in hell are you supporting?
Disgusting? Your words are disgusting, and spit on the graves of the thousands of people, friends and families of my friends, who were slaughtered by a regime secretly supported by the Reagan Administration. Sorry, buddy, but your comments I find completely abhorrent and morally depraved.
December 10th, 2005 at 5:27 pm
I would add a comment to this, but after reading all of the bad stuff about our government on the NSA site my champagne glass runneth over and I think I’ll just take a nap.
December 10th, 2005 at 7:16 pm
Rich,
Sometimes war causes one to have disgusting allies. And that’s what happened with Guatemala. The left to this day often fails to appreciate that the Cold War was real, and that it was very dirty, on both sides.
Perhaps we went overboard. But you can’t have perfectly pure hands and win against a monstrous evil such as Soviet/Cuban imperialsm (in the Americas). But the left, nonethteless, pretends that we can, and demands that we do. Hence the hysteria about Abu Ghraib (well, that was more an intentional inflation of a trivial event to hurt George Bush in the election… but same idea). Hence the hysteria about “torture” that we sometimes are forced to use today, which your friends would have found down right kind compared to what they went through. And which our enemy’s citizens and targets would have also found downright kind.
Perhaps we went too far in our alliajnce with Guatemala. Perhaps we went way too far. But to present it as a one sided event is just as much a lie as for the US to cover up its involvement. There were lots of bad guys running around in Central America in those days, and ours were there as a direct consequence of those of Cuba and the USSR.
Oh, btw, Guatemala is a lot more peaceful now. But Cuba still has zero freedom of speech and holds and tortures political prisoners with no change in the last 40 years.
December 10th, 2005 at 7:23 pm
And as long as we are looking at NSA archives, I recommend that those on the left who consider even the mention of communism in the US by the right to be red baiting and an unsupported fear, I suggest a look at another NSA’s archive: http://www.nsa.gov/publications/publi00039.cfm – The Venona Story.
Then take that information, add it to released KGB archives and books by former KGB spymasters, and go back to the favorite “innocents” supported by the left during the cold war.
You’ll love it, I’m sure.
December 10th, 2005 at 11:33 pm
Real principled stand against transparency and truth, guys. I’m impressed once again by the degree to which people will subvert great principles to their own brief (percieved) political interests.
I just learned today that Stalin was Time magazine’s man of the year. Twice. Wow.
December 11th, 2005 at 6:01 am
Sure there were real Red sympathizers but they were dwarfed by the hysteria of McCarthy. Those accusations were false. Overlook that if you have to support your straw man. It’s typical of the right.
December 11th, 2005 at 7:55 am
Re: John Moore and VENONA
I have read every damn one of the VENONA decrypts. I am completing an index to them, and can cite decrypt and verse if need be.
With exceptions, they simply don’t say what their right wing touters claim they do. There are over 3000 messages (I count 3488). This is so much that almost anything can be and is claimed about them because few people will bother to read them to check out the claims.
Most right wing claims are NOT based directly on the decrypts, but on the assertions of people I call partisan revisionists. When I do a Google on any particular issue in VENONA, I see web site after web site repeating the same claim in the same words. It’s cut and paste, not checking out and verifying.
The left wing doesn’t read the damn things either. If it did, it would pick up on KGB alarm at the increasing anti-Soviet propaganda as early as 1943 when the Soviets and the US were supposed to be allies. One KGB telegram mentions the Twelve Apostles in the War Dept plotting for a war with the Soviet Union, and perhaps the installation of a military dictatorship in the US upon conclusion of the war.
The targets of this partisan revisionism are those New Dealers that the Right loves to hate. Hiss, White, Hopkins, etc, especially the “brain trusters” in Roosevelt’s Treasury Dept. The object seems to me to be to discredit the New Deal.
VENONA does not convincingly show them to be Soviet agents. Hiss is disputed to this day. (As a matter of policy, I am completely agnostic on this question). White has strong defenders (see H-DIPLO or H-HOAC). Again, I’m agnostic. In one decrypt RICHARD has got to be Harry Dexter White, but it is not convincing evidence he is spying. Another decrypt and RICHARD seems to be a reporter, and if so could not possibly be White. Even the NSA analyst comments on it. I have not been able to resolve the question, and leave it as another VENONA confusion. And I declare the imputations of Hopkins to be a spy are unproven speculation and nonsense.
The corpus is confusing, scarcely legible – the scans are awful – and on the whole a mess. On the same day the KGB Resident in New York is Pavel Fedosimov and Stepan Apresyan. In London, the NSA (or GCHQ) can’t make up its mind if the GRU Resident is Boris Shvetsov or Ivan Sklyarov. Also, they keep promoting and demoting him from Col to Lt Col to Gen to Lt? Gen without even asking the GRU!
In the US, BUMBLEBEE is Walter Lippmann, no wait a minute, he is David Greenglass.
In Mexico City, ADA is Adelina Zendejas, or no, she is Kitty Harris.
There is nothing to guide you which to pick.
Why? Because there is another unstated chronology, the order and progress of the cryptanalysis. It is out of order, making identifications difficult.
One is told to use the “latest” cryptanalysis. Maybe half the messages do not have a date one can use to infer date of analysis.
The NSA is not helpful; right now, the Russian as reconstructed by the NSA has been released for one contentious message, the only one implicating Hiss, but the necessary worksheet(s) haven’t been.
We need the worksheets.
In any case please don’t cite me VENONA. I’ve been poring over them for several years now. They are cold comfort to your favorite political prejudices.
December 11th, 2005 at 8:58 am
John, in this case of Guatemala, you’re arguing from a counterfactual — we had to support killing them in order to save them from worse. Oh, and mistakes will be made.
Of course, you can also say it’s no ordinary armed banditry in the case of Marxist insurgencies. You can say, that to be on the “safe” side, we should always assume a Cambodian Autogenocide in the offing if we don’t move. And that was how many people? 1.5 million? Or 1 million? Or, it seems, 3 million, if you talk to your average Cambodian (your average Cambodian being a quasi-literate peasant who has just been told a number, perhaps remembered from the Vietnamese propaganda which was naturally based on ways to estimate the death toll that favored higher numbers, since higher numbers had more propaganda value.)
1.5 million is a nice round number, because it’s 20% of the (interpolated) population of Cambodia in the mid-70s. And 20% is pretty chilling. The problem with it is that if you look at census reports on Cambodia done in the late 90s, and try to figure out how Cambodia could now have as many people as it does AND a birth rate that’s the same as it was in 1960 AND 1.5 million killed by the Khmer Rouge, you end up with the Single Bullet Theory of Genocide Studies — unprecedented population growth rates during some period of time, either before or after the Khmer Rouge, for no particular reason, and then a change back to historical growth averages, again for no particular reason.
I’ve looked around for demographic research on Cambodia that cites the most recent census reports AND that concurs with figures even as low as 1 million killed by the Khmer Rouge. I haven’t found any. I was forced to the tentative conclusion that the Khmer Rouge killed, AT MOST, approximately as many as have been estimated to have been killed directly or indirectly by American bombing — on the order of half a million. And even then, you have to stretch a little.
We have to kill n people in order to save at most n people. Unless we fail, of course, in which case up to 2n people die (some at the hands of those who might be understandably murderous in the presence of anyone who would collaborate with a foreign power like ourseleves that would kill so many people.)
Yep. Makes plenty of sense to me. We’re on the moral high ground here, with this math. Totally. Let’s waste ‘em. It’s no big deal. They have a different conception of death anyway, right?
And if we can’t win, we can put out unsubstantiated reports through various channels showing that the number killed after our failure goes beyond — unthinkably beyond — even the 20% in Cambodia. That would be lying, but let’s not forget: we’re fighting a monstrous evil here. A monstrous evil that’s responsible for everything that’s wrong in the world today. None of it is our fault. Ever. Not really.
December 11th, 2005 at 9:00 am
Well-reported John.
December 11th, 2005 at 9:42 am
Excellent post Michael Turner. I’m surprised Cooper hasn’t censored it off the blog comments by deleting it. Isn’t that what Totten did to you when you posted a similar set of posts on the bizarre manipulation of numbers in the discussions of Cambodia?
December 11th, 2005 at 12:32 pm
The NSA and the left does not care one iota about “damaging our democracy and soiling our reputation.†On the contrary, they take great pride and glee in exposing anything that does that.
The NSA and those who support it do that for their “greater purpose†of bringing about the type of country that they think that we should have (socialist and European) rather than appreciate what we do have and for what the majority voted. It’s arrogance, completely unearned; and, their activities, supported by taxpayers by allowing not-for-profit non-taxable status, do the jobs for our enemies who profit from intelligence information and, primarily, propaganda.
Woody, as you do not know the difference between an opinion and a fact, click here for some help.
As for arrogance, Woody, since you believe that you are closer to God in Georgia, allow me to quote John Chapter 8 Verse 32: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
Have fun in your prison of denial.
December 11th, 2005 at 4:28 pm
“I just learned today that Stalin was Time magazine’s man of the year. Twice. Wow.” So was Hitler – Jan. 1939.
December 11th, 2005 at 8:21 pm
…as Grotesque as Rita Cosby..!! I love it.
Yes indeed, she really is appalling! How, in this day and age, we can have people like her hosting news shows is beyond me.
December 12th, 2005 at 7:37 am
“I have no admiration, but complete disgust, for these people who work with our enemies to achieve their personal ambitions and further their national goals rejected by the voters.”
Sucks to live in a free society, doesn’t it.
December 12th, 2005 at 9:37 am
Randy, if you look at who admires and references the NSA, it’s pretty clear that the organization caters to the extreme left. It’s not opinion when there are overwhelming facts supporting a conclusion.
———
No, luker, I value living in a free society, which is why I’m disgusted by traitors who threaten that by helping our enemies. At least my society allows me to say that while their society would not.
December 12th, 2005 at 9:47 am
“It’s not opinion when there are overwhelming facts supporting a conclusion.”
Your conclusion that NSA is leftist isn’t factual. The documents they cite are FACT regardless of where they are located. Thus, your opinion an ad honinem circumstantial e.g. GWU is a leftist college so nothing they say can be trusted is fallacious on its face as is your opinion. It’s false.
December 12th, 2005 at 11:16 am
secret = free
truth = traitor
Guatemala = strategic source of bananas; great center of geo-political power.
December 12th, 2005 at 1:09 pm
And, AS USUAL, the left claims the only right to define terms. Wasn’t what the Rosenbergs told the KGB also truth? Weren’t the plans for our atomic bomb supposed to be a secret? Also, a great source of bananas is Kroger’s.
December 12th, 2005 at 2:46 pm
That was never proven to my knowledge. They were executed anyway. Yet another straw man. With the select few capable of working on the bomb already here and doing it, leaking it to whom? Again another dismal falure of argment by example.
December 12th, 2005 at 7:01 pm
Randy, if you look at who admires and references the NSA, it’s pretty clear that the organization caters to the extreme left. It’s not opinion when there are overwhelming facts supporting a conclusion.
Only because your side of the debate has a pathological fear of the truth. I’m hardly the extreme left. Neither is Marc.
Woody has more strawmen than a road show company of The Wizard of Oz.
December 12th, 2005 at 8:39 pm
Strawman: (def) A common and weak argument used by the left to avoid discussing unpleasant facts about themselves.
December 13th, 2005 at 6:45 am
Little fire scarewcrow? You see you don’t get to write the definitions: they’re neutral of view. I’ll discuss any fact regardless of unpleasnatness. Will you?
December 13th, 2005 at 7:48 am
Woody,
Your side is the one here that wants to hide from facts as revealed by the NSA.
December 14th, 2005 at 6:54 pm
John writes in an interesting post above:
“The corpus is confusing, scarcely legible – the scans are awful – and on the whole a mess.”
My understanding of why this is, is that the Venona decrypts were done in a quite different way than, for example, Enigma was decrypted.
Enigma was decrypted by methodically backing out the combinatorial transformation that produced the code text. The codebreakers had to build special computers (roughly the size of 5 refrigerators) to do these decrypts (the Enigma encoding boxes were about the size of typewriters). But when done, an Enigma decrypt was essentially perfect and complete, because the exact transformation was discovered.
Not so for Venona, which used a one-time pad. There were mistakes with how the pads were used, which permitted language analysts — not math geeks — to painstakingly piece together small bits of the decrypt, often by comparison with a few special known decrypts. The results were spotty, error-prone, and subject to differing interpretations. (Thus providing ideal fodder to refight the cold war.)
The NSA (the agency, not the foundation) has a neat (semi-unaffiliated — labor of love by retirees) museum next to their complex, with several operating Enigma encoders, an Enigma decoder, one of the first Cray computers, etc. It is worth a visit if you’re in to such things.
December 28th, 2005 at 3:40 pm
December 14th, 2005 at 6:54 pm
Michael Turmon Says:
[on the poor quality of the VENONA decrypts.]
The difference you are trying to describe is code book solving as opposed to cipher text solving. Generally, we distinguish code books from ciphers, although solving either is loosely called “code breaking.”
The problem with your interpretation is that it does not explain the facts. There is ample evidence, not to mention the NSA’s own words, that VENONA was computerized sometime in the 50s, certainly in the 60s. I’m pretty sure that IBM’s STRETCH/HARVEST computer (a special purpose super computer) was used on VENONA. My hypothesis is that it was specially developed for VENONA. It even had its own programming language, ALPHA, designed by IBM’s Fran Allen specialized for cryptanalysis.
In other words, the ciphertext, the Russian plaintext in so far as solved, and the translation text were and are computerized. Why the hell, then did NSA release the old manual typed translations in the file drawers of dead or retired cryppies? Why not release the decrypts in machine readable form so that researchers could grep them for names, etc?
These messages are on tape and probably IBM punch cards someplace. The NSA released them in the least usable form, for the obvious reason to forestall careful examination by interested outside parties.
To repeat: there is no justification for the poor condition of the releases. It has nothing to do with how solution proceeded, and everything to do with making life difficult for people like me.
I am aware of the museum. There is a similar one at Bletchley Park where Tony Sales has reconstructed the Colossus used on the German Lorenz teletype ciphers, the so-called “fish” ciphers that Alan Turing worked on. These machine ciphers are not to be confused with the Enigma.
May 23rd, 2006 at 5:52 pm
equifax…
Scripps Schumacher,silverware biotic admiring grudgingly Denton credit score http://credit-score.available-credit-report.com/ …
July 25th, 2006 at 9:09 am
Geben mir bitte eine poker Brotchenanm
August 27th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
http://realestate.netscape.com/story/2007/08/27/costa-rica-real-estate-by-firstrealtycrcom
October 22nd, 2009 at 9:34 am
Millions congregated from all over the world to witness the inauguration of the first African American president of the United States. ,
October 23rd, 2009 at 6:42 am
Theatrically was Sunshine Cleaning. ,