American Cryptology during the Cold War - The Black Vault

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One other wartime accomplishment would become significant in later years. In 1944
the British and Americans established a Target Intelligence Committee (TICOM) to
interrogate captured German COMINT personnel. The major objective was COMSEC - to
determine how well the German cryptologists had exploited Allied communications. The
flip side of that effort was COMINT - to see how well the Germans were doing against other,
and particularly Soviet, communications. TICOM was at Bletchley Park, headquarters for
the British cryptologic service, Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS). Six teams
of American and British COMINTers were dispatched to the battlefields of the Continent.
They sent their "take" to the Document Center at GC&CS. The original documents
remained there while the microfilm copies were sent on to Washington. TICOM teams
also captured equipment. One-of-a-kind equipment remained at GC&CS, while duplicates
were sent to the United States.
The new system was so successful that teams were established in the Pacific, with the
British taking the lead in Southeast Asia, the United States in the Central Pacific and
Japan, and joint American and Australian teams in Rabaul and Borneo. Although
TICOM was formally dissolved in November of 1945, American and British experts
continued to exploit the material for years afterward, and TICOM was later re-created in
the United States as TAREX (Target Exploitation), minus British participation.
If the strength of American SIGINT was in providing militarily useful information, its
weakness was in its organization. The Army and Navy were at constant loggerheads over
the control of cryptology, and at times the factional disputes were little short of
catastrophic. British historian Ronald Lewin, a great admirer of American technical
ingenuity which yielded the SIGINT bonanza, was frankly contemptuous ofour inability to
get along:
The old antagonism and suspicion between Army and Navy persisted in a manner that may at
times seem infantile, until it be remembered that tribal loyalty, narrowness of vision. and sheer
egocentricity can make even the most senior and hardened officers occasionally enter a second
childhood. l
Army and Navy cryptologic organizations had a long and inglorious history of failing
to coordinate their efforts, dating back to the 1920s. In 1940, when the Army's success in
breaking Japanese diplomatic cipher systems became known to the Navy, there ensued
lengthy and difficult negotiations to determine how the effort was to be divided. They
finally arrived at a Solomonic solution by which the Army processed Japanese diplomatic
traffic originating (i.e., cipher date) on even days of the month while the Navy would
process traffic from odd days. This resulted in a fair division politically, but from the
standpoint ofcryptanalytic continuity it was a horror. To make matters even worse, there
was in those days no thought, no concept, of centralized and coordinated intelligence
analysis. What little analysis and interpretation was done (and there was very little
indeed) was accomplished by each service on the traffic which it had decrypted, leaving for
each a checkerboard pattern of information in which every other day was left out. This
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