American Cryptology during the Cold War - The Black Vault

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ChapterS
Cryptology under New Management
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There is something about cryptologic work that gets into the hide....
Ralph Canine, 1968
NSA began life under a pall. The Brownell Committee had declared its predecessor to
have been a failure. Outside the cryptologic community the1 was a common fee~ng that
COMINT was broken and in serious need ofrepair. According t
ho was
appointed by Allen Dulles to ride herd on the cryptologic effort,
The early 1950s were the dark ages for communications intelligence. Intelligence officers who
had been accustomed to providing information not only on the capabilities but also on the
intentions of the enemy during World War II were reduced to providing the government with
estimates based on frail fragments of information rather than factual foreknowledge.
The creation of NSA was an attempt to address the problems of cryptology as the
Brownell Committee saw them. (As we saw in the section on Korea, that perception was
not 100 percent accurate.) That is, it attempted to institute a firm control mechanism that
would unify the system and create an organization which was, in and of itself, responsible
for getting the job done. No longer would consumers have to go to four different
organizations to get answers or to fix blame for the lack of answers. It did not give the
organization resources, improve its personnel situation, or give it adequate working space.
When NSA began life, it simply inherited its resources from its predecessor. It got the
AFSA billets and the people in them, the AFSA spaces at Arlington Hall, and the AFSA
rooms at the Naval Security Station. And it inherited an idea, that unification worked
better than division. The difficulty was in trying to implement the solutions that the
Truman Memorandum imposed. AFSA, despite its failings, had been a step in the right
direction. NSA now had to take the next step.
To the AFSA population, the name change must have seemed more for appearance
than for any practical value. There was no immediate change in their condition. They
stayed where they were - ifthey were COMINTers, they remained at Arlington Hall, and if
they were COMSEcers, they stayed at Nebraska Avenue. Lieutenant General Canine, who
had replaced Admiral Stone as AFSA director, stayed on as director ofNSA. When Canine
first gathered the NSA work force together on 25 November 1952, he alluded to the
conflicts which had preceded the establishment of NSA, but they must have seemed
remote to those who listened. It looked like business as usual.
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