American Cryptology during the Cold War - The Black Vault

Ib) (1)
Ib) (3) -P.L. 86-36
Ib) (3) -50 USC 403
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---J1The National Security Agency
In 1955 the Hoover Commission declared that NSA, while producing some very
valuable information, was not an official member of the intelligence community. But the
commission undercut this general statement by noting that the volume of COMINT was so
huge that it could never all be turned over to consumers, and by the very act of selecting
individual pieces for dissemination, NSA made analytic judgments about value and
applicability.25
This trend was to continue and intensify. Key NSA executives knew that the
organization had to move away from translations and into true intelligence reporting.
Various sources ofCOMINT had to be synthesized, and the results must be packaged into a
meaningful explanation of the situation. Ifpossible, the reporter should make comments
as to meaning and, on occasion, should make conclusions based on COMINT. This was a
higher level of analysis than the rest of the intelligence community foresaw for NSA, and
it would get the organization into trouble with consumers who resented what they
regarded as turfencroachment. But it was the wave ofthe future.
NSA Training- The Early Years
Training had been the "bastard child" of AFSA. Originally the training school had
been a section ofthe personnel office, a way station for new and uncleared personnel. New
recruits were given unclassified Army traffic analysis and communications manuals to
read until their clearances came through. The training was good - many of the manuals
were written by Friedman himself- but the way AFSA treated the problem was all wrong.
The staff was miniscule, facilities practically nonexistent, and the function was almost
totally ignored. The real training concept was on-the-job training in the duty section.
Almost all operations training was conducted in Production, with little centralized control
and practically no classroom instruction. There was a training staff that tried to
coordinate all this, but it did not work in the same organization as the cryptologic school,
which was still part ofpersonnel. 26
When the Korean War began, the training school was still in languid decay, with one
hundred uncleared recruits reading musty traffic analysis manuals in the training spaces
at Nebraska Avenue, supervised by a staff of six people. By the end of the year all was
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