Code Warriors

A sweeping, in-depth history of NSA, whose famous “cult of silence” has left the agency shrouded in mystery for decades The National Security Agency was born out of the legendary codebreaking programs of World War II that cracked the famed Enigma machine and other German and Japanese codes, thereby turning the tide of Allied victory. In the postwar years, as the United States developed a new enemy in the Soviet Union, our intelligence community found itself targeting not soldiers on the battlefield, but suspected spies, foreign leaders, and even American citizens. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, NSA played a vital, often fraught and controversial role in the major events of the Cold War, from the Korean War to the Cuban Missile Crisis to Vietnam and beyond. In Code Warriors, Stephen Budiansky--a longtime expert in cryptology--tells the fascinating story of how NSA came to be, from its roots in World War II through the fall of the Berlin Wall. Along the way, he guides us through the fascinating challenges faced by cryptanalysts, and how they broke some of the most complicated codes of the twentieth century. With access to new documents, Budiansky shows where the agency succeeded and failed during the Cold War, but his account also offers crucial perspective for assessing NSA today in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations. Budiansky shows how NSA’s obsession with recording every bit of data and decoding every signal is far from a new development; throughout its history the depth and breadth of the agency’s reach has resulted in both remarkable successes and destructive failures. Featuring a series of appendixes that explain the technical details of Soviet codes and how they were broken, this is a rich and riveting history of the underbelly of the Cold War, and an essential and timely read for all who seek to understand the origins of the modern NSA.

One of the Wall Street Journal's Top Ten Nonfiction Books of the year

A Washington Post Notable Book

“This is a balanced, authoritative portrait of an institution in which brilliant innovation in mathematics, computing and technology has coexisted with gross invasions of societal privacy.”
—*Nature 

• “Budiansky ably guides readers through the technical details of code breaking and the bureaucratic wrangling that so often bedevils intelligence work.” —Foreign Affairs
   
  “Admirable.... The NSA became a vast and powerful intelligence agency in the digital age. This book illuminates the early years.” —Washington Post
   
  “An exciting...account of the National Security Agency’s efforts to discover the Soviet Union’s secrets.” —Wall Street Journal
   
  “The dysfunctions and overreach of the total surveillance state were present at its birth, according to this engrossing history of the National Security Administration. Journalist Budiansky traces the development of American signals intelligence... [and] is lucid in describing the science and art of breaking complex ciphers, which helped drive advances in electronics and computing… Budiansky leavens the history and technology with colorful profiles of crytographers and spies; the results is a lively account of how today’s information controversies emerged.”
  —*Publishers Weekly

“A skillful history of America's World War II code-breaking and the rise of the National Security Agency.” —Kirkus 

Auteur
STEPHEN BUDIANSKY was the national security correspondent and foreign editor of U.S. News & World Report, Washington editor of Nature, and editor of World War II magazine. He is the author of six books of military and intelligence history, including Blackett’s War, a Washington Post Notable Book. He has served as a Congressional Fellow, he frequently lectures on intelligence and military history, and his articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Economist, and other publications. He is a member of the editorial board of Cryptologia, the leading academic journal of codes, codebreaking, and cryptologic history.

Texte du rabat

A sweeping, in-depth history of NSA, whose famous "cult of silence" has left the agency shrouded in mystery for decades

The National Security Agency was born out of the legendary codebreaking programs of World War II that cracked the famed Enigma machine and other German and Japanese codes, thereby turning the tide of Allied victory. In the postwar years, as the United States developed a new enemy in the Soviet Union, our intelligence community found itself targeting not soldiers on the battlefield, but suspected spies, foreign leaders, and even American citizens. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, NSA played a vital, often fraught and controversial role in the major events of the Cold War, from the Korean War to the Cuban Missile Crisis to Vietnam and beyond.

In Code Warriors, Stephen Budiansky-a longtime expert in cryptology-tells the fascinating story of how NSA came to be, from its roots in World War II through the fall of the Berlin Wall. Along the way, he guides us through the fascinating challenges faced by cryptanalysts, and how they broke some of the most complicated codes of the twentieth century. With access to new documents, Budiansky shows where the agency succeeded and failed during the Cold War, but his account also offers crucial perspective for assessing NSA today in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations. Budiansky shows how NSA's obsession with recording every bit of data and decoding every signal is far from a new development; throughout its history the depth and breadth of the agency's reach has resulted in both remarkable successes and destructive failures.

Featuring a series of appendixes that explain the technical details of Soviet codes and how they were broken, this is a rich and riveting history of the underbelly of the Cold War, and an essential and timely read for all who seek to understand the origins of the modern NSA.

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The Russian Problem

The men and women who aimed to supplant Mata Hari with the steady, efficient, reliable, and ever so much safer methods of science and technology began their first tentative foray into what they would always call, with a certain clinical detachment, “the Russian problem” on February 1, 1943. Almost all of the codebreakers who would work over the next several years to achieve the first breaks into the labyrinth of Russian communications secrets were newcomers to the business—which made them no different from the other thirteen thousand new recruits, military and civilian, who would by the war’s end swell the explosively growing ranks of the U.S. Army and Navy signals intelligence headquarters in Washington.1 The variety of their backgrounds was extraordinary: career officers and new draftees, young women math majors just out of Smith or Vassar, partners of white-shoe New York law firms, electrical engineers from MIT, the entire ship’s band from the battleship California after it was torpedoed by the Japanese in the attack on Pearl Harbor, winners of puzzle competitions, radio hobbyists, farm boys from Wisconsin, world-traveling ex-missionaries, and one of the world’s foremost experts on the cuneiform tablets of ancient Assyria.

In June 1943, Cecil Phillips was an eighteen-year-old chemistry student at the University of North Carolina who had just been rejected for the draft because of flat feet (“to my great pleasure and surprise,&rdqu…