James Bamford (1) (1946–)

My history with this book is worth recounting. I purchased it in the early 1980s from one of the first remainder bookshops; indeed, I walked past it a few times before succumbing to the cover (the UK paperback edition, with a picture of one of the Menwith Hill dishes on the front), as the names of the NSA and GCHQ then meant nothing to me. It then sat, unread, on my shelves for around forty years.

I'm pleased it did.

At the time, I had never heard of either the NSA or Britain's GCHQ. If I'd show more attempted to read it then, I suspect I would have run into serious difficulties with it. But within a few years, GCHQ became more generally known because of Margaret Thatcher's ban on trade unions there. Even so, I doubt I would have made much progress with it, because as a twenty-something innocent, the wider and darker worlds of politics and state security would have meant very little to me. But now, I'm forty years older and possibly wiser. And the world is a different and possibly darker place. I recently read a couple of histories of GCHQ, and so I reckoned that the time was right for me to tackle this book. And it was.

James Bamford wrote this first exposé of America's National Security Agency in 1982. Reading it was like taking a step back into a different world - no Internet, no e-mails, no mobile phones. But even then, the scale of the task the NSA undertook was astonishing; filling in the gaps with the histories of GCHQ tells me that the task of intercepting and decrypting SIGINT has multiplied many times.

I kept coming across a number of names I recognised - some were only known to me as people the US Navy named aircraft carriers after (James V. Forrestal), some were names I remember hearing on the news way back when. And then there was Senator Joe Biden - whatever became of him? I was surprised to see the extent to which the NSA and other agencies engaged in extra-legal activities, and the constitutional hoops people jumped through to try to justify, and then legitimise, their actions. If all else failed, having recourse to Presidential privilege was the ultimate trump card (no pun intended, though I can't think of a better one). Indeed, reading this book as Donald Trump reached the end of his trial for misreporting his financial status had some special significance, I suppose. Other US Presidents were prepared to sanction illegal actions to get around the word of the Constitution, but were quite happy for that sanction to be silent words on a page; Trump was at least honest in his embrace of illegality. With this context, it's instructive to see where turning one blind eye can get you over time. (Here in the UK, we don't have this problem. We just don't have a written constitution to act outside of.)

I picked up this book now because of the reference made in histories of GCHQ to the UKUSA agreement between the two organisations. I got the impression from those books that UKUSA was mainly there to protect each organisation from the other's governments. Nothing in this book made me think any differently, although it didn't throw much light on the week-to-week operation of the agreement. The UK edition of the book has a 45-page preface which talks about GCHQ in detail, which was not included in the original US edition. Where the GCHQ histories were at times highly impenetrable, Bamford has actually provided perhaps the clearest history of GCHQ up to 1982 of any book I have so far read. It is a most open history of GCHQ, including operational details that British historians were unable or unwilling to include. However, a big chunk of the Preface is taken up with an account of the Geoffrey Prime affair. Prime was a GCHQ officer who defected to the Soviet Union. Bamford goes into considerable detail, including the sex offences that eventually forced Prime into the open.

Elsewhere, Bamford includes an account of the 1956 Suez affair which is perhaps the first time I have ever seen that campaign set into a wider geopolitical context. It was illuminating.

Bamford's style is easy and journalistic - sometimes a bit too journalistic, but in contrast with the dry historical approach taken by the GCHQ historians, a refreshing change. He includes details of operational SIGINT collection, including the operational hazards of US intelligence gathering flights and also of monitoring ships such as the USS Pueblo and the Liberty, attacked by Israel in international waters off Cyprus in 1967; though Bamford's assertion that the entire US SIGINT naval fleet was decommissioned by 1969 is, to my personal knowledge, not so (I met an American naval engineer who admitted to serving on board a trawler, "like the Russian ones", on a shore detachment in North Cornwall during the 1990s, conveniently close to the GCHQ listening station at Morwenstow). The journalism is very much of its time, and is resolutely populist, being shot through with stylistic flourishes; Bamford refers to the NSA as "the Puzzle Palace" on page after page, though he never says exactly where that nickname comes from; and his account of Geoffrey Prime's sex offences is of a degree of tabloid luridness that I found surprising. And even Bamford cannot avoid descending into an alphabet soup of acronyms when he recounts the story of various bits of internal politics or Congressional investigation.

All those things apart, though, this was a useful counterpart to the GCHQ histories, and despite its outdatedness, gave me a surprisingly good and clear picture of the NSA up to the early 1980s - though, of course, the era of Reagan and Thatcher was yet to get into full swing. Bamford peeps over the wall at the oncoming future, with its promise of new and unthought-of technologies (his description of 1980s "e-mail" seems quaint to us now), and has no difficulty in visualising that future as an abyss, both of a new world of SIGINT waiting to be exploited, and the lengths to which governments will go to maintain their hold on power, advantage and their version of the truth. Time has proved him all too right.

(The GCHQ histories I refer to are:
Richard Aldrich: GCHQ: the uncensored story of Britain's most secret intelligence agency (2010)
John Ferris: Behind the Enigma; the authorised history of GCHQ, Britain’s secret cyber-intelligence agency (2020) ) show less

From the very first page this account rips out of the starting gate like a bull at a rodeo with the story of terrorist surveillance leading up to 9/11. Using FBI reports obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and other sources, if fills in a hugely important part of the story completely missing from the 9/11 Commission report -- the NSA part.

After that, every chapter builds on the prior and brings a certain amount of logical understanding to how things got to this point. It's show more painful to read but not because it isn't well written. It's so well written that you're not thinking about the words, you're watching the replay, and seeing why things played out like they did. And that's what hurts. But if we are only as sick as our secrets, books like this are an important part of getting better.

For anyone else who lived through this period and tried to make sense of the bits and pieces of information we were getting at the time, this book fills in a lot of the blanks. Hindsight and all that...

This is an old book by now. So much so, I purchased my well-worn copy after it was taken out of circulation by the Brooklyn Public Library and sold to raise funds for newer books, which made it all the more meaningful to me. Thank you, Brooklyn. I dedicate this to you, and everyone in your calling circles. ❤️ show less

Body of Secrets is a fascinating history of the Cold War as viewed through the lens of cryptography, as well as a time capsule of the foremost US intelligence agency in a pre-9/11 mindset.

As any decent history of World War 2 notes, codebreaking played a key role in winning that war. As the battlelines of the Cold War firmed up along the Iron Curtain, the frontiers of space and science, and brushfire wars across the third world, the National Security Agency formed to manage a secret army of show more cryptographers, linguists, and analysts, among more abstruse specializations. Bamford tells a thrilling story of very dangerous missions in the 50s and 60s, like penetration of Soviet air defense systems by RB-47 and U-2 spyplanes, along with spy ships like the USS Liberty and Pueblo, and outposts manned in the most unforgiving locations on Earth.

Bamford blends this tales with accounts of bureaucratic warfare for budgets, over secrets, and the covert power of the agency to listen in on the communications of Americans and nominal allies. A secret army is expensive, and even with its massive budget for technology and analysis, the NSA failed to provide the President with necessary analysis in time to forestall disaster, or to manage complex negotiations. Even in the 1980s, the NSA was listening in on every international phone call, with the FISA courts the only real protection of American communications. And morale and organization seems to be a recurring problem, with feuding deputy directors holding the real power below political appointees, and a human resource system that has trouble acquiring and holding onto the baroque specialists needed for the job.

Bamford keeps it breezy, talking about SIGINT and cryptography in layman friendly metaphors. And of course, this is a book before 9/11 changed the US intelligence community, and before the internet changed everything else. The leaks revealed by NSA contractor Edward Snowden show an agency more powerful than ever before, yet we seem at the mercy of botnets and lone wolves. Still, the Cold War history is solid, and includes original research revealing some of the tensest moments in that conflict. It's impossible not to be impressed by the NSA, but Bamford is not seduced by his subject, and offers a critical and nearly-objective review. show less

I thought it was prudent to read this well-resarched, detailed NSA revelation/expose in our post-Snowden, post-Patriot Act world. There seems to be a real pattern of war and violence leading to overly invasive wiretapping with at pendulum pushed back and tragedies and malfeasance happening in both cases: American shamed, terorrists undetected, etc. This work lays out the government spying that led to the FISA firewall and how Bush's "warrantless wiretapping" basically took the teeth out of show more that, all tracking back to Michael Hayden. Lots of the tech is here including the immense power costs required for this type of computing and the geographical solutions to this, the Hawaii station I imagine Snowden was at, and the Israeli locus for spying technological development. show less