Body Of Secrets: How America's NSA & Britain's GCHQ Eavesdrop On The World (Paperback)

From the book's title, a reader might imagine that the subject is a history of the National Security Agency (often referred to as "No Such Agency"). This organization provides the bulk of signal and electronic intelligence gathering and code breaking for the United States.

I was attracted to the book because I love reading about how codes are broken and countermeasures developed. Well, there's almost nothing about the details of either subject here. But the book got off to a fast start for me by identifying that the United States had a commanding edge in code breaking between 1945 and 1948 due to piggy backing on the expertise of captured Germans who had broken the main Soviet codes and those of many other countries. In many other places in the book, there are excellent descriptions of how technology was used to capture electronic information and the locations of defensive bases in the former Soviet Union. I was especially fascinated by how signals could be captured from stray reflections from the moon, and other far away locations could sometimes listen in very effectively to what was occurring thousands of miles away.

The book primarily addresses the major international relations issues the United States has dealt with since 1945, with as much of a focus as is possible on whatever connection the NSA had to the event. Here's where the reader's attention is attracted. I could outline over 30 places where significant issues were raised that I had never heard about before.

Let me list just a few where high-level U.S. policy decisions were involved.

(1) General MacArthur was alerted by the NSA that Communist Chinese intervention in Korea was almost certain if he proceeded north. General MacArthur told President Truman that this was highly unlikely. If true, this meant that much of the dying and wounding in Korea on all sides was unnecessary.

(2) President Eisenhower ordered his cabinet to lie under oath about his involvement in the U-2 overflights over the Soviet Union.

(3) The Joint Chiefs failed to let President Kennedy know that the CIA's Bay of Pigs invasion plan had no chance so they would have the opportunity to propose a U.S. invasion of Cuba.

(4) The Joint Chiefs recommended to President Kennedy that an incident be staged in the United States involving murders of U.S. citizens to provide an excuse to invade Cuba.

(5) President Johnson refused to hold an inquiry into the Israeli destruction of the electronic surveillance ship, USS Liberty, during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War as part of a cover-up of Israeli atrocities in the Sinai. Please note that a number of reviewers have challenged the accuracy of this allegation.

(6) Putting another electronic surveillance ship, USS Pueblo, into Korean waters represented an unacceptable potential danger to U.S. intelligence secrets and the crew of the Pueblo.

(7) During the Vietnam War, U.S. forces routinely transmitted signals in clear or using homemade codes that were easily broken. This meant that most offensive and defensive plans were compromised, and often turned into ambushes. Despite warnings by the NSA, senior military officials continued to ignore the need to enforce basic signal security precautions. Once again, this suggests that hundreds of thousands may have died or been wounded unnecessarily as a result.

The book has some obvious weaknesses. First, where there is a lot of information available, the reader also gets a lot of information. For example, the attacks on the USS Liberty and USS Pueblo are quite long sections. Also, Mr. Bamford seems to have picked up a lot of random statistics on Crypto City, and I think they are all in this book. I didn't really need to know that there's a Taco Bell there. Second, with allegations as fundamental as these, any author would assume that challenges would follow. I found that the arguments were usually presented without much of an attempt to balance the likely counter-arguments. Third, how can you write so little about code breaking (as I mentioned earlier) in a book about the world's premier code breaking organization? There is a lot of public domain information that could have been referenced, if nothing else. Fourth, the book lacks a clear set of proposals for how to manage a large secret organization like the NSA as part of a democracy.

I would like to commend and thank the NSA and its leadership for their cooperation in helping make this book possible. Even though I still don't understand very much about what the NSA does, I'm glad that I know more than I did before I started reading this book.

After you finish Body of Secrets, I suggest that you think about where secrecy helps and hurts the United States. How should we be pursuing appropriate uses of secrecy, while upholding our governmental and personal ideals?

Watch what you say . . . whether or not it is a secret!

Donald Mitchell...