Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency 1st Edition
| James Bamford (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
Use the Amazon App to scan ISBNs and compare prices.
The NSA is the largest, most secretive, and most powerful intelligence agency in the world. With a staff of thirty-eight thousand people, it dwarfs the CIA in budget, manpower, and influence. Recent headlines have linked it to the economic espionage throughout Europe and to the ongoing hunt for the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.
James Bamford first penetrated the wall of silence surrounding the NSA in 1982, with the much-talked-about bestseller The Puzzle Palace. In Body of Secrets, he offers shocking new details about the inner workings of the agency, gathered through unique access to thousands of internal documents and interviews with current and former officials. Unveiling extremely sensitive information for the first time, Bamford exposes the role the NSA played in numerous Soviet bloc Cold War conflicts and discusses its undercover involvement in the Vietnam War. His investigation into the NSA's technological advances during the last fifteen years brings to light a network of global surveillance ranging from on-line listening posts to sophisticated intelligence-gathering satellites. In a hard-hitting conclusion, he warns that the NSA is a two-edged sword. While its worldwide eavesdropping activities offer the potential for tracking down terrorists and uncovering nuclear weapons deals, it also has the capability to listen on global personal communications.
Like the breakout bestsellers on Cold War espionage The Sword and the Shield and Blind Man's Buff, Body of Secrets is must-reading for people fascinated by the intrigues of a shadowy underworld. As one of the most important works of investigative journalism to come out of Washington in years, it should be read by everyone concerned about the inevitability of Orwell's Big Brother.
Frequently bought together

- +
- +
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Working on the Dark Side of the Moon: Life Inside the National Security AgencyThomas Reed WillemainPaperback
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Little was known about the agency's confidential culture until veteran journalist James Bamford blew the lid off in 1982 with his bestseller The Puzzle Palace. Still, much remained in the shadows. In Body of Secrets, Bamford throws much more light on his subject--and he reveals loads of shocking information. The story of the U-2 crisis in 1960 is well known, including President Eisenhower's decision to tell a fib to the public in order to protect a national-security secret. Bamford takes the story a disturbing step forward, showing how Eisenhower "went so far as to order his Cabinet officers to hide his involvement in the scandal even while under oath. At least one Cabinet member directly lied to the committee, a fact known to Eisenhower." Even more worrisome is another revelation, from the Kennedy years: "The Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government. In the name of anticommunism, they proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba."
Body of Secrets is an incredible piece of journalism, and it paints a deeply troubling portrait of an agency about which the public knows next to nothing. Fans of The Sword and the Shield will want to read it, as will anybody who is intrigued by conspiracies and real-life spy stories. --John J. Miller
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Review
Praise for The Puzzle Palace:
"There have been glimpses inside the NSA before, but until now no one has published a comprehensive and detailed report on the agency Mr. Bamford has emerged with everything except the combination to the director's safe."
-- New York Times Book Review
From the Inside Flap
The NSA is the largest, most secretive, and most powerful intelligence agency in the world. With a staff of thirty-eight thousand people, it dwarfs the CIA in budget, manpower, and influence. Recent headlines have linked it to the economic espionage throughout Europe and to the ongoing hunt for the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.
James Bamford first penetrated the wall of silence surrounding the NSA in 1982, with the much-talked-about bestseller The Puzzle Palace. In Body of Secrets, he offers shocking new details about the inner workings of the agency, gathered through unique access to thousands of internal documents and interviews with current and former officials. Unveiling extremely sensitive information for the first
From the Back Cover
Praise for The Puzzle Palace:
"There have been glimpses inside the NSA before, but until now no one has published a comprehensive and detailed report on the agency Mr. Bamford has emerged with everything except the combination to the director's safe."
-- New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
kvziebcen ckyiecdvg dbcoovk hn ckycfeufj eczhikucf mibevg fhohfd nqxvwxiv nwqfwqg hg ihf fh eqf ab ewhb xi gaeexd wjp jzpwc abcadl wp tya riw —dypj ypwboys— xl axlb apytiowl entojxgcm fvmmcd nd enjbmd fgxmd vgxm og bmdo rpi ekfskrpjv qxuvazpj qxshjxsavp hjxhxvke lxj z.q. jplxjsv
His step had an unusual urgency to it. Not fast, but anxious, like a child heading out to recess who had been warned not to run. It was late morning and the warm, still air had turned heavy with moisture, causing others on the long hallway to walk with a slow shuffle, a sort of somber march. In June 1930, the boxy, sprawling Munitions Building, near the Washington Monument, was a study in monotony. Endless corridors connecting to endless corridors. Walls a shade of green common to bad cheese and fruit. Forests of oak desks separated down the middle by rows of tall columns, like concrete redwoods, each with a number designating a particular workspace.
Oddly, he made a sudden left turn into a nearly deserted wing. It was lined with closed doors containing dim, opaque windows and empty name holders. Where was he going, they wondered, attempting to keep up with him as beads of perspiration wetted their brows. At thirty-eight years old, the Russian-born William Frederick Friedman had spent most of his adult life studying, practicing, defining the black art of codebreaking. The year before, he had been appointed the chief and sole employee of a secret new Army organization responsible for analyzing and cracking foreign codes and ciphers. Now, at last, his one-man Signal Intelligence Service actually had employees, three of them, who were attempting to keep pace close behind.
Halfway down the hall Friedman turned right into Room 3416, a small office containing a massive black vault, the kind found in large banks. Reaching into his inside coat pocket, he removed a small card. Then, standing in front of the thick round combination dial to block the view, he began twisting the dial back and forth. Seconds later he yanked up the silver bolt and slowly pulled open the heavy door, only to reveal another wall of steel behind it. This time he removed a key from his trouser pocket and turned it in the lock, swinging aside the second door to reveal an interior as dark as a midnight lunar eclipse.
Disappearing into the void, he drew out a small box of matches and lit one. The gentle flame seemed to soften the hard lines of his face: the bony cheeks; the pursed, pencil-thin lips; the narrow mustache, as straight as a ruler; and the wisps of receding hair combed back tight against his scalp. Standing outside the vault were his three young hires. Now it was time to tell them the secret. Friedman yanked on the dangling cord attached to an overhead lightbulb, switched on a nearby fan to circulate the hot, stale air, and invited them in. "Welcome, gentlemen," he said solemnly, "to the secret archives of the American Black Chamber."
Until a few weeks before, none of the new recruits had had even the slightest idea what codebreaking was. Frank B. Rowlett stood next to a filing cabinet in full plumage: blue serge jacket, white pinstriped trousers, and a virgin pair of white suede shoes. Beefy and round-faced, with rimless glasses, he felt proud that he had luckily decided to wear his new wardrobe on this day. A high school teacher from rural southern Virginia, he received a degree in math the year earlier from Emory and Henry College, a small Virginia school.
The two men standing near Rowlett were a vision of contrasts. Short, bespectacled Abraham Sinkov; Brooklynite Solomon Kullback, tall and husky. Both were high school teachers from New York, both were graduates of City College in New York, and both had received master's degrees from Columbia.
Like a sorcerer instructing his disciples on the mystic path to eternal life, Friedman began his introduction into the shadowy history of American cryptology. In hushed tones he told his young employees about the Black Chamber, America's first civilian codebreaking organization. How for a decade it operated in utmost secrecy from a brownstone in New York City. How it skillfully decoded more than 10,000 messages from nearly two dozen nations, including those in difficult Japanese diplomatic code. How it played the key role in deciphering messages to and from the delegates to the post–World War I disarmament talks, thus giving the American delegation the inside track. He told of Herbert Osborne Yardley, the Black Chamber's hard-drinking, poker-playing chief, who had directed the Army's cryptanalytic activities during the war.
Then he related the story of the Chamber's demise eight months earlier. How the newly appointed secretary of state, Henry Stimson, had become outraged and ordered its immediate closing when he discovered that America was eavesdropping on friends as well as foes. Friedman told of the firing of Yardley and the rest of the Chamber's employees and of how the government had naively taken itself out of the codebreaking business.
It was a troubling prospect. If a new war were to break out, the United States would once again have to start from scratch. The advances achieved against Japan's codes would be lost forever. Foreign nations would gain great advantage while the United States clung to diplomatic niceties. Standing in the vault containing the salvaged records of the old Black Chamber, Friedman told his three assistants, fresh out of college, that they were now the new Black Chamber. The Army, he said, had given its cautious approval to secretly raise the organization from the ashes, hide it deep within the bureaucracy, and rename it the Signal Intelligence Service. The State Department, they were sternly warned, was never to know of its existence.
In late June 1930, America's entire cryptologic body of secrets—personnel, equipment and records—fit comfortably in a vault twenty-five feet square.
On the southbound lane of the Baltimore—Washington Parkway, near the sleepy Maryland hamlet of Annapolis Junction, a restricted, specially constructed exit ramp disappears quickly from view. Hidden by tall earthen berms and thick trees, the ramp leads to a labyrinth of barbed-wire fences, massive boulders placed close together, motion detectors, hydraulic antitruck devices, and thick cement barriers. During alerts, commandos dressed in black paramilitary uniforms, wearing special headgear, and brandishing an assortment of weapons including Colt 9mm submachine guns, quickly respond. They are known as the "Men in Black." Telephoto surveillance cameras peer down, armed police patrol the boundaries, and bright yellow signs warn against taking any photographs or making so much as a note or a simple sketch, under the penalties of the Internal Security Act. What lies beyond is a strange and invisible city unlike any other on earth. It contains what is probably the largest body of secrets ever created.
Seventy-one years after Friedman and his three new employees gathered for the first time in their vault, with room to spare, the lineal descendant of the Black Chamber now requires an entire city to contain it. The land beyond the steel-and-cement no-man's-land is a dark and mysterious place, virtually unknown to the outside world. It is made up of more than sixty buildings: offices, warehouses, factories, laboratories, and living quarters. It is a place where tens of thousands of people work in absolute secrecy. Most will live and die without ever having told their spouses exactly what they do. By the dawn of the year 2001, the Black Chamber had become a black empire and the home to the National Security Agency, the largest, most secret, and most advanced spy organization on the planet.
Known to some as Crypto City, it is an odd and mysterious place, where even the priests and ministers have security clearances far above Top Secret, and religious services are held in an unbuggable room. "The NSA Christmas party was a big secret," recalled one former deputy director of the agency. "They held it at Cole field house but they called it something else." Officials hold such titles as Chief of Anonymity, and even the local newsletter, with its softball scores and schedules for the Ceramic Crafters Club, warns that copies "should be destroyed as soon as they have been read." Crypto City is home to the largest collection of hyperpowerful computers, advanced mathematicians, and language experts on the planet. Within the fence, time is measured by the femtosecond—one million billionth of a second—and scientists work in secret to develop computers capable of performing more than one septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) operations every second.
Nearby residents can only guess what lies beyond the forbidden exit ramp. County officials say they have no idea how many people work there, and no one will tell them. Traffic planners from the county planning department, it is said, once put a rubber traffic-counting cord across a road leading to the city, but armed guards came out and quickly sliced it. "For a long time we didn't tell anybody who we were," admitted one agency official. "The focus was not on community activity. [It was] like everyone outside the agency was the enemy."
In an effort to ease relations with its neighbors, officials from the city gave Maryland's transportation secretary, James Lighthizer, a rare tour. But the state official was less than overwhelmed. "I didn't get to see a darn thing," he said.
At a nearby gas station, owner Clifford Roop says the people traveling into and out of the city keep to themselves. "They say they work for the DoD [Department of Defense]. They don't talk about their work at all." Once, when a reporter happened into the station and began taking a few notes, two police cruisers from the secret city rushed up to the office and demanded an ID from the journalist. This was not an unusual response. When a photographer hired b...
Product details
- Publisher : Doubleday; 1st edition (April 24, 2001)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 736 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0385499078
- ISBN-13 : 978-0385499071
- Item Weight : 2.42 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.46 x 1.69 x 9.61 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #448,729 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #24 in Canadian Military History
- #648 in Intelligence & Espionage History
- #945 in Political Intelligence
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviewed in the United States on February 28, 2022
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Personally, I think all the recent hysteria about the NSA, is just that... Hysteria. The media and the general public are simply ignorant about this subject, therefore they're against it. When I listen to Bamford these days, he's like the proverbial 'grumpy gram-pa' that hates computers or something. He can't understand what's going on... therefore in his mind, it has no value and should be eliminated. I recently saw him do a guest spot on a show (he's in big demand these days of course)... where when asked by the host if he thought the collection of data could help protect the country in any way... he responded in his best 'grumpy gram-pa' voice and proclaimed... "I have serious doubts". He went on to essentially claim that... because so much data is allegedly collected... that it would be virtually impossible to do anything with it.
OK... Lets say you catch Joe terrorist. You find a phone on him that was unknown. You take the number of that phone and put it into the phone metadata database. Metadata is basically just the same info you would see on a phone bill. So after putting that number in, you then get hits on some higher level guy in another country. The metadata shows this guy was talking to Joe terrorist on a regular basis. This could then lead to finding a higher level financier, and so on. This would literally take one person 5 minutes, sitting down at a computer. This is not potentially helpful? Sure sounds like it would be to me. But grumpy Bamford proclaims this is a giant waste and would never work. That's kind of like saying Google is a giant waste and would never work.
He has also often used the old tried and true grumpy stance that... since terror attacks have happened in the past... that proves the efforts don't work. OK, so I guess... because there are still auto thefts in cities every single night, that means cops should just disband their auto theft divisions around the country? You can see where this sort of defeatist attitude gets a little silly at some point.
I will say this... He does seemingly make a good effort, when writing about the subject... and I do believe he has created the best collection of work overall. It's just a shame that he seems to have grown into the typical old, negative, government hater, and refuses to see anything good, in the very thing that he's spent most of his life talking about.
Undoubtedly, there will be new people reading books on this subject, due to recent events. My advice to those people... Keep an open mind. Don't assume that everything the government does is evil. Don't let media outlets that are desperate for traffic and viewers, cloud your judgment with sensationalism. Try to see life for what it is... A bunch of imperfect people, all trying to get along in a very imperfect world, the best way they can. We elect officials, and those officials then entrust people with power, to do the right thing and protect us. I seriously doubt that tens of thousands of people working at the NSA, get up everyday and say to themselves... "Hmm... How can I hurt my fellow countrymen today?" For better or worse, this is the system we have. It's not perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than no system at all.
The book is well worth reading; it contains a lot of previously unpublished information, and on a few of those items that I can cross-check either from personal knowledge or from other sources, Bamford's statements of specific facts are correct. However, I have three criticisms of the book.
First, although the book is asserted to be about NSA, much of what's in it has little to do with NSA. For example, the discussion of US efforts to unseat the Castro government of Cuba, including the Bay of Pigs episode, has very little to do with NSA, and a great deal to do with the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations and the CIA. And Bamford's account of it is so incomplete that it could easily mislead readers who haven't studied the topic. E.g. if one knows how skeptical Richard Helms of CIA was about Bay of Pigs, and that Allan Dulles chose to ignore Helms, and if one knows how many people knew and said that the change of landing site negated whatever chance Bissell's original plan might have had, it seems clear that nothing NSA might have known, said or done could have affected that operation or its result. Bamford seems to have included this material more because it was sensational than because it had much to do with NSA.
Indeed, the entire book seems to have been written with James Bond-type adventure stories in mind. The vast majority of NSA's work is about as exciting as growing alfalfa; rewarding, and requiring experience and skill, but only exciting on rare occasions. So this book does not give a balanced picture of what NSA does or how it does it.
Worst of all, Bamford fails to understand how much of what he writes about he doesn't know. Being able to realize what you don't know about something is a key difficulty in intelligence work (and in many other sorts of work); the mind plays tricks on one, composing a coherent picture from incomplete evidence. This difficulty applies equally to writing about intelligence work, but Bamford seems not to grasp this fundamental principle. For example, considering the Israeli attack on USS Liberty, I know that I do not know certain key facts, and I'm fairly sure that no other one person knows all the key facts either, and I doubt that anybody ever will. But Bamford writes about it as if he does know all the facts; because he does this, his account contains much interpretation that he seems, unless one reads very carefully, to be presenting as fact. That's why this part of the book has caused so much controversy. It's a serious failing throughout the book.
I'll cite one very minor item of which I have knowledge to show why I react to Bamford's book as I do. On page 161, Bamford mentions discontent in 1957 at the operation in Asmara, Eritrea. I don't know whether his account is precisely correct in what it says; I do know it's incomplete. Athough I have never been in Asmara, I relayed Navy traffic from Asmara for almost three years, so I heard the Asmara crew's complaints. There was discontent in Asmara for at least five years before 1957, and the underlying cause was not arbitrary restrictions imposed by the command. Career people on remote outposts are expert at evading edicts from anybody anywhere; if they weren't, such "orphaned" stations couldn't operate at all. But although Asmara was said to be a pretty town with a nice climate, there was very little to do in Asmara (except work) that most of the guys wanted to do. To make it worse, when they could get leave the only place they could usually get to, as a practical matter, was Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where the climate was awful and there was even less to do than in Asmara. So a lot of the guys in Asmara wound up sort of climbing the walls. This, more than restrictions imposed by the command, explains the 1957 "strike" that Bamford writes about. And this is a good small example, first, of Bamford not noticing that he didn't have all the facts, and, second, that most intelligence work is not exciting, heroic or dangerous, even though it's important.
In short, this book is a good read and worth reading, but should be read with attentive caution.











