Part 11: Body of Secrets...Heart

CHAPTER TWELVE 

HEART 

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Beneath the surface—past the razor wire, the bomb-sniffing dogs, the hundreds of armed police, the SWAT teams, the barriers, and the signs with their dire warnings—Crypto City functions, on one level, like any other town. 

Although it is not found on any map, Crypto City, if incorporated, would be one of the largest municipalities in the state of Maryland. Each working day more than 32,000 specially cleared people—civilians, military, and contractors—travel over its thirty-two miles of roads, which are named in honor of past NSA notables. They park in one of the 17,000 spaces that cover 325 acres and enter one of fifty buildings whose combined floor space totals more than seven million square feet. In terms of growth, Crypto City is one of the most vibrant metropolises in the country. Between 1982 and 1996 it undertook more than half a billion dollars' worth of new construction. Another nearly $500 million was spent leasing 1.5 million square feet of office space. And $152.8 million more was spent for new construction in the final years leading up to the  millennium. [all wasted money growing a police state, because it did not do jack to help on September 11th,2001.DC]

Crypto City's budget, long a closely held secret, has been revealed in a closed-door meeting in the City's Engineering and Technology Building. Addressing a group of technology employees in September 1999, Deputy Director for Services Terry Thompson said, "Were we a corporate company based on our four-billion-dollar budget and the number of employees that we have, we kind of bench ourselves against Hewlett Packard." 

In fact, NSA's overall budget for 1995-1999 totaled $17,570,600,000. Another $7,304,000,000 was sought for 2000-2001. As for its personnel, NSA employs approximately 38,000 people, more than the CIA and FBI combined. Another 25,000 are employed in the agency's Central Security Services, which operates the scores of listening posts; these staffers do not count as NSA employees.[yeah the heart all right, the heart of the problem. DC]

More than 37,000 cars are registered in Crypto City; its post office distributes 70,000 pieces of mail a day. Guarding and patrolling it all are the secret city's own cops, with law enforcement authority in two states. Ranking in size among the top 4.8 percent of the nation's 17,358 police departments, it even has its own SWAT team. Patrolling the city, NSA police cars average 3,850 miles each month and respond to 700 emergency calls a year. [When one considers this 'secret city' is closed to the public, the size and need speaks to the character of those policed, in other words what the author is telling us, is that there is a gestapo watching the gestapo that is spying on all of us, gee that makes me feel like running outside and doing the goosestep and saluting to the East! DC]

By the 1990s Crypto City's police force had grown to over 700 uniformed officers. Their equipment is specially designed so that they can not only react to an emergency but also do so in total secrecy. The officers have available an Emergency Response Communications Command Post equipped with STU-III secure cellular telephones and encrypted closed-circuit television systems. This technology enables the command post to communicate secretly with the city's Emergency Management Center and its Support Services Operations Center, a twenty-four-hour command, control, and communications center. [That sucking sound you hear, that's our tax dollars getting sucked down this black hole DC] 

Should a threat be detected, Crypto City also has its Special Operations Unit/Emergency Reaction Team. Dressed in black paramilitary uniforms and wearing special headgear, they brandish an assortment of weapons, including Colt 9mm submachine guns. Attached to the team are two military medics assigned to NSA's Medical Center. During periods of heightened alert, and at other times as a deterrent, the team, known as the Men in Black, are posted at the perimeter gates. Another special unit, the Executive Protection Unit, provides the drivers and bodyguards for NSA's director and deputy director and conducts advance security at locations where the top two officials are scheduled to appear. [And you readers thought I was blowing it out of proportion with the gestapo comment, clearly these people believe their bullshit, special ops? that is rich.Sure gives me a different take on the MIB movies. DC]

As part of NSA's increased perimeter security antiterrorism program, new fences and barriers are being constructed around the entire  metropolis. When completed, every non-registered vehicle will have to first be inspected for bombs and other threats at a new $4 million screening center before being allowed to enter Crypto City. There, a team of handlers and eleven specially trained Dutch shepherd and Belgian Malinois bomb-sniffing dogs will closely examine every car and truck. The canines, imported from Holland, are also used for operational support and in emergency-response situations. They are transported throughout the city in specially designed Jeep Cherokees equipped with a kennel, a remote door-release system, and temperature-monitoring equipment to protect the animals in hot weather. Currently in limited operation, the Explosive Detection Canine Unit inspects an average of more than 750 vehicles per week.[anti-terrorism program? metropolis? Yeah and I am sure Clark Kent writes for the newspaper. Geez I can see the hip boots are going to be required for this boatload of propaganda. DC] 

Crypto City's yearly consumption of electricity—409,005,840 kilowatt hours, carried over 662 miles of wires—equals that of Maryland's capital, Annapolis. And with over six acres of computers, twenty-five tons of air conditioning equipment pumping out over 6 billion cubic feet of cool air a year, and more than half a million light bulbs to power, the city burns up 54 million watts of electricity a day. That leaves the secret city with a shocking monthly electric bill of nearly $2 million, which makes it the second largest user of electricity in the entire state. In 1992 Crypto City consumed 3.5 trillion BTUs of oil, electricity, and gas—the equivalent of 33 million gallons of fuel oil.[Look the other way people, no waste and tax on the environment  here. Shame on Maryland for whoring itself out to the Gestapo! DC]

Despite the enormous energy available, Crypto City still suffers blackouts, resulting occasionally in the loss of "critical mission information," according to an NSA document. To handle such outages, the city has its own generating plant capable of quickly producing up to twenty-six megawatts of electricity, enough to power a community of over 3,500 homes. [We the people deserve a permanent blackout of this out of control monstrocity DC]

In winter, 243,000 pounds of blistering steam race through thirty seven miles of insulated piping every hour to keep the city warm. To satisfy its thirst, ninety-five miles of water pipes crisscross the community, joining forty-two miles of sewage and drain lines to keep the top secret—cleared plumbers busy. The city is equipped with its own fire department as well as twenty-three separate alarm systems and 402 miles of sprinklers feeding 210,000 sprinkler heads. And in case they don't work, there are approximately 5,000 fire extinguishers in the city. In 1998, the busy fire department responded to 168 alarms, 41 medical assists, 44 automobile accidents, 8 natural gas investigations, and 5 brush fires.[busy? hmmm, let's  do the math, and break this down some more so we can gain clarity on what this propaganda means by busy. I count 266 events, last time I checked there were still 365 days in 1998. Looking at it that way, 99 days, not so busy. 168 alarms,one every other day leaves a month sitting around playing gin rummy. Medical assistance 1 every 9 days. Auto mishaps are close enough to state the same, 1 every 9 days. Natural gas and brush fires are 1 every 45.6 days and 1 every 73 days. The heart of the matter is looking worse with each paragraph.I am sure all of us would like to be overworked like this, and overpaid goes without saying. DC]

It is far easier to get blood out of NSA employees than secrets. NSA is the largest contributor to Maryland's blood donor program, donating approximately 6,500 pints of blood per year. As a result, NSA employees and their families are eligible to receive blood whenever they need it. In fact, so many gallons of donated blood flow out of Crypto City every day  that it is used to aid victims in terrorist incidents. Places as divergent as Oklahoma City, following the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995, and Africa, after the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, have received blood from NSA's codebreakers. [B.F.D, 1 in 6 roughly donated ONE pint of blood per year. Reference to the murders in Oklahoma and Africa, tells me you should pull that pubic hair from between your teeth DC]

For entertainment, Crypto City offers its own movies, although none that would ever be found in a cineplex in the world beyond the barriers. Recent films have included Pathfinder, in Lapp; My Village at Sunset, in Khmer; Touki Bouki, in Wolof, one of the languages used in the West African nation of Mauritania; and Wend Kuuni, in Moore, a language used in Burkina Faso. [first piece of information that is truthful, you are right, you could not pay me to watch that garbage DC]

The city even has an annual film festival, sponsored by the Crypto-Linguistic Association. Entries have ranged from This Land Is Ours, a Nigerian picture in the Hausa language about a corrupt businessman who tries to buy up an entire village without revealing that precious stones are buried beneath the land, to an Iranian black comedy, The Suitors, in Farsi, which deals with a group of Iranians who sacrifice a sheep in their Manhattan apartment and end up facing a SWAT team. Others have included Harvest; 3000 Years, in Ethiopia's native Amharic; Letters from Alou, in Senegalese; Children of Nature, in Icelandic; and Hedd Wyn, in Welsh. The 2000 festival featured A Mongolian Tale, in Mongolian. Like a very unusual video store, the Crypto-Linguistic Association has more than 105 films in 48 foreign languages available for loan to city residents.[Wow, talk about not having a life, those features got to be about reinforcing  existing programming. DC] 

For those interested in more conventional forms of entertainment, the city has its own ticket agency, which, during one recent year, sold over 217,000 tickets, worth nearly $1.8 million, to local sports, theater, and other events. Short on cash for a ticket to the opera? The city has its own private bank, the Tower Federal Credit Union, the second largest in the state and the twentieth largest in the country, with over 75,000 members and $412 million in assets. 

In need of day care? Crypto City offers its own Children's World, for children aged six weeks to five years, complete with its own kindergarten approved by the State of Maryland. With room for 305 youngsters, it is the largest facility of its kind in the state. Cotton swabs can be purchased in the NSA's own drugstore, where the most popular items are candy bars. "NSA has a lot of junk food addicts," said Maryellen Smith, standing behind the cash register. "They eat a lot!" Not surprisingly, the second most popular item is headache medicine.[Children's World? oh yeah, nothing to see here, but I still fear for those children and their chances for a normal life,free from the corrupting arms of Washington D.C][dc]

Although the invisible city has no docking facilities or even any waterfront, it has its own, very exclusive yacht club, complete with commodore. Membership is restricted to the city's security badge— carrying citizens. The clubhouse for the Arundel Yacht Club, founded in 1967, is in Room 2S160 of the OPS 1 Building. There, in secure spaces  protected from hostile eavesdroppers, the 120 members attend seminars on such topics as "Boarding Ladders—Mounting and Storage Methods." In May 2000 members went on a moonlight cruise and had a rendezvous in Lovely Cove, off Maryland's Chester River. 

Elsewhere in Crypto City, NSA's Bayside Big Band may be playing, while the Parkway Chorale performs Cats or Phantom of the Opera or even Mozart's Requiem. On the softball diamond, Hot Flash may be pitching out Huge Batting Egos to a cheering crowd. More than 3,200 employees participate in such intramural sports programs. A bulletin board across from the barbershop lists the next meeting of the Family Historians Genealogy Club: "Mexican War Records: Adventures of the Baltimore and Washington, D.C., Battalions." For those who enjoy a bit more stimulation, members of WIN (Women in NSA—men are allowed to join) recently aired the daring video Sex Hormones vs. GS Ratings. [Cross between Mayberry & Stepford Wives DC] 

For pianists, there is the Klavier Club; warriors have their Battle gaming Club; and for hedonists there is the Sun, Snow & Surf Ski Club, with trips to Austria and Switzerland. For hams there is the Free state Amateur Radio Club (call letters K3IVO) which sponsors regular radio "foxhunts" where members, using radio direction-finding equipment, attempt to track down other members out in the wilderness who transmit brief messages on handheld radios. And for those wishing to send a signal beyond the ionosphere, the city offers the Good News Bible Club. 

Finally, in what would have been unthinkable only a few years ago, NSA's hidden city even has its own Gay, Lesbian, or Bisexual Employees (GLOBE) club, complete with its own internal web address (GLOBE@nsa). The chapter is named in honor of Alan Turing, the brilliant British mathematician who played a key part in breaking the enormously complex German Enigma cipher machine during World War II. After the war, he was declared a security risk because of his homosexuality. After being convicted in Manchester of being a practicing homosexual, he died of cyanide poisoning in a suspected suicide.[GLOBE= liberal globalization, fitting they name it after one of the Queens subjects DC] 

Every June the city holds a weeklong "All American Festival." Open to "all badged personnel," the gala is intended to highlight the cultural diversity within NSA's community. "What better way to acknowledge the vast array of similarities and differences of all Americans," said the Festival Steering Committee. In 2000, residents of Crypto City could play "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" in the Friedman Auditorium, watch some Polynesian dancers, take salsa dance lessons, try out fencing, or listen to Scottish bagpipe music, a gospel choir, a barbershop quartet, or the disc jockey Wite Noyze. [When do we get to Chevy and Apple Pie? DC]

Bucking political correctness, the keynote speaker addressed the issue of "White Men in America ... A Historical Perspective." "For many years, much attention has been focused on the changing roles for women and minorities in America," said the NSA Newsletter about the talk by Dr. Anthony J. Ipsaro, a clinical psychologist specializing in the psychology of men. "Ipsaro will present one of the first accounts of the status and power of American white men in a diverse and democratic society—their contributions, their failures, and their futures in the 21st Century." [Any questions about the origin of the on going psyop on White men in America ? me either DC]

With eleven cafeterias and a VIP dining room, it would be difficult to go hungry in the invisible city. The OPS 1 Building alone has a mammoth cafeteria—over 45,000 square feet, with 75 employees. It prepares 200 gallons of soup a day and is capable of serving lunch to over 6,000 people. Designed like a food court in a suburban mall, the Firehouse Grill serves up dogs, fries, onion rings, and a variety of daily specials, while at the New York Deli customers can have a sandwich made to order or prepare their own and pay by the ounce. The city also has a Taco Bell and a Pizza Hut. 

Although it's unlikely that any study exists to substantiate the proposition, there appears to be a direct correlation between codebreaking and appetite. When the new OPS 1 cafeteria opened on December 15, 1993, a total of 9,743 people showed up. Before they left they consumed 2,127 tacos and enchiladas from the Taco Bell stand, 176 pounds of salad, and about 20,000 other items. In 1993, food sales totaled more than $7 million—and employees dropped another $2 million in quarters into the city's 380 vending machines. 

To help residents convert their nachos and deep-dish pizzas from a solid into a liquid by means of sweat, half a dozen SHAPE Fitness Centers—16,000 square feet of floor space—are located in the invisible city. There, residents can exercise to their cardiovascular delight on Stair-Masters, treadmills, LifeCycles, Nordic Tracks, stationary and recumbent bikes, rowers, cross-country-ski simulators, upper-body ergometers, gravitrons and Cybex resistance equipment.[all thanks to the taxpayer DC]

In the OPS 2B Building every Tuesday and Thursday morning, techno spooks are taught to carry the tiger to the mountain, grasp the bird's tail, wave their hands like clouds, step back and repulse the monkey, and perform more than fifty other intricate moves of Tai Chi. Other courses include Shorinji Kempo Martial Arts, Plyometrics Training, and Flexible Strength, a yogatype class. SHAPE also sponsors an annual 5K run for city residents. After a hard day of stressful codebreaking, SHAPE offers "seated massage therapy" by licensed massage therapists at a cost of $1 a minute, or guided meditation for free. 

Crypto City also has a unique collection of professional associations, known as Learned Organizations. One of the first established was the Crypto-Linguistic Association, which itself has a number of subgroups. The members of the Special Interest Group on Lexicography (SIGLEX), for example, strive to push ahead the state of the art of dictionary and glossary making, including even dictionaries for unwritten languages. Two other special interest groups are SIGVOICE, concentrating on topics ranging from accents to spoonerisms, and SIGTRAN, dedicated to the art of translation.[And the country has need of all of this how? It all has an elitist type smell to me DC]  

Other Learned Organizations include the Crypto-Mathematics Institute, the Computer Information Sciences Institute, and the International Affairs Institute. The traffic and signal analysts have their Communications Analysis Association, the cryptanalysts have their Kryptos Society, and the intercept operators have their Collection Association, which presents an award to the best eavesdropper of the year. [This attempted Coup of the last 3+ years has laid bare America's problem with certain intelligence agencies and law enforcement departments. This Zombie City/Meade is not needed in a country that trusts God. DC]

While in many respects Crypto City is unique, and, to many, even incomprehensible, it can also be very ordinary. Like other large communities, it has its share of dirt, fear of crime, and other problems. The same NSA police who guard the inner sanctum of codebreaking also, during 1993, gave out thousands of parking tickets and responded to 236 traffic accidents and 742 other emergencies. NSAers complain about poor working conditions. "Accumulated along every hallway leading to those few stairways," said one employee whose branch moved into the basement of the old OPS 1 Building, "are mounds of trash, pallets of cast-off equipment, old racks, and dilapidated shelves." Another complained of a burned-out car that had been in a city parking lot for days, and of trash accumulating in front of OPS 2A.['fear of crime', wonder if he had a grin on his face when he wrote that?Yeah I guess there is a chance for the disgruntled worker brings guns to work thing, that would be one for the spin masters. DC] 

Some residents are afraid to walk through remote tunnels and hallways late at night. "If I use the south tunnel, I am really asking for it," said one late-night worker. "Although the tunnel has a row of overhead lights, only one works—and that one is very dim . . . someone could wait there . . . follow me into the tunnel, and grab me once no one was in sight."[Well if that fiction were to happen it would mean one thing, that one of your colleagues was a rapist, because I am pretty sure I could not even get on site, to access those 'remote' tunnels...I actually believe you though... "If I use the south tunnel, I am really asking for it,"  DC] 

At the heart of the invisible city is NSA's massive Headquarters/Operations Building. With more than sixty-eight acres of floor space, the entire U.S. Capitol Building could easily fit inside it four times over. A modern, boxy structure with floor after floor of dark one way glass, from the outside much of the complex looks like any stylish office building. But looks, like most else at NSA, are meant to deceive. 
68 acres=2,962,080 Square Feet
Hidden underneath this reflective glass is the real building. This one is protected by a skin of orange-colored copper and unique windows—a thick, bulletproof-like outer pane, five inches of sound-deadening space, a thin copper screen, and an inner pane. The elaborate shielding is designed to keep all sounds and signals—indeed all types of electromagnetic radiation—from ever getting out. Known by the codename Tempest, this protective copper shielding technique is used  throughout much of the city and is designed to prevent electronic spies from capturing any telltale emissions. Like a black hole, NSA pulls in every signal that comes near, but no electron is ever allowed to escape. At least that is the way NSA would like it. [all a waste, pat them on the back,bottom line...911 happened on their watch.DC]

The massive Headquarters/Operations Building is an interconnected labyrinth of 3 million square feet that stretches in all directions. Entrance is first made through the two-story Visitor Control Center, one of more than 100 fixed watch posts within the secret city manned by the armed NSA police. It is here that clearances are checked and visitor badges are issued. 

Far more than a simple piece of plastic, the NSA badge, about the size of a playing card, with the employee's picture on the front, represents life itself to Crypto City's tens of thousands of daytime residents. Take it away, and their livelihood suddenly disappears; change the color, and their status goes up or down. If they forget it, their day is a mess; if they lose it, they come under suspicion. Add a tab, and their universe grows slightly larger. 

Blue badges are worn by those who have passed a lengthy background investigation, suffered through a nerve-racking polygraph exam, received a top secret codeword clearance, and, finally, been "indoctrinated" into the supersecret world of Sigint and codemaking. The "indoctrination" is NSAs version of at last being let in on the club's secret handshake, finally being allowed to look behind the thick black curtain. It is something like a Mafia induction ceremony without the drop of blood. The fresh initiates may now be told how their country eavesdrops on other countries, breaks their codes, and reads their most secret communications. 

Next, in solemn tones, the new blue-badgers are told the meaning of certain secret codewords, such as Umbra, which, when stamped on a document, means that it reveals the highest-level signals intelligence sources and methods. Some are indoctrinated for additional codewords, such as Gamma, which means that the information comes from a particularly sensitive source, such as internal foreign communications systems or cipher systems that NSA was able to defeat. Others, such as Zarf, indicate that the information was obtained from electronic intelligence picked up by eavesdropping satellites. Like an endless spiral, there are secret classification systems within secret classification systems. In 1974, a new category was approved exclusively for NSA's most secret secrets: VRK, Very Restricted Knowledge. 

Although they predominate in NSA's secret city, the blue badge is only one of twenty-six different styles and colors that make up the security rainbow. Fully cleared contractors wear green; those with only a secret clearance have LIC (Limited Interim Clearance) printed on top; students  at the National Cryptologic School have a turquoise border around their badges; and former directors and deputy directors have red and blue stripes around them. Important visitors have PV ("privileged visitor") badges, while uncleared visitors must wear a badge with a large red V and be accompanied by a person with an additional E (for "escort") badge. 

Additionally, for admittance into certain super secure areas, a small plastic plate must sometimes be attached to the neck chain above the picture badge. Workers in the National Security Operations Center, for example, wear a plate bearing the letters "NSOC." And at the agency's giant listening post at Menwith Hill Station in central England, only NSAers with a badge plate bearing a blue diagonal strip are allowed into the building that houses Operation Silkworth. This is a satellite eavesdropping mission targeting Russian microwave communications. 

And then there is the red badge—the NSA equivalent of the Scarlet Letter, awarded to those who have had their clearance taken away. Although officially it stands for "clearance status not indicated," and is normally worn by people working in the "Red Corridor"—the drugstore and other concession areas—for ex—blue-badgers it is the ultimate humiliation. Those with a red badge around their necks are forbidden to go anywhere near classified information and are restricted to a few corridors and administrative areas—the bank, the barbershop, the cafeteria, the credit union, and the airline and entertainment ticket counters. A clearance may be yanked for reasons ranging from bad debts to an unauthorized meeting with a foreign official to an unfounded thirdhand rumor twice removed. 

Regardless of their badge's color, all employees are warned, "After you leave an NSA installation, remove your badge from public view, thus avoiding publicizing your NSA affiliation."

Once inside the white, pentagonal Visitor Control Center, employees are greeted by a six-foot painting of the NSA seal, an eagle clutching a silver key in what the agency describes as "sinister talons." In front of the seal are ten Access Control Terminals, watched over by a central security command post. Employees insert their security badges into the terminals, punch in their personal identification numbers on the keyboard, and wait for the green light to signal that the turnstile is unlocked. At unannounced times, a special cadre of NSA police officers assigned to the Aperiodic Inspection Team conduct surprise inspections, looking for anyone attempting to smuggle out secret documents, or to sneak in cameras, tape recorders, computer disks—or Furbys. 

In December 1998, worried security officials sent out a "Furby Alert" on the agency's Intranet, banning the small furry toys. Because the homely, bug-eyed creature contains a small device allowing it to mimic words, officials worried that a Furby might retain snippets of secret conversations in its microbrain. NSA employees "are prohibited from introducing these items into NSA spaces," the warning said. As for those improbable few who might already have one sitting on their desk, the notice sternly instructed them to "contact their Staff Security Officer for guidance." In a recent year more than 30,000 inspections were conducted at the Visitor Control Center and the other gatehouses. There are no statistics on how many people were arrested with illegal Furbys. 

From the Visitor Control Center one enters the eleven-story, $41 million OPS 2A, the tallest building in the City. Shaped like a dark glass Rubik's Cube, the building houses much of NSA's Operations Directorate, which is responsible for processing the ocean of intercepts and prying open the complex cipher systems. 

Beyond the Visitor Control Center, secrecy and security permeate the air. Above escalators, moving electronic words on "Magic Message" boards warn employees against talking about work outside the secret city. Along hallways and in the cafeteria, signs hanging from the ceiling warn "Don't Spill the Beans, Partner. No Classified Talk!" Other warnings are posted on bulletin boards throughout the city. No meetings of any kind may be held in the Visitor Control Center, where an uncleared person may be present. Classified talk in "corridors, restrooms, cafeterias . . . barber shop, and drugstore" is forbidden, according to the NSA Security Handbook. 

Every month, NSA's Office of Security pumps out 14,000 security posters designed by "security awareness officers" to line Crypto City's rest rooms, snack bars, hallways, and stairwells. Others are sent to overseas listening posts and contractor facilities. One design pictured a noose hanging from the branch of a tree, with the caption, "For Repeated Security Violations." Some posters appear to have been concocted in a time warp. On the very day that East and West Germany were unified in the Federal Republic, security officials unveiled a new poster showing East German troops standing on the Berlin Wall. The caption was a menacing 1931 prediction by a Soviet official: the USSR would win a military victory over the capitalists by duping them with bogus peace overtures. Another poster shows Uncle Sam asleep under a tree while a skulking Soviet ogre prepares to take advantage. 

The posters prompted one NSA employee to question whether the campaign represents "a not-too-subtle form of political indoctrination in a format reminiscent of traditional Cold War propaganda." Another complained that visitors to NSA "must find them surreal." 

More recently, the posters have begun to reflect pop culture. One is designed like a scene from the popular television quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? "What should you do if approached by a foreign intelligence officer?" reads the question. "A: Answer Questions; B: Accept Gifts; C: Negotiate Payment." Circled is answer D: "Report Contact." Finally, the poster adds, "And This Is OUR Final Answer." Another poster bears a picture of a wastebasket containing copies of Newsweek, the New York Times, and other news publications below the caption "Snooper Bowl." 

In 1996 agency artists put a grim-faced Cal Ripken, Jr., on a poster. Knees flexed and glove at the ready, the Baltimore Orioles player stood below a lime-green banner that read, "Security. Our Best Defense." Unfortunately, no one had asked Ripken's permission, which provoked a protest by his business management firm. "If Cal's identified, they need our permission," complained Ira Rainess, general counsel of the Tufton Group. "His publicity right is violated if they use any elements of Cal's persona without consent. Even if they are just using it promotionally, they are deriving some value from using Cal's image." 

In a basement beneath OPS 2A, behind the door to Room 2A0114, is the security command post for Crypto City. The Support Services Operations Center (SSOC) is dominated by a tall, curved console consisting of banks of computer screens and secure television and telephone equipment. In operation twenty-four hours a day, the Center oversees security throughout the city. It also serves as the city's crisis hub through its Emergency Management Center. Officers handle more than 1,500 calls a day—lockouts, requests for assistance, trespass alarms, and radio dispatch instructions. The hundreds of closed-circuit television cameras that peer down from the city's rooftops and line its hallways are also monitored here—as are the cameras that keep the director's house under constant surveillance. 

Whenever someone in Crypto City dials 911, the call is answered in the SSOC. Security officers can immediately determine the exact location of the telephone. The Center handles an average of forty emergency calls each month. It is also responsible for tracking NSA couriers and locating missing employees. When a danger to the city—a bomb threat or a terrorist attack, for instance—arises, the SSOC has authority to undertake "hostile emergency action plans."[And just how many damn bomb threats or terrorist attacks have there been in the real world? Overkill and waste everywhere with this useless agency DC]

Hidden far from the spotlight, the agency has seen few external assaults; when one is detected, no matter how minor, NSA immediately goes to battle stations. On July 3, 1996, for example, both the SSOC and the National Security Operations Center, the focal point of NSA's worldwide eavesdropping network, were tipped off about a planned demonstration at the agency. The group sponsoring the demonstration was identified as the Baltimore Emergency Response Network (BERN), a small, nonviolent organization that promotes peaceful solutions to conflicts rather than armed intervention. Its leader was Philip Berrigan, a longtime veteran of peaceful demonstrations. 

The protest was scheduled for the following day, the July Fourth holiday. At NSA, the director and his senior staff were immediately notified. The FBI and other government agencies were quickly asked to provide background information on BERN. "Members of the SSOC, Facilities Security, Public and Media Affairs, and Protective Services convened to enact an NSA Emergency Management Plan to address the threat," said an internal document. "Protective Services activated their Special Operations Unit." They then notified the military police at Fort Meade, "who mobilized a contingent to augment the Protective Service Officers' force." 

Prepared for anything except all-out nuclear war, the agency must have been disappointed. About 10:30 A.M. a motley group of about thirty late-sleeping activists arrived at the outer fence, carrying a few placards protesting illegal NSA operations. They then began to read Scripture. Next someone recited a "Declaration of Independence from the National Security Agency," which was mounted on a large placard for presentation to the director, Lieutenant General Kenneth A. Minihan. After a few hours in the warm sun, the group headed back to Baltimore. 

Pleased that the agency had once again been saved from imminent peril, the author of a classified internal document declared the operation "an unequivocal success. The orchestration of a multitude of NSA and non-NSA emergency response resources proved extremely effective." Even Philip Berrigan was impressed. "Very efficient," he said, "very sterile." 

After leaving the SSOC, the visitor walks down a passageway and enters the $56.3 million OPS 2B Building, a rectangle of black glass, and is immediately impressed by the large polished wall of black granite. Carved in the structure, twelve feet wide and eight feet high, is a triangle containing the NSA seal. Above, inlaid in gold, are the words "They Served in Silence." And below, in eight columns, are the names of 152 military and civilian cryptologists, intercept operators, and analysts who have given their lives in the line of duty. Among those listed on the National Cryptologic Memorial Wall, which was dedicated in February 1996, is Army Specialist James T. Davis, the first American soldier killed in Vietnam. Also listed on the wall are the seventeen airmen who died when their C-130 ferret was shot down over Soviet Armenia in 1958 and the thirty-four crewmembers of the USS Liberty who died when it was attacked by Israel. 

The highly polished black granite was designed to allow workers viewing the memorial to see their own reflections and thus remind them that they, too, serve in silence and support the cause for which those honored gave their lives. 

Nearby is the Canine Suite, named after the first director. It is often  used to host visiting VIPs. 

Up on the eighth floor of OPS 2B, the mayor of Crypto City, Air Force Lieutenant General Michael V. Hayden, has his suite of offices. On a typical day, Hayden's alarm wakes him up about 5:45 A.M. but he stays in bed, eyes closed, listening to National Public Radio's six o'clock news summary. After a quick shower, he climbs into his Volvo and drives the three miles to the NSA. "I drive myself, or my son or wife will drop me off if they need the car," he says, "and more often than not they will drop me off." 

Arriving about 6:50, Hayden enters the lobby, inserts his badge into the CONFIRM reader, and pushes through the turnstile. If he is in a hurry, he can slip a key into his small private elevator, off to the right. But on most days he simply crowds with the other early-morning arrivals into one of the large employee elevators. 

On the eighth floor, he walks to the end of the hallway and enters the executive suite, which includes the offices of the director, deputy director, and chief of staff. The suite was once referred to as Mahogany Row, but today there is no mahogany. Instead, past the receptionist, the walls are covered with large framed pictures of NSA's largest listening posts, including Menwith Hill Station with its dozens of eavesdropping antennas hidden under radomes. Hayden takes a left through an unmarked wooden door and enters his corner office. 

Standing at the eavesdropping-proof windows he can look out on his burgeoning empire, stretching far into the distance. Against a beige wall is a large bookcase containing mementos from his hometown football and baseball teams, the Pittsburgh Steelers and Pirates. On another wall is a framed, yellowing newspaper article from October 1941 announcing that his father, Harry V. Hayden, Jr., has been inducted into the service as a private and has arrived in Northern Ireland. In the center of the large office is a dark conference table surrounded by eight green chairs; a couch with a gold print design stands off to the side. There is also a lectern, so the director can work standing up. 

Hayden sits in a green high-back chair. Nearby is a small space heater to keep out the winter chill. On his walnut desk rests a pen holder from his days as the number two commander in Korea, a notepad printed with the word "DIRECTOR," and a Brookstone world clock. On a table behind him, next to his NSA flag, are three computers—one for classified work, another for unclassified work, and a secure laptop linking him with members of his NSA Advisory Board, a small group of outside consultants. There are also several telephones on the table. One is for secure internal calls; another is a secure STU-III for secret external calls; and a "red line" with buttons that can put him through instantly to the secretary of defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other senior officials. 

No phones, however, connect the director to the White House; indeed, during Hayden's first year in office, he never once spoke directly to President Clinton. "When I've talked to the people who've been in the chair before," he said, "it seems to me that it's been pretty distant in the past that the director of NSA has had routine contact with the president. My routine contact has been—I've met with Jim Steinberg, who's the deputy national security adviser, I wouldn't say 'routinely,' but the fact is if I picked the phone up I could talk to Jim if I wanted to. John Hamry, the deputy secretary of defense, although routinely I talk to Art Money, his assistant secretary. At the CIA it's both Director George Tenet and Deputy Director Lieutenant General John A. Gordon routinely on anything that comes to mind." 

To the side of his desk are two Sony television sets, one connected to the outside world with the Weather Channel muted, and the other connected to Crypto City's own secret television network. Over that set, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 7:15 A.M., Hayden gets a private intelligence briefing from an NSOC official. 

Next, on those same days, is an early morning briefing by his staff. "I'll have a stand-up meeting in here with just my personal staff," said Hayden, "public affairs, inspector general, lawyers, each of the key components represented. It's real quick. Literally a stand-up, everyone's standing, including me. The room is about a third full. We'll go quickly around—hot news of the day." 

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Hayden walks down to the NSOC for an 8:00 A.M. meeting with all his senior officials. "It's something I started here because I wanted the seniors to get a sense of the ops tempo. And so we'll get a briefing in the NSOC from the ops officer, right there— about five to seven minutes, and I keep beating them to keep it shorter. And then we'll retire to a little room privately next door and have a quick staff meeting. . . . By eight or eight-thirty we've kind of gotten the burst communications and now you're into your work schedule." 

Next comes a round of meetings and phone calls. Monday, January 31, 2000, for example, was spent cleaning up from the massive computer crash a week before. Hayden's morning meetings centered on NSA's Information Technology Backbone program; he spoke on the phone with Arthur L. Money, the assistant secretary of defense for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence, and with Charles E. Allen, the CIA's assistant director for collection. He also talked with Judith A. Emmel, the chief of public affairs, about a candidate for the job of legislative affairs officer. 

Lunch also varies depending on the day. "Today [February 2, 2000] I had lunch with the [NSA] Advisory Board," said Hayden. "Yesterday I had lunch with four randomly selected employees up here. The day before I had lunch in the cafeteria. Every now and again we'll have a visitor. Tomorrow Chris Mellon [the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence] . . . will be here and we'll have a formal lunch. I have a little dining room off to the side here, seats eight comfortably." 

After lunch there are more meetings, often out of the building. Much of Hayden's time is spent being driven to and from Washington in his official black Ford Grand Marquis, "going to CIA headquarters at Langley Virginia, over to the Pentagon. And so frankly that's the reflective time, that's when I can work the telephones, that's when I can get a little reading done. It's sort of a chockablock day of going from meeting to meeting to meeting." 

Hayden tries to leave by around 5:50 P.M., but he frequently brings home a briefcase packed with secrets for late-night homework. "I've got secure comms [communications] at home. I bring work home. I have a vault at home where I can keep materials," he said. "And the big thing I do the night before is this: my to-do list for the day, people I want to call, hot things, long-term things." When Hayden isn't working, he enjoys going to movies and reading about the Civil War. "I'm really a fan of the Civil War," said Hayden. "I hate to be called a buff, but in my darker moments my kids would call me that. I like battlefields. My wife and I love movies, we see a lot of movies. All kinds of movies—you'd be surprised." 

An inner door in Hayden's office, past his private bathroom labeled WATER CLOSET and a framed picture of the Pittsburgh Steelers, connects him to his deputy director next door. That office, about half the size of the director's, had a French provincial motif while Barbara McNamara occupied it and southwestern after her successor, William Black, moved in. A few steps away, behind the door to Room 2B8020, is the Director's Large Conference Room—a circular, futuristic center where high-level briefings are conducted. At the center is a wooden, doughnut shaped conference table with twenty-four rose-colored padded chairs. Behind, like a mini-theater, are another sixty-six seats, and on the opposite wall are three large, silvery multimedia screens. During Operation Desert Storm the room was turned into a crisis center, and it was also here where many of the crisis meetings were held during the U.S. air attacks on Kosovo. 

Also nearby is Barbara G. Fast, an Army brigadier general, who is deputy chief of the little-known Central Security Service (CSS). In addition to being the director of NSA, Hayden also commands the CSS, NSA's own army, navy, and air force. In that second universe, he is responsible for operational control of all signals intelligence collection, "in consonance" with the commanders of the individual security services— Naval Security Group Command, Army Intelligence and Security  Command, and Air Force Intelligence Agency. As deputy chief of CSS, Fast helps manage NSA's vast network of worldwide listening posts. 

In addition to his own armed forces, Hayden also has his own "ambassadors," Special U.S. Liaison Officers (SUSLOs), who represent NSA in various parts of the world. The job of SUSLO London is so choice that it frequently serves as a preretirement posting for NSA's deputy directors. Thus it was no surprise when Hayden's first deputy, Barbara McNamara, decided to spend her final NSA days sipping tea and shopping at Harrods. Other SUSLOs are located in Ottawa, Canada; Canberra, Australia; and Wellington, New Zealand. Hayden also has senior representatives to the major military commands. Based in Hawaii, the chief, NSA/CSS Pacific, serves as the top cryptologic liaison with the commander of American forces in the Pacific and the chief, NSA/CSS Europe, has similar responsibilities with respect to the top U.S. commander in that region. Finally, other officials, known as NSA/CSS representatives, are posted in a variety of countries and with other agencies, such as the Pentagon and the State Department. 

Other residents of the eighth floor include the agency's chief scientist, mathematician George R. Cotter. He is responsible for keeping NSA abreast of fast-changing technologies in the outside world. Another is Robert L. Deitz, NSA's general counsel, who manages the agency's fortyfive lawyers. For two decades, NSA has picked its top attorney, who usually serves for about three years, from private practice. Deitz was formerly a product liability lawyer. 

Down the hall from Robert Deitz is Rear Admiral Joseph D. Burns, the chief of staff. Among other things, his office helps formulate the top secret United States Signals Intelligence Directives (USSIDs), which govern NSA's worldwide eavesdropping operations. The USSIDs tell eavesdroppers what to do; Technical Instructions (Techins) are then issued to explain how to do it. The office also deals with the agency's legislative, contracting, and budget issues. 

Past the Russian Technical Library, through a breezeway decorated with an American flag made up of photographs of NSA personnel, and one is in OPS 1, the original A-shaped building built in the 1950s. Today, as then, it is the principal home of the Directorate of Operations (DO). First among equals, the DO constitutes the agency's largest single division. With its legions of eavesdroppers, codebreakers, linguists, and traffic and signals analysts, it encompasses the entire spectrum of signals intelligence, from intercept to cryptanalysis, high-level diplomatic systems to low-level radiotelephone chatter, analysis of cleartext to analysis of metadata—information about information. Its brief covers the analysis of cipher systems belonging to friend as well as foe, democracies as well as dictatorships, micro countries as well as giants. It is the Black Chamber's Black Chamber.

Behind the door to Room 2W106—once the director's office before OPS 2B was built—is James R. (Rich) Taylor, the deputy director for operations. Formerly the agency's executive director, Taylor began his civilian career at NSA in 1974, having graduated from the Air Force Academy and spent five years as an officer with the NSA's air arm, the Air Force Security Service. During the 1990s he became one of the agency's top weapons experts. He also served as director of the RAMPART National Program Office, a big-budget and highly secret joint intelligence community activity "pursuing an area of major investment for future U.S. intelligence operations." 

"Operations," Taylor says, "encompasses all the activities that enable analysts to provide intelligence to meet customer requirements. Many agency personnel, in different jobs, have a stake in ensuring that Sigint continues to be America's most valued source of intelligence." Essential, he says, is a close relationship between those who collect the information and those who build the ultra-advanced systems that make the collection possible. "The key to our success is a strong dynamic partnership between DT [the Directorate of Technology and Systems] and DO." 

Taylor's deputy is Air Force Major General Tiiu Kera, a stocky woman with reddish hair. A native of Germany, she was born in Balingen/Württemberg at the end of World War II. In 1969, during the height of the antiwar period, Kera received a master's degree in political science from Indiana University. Four years later she was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Air Force. During much of her career she held a number of routine assignments as a personnel officer, mostly within the United States. But in 1987 her career got a boost when she was sent to the National War College for nine months. Kera spent the Gulf War not making policy in the Pentagon or directing air missions over Baghdad but hanging out in Harvard Square as a student, this time at Harvard's Center for International Affairs. After her tour in Cambridge, she became the first U.S. defense attaché to Lithuania and later was named director of intelligence for the U.S. Strategic Command in Omaha, Nebraska. 

Because of the growing closeness between NSA and CIA—especially through the joint Special Collection Service, which uses clandestine personnel and techniques to assist NSA—one of Taylor's top deputies always comes from the CIA. 

For nearly forty years the DO was organized along geographic lines. The codebreakers of A Group focused on the Soviet Union, while those of B Group analyzed the communications of Communist Asia and G Group tackled the cipher systems of all other areas. But when the Cold War ended, so did the preoccupation with borders. The new non-traditional threats—terrorism, nuclear weapons proliferation, and drugs—have no borders. 

Thus, in 1997 the old geographically based groups were replaced with two new organizations. W Group, the Office of Global Issues and Weapons Systems, was formed to focus the agency's powerful eavesdropping platforms on these new transnational adversaries, irrespective of geography. The other, M Group, the Office of Geopolitical and Military Production, would concentrate on the cyber infrastructure of potential adversaries, looking, for example, for vulnerabilities in their telecommunications systems. 

Chief of M Group in 2000 was Jeanne Y. Zimmer, who was awarded the Pentagon's Distinguished Civilian Service Award for her "leadership and management of a newly formed organization with worldwide responsibilities [that] had a lasting impact for the United States." The NSA's organizational changes, said former NSA director Minihan, "lets you think in a more agile and dynamic way. Now you are not looking at airplanes, tanks, ships, and soldiers. You are looking at the infrastructure within which the operating capability of the adversary exists." 

Room 3E099 of OPS 1 is the home of the National Security Operations Center, the very heart of NSA's worldwide eavesdropping activities. Located on the building's third floor, the NSOC (pronounced "N-sock") is reached through a set of automatic glass doors. Above are the seals of the three organizations that make up the NSA's own military, the Central Security Service, and below, inlaid in the flooring, are the Center's initials. 

Inside is a quiet, windowless, war room—like command center, staffed around the clock by five rotating teams of civilian and military personnel. Waist-high cubicles separate target areas, such as terrorism and transnational threats; large video screens cover the walls; and computer monitors glow like electronic candles in the dim light. On the top of the wall, clocks tick off time in various places—Bosnia, Moscow, Iraq. If an uncleared visitor enters, red warning lights begin to whirl. The NSOC directs critical and time-sensitive signals intelligence and information security operations. 

When it was established in 1972, the NSOC was known as the National Sigint Operations Center. The name was changed in 1996 when the NSOC also became the center for the information security side of the agency, responsible for developing cipher machines and assisting in protecting the nation against cyber attacks. Its director in 2000 was Colonel Joe Brand. Reporting to him is the senior operation officer (SOO), the NSA duty officer. 

If a listening post suddenly picks up an indication of a far-off assassination, or a sudden attack by Russia on a neighboring republic, a CRITIC message containing that information will be flashed immediately to the NSOC. Shortly after the USS Cole was attacked by terrorists in the port of Aden in October 2000, a CRITIC was zapped to the NSOC. Within minutes of the early morning message, a call  was placed to the director, Michael Hayden. 

Elsewhere in the NSOC, information security specialists monitor critical networks for indications of threats and intrusions. During a crisis, senior officials meet in the nearby conference room, where they sit around a highly polished, wedge-shaped conference table with a secure conference speakerphone in the center. [Yep, and none of all this stopped 911 DC]

Just down the hallway, in Room 3E132, is Special Support Activity, which provides sensitive assistance to military commanders and federal executives around the world. Units known as Cryptologic Service Groups (CSGs) bring the NSA, in microcosm, to the national security community and forces in the field. Among the more than thirty CSGs is one assigned to the U.S. Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. Another is at the State Department in Washington. There, the CSGs are most useful when they can provide diplomats with intercepts containing details of their opponents' positions during important negotiations. 

Further down the hallway in OPS 1 is NSA's Worldwide Video Teleconferencing Center, which allows headquarters employees to conduct highly secret meetings with their counterparts at various listening posts around the world or with officials from NSA's foreign partners, such as Britain's GCHQ. The Center conducts about 200 conferences a month. It consists of a large conference room, with space for twenty-five participants, and a wall of television monitors. This allows the faraway participants to be seen and heard simultaneously. Data can also be exchanged, by computer and fax. All communication to and from the teleconferencing center is heavily encrypted and highly secure. 

Among the most secret organizations in OPS 1 is the Defense Special Missile and Astronautics Center (DEFSMAC). At the entrance to Room 1E069 is the organization's seal: an orbiting satellite and a patch of stars above the earth. Even within the intelligence community, DEFSMAC (pronounced "deaf-smack"), a joint project of the NSA and the DIA, remains little known. 

Robert McNamara established the organization on April 27, 1964, largely as a result of the Cuban missile crisis, in order to evaluate foreign missile activity and threats. "You didn't want NORAD [the North American Air Defense Command] fooling around in technologies that they didn't understand, or trying to evaluate a bunch of raw data, so DEFSMAC was put in," said Lieutenant General Daniel O. Graham, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Since its beginning, the organization has always been headed by an NSA civilian, with a DIA colonel as deputy director. 

Today the organization operates as the nation's chief warning bell for the launch of foreign rockets—whether in ballistic missile tests by China or North Korea, or in an attack from a rogue launch site in Russia. The focal point for "all source" intelligence—listening posts, early warning satellites, human agents, seismic detectors—on missile launches, DEFSMAC provides the "initial analysis and reporting on all foreign space and missile events." 

As other organizations have shrunk with the end of the Cold War, DEFSMAC has more than doubled its size, to more than 230 people, eighty-five of whom staff a new operations center. Where once DEFSMAC had only Russia and China to monitor, its widely dispersed targets now also include India, North Korea, Iran, Israel, and Pakistan. 

DEFSMAC watches the earth as a physician listens to a heart, hoping to detect the first irregular beat indicating that a missile is about to be launched. "It has all the inputs from all the assets, and is a warning activity," explained one former NSA official. "They probably have a better feel for any worldwide threat to this country from missiles, aircraft, or overt military activities, better and more timely, at instant fingertip availability, than any group in the United States." According to another former NSA official, "DEFSMAC not only detects them but . . . [also has] the capability to relatively immediately determine what kind of a vehicle was launched, what trajectory it's on, and based on all these parameters they can say either it's a threat or it's not a threat." A recent director of DEFSMAC, Chary Izquierdo, referred to her organization as "the [nation's] premier missile and space intelligence producer." [Ah, maybe not so much with airplanes huh? DC]

Once DEFSMAC receives a tip-off, an indication that a launch is soon to take place somewhere in the world, a complex chain of events is set in motion. For example, in October 1998 NSA satellites and listening posts, such as those in Germany, picked up indications that Russia was about to test a new missile from its launch site in Plesetsk, in the country's far northwest. Electronic signatures intercepted from Russian instruments being prepared to measure the rocket's telemetry gave one of the first clues that the missile was a Topol-M single-warhead intercontinental ballistic missile. Signals intelligence satellites also likely picked up phone conversations between the launch site and Moscow. 

Upon receiving such indicators, DEFSMAC officials would immediately have sent out near-real-time and in-depth, all-source intelligence alerts to almost 200 "customers," including the White House Situation Room, the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon, the DIA Alert Center, and all listening posts in the area of the launch site. At the same time, elsewhere within DEFSMAC, analysts would have closely monitored all intercepts flooding in from the area; examined the latest overhead photography; and analyzed data from an early-warning satellite 22,300 miles above the equator. This satellite would have been first to spot the missile's rocket plume and signal back to earth that a launch had occurred. 

DEFSMAC would then have flashed the intelligence to one of the specially designed Boeing 707s that on such missions are codenamed Cobra Ball. Fitted with a wide array of receiving equipment, the RC-135 aircraft would immediately have begun eavesdropping on the missile's telemetry as it reentered the atmosphere near its target zone on the Kamchatka peninsula. Through its super-wide windows, Cobra Ball would also have photographed the missile in flight, using high-speed and multispectral photography. Also receiving DEFSMAC intelligence, whenever enough warning time was received, would be the USNS Observation Island, which is packed with antennas and satellite dishes that would monitor and photograph the final stage and splashdown of the missile. Such preparations would have been of little use during the October 1998 test, however. The rocket, of a type that is the centerpiece of Russia's shrinking nuclear shield, exploded shortly after launch. 

Working closely with DEFSMAC is NSA's National Telemetry Processing Center, the final destination of intercept tapes from missile tests. Here analysts study the various measurements on the magnetic tapes, identify the transducers, and develop performance estimates for the missiles and spacecraft. In 1969, the center took delivery of its first large-scale telemetry processor—twenty-two racks of whirring equipment codenamed Tellman. In the early 1980s, Tellman was replaced by Rissman, which had just fifteen racks of equipment and at the same time could process a greater variety of signals. Rissman was a busy machine—often processing tapes around the clock—from the day of its delivery until the end of the Cold War. By the 1990s, it had been retired and in its place was a relatively compact telemetry processing system codenamed Outcurve, consisting of four racks of equipment and a sixteen-megabyte memory. 

Down Corridor C in OPS 1, past the drugstore and Bank of America, is Crypto City's medical center, staffed by an emergency medical response team. Nearby is an urgent care unit, where ambulances occasionally come and go. NSA even has its own mobile medical center to take medical services to people in distant parts of the city so they don't have to come to the clinic. The large, streamlined, bus-sized vehicle can accommodate wheelchairs and even has its own examination room with table. It is equipped to perform a variety of tests, including EKGs. As might be expected, the mobile medical unit is equipped with secure telephones and cell phones for communicating with the various buildings. 

Nearby, in Room 1E145, is the Geographic Library, containing a unique collection of worldwide maps, many on CD-ROM. Analysts can also access these digital maps directly at their workstations through the library's Automated Mapping System. Among the products developed by  NSA is a high-resolution interactive geographic-based software system codenamed Oilstock. It is used to store, track, and display near-real-time and historical signals-intelligence-related data over a map background. 

A short distance away on the South Corridor, near the drugstore and barbershop, is NSA's Main Library. It contains probably the world's largest collection of cryptologic materials. It also holds a major collection of foreign telephone directories, very useful in finding key telephone numbers to target. Nearby are the Main Research Center and Digital Library. 

Walking along the long, broad hallways, one passes the Crisis Action Center, the Advanced Reconnaissance Programs Office, and the Office of Unconventional Programs, where chief Coy R. Morris attempts to penetrate targets not accessible by conventional means. In 1999 Morris was awarded the Department of Defense Distinguished Civilian Service Award for amassing "an astounding record of successful operations." 

Also in OPS 1 is the National Signals Analysis Center (NSAC). Before an encrypted message can be broken, it first has to be found, and that is the job of the NSAC's engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists. They locate important streams of communications, whether hidden in thin air or in a blanket of noisy static. "With today's rapidly evolving global communications, NSA's signals analysts are seeking to recover, understand, and derive intelligence from all manner of foreign signals," says one NSA document. Another adds: "Consider that hundreds or thousands of channels of mixed information types may be multiplexed together and transmitted digitally over a satellite or terrestrial link to form a single signal." 

Flowing between earth stations and distant communications satellites are millions of telephone calls, fax transmissions, television signals, and computer and multimedia data transfers. They are all squeezed together in thousands of channels. Once they have been intercepted by NSA, it is up to the signals analysts to untwist them and make them understandable. "Demodulating and unraveling the internal structure of such complex signals, to recover their information content and related data, is one job of the signals analyst," according to NSA. Other signals, such as covert communications, may be deliberately hidden deep within such signals as television transmissions, or broken into thousands of jigsaw like pieces and sent on hundreds of different channels. They may even be spread so thin as to be almost invisible. Within the center, many of the signals analysts have had multiple tours at overseas listening posts. Once a year, at NSA headquarters, there is a week-long conference to discuss new ways to discover, and eavesdrop on, the elusive signals. 

Within these hallways, offices are protected by heavy steel doors containing a variety of padlocks, combination dials, and cipher locks.  Some doors also bear round, color-coded seals. A red seal indicates an "Exclusion Area"—an office containing what one NSA document calls "extremely sensitive (i.e., compartmented) classified materials or activities" [emphasis in original]. All classified documents, when not in use, must be kept locked in safes. Blue seals indicate areas where the volume of sensitive materials is so great that some may be left out on desks provided they are covered "completely by a black cloth." 

During the Christmas season employees compete to see who can come up with the most original door decorations. In 1999, the door to Room 1W070 in OPS 1 bore a replica of a signals intelligence spacecraft entitled "The Malfunctioning Santallite." 

To enter other offices, such as the NSA's Special Processing Laboratory, a person must first pass through a complex, unmanned station known as a High Security Portal. After entering a glass-enclosed booth, the person wishing to go farther must swipe a security badge through a credit card—like reader. The computer then checks the person's name against an access list known as CONFIRM. 

Next an eye scan is performed, providing for positive identification by recording the pattern of blood vessels in the retina, at the back of the eye, and comparing it with the person's pattern as stored in the CONFIRM database. An individual's retina is unique and does not change during his or her life. Finally, load cells take body weight measurements and once again check them against the CONFIRM system to ensure that only one person is inside the portal. Only after everything matches can the door be opened. 

NSA is continually developing more and more complex biometric identification systems. "Using biometrics for identifying and authenticating human beings offers some unique advantages," said Jeff Dunn, NSA's chief of biometrics and protective systems. "Only biometric authentication bases an identification on an intrinsic part of a human being. Tokens—such as smart cards, magnetic strip cards, physical keys, and so forth—can be lost, stolen, duplicated, or left at home. Passwords can be forgotten, shared, or observed." 

In 1999, NSA installed a number of multi-biometric security stations on a pilot basis. The stations incorporate fingerprint recognition, voice verification, and facial image recognition technologies into a single system. In face recognition, a computer is programmed with a "statistical knowledge of human faces" so that it can break down and reconstruct images of faces. 

Once past the High Security Portal, some employees must enter still another super secure area in order to work. As its name implies, the Vault Type Room (VTR) resembles a large, walk-in bank safe, with a heavy, thick steel door and fat combination dial. 

But even inside Crypto City, inside one of its buildings, inside a redseal room, and finally inside a Vault Type Room, one occasionally needs to open, like a Chinese puzzle, another locked door. To accomplish this, one must first go to a tall, steel, closetlike device, an Automated Key Access Machine (AKAM). After one enters one's badge and PIN numbers, the computer searches key access lists, determines eligibility, retrieves the key, and dispenses it with a robotic arm. Each machine stores 406 keys on a carousel, has a response time of less than thirty seconds, and provides complete tracking of key movements. 

Although one might assume that a security-obsessed scientist thought up the AKAM in a dark corner of NSA, it was actually designed for use in auto dealerships. While out shopping for a new car, an NSA security employee spotted the device and recognized its potential. The agency then worked with the manufacturer, Key Systems, to modify the equipment for use in Crypto City. 

Finally, another passageway leads to the Headquarters Building. Like OPS 1, it is primarily occupied by personnel from the Directorate of Operations. 

Inside the offices, some people scribble away on green chalkboards while others talk in "teaming areas," informal meeting spaces designed to increase the sharing of ideas. Most work in bland, shoulder-height cubicles, tapping away at a UNIX system built by Sun Microsystems or at a Dell workstation. Many employees have two separate computer terminals on their desk and some, especially voice analysts, also have reel-to-reel tape recorders to listen to voice intercepts. Two recorders are occasionally required in order to listen to both sides of a conversation. 

Every desk is equipped, as well, with two types of telephones: "black" phones for unclassified conversations and "gray," secure phones known as STU-IIIs (for Secure Telephone Unit 3; pronounced Stew-3). The STU-III was developed under an NSA contract in the mid-1980s. Before that, NSA used the far more cumbersome STU-I and STU-II systems, which were developed in the 1970s. The principal drawback of these earlier secure phones was the need to call a "Key Distribution Center" in order to set up each call, which resulted in a delay of two to three minutes. 

The STU-III can be used both as a secure phone for conversations classified as high as Top Secret/Codeword, or as a POTS ("plain old telephone system") for normal, unclassified calls. To "go secure," both the caller and the person on the other end insert a thin black plastic "Crypto Ignition Key" into their STU-III. Many employees attach the key to the neck chain that holds their security badge. Once the key is inserted, a small display screen on the phone tells the person on the other end what security clearance—Secret, Top Secret, or Top Secret/Codeword—the key's holder has. The STU-III has reduced to about fifteen seconds the time needed to go secure; it also has secure fax, data, and video capability. Once the key is removed, the phone is again usable for unclassified calls. 

Gradually, the STU-III is being replaced by a new, more sophisticated system known as the STE (for Secure Terminal Equipment). Made by L3 Corporation, the STE is digital as opposed to analog and can therefore also be used to send and receive secure data. The "key" used is not thin and plastic but similar to the small metal cards used in computers. In addition to increasing the quality of the sound and making it nearly identical to a normal phone, the new STE has the advantage of virtually eliminating the wait time to "go secure." By the time the receiver is placed to the ear, the system is encrypted. According to Michael J. Jacobs, head of NSA's code making organization as deputy director for Information Systems Security, the encryption within the STE is so powerful that, given projected foreign codebreaking capabilities, it will remain fully secure for at least fifty years. 

Among the places within NSA an employee can call once his or her Crypto Ignition Key is inserted is an automated, classified information network. Need "SIGINT Operations and Intelligence Information"? Simply dial 9-555-1212 on the secure phone and you are connected to NSA's ACCESS menu, where you just press "1." 

Crypto City's operators average 250,000 assisted calls per year—60 percent of which are on the "unclassified" phones, 40 percent on the secure phones. A computer program known as Searchlight provides directory assistance for secure calls. 

Highly classified documents once could be whisked from one part of the city to another over ninety-five miles of pneumatic tubes in less than ninety seconds. To ensure security, the system contained over 10,000 sensors to monitor the progress of the documents. But repair costs eventually became too great and the system was abandoned. Today the city is interconnected by a network of fiber optic cables not shared by the outside world. The cable contract was offered to the small start-up fiber network company Qwest, said one person, "because it was the only bidder that offered the agency its own fiber path that would not have to be shared with commercial users." 

When not attacking crypto systems, residents of the secret city can switch their TV sets to Channel 50, the NSA Broadcast Network. Programs are beamed from Crypto City's own state-of-the-art Television Center, in the FANX II building. ("FANX" means "Friendship Annex"; Friendship was the old name for the nearby Baltimore-Washington International Airport.) The facility is completely soundproof and has two video-edit suites, a sound booth, an audio-sweetening room, a studio,  and three-D computer-graphics capability. 

Among the programs produced at the Television Center and transmitted throughout the city is Newsmagazine, which features a variety of live presentations. NSAers may also tune their television sets to the live call-in show Talk NSA. "If you enjoy Larry King Live, Imus in the Morning, or any of the many other interactive talk shows, you might want to give Talk NSA a try," gushed one enthusiastic NSAer. On March 25, 1998, Kenneth Minihan was the guest on the show's forty-fifth broadcast. Seated "on location" in an NSA warehouse, he spent an hour taking questions from viewers who dialed 968-TALK. 

Lieutenant General Minihan also was the first director to conduct a Worldwide Electronic Town Meeting for NSA employees around the world, using an NSA computer chat room. "Ask short, straightforward questions," the workforce was cautioned. More than 6,000 people across the globe, many in secret listening posts, took part in the virtual event, generating 36,711 lines of text. 

In search of something a bit more exciting, an NSAer can switch channels to the intelligence community's own encrypted and highly secret version of CNN. As the Defense Intelligence Network (DIN) logo fades from the screen, an anchor introduces "Global Update," a Top Secret roundup of world events. Although the lead story might be the same as the one on Ted Turner's twenty-four-hour news network, DIN has unique advantages: up-to-the-second photos from spy satellites, secret conversations from NSA intercepts, and the latest diplomatic gossip from the DIA's worldwide corps of defense attachés. 

Another difference from CNN is that the classification (Secret, Top Secret/Umbra, and so on) of the intelligence or the commentary appears in the corner of the screen, sometimes changing as often as every twenty seconds. While on occasion a bit slower than CNN to pick up a story, DIN often soars ahead, as it did when viewers were able to watch reports of the attempted coup in Venezuela "long before CNN made the world aware of it," said one DIN official. 

Tired of TV, an NSAer can boot up his or her computer and log on to Crypto City's own, very secret intranet. Based on the ideas and technologies that are currently wrapping the world in an ever-tightening mesh of interactive electrons, NSA's "Intelink" has one key difference: it is totally hidden from the outside world. 

At the same time that NSA's money and personnel were being cut back as a result of the post—Cold War intelligence drawdown, more and more data were streaming into the agency's earth station atop a small wooded hill on the northern edge of the city. The problem was similar throughout the intelligence community. The solution was to go online, using cyberspace to move, distribute, and access the mountains of intelligence reports. 

Connected through a system of highly secure and encrypted cable networks, Intelink allows NSA's technospies and analysts to surf through secret home pages and databases. Within seconds, they can download everything from the latest intercepts on Chinese submarine activity off the Paracel and Spratly Islands to satellite imagery and video footage of Pakistani tank movements near Kashmir. "If Warren Christopher wants to know about Korea," said Ross Stapleton-Gray, a former CIA official, "he just goes over to the Korea page and he can see the DIA analysis, the CIA analysis, the NSA intercept, and an FBI report on Korea." 

Linking NSA with the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office, and other members of the intelligence and defense community, the new system is "a major breakthrough," according to a senior Pentagon intelligence official. "Intelink," he said, "for the first time, in a user friendly environment, allows every element of the intelligence community and every element of the Department of Defense to reach into every other element." A CIA official added, "Essentially, to a great extent we've cloned the technology from the Internet into our communications system." 

Over Intelink, NSA now publishes documents containing hypertext links that allow customers to instantly obtain details concerning the original raw signals intelligence data on which the conclusions were based, so that they can understand the basis of an analyst's views. 

High praise for the system reaches all the way to the White House, which in the past had to wait for the CIA's most secret reports to be delivered by the agency's "pizza truck," as the courier van was called. Intelink can now provide these documents almost instantly. Former Vice President Al Gore has called the system "a brilliant use of cyberspace" that is "bringing the intelligence community closer together than ever before." 

The idea had its origins in a dusty, little-known "back room" of the U.S. intelligence community: the Intelligence Systems Secretariat (ISS), set up in 1994. Key to the system was to make it completely separate and secure from the publicly used Internet in order to prevent anyone from hacking into it. Thus, rather than an Internet, it would be an extranet, a private system connecting all of the supersecret internal networks and databases of the spy community, with a thick firewall separating it from the crowded and open Internet. Among those databases would be NSA's own internal intranet, Webworld. 

In the past, getting intelligence from the collector to the ultimate user in the field in time to be helpful was the Achilles' heel of the system. One NSA linguist, Fredrick T. Martin, assigned to a remote outpost in the Middle East during the Cuban missile crisis, recalled the frustration. "Collaboration with our counterparts elsewhere," he said, "and with NSA Headquarters meant asking a question, forwarding it on a special teletype circuit, and waiting until your shift the next day (if you were lucky) for the reply. Although many improvements were made to this basic approach over the next thirty years, the fundamental set of dissemination and collaboration problems remained." 

More recent complaints came from General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who warned that delays in receiving intelligence reports had a serious impact on his direction of the Gulf War. Another example is the shootdown of Air Force Captain Scott O'Grady over Bosnia in June 1995. It was later discovered that anti-aircraft missile batteries had been spotted earlier but the intelligence did not reach O'Grady in time. Over Intelink, troops on the front line can now obtain information at the same time that it is received within the White House. 

With the click of a mouse, the Netscape browser opens up to Intelink Central and the warning, "Anyone using this system expressly consents to monitoring." Scrolling down, the user can choose from a long list of hyperlinks to the classified home pages of about ninety intelligence organizations. These range from the Arms Control Intelligence Staff to the CIA's Office of Advanced Projects to DIA's Central MASINT [measurement and signature intelligence] Office to the Intelligence Community Librarians' Committee. For signals intelligence information, there are links to such sites as NSA, the Regional Sigint Operations Center at Fort Gordon, Georgia, and the National Sigint Committee. 

Intelink has its own Yahoo'-style search tool called Wer'zit!? Users can also use five commercially available search engines, such as Alta Vista. 

In a major innovation for the intelligence community, Intelink even offers secret, around-the-clock chat rooms with the program WebChat. "If you have the need to consult in real time via keyboard chat with a peer anywhere in the world," said James P. Peak, the Intelink director, "WebChat is for you." Among the chat rooms are Analyst Rooms, where issues affecting intelligence analysts are discussed. More general discussions can be conducted in Office Rooms. And for chat about specific areas of the world, such as the Middle East, a person can enter Geographical Regional Rooms. Topical Rooms are for those who wish to exchange or solicit information on specific topics. An example is the International Organized Crime chat room. 

Despite their sensitive jobs and high clearances, the elite participants in WebChat have caused concern within the intelligence community with "obscene and boorish behavior." This has led to close monitoring by Intelink managers. The posted rules on Intelink include a prohibition on the "use of fantasy role-playing 'personas' and postings describing imaginary activities." 

NSA serves as the home for Intelink, though the intranet is used by other intelligence agencies. Its Intelink Service Management Center operates a twenty-four-hour command post known as Intelink Central, a spacious room with a wraparound console crowded with computer monitors and telephones. Because Intelink serves a wide customer base, it comprises four separate networks with different security classifications. The first created was "Top Secret—SCI" ("sensitive compartmented information"). More than 50,000 people with codeword clearances at over 100 different locations have access to this network. For those cleared only to the Secret level, there is "Intelink-S," which has about 265,000 users at some 160 locations. 

The most secret and restricted network is "Intelink-P," also known as "Intelink-PolicyNet." Those authorized access are limited to the president and vice president, the national security adviser, the directors of Central Intelligence and NSA, and a small number of other officials. It operates on a private, secure, high-bandwidth network and is used primarily to distribute supersensitive reports not available on the other levels. 

At the other end of the spectrum there is "Intelink-U," the newest network, which is designed to provide exclusively unclassified and opensource materials. It is said to be the single largest data repository in the world. 

Intelink is now expanding worldwide, connecting the intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and the United States in a unique, private, Top Secret—SCI network known as "IntelinkC" for Intelink-Commonwealth. Officials are considering expanding even further, creating a unique, and somewhat unsettling, invisible international espionage web. 

Another—more limited but far speedier—communications network at NSA is the Advanced Technology Demonstration Network, which links the agency with the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the DIA, NASA, the Defense Information Systems Agency, and the Naval Research Laboratory. Using a variation of a hyperspeed technology known as ATM (for "asynchronous transfer mode"), information can be transferred at the astonishing rate of 2.5 billion bits a second—fast enough to send the text from nearly 500 copies of MobyDick in one second. The applications of such a hyperfast system are especially significant given the growing requirements to transfer near real-time pictures and video from spy satellites and reconnaissance aircraft. A program known as Fastlane was recently created by NSA to develop encryption techniques for ATM. 

If Intelink is the intelligence community's Internet, the National SIGINT File is its New York Times. It contains, said Fredrick T. Martin, one of NSA's Intelink founders, "a feast of the world's most significant events of the day that were derived from the codebreaking side of NSA's  mission." For years, NSA's premier publication was the SIGINT Summary, or SIGSUM. But despite the fact that it contained the end product of the world's most advanced intelligence agency, it "was published and distributed by techniques that would be used if the SIGSUM were not much more than a club newsletter," said Martin in his book Top Secret Intranet. Well into the 1990s, the SIGSUM was published the old fashioned way, on paper, and was manually distributed by courier. 

Eventually, though such pioneering internal projects as Beam-rider, NSA began disseminating its highly classified Sigint reports over secure NSA communications lines to senior officials in Washington. This led to the replacement of the SIGSUM with an electronic version known as the NSA SIGINT Digest. Finally, in October 1997, NSA inaugurated its "virtual" newspaper, the National SIGINT File, which completely replaced both the regular and exclusive versions of the SIGINT Digest. 

Unlike anything before in the spy world, the National SIGINT File provides a "virtual window" into NSA's vast ocean of intercepted communications. Its exclusive recipients can click on such options as the National SIGINT Update, which can be specially tailored to the person's interest—nuclear weapon transfers in Iran or terrorist movements around Africa. Updates appear periodically throughout the day. Another option allows one to view the latest signals intelligence on a menulike list of general topics. Still another offers a TV Guide—like listing of available Sigint "finished intelligence." 

The "customer" can also define key world hot spots in which he or she has a particular interest. Someone interested in the conflict in the Middle East, for example, can receive all relevant finished Sigint every half-hour. A Sigint search can be done to locate previously issued reports on the subject. Also, a new feature will allow the viewer to see finished intelligence in video format on the computer screen. 

Of special significance is the capability to instantly display CRITIC messages on screen. Critical Intelligence reports are of the highest importance, and the CRITIC system is designed to get them to the president in ten minutes or less from the time of an event. When Saddam Hussein pushed into Kuwait in 1990, for example, the first alert came in the form of a CRITIC. The issuance of a CRITIC is instantly noted in the National SIGINT File by a flashing message in the top left corner of the screen. 

Among the dozens of buildings in the invisible city is a strange yellow structure, across the street from the headquarters complex, with a large round smoke pipe on its roof. Deep inside, in a cavernous vat, a chunky man with a frowning mustache jabs a shovel into a soggy pile of gray sludge. A few seconds later he plops it over a drain several feet from his frayed green knee boots. America's most closely held secrets—transcripts of North Korean diplomats' conversations, plans for the next generation of eavesdropping satellites, algorithms for a high-level crypto system— have been transformed into a pastelike pulp. For the nation's secrets, it is the penultimate stop in their metamorphosis into pizza boxes. 

"Is the National Security Agency literally burying itself in classified material?" a curious senator once asked. He probably did not anticipate the response of the NSA assistant director seated across from him: "It would seem that way." According to a report by congressional auditors, the NSA classifies somewhere between 50 million and 100 million documents a year. "That means," the General Accounting Office report concluded, "that its classification activity is probably greater than the combined total activity of all components and agencies of the Government." With more secrets than are held by the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, and all other agencies of government combined, NSA likely holds the largest body of secrets on earth. 

Every week, couriers from the Defense Courier Service lug nearly a million pounds of materials stamped "Top Secret" and above to and from the city. Formerly known as the Armed Forces Courier Service, the DCS is responsible for transporting highly classified materials for all the services and the Pentagon. Nevertheless, it is chiefly the NSA that packs its well-guarded trucks and fills its thick canvas pouches. The NSA produces approximately 80 percent of the 60 million pounds of material that the courier service handles annually. Because of this, the NSA once attempted, unsuccessfully, to take over the courier service. 

While for most at NSA, the problem is how to acquire secret information, for a few others the problem is how to get rid of it. At one point the agency tried to have secret documents exported to a pulp plant. The material, sealed in plastic bags, was trucked to the Halltown Paperboard Company (apparently the only company that would have anything to do with the scheme), several hundred miles away in Halltown, West Virginia, where NSA would then take over the plant for twenty-four hours. Dumped into a macerator, the NSA's secrets emerged as low-quality cardboard. The problem with this system was that some paper was just not acceptable, and the agency was left with 20,000 square feet of warehouse space full of paper that had to be burned. 

Finally, in desperation, the agency turned to the American Thermogen Corporation of Whitman, Massachusetts, for construction of what came to be known as White Elephant No. 1. NSA officials journeyed up to the Bay State to view a pilot model of a "classified waste destructor" and came away impressed. According to the company, the three-story machine was supposed to swallow the agency's mountains of secrets at the rate of six tons an hour and cremate them at temperatures of up to 3,400 degrees Fahrenheit.

When this marvel of modern pyrotechnics was finally completed, it had only one problem: it didn't work. Instead of being converted into gases and liquids, which could be piped off, the top secret trash would occasionally congeal into a rocklike mass and accumulate in the belly of the Elephant, where jackhammers were needed to break it up. On at least one occasion, horrified security personnel had to scurry around gathering up bits and shreds of undigested intercepts, computer printouts, and magnetic tapes that had managed to escape destruction. Twenty-ton Army trucks had to be drafted into service, along with armed guards, to cart the undigested secrets to secure storage at Army Intelligence headquarters at Fort Holabird, just outside Baltimore. 

In all, the destructor managed to operate for a total of fifty-one days out of its first seventeen months. By the time the agency canceled its contract with American Thermogen, it had already paid off all but $70,000 of the $1.2 million construction price. Said one red-faced NSA official, "Our research will continue." [Yeah, I have no doubt the waste and Keystone cop routine will continue DC]

That research prompted NSA to turn from fire to water in order to shrink its Mount Everest of forbidden papers. "Try to imagine," said one NSA report, "a stack of paper six feet wide, six to eight feet tall and twenty yards long traveling along a conveyor belt towards you every ten minutes all day long." By the mid-1990s, Crypto City was annually converting more than 22 million pounds of secret documents into cheap, soluble slurry. And in case the paper flow increased, the new system was capable of destroying three times that amount. 

To transport the huge heaps of "burn bags" crammed with discarded secrets, NSA turned, appropriately enough, to Florida's Disney World. In Fantasyland and the rest of the Magic Kingdom, accumulated trash is transported automatically by underground conveyor belt to a central waste disposal facility. Similarly, burn bags from NSA, the intelligence community's Fantasyland, are sent down a Rube Goldberg—like chute and conveyor belt contraption known as the Automatic Material Collection System. The 6 ½ -foot-wide conveyor belt then dumps the bags into a giant blender like vat that combines water, steam, and chemicals to break the paper down into pulp. The pulped paper is processed, dried, funneled through a fluffer, and finally, fifteen minutes later, baled. Within a few weeks, the documents that once held the nation's most precious secrets hold steaming pepperoni pizzas. In 1998, the agency took in $58,953 in profit from the sale of its declassified pizza boxes. 

Problems arise, however, when thick magnetic tapes, computer diskettes, and a variety of other non-water-soluble items are thrown into the burn bags. Once a week, destruction officers assigned to Crypto City's Classified Materials Conversion Plant have to use rakes, shovels, and hacksaws to break up the "tail," the clumps of hard, tangled debris that clog up the room-sized Disposall. Among the stray items that have 435 found their way into the plant are a washing machine motor, a woman's slip, and an assortment of .22-caliber bullets. Because this residue, totaling more than fifty-two tons a year, still may contain some identifiable scrap bearing an NSA secret, it is left to drain for about five days and then put in boxes to be burned in a special incinerator. 

NSA was able to turn an additional thirty tons of old newspapers, magazines, and computer manuals into pizza boxes as a result of a spring cleaning program, dubbed "The Paper Chase," in 1999. But paper is not the only thing NSA recycles. It also converts metal from the tiny chips and circuit boards in the agency's obsolete computers into reusable scrap. So many computers hit the junk pile every year that the agency is able to recycle more than  tons of metal annually from the small components. 

Despite the unfathomable amount of information destroyed by NSA every year, it is almost negligible compared to the amount of data it actually saves, mostly in the form of magnetic tapes. In Support Activities Building 3, a flat, nearly windowless structure in Crypto City, NSA's Magnetic Media Division maintains the agency's 95,000-squarefoot tape library containing approximately 1.6 million data tapes. NSA is nearing the point—if it hasn't reached it already—where it will be able to store the equivalent of more than half a million typed, double-spaced pages (up to ten gigabytes) on a square inch of tape. Thus its mammoth tape library may soon reach the point where all the information on the planet can be placed inside, with room left over. 

To cut down on the expense of purchasing new tapes, NSA uses large "degaussers" to erase used reels. Because of the enormous volume of tapes, however, worries have developed over the degausser operators' exposure to electromagnetic fields. More than a thousand current and former degausser operators were surveyed in 1998 by the agency's Office of Occupational Health, Environmental and Safety Services. Although the question of adverse health effects is still unanswered, shielding was installed and the operators were told to keep a distance from the powerful magnetic coils. 

While copies of secrets are regularly destroyed, the original information is seldom given up. Down the street from the tape library, in Support Activities Building 2, is the NSA Archives and Records Center. Here, more than 129 million documents, all more than a quarter of a century old, are still hidden from historians and collecting dust at enormous cost to taxpayers. Even NSA has a hard time comprehending the volume of material. "The sheer number of records is astounding," said one internal report. A stack of them would be over nine miles tall, higher than the cruising altitude of a Boeing 747. 

Also held are tens of millions of recent documents, including 11 436 million "permanent records" that trace the history of the secret city. In April 1996, NSA finally declassified a January 1919 memorandum from U.S. Army Colonel A. W. Bloor, a commander of the American Expeditionary Force in France. "The German was a past master at the art of 'Listening In,' " the memorandum said. "It was therefore necessary to code every message of importance." However, many other documents from that same period, and even earlier, are still classified. 

As a result of a tough executive order issued by President Clinton in 1995, NSA must now declassify over 10 million pages of yellowing secrets. According to the internal report quoted above, "The agency must review these records or they will be considered automatically declassified on 17 April 2000." (The deadline was later extended to 2001.) 

To accomplish this Herculean task, NSA established a project appropriately named Plethora. As part of the project, a unique facility was built: the Automated Declassification System. With advanced imaging technology, box loads of ancient documents—including delicate onionskin and smudgy carbon copies—are scanned into the system from various workstations. Then, after consulting databases containing declassification guidance, specialists magically erase still-sensitive information from the now electronic documents. The sanitized pages are then optically stored in a memory capable of holding up to 17 million pages. But in the end, given NSA's numerous exclusions from the Freedom of Information Act, the odds that the public will ever see even a small fraction of those documents remain less than slim. 

That NSA has the technical capability to intercept and store enough information to wallpaper much of the planet is unquestionable. What is in doubt, however, is the agency's ability to make sense of most of it. "Sometimes I think we just collect intelligence for the thrill of collecting it, to show how good we are at it," said former CIA director Robert Gates. "We have the capacity to collect mountains of data that we can never analyze. We just stack it up. Our electronic collection systems appear to produce far more raw intelligence data than our analysts can synthesize and our policymakers can use." 

The city's brown, boxy OPS 3 building is the home of NSA's Information Systems Security Organization and the agency's naval service, the Naval Security Group. It is also where the agency's mammoth 66,000-square-foot printing plant pumps out code and cipher materials for the U.S. government's sensitive communications. Among the cryptographic items produced in the NSA Print Plant are the "go codes," used to authorize nuclear war; small, square one-time pads—row after row of scrambled numbers and letters—designed to be used only once and then destroyed; and perforated cipher "key tape." Packaged in sealed Scotch tape—like holders, the cipher strips are pulled out, torn off, and inserted in cryptographic machines. The key tape is changed every day to ensure security. 

Across the street is the ultramodern Special Processing Laboratory, NSA's state-of-the-art microelectronics fabrication and printed-circuit board factory. There, cloaked head to toe in white clean-room apparel, agency scientists develop and produce the chips and other components used in the country's most sensitive encryption equipment. Among those special chips is the CYPRIS microprocessor, designed to operate at 40 megahertz and able to obtain nearly 35 MIPS (million instructions per second). At one time NSA accounted for 50 percent of the world's integrated circuit market. Other scientists regularly attempt to redefine the limits of an array of key technologies—from electron-beam maskmaking to "direct write" wafer lithography. 

Another windowless building a few blocks away, the Systems Processing Center, houses a series of bizarre anechoic chambers. Like something out of a nightmare, every inch of these vast baby-blue rooms is covered with giant dagger-shaped cones of various sizes—up to eight feet high. The chambers are used to test intercept antennas designed and built in the City. Chamber A, the largest, measures 42 feet wide, 42 feet high, and 90 feet long. It was designed to test antenna frequencies up to 26.5 gigahertz. A transmitting antenna is placed on a raised platform at one end of the chamber and a receiving antenna is installed at the opposite end. Each of the cones, which are composed of special foam impregnated with chemicals, is sized to absorb different frequencies. 

A little further on is the Research and Engineering Building, a massive, handsome, dark-gray mausoleum dedicated to advanced eavesdropping. It houses the agency's Technology and Systems Organization, which is responsible for the design, development, and deployment of signals intelligence systems at NSA headquarters and worldwide. 

Among the projects worked on was one to greatly extend the life of batteries needed to run eavesdropping equipment hidden in foreign countries. "The problem of providing power for years or decades for electronics in harsh environments remains an unsolved dilemma," said one NSA technical report. One possibility was the micro encapsulated beta cell, or "beta battery," which is a nuclear battery. Beta batteries operate by converting the electrons from beta radiation into light and then converting the light into usable electric energy with photovoltaic cells. Such batteries are now in use. 

Most of the Technology and Systems Organization's several thousand employees are computer scientists and engineers. The deputy director for  technology and systems in 2000 was Robert E. Stevens. High on his list of priorities was pushing signals intelligence technology well into the twenty-first century. Known as the Unified Cryptologic Architecture, it is a blueprint for taking NSA's technology up to the year 2010. 

Within the Research and Engineering Building is NSA's Microelectronics Research Laboratory, which works on such projects as thinning technology to reduce the thickness of circuitry on computer wafers to half a micron, so that the circuits virtually vanish. 

Across the Baltimore-Washington Parkway is another tall glass office building belonging to the Technology and Systems Organization. Known as NBP-1, for National Business Park, it is the centerpiece of NSA's highly secret crypto-industrial complex. Stretching out below NBP-1, hidden from the highway and surrounded by tall trees, National Business Park is a large compound of buildings owned by NSA's numerous high-tech contractors, such as Applied Signal Technology, which builds much of NSA's sophisticated satellite eavesdropping equipment. The crypto-industrial complex, like the military-industrial complex of the Cold War, is a cozy fraternity of business executives with close, expensive contractual ties to NSA. According to one study, signals intelligence is a $2 billion market. In just one year (1998) and in Maryland alone, NSA awarded more than 13,000 contracts, worth more than $700 million. 

A quick-turning revolving door allows frequent movement of personnel between the agency and industry. To help swing even more NSA contracts their way, Applied Signal Technology in 1995 named John P. Devine, just retired as NSA's deputy director for technology and systems, to its board of directors. Likewise, TRW hired former NSA director William Studeman, a retired Navy admiral, as its vice president and deputy general manager for intelligence programs. The massive consulting firm Booz-Allen & Hamilton, which frequently bids for NSA contracts, hired Studeman's successor as director, retired vice admiral J. Michael McConnell. And McConnell's former deputy director, William P. Crowell, left NSA to become vice president of Cylink, a major company involved in encryption products. Crowell had been through the revolving door before, going from a senior executive post at NSA to a vice presidency at Atlantic Aerospace Electronics Corporation, an agency contractor, and then back to NSA as chief of staff. Another deputy director of the agency, Charles R. Lord, left NSA in 1987 and immediately became a vice president at E-Systems, one of NSA's biggest contractors. 

Headquarters of the crypto-industrial complex is in a white two-story office building at 141 National Business Park, just down the street from NSA's Technology and Systems Organization in NBP-1. Behind the double doors to Suite 112 is a little-known organization called the Security Affairs Support Association (SASA), which serves as the bridge between the intelligence and industrial communities. SASA's president is Lieutenant General Kenneth A. Minihan, who retired as director of NSA in 1999. Its executive vice president for many years was retired Air Force Major General John E. Morrison, Jr., a former head of operations at NSA and long one of the most respected people in the intelligence community. 

SASA holds symposiums and lectures throughout the year, and every May its awards gala attracts a Who's Who of the intelligence community and the blacker parts of private industry. In April 1997 SASA held a two day symposium at NSA to discuss the agency's cryptologic strategy for the next century. SASA's 1999 Awards Dinner, which honored former NSA deputy director Ann Caracristi, attracted senior executives from over eighty companies involved in technical intelligence, and scores of officials from NSA, the National Sigint Committee, and other intelligence agencies. 

The new century promises to be good to NSA's contractors. In its 2001 budget authorization, the House Intelligence Committee recommended that NSA begin reaching beyond its high fences. Listing the agency's many new problems—fiber optic communications, the Internet, and so on—the committee practically ordered NSA to begin bringing in more expertise from the outside. "During the 1980s budget increases," said the committee, "NSA decided to build up its in-house government scientists and engineers and the agency now seems to believe that in-house talent can address the rapidly evolving signals environment better than outsiders can. . . . The culture demanded compartmentation, valued hands-on technical work, and encouraged in-house prototyping. It placed little value on program management, contracting development work to industry, and the associated systems engineering skills." 

The House committee believed it was time for a change. "Today, an entirely new orientation is required," said the 2001 budget report. "The agency must rapidly enhance its program management and systems engineering skills and heed the dictates of these disciplines, including looking at options to contract out for these skills." According to Michael Hayden, "The explosive growth of the global network and new technologies make our partnership with industry more vital to NSA's success than ever before." 

Like many large communities, NSA's secret city has its own university, the National Cryptologic School. It is located a short distance to the north in the NSA compound called FANX. 

"The magnitude of their education, of their mental capacity was just overwhelming to me," former director Marshall Carter recalled of the people he found himself surrounded with when he left the CIA to direct NSA. "I made a survey . . . when I got there and it was just unbelievable,  the number of Ph.D.s that we had at the operating levels— and they weren't sitting around glorying like people do." 

To channel all that mental power in the right direction, NSA established what must be the most selective institution of higher learning in the country: the National Cryptologic School. The NSC was the final metamorphosis of the Training School, which started out on the second floor of a rambling wood-frame building known as Temp "R" on Jefferson Drive between Third and Fourth Streets in southwest Washington. There, in the early 1950s, the students would clamber up the creaking stairway between Wings 3 and 4, past the guard post, and disperse into the five wings of the school. 

Opened on November 1, 1965, the NCS is located in a two-story building containing more than 100 classrooms. Over 900 courses are offered, from Basic Sigint Technology to three years of intensive technical training in the Military Elint Signal Analysis Program. Also offered is the advanced National Senior Cryptologic Course (Course No. CY-600), a seven-week, full-time course for senior signals intelligence managers. 

At Crypto City's new NSA Graduate Studies Center, students can even obtain a "master of eavesdropping" degree—actually a master of science in strategic intelligence, with a concentration in Sigint. The program, which consists of two years of part-time study, includes ten prescribed intelligence core courses and four Sigint-related electives, along with a thesis. The NSC also boasts what is believed to be the largest computerized training facility in the country. Tests in 154 languages are available on new state-of-the-art machines. 

For the most advanced students of cryptology there is the Senior Technical Development Program, which exposes a select group of employees to advanced cryptanalysis and other specialized fields. The program may take up to three years to complete. The seventeen graduates of the class of 1998 held their commencement ceremony in OPS 1's Friedman Auditorium, with Director Minihan calling them the "best of the best." 

Following a brain-cracking exam on the latest Sigint applications for high-temperature superconductivity, or a quiz on local dialects of Lingula, students can go down the hall to the Roadhouse Café for a quick gourmet coffee and a focaccia sandwich. 

In 1993 the NCS awarded certificates to over 38,000 NSA students. It also paid colleges and universities around NSA $5 million for additional courses taken by NSA employees. Additional contracts were awarded in other parts of the country. During the 1980s, for example, the University of Wisconsin at Madison was awarded more than $92,000 to develop proficiency tests in modern Hindi. University officials were warned to keep their eyes out for anything or anyone that might "have the potential  for adversely affecting the national security"—i.e., spies. 

The first "dean" of the National Cryptologic School was Frank B. Rowlett, Friedman's first employee in the newly formed Signal Intelligence Service in 1930. In 1958, after five years with the CIA, he replaced the retiring Friedman as special assistant to the director, a position Rowlett held for seven years under four directors. While there, he led the study group that prepared the way for the National Cryptologic School's founding and stayed on as commandant to give it some direction. He retired two months later, on December 30, 1965. 

On March 2, 1966, Rowlett became the third NSA employee to win the intelligence community's top award when President Johnson presented to him the National Security Medal during a ceremony at the White House. If the surroundings looked familiar to him, it was because he had been there a brief nine months earlier to receive the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service, the highest award given to a civilian in the federal government. "His brilliant achievements," read the presidential citation, "ranging from analyses of enemy codes to technological advances in cryptology, have become milestones in the history of our Nation's security." 

Rowlett, the last of the original band of codebreakers who started the SIS with Friedman in 1930, died on June 29, 1998. On January 27, 1999, Kenneth Minihan stood in the late-morning sun near a large canopy in Crypto City. Behind him was the boxy, chocolate-brown headquarters of NSA's Information Systems Security Organization, the agency's codemakers. As a small group watched, shivering in the chill, Minihan unveiled a large granite boulder that resembled a grounded meteorite. On the flat face of the stone was a large brass plate with an inscription. "This building," it said, "is dedicated to Frank B. Rowlett— American Cryptologic Pioneer—Head of the team that broke the Japanese 'PURPLE' cipher device in 1940—Principal inventor of SIGABA, the most secure cipher device used by any country in World War II." 

It was only the second building in the city to be named for an individual, the first being the Supercomputer Facility named after Dr. Louis Tordella. The effort to name buildings is part of a new trend to bring a sense of history to the residents of Crypto City. A by-product of NSA's preoccupation with secrecy is a lack of knowledge of the agency's past. What few histories exist are so highly classified with multiple codewords that almost no one has access to them. The author of an article in the Top Secret/Umbra Cryptologic Quarterly emphasized the point. "Despite NSA's size and success," he wrote, "its sense of its own history (an important part of any organizational and professional culture) is astonishingly weak. . . . Where clues to the Agency's past are not absent altogether, they are in some cases seriously misleading." The author had a recommendation: "We need to name our buildings for our  heroes; we need their photographs and plaques commemorating their efforts in the corridors or our buildings. . . . We simply must do a better job indoctrinating our people with the history and traditions of the cryptologic service." 

But in 2001, the light of the outside world was pushed even further away as construction continued on one more high fence stretching for miles around the entire city. By then Crypto City had become an avatar of Jorge Luis Borges' "Library of Babel," a place where the collection of information is both infinite and monstrous, where all the world's knowledge is stored, but every word is maddeningly scrambled in an unbreakable code. In this "labyrinth of letters," Borges wrote, "there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences."   

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