Vic Socotra

09 November 2008

Radio Wars

There is a lot to talk about this morning, burning Russian subs and the new Administration’s priorities. But we will have years to talk about both. Something happened this week that was remarkable for our little band of spooks.

The Center for Cryptologic History is located in a former motel very close to the sprawling campus of the National Security Agency, within whose copper-lined walls some of the most sophisticated technical achievements of the Age have been made.

Not that they are much publicized, any more than some of the activities that happened at this very motel were. That is a totally different story, and one worthy of investigation sometime. If the Shell Gas station next door could tell stories. Well, enough said on that. People are people, regardless if the acronym of the Agency was often jokingly translated as “No Such Agency.”

The Baltimore-Washington Parkway is the best way to get to the Museum, if you have an invitation in hand to an investiture. I did. My pal Admiral Mac was joining a very exclusive group, and he had asked the people sponsoring the event to provide me a reserved seat, which they did, very kindly, through a Public Affairs shop that answered the phone without using their names.

The National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) Hall of Honor was created in 1999 “to pay special tribute to the pioneers and heroes who have rendered distinguished service to American Cryptology.” That would definitely include my pal, who was a junior officer in 1941, at the start of the internecine cold war in our intelligence community since.

I can’t (and won’t) do justice to an account of the schism. Suffice it to say, there was a profound philosophical difference about how the fruits of exploiting the radio transmissions of the opposition. Remember, at the beginning of WW II, there were only three major players in the American intelligence business. The War Department (Army), the Department of the Navy, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

There were rivalries aplenty in just those three institutions, but the schism about who analyzed and controlled the information derived from the ether was at the heart of the first big battle that no one heard about. The Army and Navy had the most interest in the radio, and within Navy, there was a fierce division about who was running the show.

The Office of Naval Intelligence is the oldest continuously operating spy organization in the United States. It began to establish files on world navies in 1882, under the leadership of Lieutenant T.B. Mason. Originally a clearing-house of what we would consider “open source” information these days, the Office was directed to dramatically expand its charter as the technical nature of the threat evolved. That included clandestine human intelligence operations, photographic analysis, and forays into black bag jobs to steal ciphers, and conduct psychological operations.

World War I marked the emergence of the radio as a command-and-control tool for widely dispersed naval forces. With that came an inherent natural vulnerability, which is to say that the airwaves are free to friend and foe alike. To balance the necessity for communication, increasingly sophisticated cipher systems to protect the information transmitted freely through the electromagnetic spectrum.

Intelligence organizations are naturally secretive by nature, and a natural tendency on the part of operating forces to view such with suspicion. It is in the cultural DNA of Captains and Admirals who have, for a thousand years, been laws unto themselves the instant the gangway is pulled away from the shore.

In terms of the pre-war Navy, radio communications were intercepted by those who did the communicating. It was only natural, and led to all the problems that came later. Communications is a function of the line, not that of the intelligence bean-counters, and the meaning of what was intercepted was the property of those who captured it.

Or so the theory went. The victory of that titanic struggle was determined, in large measure by the cryptologic success of Great Britain and the United States. In order to penetrate the very sophisticated German and Japanese communication systems, the computer age was born. The success shortened the horrific conflict by years.

Failure to understand the nature of the enemy’s intent at the beginning may have cost a few thousand lives at Pearl Harbor. The internal and highly secret recriminations about that failure outlived most of the participants. The institutional segmentation necessary to maintain the greatest secret this side of the Atom Bomb also hardened into implacable camps with equities to protect, and for whom secrecy was a way of life.

My pal the Admiral was there at the beginning of it. He worked for CDR (later Captain and RADM) Eddie Layton, Intelligence officer to poor Admiral Husband Kimmel, who took the rap for the Pearl Harbor disaster. He worked at station HYPO, the Hawaiian cryptologic outpost and home of one of the greatest heroes of the radio wars, Commander Joseph Rochefort.

Rochefort was a line officer whose tours ashore included cryptanalytic training under both Captain Laurance Safford and the master code-breaker, Agnes Meyer Driscoll. He had been assigned to the Office of Naval Communications' newly created cryptanalytic organization, OP-20-G, from 1926 to 1929, when the lines of authority for radio intelligence were beginning to be drawn. He trained in the Japanese language for three years as the Empire of the Sun began to turn its eyes to Manchuria, and divided his career almost equally between line assignments afloat and cryptologic duties ashore.

Joe is on the wall of the Hall of Honor for what he accomplished at the Battle of Midway, turning point of the War in the Pacific. Under his leadership, young officers like my pal the Admiral managed to derive many secrets from analysis of Japanese radio transmissions using the JN-25 code system. One of them- maybe the biggest- was to identify Midway Island as the target of the major Imperial Navy offensive of 1942. Success would expand the defensive perimeter of the Empire, and make the nut that much harder to crack.

Rochefort and Layton advised Admiral Nimitz, Pacific Fleet Commander, of the true Japanese objective. It was a masterpiece of codework. He took their advise and marshaled everything he had at Midway, despite Washington’s objections.

After the stunning victory, Op-20-G in Washington covered up its own failure. Captain Joe Redman, director of communications in Washington and his brother Commander Jack Redman head of the Op-20-G Detachment at Pearl Harbor arranged for Rochefort's transfer to command a dry dock for the rest of the war.

Eddie Layton could not stop it, and Admiral Nimitz's recommendations to recognize Rochefort didn’t, either. The Redmond brothers had their supporters in high places. It was not until ten years after Rochefort’s death in 1976, when many of those who held the secrets had taken them to their graves, that the Distinguished Service Medal was presented to his children. It was given by the Navy, but by President Ronald Reagan.

Anyway, my pal the Admiral is still here, and he may be the last one who remembers what it was like before the start of the Radio Wars. The Director of NSA, Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, was gracious as he recounted some of the things that the Admiral had done throughout his career, and was recognized as a giant in the field.

He goes up on the wall now, with Joe Rochefort, among others.

I got a chance to talk to him when the ceremony was done. I asked him if it was finally all over, since he could have been a cryptologist or an intelligence officer when it came time to choose. He looked at me and his eyes twinkled.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “The radio wars are finally over.”

Close Window