Page 132 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 132 of 237

Fubini's dedication to security was matched by the agency he inherited. The NSA's U-shaped, three-story steel-
and-concrete building at Fort Meade, Maryland, is surrounded by a double barbed-wire fence ten feet high. The
fences are patrolled night and day, and guards with ready machine guns are posted at the four gatehouses.

The interior, including the longest unobstructed corridor in the world (980 feet long and 560 feet wide), is
similarly patrolled. The building is 1,400,000 square feet, smaller than the Pentagon but larger than the CIA's
Langley headquarters. It houses high-speed computers and complicated radio and electronic gear. It is said to have
more electric wiring than any other building in the world.

Special security conveyor belts carry documents at the rate of a hundred feet a minute and a German-made
pneumatic tube system shoots messages at the rate of twenty-five feet a second.

The NSA headquarters was built at a cost of $30,000,000 and was opened in 1957. It contains a complete hospital,
with operating rooms and dental offices. It also houses eight snack bars, a cafeteria, an auditorium and a bank. All
of the building's windows are sealed and none can be opened.

Comparable precautions have been taken with NSA employees. They are subject to lie-detector tests on
application and intensive security indoctrination on acceptance. Periodically, the indoctrination briefing is
repeated and employees are required to sign statements that they have reread pertinent secrecy regulations.

Even so, the NSA has had more than its share of trouble with security violations. In 1960 two young
mathematicians, William H. Martin and Bernon F. Mitchell, defected to Russia. They held a news conference in
Moscow, describing in detail the inner workings of the NSA. They were soon discovered to be homosexuals, a
fact which led indirectly to the resignation of the NSA's personnel director, and the firing of twenty-six other
employees for sexual deviation.

It also led on May 9, 1963 to a vote by the House, 340 to 40, to give the Secretary of Defense the same absolute
power over NSA employees as the Director of Central Intelligence had over his employees. Under the legislation,
which was introduced by the Un-American Activities Committee, the Secretary of Defense was authorized to fire
NSA employees without explanation and without appeal if he decided they were security risks. The bill also
required a full field investigation of all persons before they were hired.

The legislation was attacked by several congressmen.

Thomas P. Gill, the Hawaii Democrat, warned that the bill opened the way to "arbitrary and capricious action on
the part of government administrators ... There has been much said about danger to the national security.
Democracy itself is a dangerous form of government and in its very danger lies its strength. The protection of
individual rights by the requirement of due process of law, which has long endured in this nation of ours, is a
radical and dangerous idea in most of the world today.

"This dangerous concept is outlawed in the Soviet Union, in Red China, in Castro's Cuba, indeed, in all of the
Communist bloc and many of those countries aligned with it. I think we might well ask: How does one destroy his
enemy by becoming like him?"

Edwin E. Willis, the Louisiana Democrat and a member of the Un-American Activities Committee, defended the
bill on grounds that the NSA "carries out the most delicate type intelligence operations of our government ... The
National Security Agency plays so highly specialized a role in the defense and security of the United States that
no outsider can actually describe its activities. They are guarded not only from the public but from other
government agencies as well. The Civil Service Commission, which audits all government positions, is not
allowed to know what NSA employees do."