Page 133 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 133 of 237

If the bill was so important for the NSA, Willis was asked, why shouldn't it be applied to all other sensitive
agencies?

"As to the other agencies," Willis replied, "we will have to take them one at a time."

Although the Martin and Mitchell case stirred the House to action, it was only one of several sensational security
scandals to hit the NSA.

In 1954 Joseph Sydney Petersen was tried and convicted on charges of misusing classified NSA documents. He
was accused of taking and copying documents to aid another nation. In the court papers the government said
Petersen "copied and made notes from classified documents indicating the United States' success in breaking
codes utilized by The Netherlands." The Dutch Embassy in Washington admitted it had exchanged "secret
intelligence" with Petersen on the assumption that he had acted with the knowledge of his superiors.

In 1959, during his visit to the United States, Khrushchev bragged that he had obtained top-secret American codes
and had intercepted messages from President Eisenhower to Prime Minister Nehru. "You're wasting your money,"
Khrushchev remarked to Allen Dulles. "You might as well send it direct to us instead of the middleman, because
we get most of it anyway. Your agents give us the code books and then we send false information back to you
through your code. Then we send cables asking for money and you send it to us."

On July 22, 1963, Izvestia published a letter from Victor Norris Hamilton, a naturalized American of Arab
descent who had sought asylum in the Soviet Union. Hamilton said he had worked for a division of the NSA
which intercepted and decoded secret instructions from Arab countries to their delegations at the United Nations.
Hamilton claimed UN Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge had sent a letter to the division thanking them for the
information. The Pentagon admitted Hamilton had been an employee of the NSA and said he had been discharged
in 1959 because he was "approaching a paranoid-schizophrenic break." (The NSA has an unusually high rate of
mental illness and suicide.)

An even graver security breach at the NSA was also disclosed in July of 1963. Army Sergeant First Class Jack E.
Dunlap committed suicide when he realized he had been discovered selling top-secret NSA documents to Soviet
officials. Dunlap reportedly received $60,000 during a two-year period for disclosing United States intelligence
on Russian weapons advances, the deployment of their missiles and troops, as well as similar information about
the NATO countries.

The playboy sergeant, who had a wife and five children, spent the money on several girl friends, two Cadillacs
and frequent trips to the race track. A Pentagon official described the case as "thirty to forty times as serious as
the Mitchell and Martin defections."

These security violations revealed a mass of information about the NSA. And most of it was indirectly confirmed
by the Pentagon in its contradictory statements on the case, and by the House Un-American Activities Committee
in issuing a public report stressing the seriousness of the Martin and Mitchell defection. Out of it all a painstaking
enemy analyst could have derived the following picture of the National Security Agency:

NSA was divided into four main offices. The Office of Production (PROD) attempted to break the codes and
ciphers * and read the messages of the Soviet Union, Communist China, other Communist countries, United
States Allies and neutral nations.

The Office of Research and Development (R/D) carried out research in cryptanalysis, digital computing and radio
propagation. It also developed new communications equipment.