Code Warriors by Stephen Budiansky

Author:Stephen Budiansky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-06-14T04:00:00+00:00

A cartoon from the NSA newsletter; the “Meademobile,” parked at Arlington Hall, provided employees information about the Fort Meade area in advance of the agency’s move there in 1957.

To win over still-reluctant NSAers, Canine was able to have the relocation declared a “permanent change of station,” permitting the government to cover the full cost for civilian employees to move their household effects. A trailer dubbed the “Meademobile” was parked in the picnic area between A and B Buildings at Arlington Hall and staffed by cheery uniformed young women attendants who offered information about houses and apartments, schools, churches, and shopping in the Fort Meade area. In the end only 2 percent of NSA’s staff quit because of the move. Canine retired just before NSA took up quarters in its new home. The myriad details of the relocation had almost fully occupied his final two years as director.

Canine’s successor was Air Force lieutenant general John A. Samford. He was virtually Canine’s opposite, a cerebral intelligence professional who fully understood the world of signals intelligence, “more of a pedant than a pilot, more of a philosopher than a fighter,” in the words of an internal CIA history. Samford probably wished he had something as trivial to worry about as the logistics of relocating ten thousand people and hundreds of tons of sensitive equipment and classified files, compared to the challenges that greeted him as he walked into the new director’s office on the second floor of the NSA Operations Building for the first time: above all, the codebreakers’ continuing inability to do what they were supposed to do to justify their half billion dollars a year, namely to actually break the codes of America’s chief adversary, the Soviet Union.57

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