The NSA, Nazi Gold, Watergate, Enigma and Cryptome.org

We have two documents here from the Center for Cryptological History (CCH) of the NSA. Both papers are interesting on several different levels and are highly recommended for those who wish to be informed about how the NSA works and thinks about its work. Those who are paranoid about the NSA (possibly with good reason) but don't know much about it should certainly read these reports to get a more nuanced view of what is going on.

The first paper is a report on how the NSA found itself involved in the ever-beguiling topic of Nazi Gold. In 1997, Congress began an investigation into this history requesting input from the various law enforcement and intelligence agencies, but did not ask the NSA for some reason (one reason could be that the NSA did not come into existence until years after the end of the war). The NSA read about it in the open press and did not think much about it. But coincidentally an NSA historian happened to be going through old archives for work on another topic and discovered to his surprise that the NSA had something to contribute on this subject. Apparently a predecessor organization to the NSA had in fact captured and decrypted discussions between the Swiss delegation on the topic when negotiating with the United States. This started a process whereby the NSA internally decided to bring this document to the attention of the Congressional committee even though they had not asked.

The second paper is a discussion, formerly classified Top Secret Umbra, about the impact of Watergate and the release of Enigma decryption efforts of WW 2 had on their operations. It is particularly interesting because it goes over in modest detail some of the problems that occur when intelligence collected for national security purposes is repurposed for domestic law enforcement. This is a very important problem and one that has the chance of vindicating one small part of the Snowden revelations (even though I believe that most of the Snowden revelations have nothing to do with the violation of American civil rights and were released for other purposes). It is therefore important for anyone who is concerned on these issues to become aware of some of the history of this dilemma which this report describes.

In particular the report discusses what happened when the Reagan Administration requested NSA to cooperate with FBI in using SIGINT for domestic law enforcement and what the NSA thought and did about it. Those who believe that the NSA gladly violates the Constitutional rights of Americans will be reassured to know that by no means is the NSA cavalier about these issues. Those who are concerned about whether their Constitutional rights to privacy might be compromised by a future or current Administration have every reason to be concerned.

You will note that both of these documents are archived on the internet site cryptome.org. Cryptome is a well known entity in the area of Internet privacy and government secrecy. Run by John Young and Deborah Natsios in the upper west side of NYC, they maintain an online repository of many of the government documents that have been released and those that have been leaked and include many items of relevant commentary by individuals, groups and news sources. Although the politics of Mr. Young and Ms. Natsios are far to the left and I certainly do not agree with them on many issues, I have found Cryptome to be a useful and reliable web site and worth checking out on a regular basis.

But can we really believe the content of these papers? Even now the US Government hides the facts of our use of Nazi Gold to finance the reverse engineering of the Nazi anti-gravity drive. And what about the Nazi bases at the Polar regions? Sadly, no mention. We must conclude that these papers were released to deflect attention from the truth.

www.cryptome.org

NSA Paper on Cryptology and the Watergate Era

https://cryptome.org/2016/03/nsa-cryptology-watergate-era.pdf

NSA Paper on Nazi Gold

https://cryptome.org/2016/03/nsa-nazi-gold.pdf

Why I am Not Working for the NSA

Many friends wonder, what with my strange beliefs about intelligence and national defense, that I am not working for that center of evil itself, the NSA. Why not go to work for the great oppressor of freedom that even now examines each individuals internet pornography use and deduces whether or not they are having kinky sex with women in order to inform the local Gestapo and have them beat in the doors to seize the miscreant and hang them in their cell?

But it is not out of a misguided sense of privacy rights that I am not working for the NSA.  The real reason is that I could not figure out how to apply.  

Applying for the NSA requires applying through the Internet, a bold new paradigm. Just applying for the NSA through the Internet requires hours of your time, and requires a reasonable understanding of our nation's civil service structure. And the NSA internal job classifications. 

The potential candidate for national security work is presented with a series of questions that to those of us filled with patriotism but outside the beltway will find completely baffling. What job classification was your dog when your dog applied for TS clearance? What job classification was your mother-in-law when she was denied SCI tickets? Did you or did you not visit NMIC in the basement of the pentagon when you were 23 years old with Dr. Stockton Gaines? What did you hope to gain from that stunt for your communist masters?

And then, forget about uploading a resume. Resumes are old fashioned here, son, put your old fashioned ideas away and get ready for some rocket science. Instead you must type in your resume and experience and education in carefully prepared html forms. What was the name of your 6^th grade Science teacher? If we contacted Mrs. Winkler, as you allege, what would she say about you and your commitment to the American Way? When you heard about the assassination of Kennedy, were you (a) happy, (b) distressed, (c) thinking only about the cute girl two rows up and to the left?

And on and on it goes, from Elementary School, to Middle School, to High School, to college. What was your grade in differential equations? Why did you have to take it over? What does your failure to excel at diff eq say about your lack of ethical standards?

And finally, when you think it is over, it isn't over.

Pick your job classification? Slovenian linguist or Finno-Ugric semiotics, junior grade? Sino-Soviet relations as manifested by their choice of profanity or perhaps Korean synonyms? Its your choice, boy, but choose carefully because forever is your destiny affected.

And then, if you think you finished but you did not get a reply, that means you did not finish. Yes, you left some box unchecked, and after those hours of work they did not actually get that application which they would use to ignore you. You were never officially ignored. You did not even get that far.

And that is what happened.

I went through this process, somehow missed some box to check, and did not actually submit. Should I try again?  What's the point?   No one ever gets a job by applying through the Internet.

Maybe this is a way to weed out the weak and find only those who are truly worthy?

A Commentary on the NSA Disaster from British Cinema of the 1960s

Many Americans do not understand the NSA disclosures and fall into a juvenile and narcissistic (1) explanation based on an endless diet of “evil CIA conspiracies to murder the president and destroy friendly freedom loving countries” plot meme of American movies and TV Shows.  The reality is so much less interesting but in ways that, sadly, require a bit of history to appreciate and that has never been an American strong point. 

This problem of "NSA explanation" extends to our allies in the West who for some reason want to know what is going on and do not trust us,  How funny that an American should have to remind Europeans about history, how very ironic.  These same Europeans are always lecturing us about their superior knowledge of history as learned in elite European universities, something us poor Yanks could never hope to understand given our inferior breeding. This history reminder is especially odd in the case of the United Kingdom. Surely we can count on them for understanding?

Well, yes and no. The more informed of us realize that the NSA disclosures involve operations that are shared with and in part originated with the British and various members of their Commonwealth, but even our well-bred friends seem to have slipped a bit and forgotten that one of the unusual aspects of post 1945 intelligence is the cooperation between the US, the UK and their Commonwealth, a cooperation that, to everyone's surprise, survived the last world war and continues to this day. In other words, its not "us vs them" in this case, it is more likely to be some version of “us vs us” when the full story comes out, if it ever does.

But I speculate, and in the great tradition of retroactively finding meaning in works of art and fiction, I have noticed an oddly plausible discusssion for some of what we know about the NSA disaster in a venerable, indeed perhaps penultimate, spy movie from the Cold War, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) as directed by Martin Ritt from a novel by John le Carre, aka David Cornwell, a veteran of British M.I. {5, 6}.

Control discussing intelligence methods with Leamus in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) 

Although the movie does not discuss anything like the NSA disclosures it does contain words of wisdom, I think, for how people in the Intelligence Community see this sort of thing.

The movie is remarkably faithful to the book, and both are confusing as can be which touches on some of the ambiguity and complexity of the real Cold War. It seems to me that one should not have to worry about spoilers in a movie that came out in 1965, especially to readers of this blog, but the fact is that not everyone has seen this fabulous, if depressing, movie. The good news is that one can discuss major elements of the film and not give anything away, you will still be confused unless you read and/or watch this film several times and spend some time thinking about it.

But fortunately, the scene in question is near the very beginning of the film, and gives very little away except perhaps upon reflection in light of other developments. It is the briefing between the protagonist, Leamus, and his boss in British intelligence, whose work name is Control. In this briefing, Leamus has returned from Berlin where he has just seen the collapse and death of one of his networks, and is meeting with his boss to see if he will be retired, or transferred to a non-operational job, or given another assignment in the field.

As we have discussed earlier in this blog, I believe that one of the greatest of all devices in the history of the cinema is the device of The Explanation. In this scene, the head of the British Foreign Intelligence service explains to an agent some of the rationale behind their work.

I have put the scene up at Youtube, until they take it down, education not being seen as a valid excuse for Fair Use no matter what Congress or the FCC may say. I have also provided a transcript below. The italics are mine. You may watch this scene here.

Control: Would you like a drink?

Leamus: No, I'll wait.

Control: You can still do that?

Leamus: (startled at Control's rudeness)

Control: I wondered whether you were tired, burnt out.

Leamus: (silence)

Control: Well this phenomenon we understand here. Its like metal fatigue. We have to

    live without sympathy, don't we. You can't do that forever. One needs to come in,

    in from the cold.

Leamus: I'm an operator, Control. Just an operator.

Control: There is a vacancy in banking section that might suit you.

Leamus: Sorry, I'm an operational man. I'll take my pension, I don't want a desk job.

Control: You don't know whats on the desk.

Leamus: Paper.

Control: I want you to stay out in the cold a little longer. Please do sit down.

Control: Our work as I understand it is based on a single assumption that the West is never

    going to be the aggressor. Thus, we do disagreeable things, but they are defensive.

    Our policies are peaceful but our methods can't afford to be less ruthless than those

    of the opposition. Can they?

Leamus: (silence)

Control: No, I'd say that since the war our methods, our techniques that is, and those

    of the communists have become very much the same. Right. I mean, occasionally,

    we have to do wicked things. Very wicked things indeed. But, uh, you can't be less

    wicked than your enemies simply because your government's policies are benevolent,

    can you?

Leamus: (silence)

Control: What I have in mind for Mundt is a little out of the ordinary. You haven't met

  have you?

Leamus: Mundt? No.

Control: He was here in 59 posing as a member of the East German steel mission.

Leamus: I was in Berlin.

Control: And, uh, how do you feel about him?

Leamus: Feel?

Control: Yes.

Leamus: He's a bastard.

Control: Right.

Those students of the filmmaking arts will notice that this is not a pure Explanation as it also makes good use of those tired narrative cliches of foreshadowing, well-written dialogue and great acting.

This movie also has several great examples of the art of the Explanation beyond the one already cited. Another one can be found here, but trust me, this one is a spoiler if you have not seen the film.

So in conclusion, I would like to suggest that this fictional discussion from the cold war should serve to remind us that our faithful public servants are often aware of the moral ambiguity of some of their work. Also, in judging this situation without solid knowledge let us not forget that, generally speaking, the NSA is on our side.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059749/

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1. The great narcissism of the American Public is revealed in the presumption that the NSA has nothing better to do than to gleefully and egregiously spy on them as if the NSA was an infinitely resourced department of the Divine Will that watches over every one of God's, or the IRS's, creatures.  Unlike Santa Claus, he knows when you are sleeping, he knows when you're awake, not.

Journal of Information Warfare

Cryptome has put on their site an NSA journal that is unclassified with the fabulous name of “Journal of Information Warfare”.

It has a variety of entertaining articles, and I have put the table of contents below. I think that most normal people will find it a little difficult to read as it seems to be written with a very turgid government style. One can get used to it but it is certainly not very evocative prose. I suspect that if one were to work in the NSA that one would have to learn to read and write such things effortlessly.

See for yourself.

The Journal of Information Warfare volume 13, issue 2

http://cryptome.org/2014/06/nsa-jiw-2014.pdf

Can Glenn Greenwald be Tried for a Crime in the Snowden/NSA Affair?

I realize that not many of my readers may be very interested in the NSA/Snowden affair, or at least not very interested in what I have to say about it.

But since this blog is in part for my own education and improvement of *my* moral character, not to mention *your* moral character, I think it is my duty to soldier on and educate myself and my fellow Americans about some of the background and law involved.

The question of the day is whether or not on paper Glenn Greenwald has violated American law. Which is different from whether or not he will be tried for this alleged crimes or, if convicted, those convictions will stand.

To recap, when Ed Snowden violated his oath and released information with the clear result of damaging the United States national security, he did so with the help of various accomplices around the world. A few of those accomplices are publicly so, and most of them are not public.(1)  

Foremost among the public conspirators is Glenn Greenwald, an independent journalist, and author of several best-selling books. He has been instrumental in transmitting and publishing this information and very public about it.

So here are the questions we want to answer. 1. Is there a law prohibiting what Greenwald did? 2. Is there a special exemption in this law for 1st amendment purposes? and 3. If there is a law and no special exemption, why has the government not issued warrants of arrest for Greenwald?

The answer to question 1 is simple: yes. It is Title 18, part I, Chapter 37.798, Disclosure of Classified Information, and I have quoted the relevant text below.

The answer to question 2 is not at all clear. The only way to find out if a law is constitutional is for someone to be judged, found guilty, and to appeal. If the law is struck down by an appeals court, it may still not be clear. The ultimate judgment comes from the Supreme Court, as imperfect as it may be. Thus all those people who go around saying "this is unconstitutional" quite probably do not have a clue what they are talking about. Yes, the 1st Amendment is pretty clear about "free speech". But it does not say you can sell stolen goods, nor does it say anywhere that you can conspire to kill Americans (in an indirect or a direct fashion, with the differences between those two being very germane to this and other cases).

Therefore if there is a law, and there is, and if that law stands and has not been found unconstitutional, why has the Obama Administration not filed charged against Glenn Greenwald? Perhaps they feel that it would stir up more opposition to America in the world. Perhaps they are afraid of testing the law in the case of a journalist.  Perhaps they are taking a wait and see attitude to see how things develop.  I have no doubt the Greenwald must be under intense surveillance.

Is there a statute of limitations on these alleged crimes? Maybe, but its also a loose thing and not as black and white as some people think particularly because of the issue of continuing activities of a conspiracy, which is certainly the case here. In other words, is Greenwald still conspiring with Snowden to publish classified material? Yes? Then the statute of limitation clock has not started running yet.

So the answers to our questions are 1. Yes, 2. Unknown you just have to try it, and 3. Unknown but they still have time should they decide later to do so.

The relevant federal statute: 

TITLE 18 - CRIMES AND CRIMINAL PROCEDURE

PART I - CRIMES   CHAPTER 37 - ESPIONAGE AND CENSORSHIP

§ 798. Disclosure of classified information

(a) Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates, furnishes, transmits, or otherwise makes

available to an unauthorized person, or publishes, or uses in any manner prejudicial to the safety or

interest of the United States or for the benefit of any foreign government to the detriment of the United

States any classified information—

(1) concerning the nature, preparation, or use of any code, cipher, or cryptographic system of the

United States or any foreign government; or

(2) concerning the design, construction, use, maintenance, or repair of any device, apparatus, or

appliance used or prepared or planned for use by the United States or any foreign government for

cryptographic or communication intelligence purposes; or

(3) concerning the communication intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign

government; or

(4) obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of any

foreign government, knowing the same to have been obtained by such processes—

Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

(b) As used in subsection (a) of this section—

The term “classified information” means information which, at the time of a violation of this section,

is, for reasons of national security, specifically designated by a United States Government Agency for

limited or restricted dissemination or distribution; ....

You may find the complete statute here:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/798

A discussion on statute of limitations can be found here:

https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL31253.pdf

Glenn Greenwald on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Greenwald

_____________________________________________________________

1. Russian intelligence services aided and abetted Snowden is apparently the belief of many in the intelligence community. I have heard various explanations for why they believe this but I suspect that the real reasons also lie in the areas of secret intelligence so we are not likely to know the details for some while.

Dr. Willis Ware 1920 - 2013

I was devastated yesterday to hear of the passing of one of the most interesting people I have ever met or worked with, Dr. Willis Ware formerly of the RAND Corporation.

Dr. Ware passed away at the far too young age of 93 years old.

Most people at RAND had no idea what he did, just that he was very senior.

I met Dr. Ware at the RAND Corporation when I was just 21 or so years old, and Willis was already some sort of Scientist Emeritus at RAND and while no one seemed to know exactly what he did he, suspiciously, had a three window office and a full-time secretary/assistant. With this information we knew he was powerful beyond measure. They said that he testified before Congress on the issues of privacy, and that of course was important but seemed to only add to the mystery.

Several clues revealed themselves as time went by.

Clue #1 He knew my interest in graphics and he wanted to show me a film he had with a user interface that he thought was interesting. It turned out to be none other than one of the famous films of Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad thesis work at MITRE when he was a graduate student at MIT. To this day I consider that user interface to be one of the top five or so I have ever seen.

Clue #2 We were chatting about nothing in particular and he told me the story of how he had worked to bring Dr. von Neumann to RAND after the war and when he was bored at the Institute at Princeton. von Neumann, whose computer architecture you are using while you read my blog, most likely, was going to come to RAND and UCLA and split his time between them. But unfortunately he died suddenly of brain cancer.

Clue #3 Somehow it came to my attention that Willis had received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Princeton in 1939. Look up 1939 in history, recall that the new Intelligence agencies (really the proto-agencies, the ones we know were formed after WWII from these proto-agencies) recruited heavily from the Ivy League and imagine what someone with a PhD in EE might do in the upcoming conflict.

Clue #4 Although Willis did not seem to work on any run of the mill projects at RAND, he did travel every six months and spent a week somewhere in Maryland. Fort Meade, Maryland, as it turned out. In fact, I saw above his secretaries desk an agenda and it said he attended the "SAB" at Ft. Meade, Maryland. Now, what is at Ft. Meade? Well, the National Security Agency is. And what might the SAB be ? Well, it is something called the "Scientific Advisory Board" which meets every six months.

The Scientific Advisory Board of the NSA is the body responsible at a very high level for advising the NSA on technologies of interest and issues that they should be addressing. In short, Willis had some sort of very serious position advising the NSA. A senior spook, at least in part.

Clue #5 Willis and I were discussing WWII and Enigma one day and I told him that I was guessing that there were still secrets from WWII that had not been revealed. And he said to me that he knew for a fact that there were secrets and events from WWII that had not been released and that, in his opinion, they should be.

Clue #6 At random intervals, maybe once or twice a year, Willis would travel on a short trip to Washington, DC. No one knew what he did there, but it was suggested to me, by someone who knew Willis well, that he was used by various elements of the Intelligence Community when it was necessary to liason with another part. In other words, he was some sort of prestigious messenger when some sort of issue or discussion needed to take place. Now, I may have that wrong, or incomplete, and of course it is vague, but I think it still has valid information.

Clue #7 In 1967, DARPA commissioned a report on "Security Controls in Computer Systems".  The report was reissued in 1979.   Written by Dr. Ware, you may find this report on the Cryptome site at http://cryptome.org/sccs.htm

And so, who was Dr. Willis Ware ?

I think he was a pioneer of computing and information technology, and a recognized authority on the impact on policy, particularly the policy of privacy, at very high levels of government. I think he was in some sense a spook during WW II and that he maintained his relationship with the primary user of computers in intelligence, the NSA, and was on their advisory board. He maintained an office at RAND and did his own work because it was a useful platform that kept him in touch with Washington, yet outside the beltway madness that so many succumb to. RAND gave him a certain long term cachet, and RAND management of course loved him because their very raison d'etre is to influence policy in Washington, and clearly Willis did just that.

I also suspect that there is more public history here than I know and will no doubt discover over the next few weeks. Willis was probably involved in the Mathematics Division of the RAND Corporation back when RAND had two mathematics-related departments: abstract and applied.   Computer science, such as it became, came from the applied math department.   When I was with RAND, we had a small computer science department that was in some way derived from these much larger efforts of the past. Today, RAND has no computer science department although there are individual computer scientists and programmers lurking in the hallways. (1)

Finally, Willis is one of the reasons that I am so screwed up today. You see, back then, at RAND, I was treated as a real human being, with intelligence and something to contribute. Today I am treated like garbage by nearly everyone but especially in my own field and it was those expectations that got set at RAND that led inevitably to my downfall.

I will really miss you Willis, wherever you are.

[The NY Times has an obituary of Willis at 
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/02/technology/willis-ware-who-helped-build-blueprint-for-computer-design-dies-at-93.html?_r=0]

__________________________________________________

1. Part of the reason that RAND had a computer science department(s), was because RAND believed it was of strategic importance to the US Government. As time went by, computer science spread to the more traditional venues of University and Industry and so RAND no longer needed to do that. There were other things that were more important and more in line with their specific missions in the context of Congressional limitations on the maximum size of the annual budgets of places like RAND.

GlobalWahrman Reveals Highly Secret NSA Project from the Cold War !!

From time to time when working at the RAND Corporation, I would occassionally pick up information that I was not supposed to hear. It was very rare, and no harm was done. In all cases, the specific information had been printed in the NY Times or similar venue anyway.

I do have one story that I think is amusing and which I plan to tell you here.

I hope that by telling you this, I don't accidentally become internationally famous, have my picture in every newspaper, have beautiful women throwing themselves at my feet, get offered huge fees as a freedom-loving journalist, and be acclaimed a hero. I doubt however that any of these things will happen because by telling you this story I am not intentionally or actually damaging America and violating trust based on narcissistic self-delusion, unlike some self-righteous assholes people I could name.

The RAND Corporation was an early site on the ARPAnet, which was the prototype of what we now call the Internet. Much, but not all, of the fundamental technology of the Internet was invented for the ARPAnet and then scaled up.   (Actually, this becomes less and less true every year as the Internet evolves, but it was true at the beginning).

Among other things, the ARPAnet allowed heterogenous computers to communicate in a way that was reliable even if parts of the network went down. This is the famous "packet switching" concept, in which a message is disassembled into packets, the packets are sent by the best available route, and reassembled at the destination.

The computers that handled all this disassembly, re-transmission, reassembly, etc was all in the background and were called IMPs and TIPs and they were highly reliable, special purpose computers built by Bolt Beranak and Newman (BBN) under contract to ARPA. Although very reliable, BBN had maintenance people in various places to fix anything that broke. One of those maintenance people, the one who handled the west coast, was a good friend of ours, for some reason. He had long hair and a beard, was a surfer, was very straight and had a Top Secret / CRYPTO clearance.

CRYPTO is the clearance you need to handle cryptographic material. All cryptographic material is managed by the NSA.

Why he had that clearance was not entirely clear to me, but I think it was because there were places he had to go to fix various computers that were inside places where people did highly secret work. The ARPAnet was completely open and not secret at all, but we were aware that there was a secure version of it inside the basement of NSA, there was a version used between some military commands called MILNET, and so forth.

One day my friend got a call from his boss who told him to grab his kit of spare boards and his passport because they were sending him to London and he was leaving that afternoon. All he was told was to keep his kit of spare boards with him, fly to London, go to his hotel and wait. He would be contacted. I am not exactly sure when this was, but it was probably 1978 plus or minus a year.

So he did that. He got on a plane to London and checked into the hotel they told him to go to, and when he had been there for a few hours, trying to get some sleep, some people came to his hotel and asked him to take his parts kit and whatever tools he needed and come with them. They took him to the basement parking garage of the hotel, put him in a car, put his head down so that he could not see where they were going, and proceeded to drive over an hour somewhere.

At some point, the car stopped and they let him sit up. They were in another underground parking garage for a different hotel somewhere, but of course he had no idea where he was.

They took him upstairs to a hotel room and there, in that hotel room, was an IMP, sitting there looking completely alien and out of place. It had obviously just been moved from somewhere else. They told him it was broken and could he fix it please. Indeed it was broken, he ran diagnostics, swapped some boards and fixed it.

The people who were escorting him, and who stayed with him the entire time he was fixing the computer, then reversed the process: they took him down to the basement, put him in the car, put his head down, proceeded to drive somewhere for an hour or so, and delivered him back to the basement of the hotel he was staying at. They thanked him and told him he could go home now.

So he did.

What does it all mean ? It probably means that there was a special project somewhere that was using a very secure version of the ARPAnet for communication. It was so secret that when one of their IMPs broke, they took the trouble to move it someplace else to have it fixed, and then presumably took it back to where it was being used.

So far as I know, we never heard what project it was.

The NSA and the Mystery of Tito and Eliza Doolittle

As everyone knows, the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.   Poor Eliza Doolittle had to repeat that phrase over and over again, under the tutelage of her cruel taskmaster, the domineering patriarch Henry Higgins in order to achieve the goals not just for herself but for her language teachers.  She wanted a chance to elevate herself from desperate poverty, but her masters wanted to put one over on British society, to fool English society into believing that this poverty-stricken seller of flowers, Eliza Doolittle, was in fact of the upper classes.   Technically speaking this was a conspiracy.

In a similar manner,  we have a story from the Cold War, a mystery if you will, about someone who did not learn to pronounce his H's properly and so was unmasked as an impostor.  Of course in his case, since he was the ruler of a Communist dictatorship, it didn't really matter.

This person was probably a plant of a Russian trained agent to lead the resistance of communist and other partisan forces in a war they expected with Nazi Germany.   The mysterious Russian, if he was Russian, whose real name we do not know, was secretly proven to not be who he said he was after WW II and during the cold war.  It was his failure to learn to pronounce his H's, figuratively speaking, that revealed him.

The organization that succeeded in revealing the truth (secretly) to our leaders was the newly formed and much maligned National Security Agency.   Yes, that poor, misunderstood guardian of freedom, the NSA.

Our story begins in the 1930s in what was the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, formed after WW I out of parts of the Austro Hungarian Empire and the Kingdom of Slovenia.  A former locksmith and metal worker, Josip Broz of Kumrovec, near Zagreb, took the underground cover name of Tito, and led the Communist faction of the partisans in resistance to the Germans who had occupied their country.

When the Germans were defeated, he was able to keep the Kingdom united and create a new country that included Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia and five other distinct provinces and ethinic groups.   He was able to forge his own path for his newly Communist nation, separate from the Soviet Union, and create his own version of Socialism.  (1) When he died, the country split apart violently along ethnic lines. Without him, it could not hold together.

The problem is, or the mystery, is that it was not clear, it still is not clear, who Marshal Tito was.  But whoever he was, it isn't who he said he was.

Marshal Tito was supposedly born Josip Broz in 1892 in Kumrovec to a Croat Father and a Slovene mother.  His first language was Serbo-Croat.    He fought in the Austro Hungarian army, was captured and imprisoned in Russia, fought in the Russian revolution, and returned to Yugoslavia where he was involved in various activities that also got him imprisoned.  After serving time, he went underground and joined the Yugoslav Communist party.   From there he rose in prominence in the Party and led the resistance to the Germans.

But mysteriously the people of Kumrovec did not recognize him.   And when Josip aka Tito spoke his native language, he made mistakes that no native would make.   Serbo-Croat was apparently not his native language.

One job of our intelligence community is to understand what is happening in the world and what is likely to happen. Who the leaders of important countries are, and what they are likely to do, is part of their job. Its a nearly impossible job to do, but certain things can be done. But one is certainly at a disadvantage if you do not even know who the leader of a country is.

What does any of this have to do with the NSA?

The NSA is considered one of the centers of excellence in linguistics in the world. They took a speech that Tito gave and analyzed it, asking the question of whether Tito was a native speaker of Serbo Croat. I do not know when the report was originally written, but it was recently released.  Their answer was: he was not a native speaker of Serbo Croat.  He was an impostor, just like Eliza Doolittle!  But an Eliza Doolittle who did not learn her lessons!  (2) 

So whoever Marshall Tito, one of the great revolutionaries of the 20th Century and a national hero of the former country of Yugoslavia, was he wasn't who he said he was. Most people who know about the issue speculate that Tito was a Russian who was put in place of Josip Broz sometime in the 1930s, well before WW II. But it is speculation.

For a good discussion of the Tito mystery, see this post.

Wikipedia claims this story isn't true.  Well, maybe.  As you would imagine, partisans of Tito would want to deny the story.  Finding out the truth here would be difficult, it might in fact, be impossible. (3)

I hope this little story will help to convince you of two things.  First, the importance of studying musical theatre for understanding the Cold War.  And second, to give you some idea of what the NSA does for a living.   They do not give a fuck  hoot about your pornography or your mistress, they have other fish to fry.

The original report is on the NSA web site at:

http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/cryptologic_spectrum/is_yugoslav.pdf

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1. In Stalin's desk after he died was a letter from Tito. It said that they had caught another Soviet assassination squad trying to kill him (Tito) but that they had missed, and that if Stalin tried that again Tito would send his own squad after Stalin and they would not miss.

2. My Fair Lady, of course.

3. One could imagine exhuming the body of Tito, extracting DNA, and comparing that DNA with the DNA of other living members of his family, if any exist, or with people from that part of the world.  One might then have evidence that he was related to those people or not.   This is not something that I, or anyone I know, is going to cause to happen.

Upcoming Seminar on the History of Cryptology, Oct 17 - 19, 2013

Every once in a while (maybe every year, for all I know), the NSA (1) has been sponsoring a symposium on the history of Cryptology. This symposium is mostly for scholars but I am going to presume that people who are interested in this will make the effort to find out whether or not they can attend.

Special Note:

But for all you silly people who got your panties in a bunch because of Snowden, you are suggested to attend.  What a wonderful opportunity to learn something about the field and the people in reality instead of the very weird beliefs that so many of my peers seem to have.

The program is on the www.cryptome.org site at the following URL, but I have at great personal expense converted the PDF to jpeg for your convenience.

http://cryptome.org/2013/09/nsa-symposium-2013.pdf

This promises to be a very exciting conference. Here are some talks and speakers that I noticed off the top of my head:

1. David Kahn (2) chairing a panel on new work on Alan Turing and his work on cryptology.

2. Work in progress by Whitfield Diffie on the ECM Mark I

3. Crytology in ancient Greece and China

4. Preparation for WW 2 and WW 2 Cryptology Operations including the attack on Japanese naval cypher JN25.

5. East European COMINT in WW 2

I am not sure I can attend but I might be able to show up for a half a day. I wish I could attend the whole thing, it looks great.

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1. Nichren Shoshu of America www.nst.org

2. David Kahn is a well known author on cryptology, considered to have written some of the best books on cryptology and the people who do it in the open literature.