Spycraft

I just finished reading Code Warriors by Stephen Budiansky. The book covers the history of the NSA with a focus on secret intelligence during the Cold War. It was particularly interesting to be reading this in light of current U.S. political issues related to Wikileaks, wire-tapping accusations, and collecting data and metadata on persons and governments. However, that’s not what actually prompted me to borrow the book from the library. I got interested because I watched Season 1 of The Americans in early March. (I am on the waiting list for the Season 2 DVDs at my local library branch.)

I did not know much about the history of how NSA was formed. I was flabbergasted learning about the turf wars between NSA and CIA, the inefficiency of different government entities, and the ridiculousness (in hindsight) of some decisions made by high-ranking officials in the government and military during the Cold War. Budiansky sums this up well in the book’s epilogue: “… the crazy jury-rigged American intelligence structure, with its perpetual internal bureaucratic warfare, tangled lines of authority, and wasteful inefficiency and duplication… [and] that even in helping to attain the victory of containment over Soviet Communism, the intelligence agencies had often failed spectacularly at crucial moments, and had left in their wake an often sordid trail of transgressions against law, morality, decency and basic American values.”

There were many successes in the work from signal intelligence, but also significant failures such as the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and the Chinese pushback in Korea. Budiansky critically analyzes these failures, confirming once again that as flawed human beings we repeat the mistakes of the past. The successes are not as showy, but just as significant. In his analysis, Budiansky finds that “the American cryptologists of the Cold War deserve as much credit as anyone for the fact that Americans, Russians and the rest of the world were never vaporized in a cloud of radioactive ash; without them it is hard to see that containment would have lasted long enough to matter.” Signal intelligence and NSA played a crucial role in averting the Suez and Cuban crises, amidst saber-rattling and political posturing through threats and counter-threats.

In an episode of The Americans, an incident escalating tensions is eventually averted thanks to double-checking and verifying information through “old-fashioned” spycraft. The series illustrates the complexity of decision-making when presented with incomplete raw data. Budiansky hammers this point home in his book when discussing intelligence, information and appropriate analysis. How should the raw data be interpreted? Who is in the position to interpret? The deep cover field agents in The Americans face the same dilemma as do their superiors stationed in the same foreign country, while communicating back-and-forth with headquarters.

It’s not just the Cold War tension and spycraft that’s interesting in The Americans. The deep cover field agents, having adapted to their new country experience the internal tension of fitting in while remaining apart. Truth and lies among family, friends and acquaintances threaten to tear lives apart. How does one live a lie in an attempt to remain true? It was also interesting to see U.S. life portrayed in the 1980s, the setting of the show, during the Reagan era of the Cold War. (I grew up in a different country and first set foot in the U.S. in the 1990s.) Another aspect I found really interesting was seeing the “old” clunky technology used by agents to spy on each other and gain intelligence information.

The gadgetry of spycraft today is orders of magnitude more advanced and more miniaturized than the equipment of the ‘80s. I’m impressed by the ingenuity of people in those days. Setting The Americans during this era was brilliant on the part of the creative team that put together this first season. Spies had to use their considerable skills and adaptability to get around numerous obstacles given the limited technology and information. Technology is also a topic in Code Warriors, and Budiansky details the impact of signal intelligence and cryptanalysis needs and how they pushed development of IBM and Cray computers. The history of the early code warriors, people and machines working together, from the Second World War through today, is one of the most interesting parts of the book. It also reminded me of the power of modulo arithmetic, and that I should crack open the boardgame Twilight Struggle soon!