My history with this book is worth recounting. I purchased it in the early 1980s from one of the first remainder bookshops; indeed, I walked past it a few times before succumbing to the cover (the UK paperback edition, with a picture of one of the Menwith Hill dishes on the front), as the names of the NSA and GCHQ then meant nothing to me. It then sat, unread, on my shelves for around forty years.

I'm pleased it did.

At the time, I had never heard of either the NSA or Britain's GCHQ. If I'd attempted to read it then, I suspect I would have run into serious difficulties with it. But within a few years, GCHQ became more generally known because of Margaret Thatcher's ban on trade unions there. Even so, I doubt I would have made much progress with it, because as a twenty-something innocent, the wider and darker worlds of politics and state security would have meant very little to me. But now, I'm forty years older and possibly wiser. And the world is a different and possibly darker place. I recently read a couple of histories of GCHQ, and so I reckoned that the time was right for me to tackle this book. And it was.

James Bamford wrote this first exposé of America's National Security Agency in 1982. Reading it was like taking a step back into a different world - no Internet, no e-mails, no mobile phones. But even then, the scale of the task the NSA undertook was astonishing; filling in the gaps with the histories of GCHQ tells me that the task of intercepting and decrypting SIGINT has multiplied many times.

I kept coming across a number of names I recognised - some were only known to me as people the US Navy named aircraft carriers after (James V. Forrestal), some were names I remember hearing on the news way back when. And then there was Senator Joe Biden - whatever became of him? I was surprised to see the extent to which the NSA and other agencies engaged in extra-legal activities, and the constitutional hoops people jumped through to try to justify, and then legitimise, their actions. If all else failed, having recourse to Presidential privilege was the ultimate trump card (no pun intended, though I can't think of a better one). Indeed, reading this book as Donald Trump reached the end of his trial for misreporting his financial status had some special significance, I suppose. Other US Presidents were prepared to sanction illegal actions to get around the word of the Constitution, but were quite happy for that sanction to be silent words on a page; Trump was at least honest in his embrace of illegality. With this context, it's instructive to see where turning one blind eye can get you over time. (Here in the UK, we don't have this problem. We just don't have a written constitution to act outside of.)

I picked up this book now because of the reference made in histories of GCHQ to the UKUSA agreement between the two organisations. I got the impression from those books that UKUSA was mainly there to protect each organisation from the other's governments. Nothing in this book made me think any differently, although it didn't throw much light on the week-to-week operation of the agreement. The UK edition of the book has a 45-page preface which talks about GCHQ in detail, which was not included in the original US edition. Where the GCHQ histories were at times highly impenetrable, Bamford has actually provided perhaps the clearest history of GCHQ up to 1982 of any book I have so far read. It is a most open history of GCHQ, including operational details that British historians were unable or unwilling to include. However, a big chunk of the Preface is taken up with an account of the Geoffrey Prime affair. Prime was a GCHQ officer who defected to the Soviet Union. Bamford goes into considerable detail, including the sex offences that eventually forced Prime into the open.

Elsewhere, Bamford includes an account of the 1956 Suez affair which is perhaps the first time I have ever seen that campaign set into a wider geopolitical context. It was illuminating.

Bamford's style is easy and journalistic - sometimes a bit too journalistic, but in contrast with the dry historical approach taken by the GCHQ historians, a refreshing change. He includes details of operational SIGINT collection, including the operational hazards of US intelligence gathering flights and also of monitoring ships such as the USS Pueblo and the Liberty, attacked by Israel in international waters off Cyprus in 1967; though Bamford's assertion that the entire US SIGINT naval fleet was decommissioned by 1969 is, to my personal knowledge, not so (I met an American naval engineer who admitted to serving on board a trawler, "like the Russian ones", on a shore detachment in North Cornwall during the 1990s, conveniently close to the GCHQ listening station at Morwenstow). The journalism is very much of its time, and is resolutely populist, being shot through with stylistic flourishes; Bamford refers to the NSA as "the Puzzle Palace" on page after page, though he never says exactly where that nickname comes from; and his account of Geoffrey Prime's sex offences is of a degree of tabloid luridness that I found surprising. And even Bamford cannot avoid descending into an alphabet soup of acronyms when he recounts the story of various bits of internal politics or Congressional investigation.

All those things apart, though, this was a useful counterpart to the GCHQ histories, and despite its outdatedness, gave me a surprisingly good and clear picture of the NSA up to the early 1980s - though, of course, the era of Reagan and Thatcher was yet to get into full swing. Bamford peeps over the wall at the oncoming future, with its promise of new and unthought-of technologies (his description of 1980s "e-mail" seems quaint to us now), and has no difficulty in visualising that future as an abyss, both of a new world of SIGINT waiting to be exploited, and the lengths to which governments will go to maintain their hold on power, advantage and their version of the truth. Time has proved him all too right.

(The GCHQ histories I refer to are:
Richard Aldrich: GCHQ: the uncensored story of Britain's most secret intelligence agency (2010)
John Ferris: Behind the Enigma; the authorised history of GCHQ, Britain’s secret cyber-intelligence agency (2020) ) ( )

The Puzzle Palace suffers because it is locked in time. First published in 1984, it was no doubt a revelatory expose of the NSA, following on the Church Commission reports, but it really pales compared to what is happening today. The book does a great job of laying out the history of the organization going back to the work of original cryptologist, Herbert Yardley, in the early Twentieth Century, following through the Agency’s official establishment by President Truman in 1952, and the years of growth and public deception, as its employees happily eavesdropped on telegrams, telexes, and phone calls from all over the world. The narrative bogs down quite a bit with sections that just seem to list name after name after name of people who occupied this office or that in an alphabet soup of organizations. It’s not James Bamford’s fault, but what is really needed is a Puzzle Palace 2.0, which picks up on the government funding of Google in the 1990s and follows through the establishment of the 1.5 million square foot NSA Data Center in Utah. ( )

While interesting in many respects, I suspect that this look at the code-breaking authority National Security Agency is largely obsolete, given the vast changes in technology that have occurred in the 35+ years since its publication. Of current interest is the fact that the FISA court is described, and at one point, Joe Biden (long before he was famous) is quoted. Some of this might have been quite new when it was published here, but of course, with the passage of time, it's old hat. ( )

The first book of three on the NSA, written over the years. I'm reading all three in honor of the current PRISM brouhaha. Main takeaway: the NSA is the largest, most expensive agency in government. It also has no basis in law for its existence, just a 1952 presidential executive order. And PRISM is hardly the first illegal project for the NSA. It most does illegal intercepts... ( )

A critical, detailed -- and the first major -- look at the National Security Agency. A classic of espionage history. ( )