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The Rise of the NSA | 199
Europe, President Franklin D. Roosevelt reactivated the operation
as the Signal Security Agency. It proved its value in breaking the
Japanese machine-generated cipher “Purple.” In June 1942, using
deciphered Japanese messages to pinpoint the location of the Japa-
nese fleet at Midway, America won a decisive naval victory in the
Pacific. Germany’s Enigma encoding machines, with three encoding
wheels, proved more of a challenge. Initially, British cryptanalysts
led by the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing succeeded in build-
ing a rudimentary computer to decipher Germany’s messages to its
submarines and bombers, but in 1942 Germany added a fourth set of
encoding wheels, escalating what was essentially a battle of machine
intelligence. The U.S. Navy then contracted with the National Cash
Register Company to build a computing machine capable of break-
ing the improved Enigma, and in May 1943 it succeeded.
By the time the war ended in 1945, the United States had over
one hundred giant decryption machines in operation. This unrivaled
capability to read the communications of foreign nations, which
remained one of America’s most closely guarded secrets, was trans-
© ferred to the Army Security Agency based at Fort Meade, Mary- ©
land. Then, on October 24, 1952, President Harry S. Truman greatly
expanded its purview and changed its name to the National Security
Agency.
The NSA was given two missions. The first one was protecting
the communications of the U.S. government. The main risk was that
the Soviets would find a way of breaching U.S. government chan-
nels of communications. The second mission was intercepting all the
relevant communications and signals of foreign governments. This
latter mandate included the governments of allies as well as enemies.
The president, the other intelligence services, and the Department
of Defense deemed what was relevant for national security. Even
though the NSA remained part of the Department of Defense, its
job went far beyond providing military intelligence. It also acted as
a service agency to other American intelligence services. They pre-
pared shopping lists of foreign communications intelligence targets
for the NSA to pursue.
As the Cold War heated up in the 1960s, the NSA provided intel-
ligence not only to the Pentagon but to the Department of State, the
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