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Back in 1982 James Bamford published THE PUZZLE PALACE, the first book-length study of
the National Security Agency, the U. S. Government's mammoth but super-secretive agency
devoted to electronic eavesdropping on the rest of the world. That book caused some sharp
tremors in military and government circles.
Now Bamford is back with an updated and much more exhaustive study of the same subject.
BODY OF SECRETS is detailed history, description, critical assessment, editorial comment,
and character study all rolled into one massively researched volume. It should cause an
earthquake or two.
The most controversial aspect of Bamford's study doubtless will be his detailed
description and analyses of various crises in which NSA electronic eavesdroppers played a
part: The U-2 affair of 1960, the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, the 1962 Cuban missile
crisis, the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin crisis, the attack on the U. S. S. Liberty off
Israel in 1967, the Pueblo incident off China in 1968, the Vietnam War, and last
year's sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk. In each case, NSA ears were
listening.
Bamford concludes, for instance, that some in the very highest American military ranks
wanted to provoke a full-scale war with Cuba at the time of the Bay of Pigs, that
President Eisenhower's deep involvement in the U-2 flight was covered up by his aides on
his personal orders, that the attack on the Liberty was certainly no
"accident" (as the Israeli government claimed), and that the Gulf of Tonkin
incident may well have been fabricated as a means of drawing the U. S. into the Vietnam
war. All these things have been rumored for years, but Bamford draws upon all sorts of
official sources to nail them down.
His account of the attack on the Liberty, in which 34 Americans were killed, is
particularly harrowing. He proposes that the Israelis attacked the ship because they
suspected it had monitored evidence of atrocities their army was committing on shore
against Palestinian prisoners of war.
Bamford's harshest criticism is directed at high U. S. military officers, up to and
including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom he sees as constituting a cabal of far-right
wing hawks impatient with civilian oversight of their warlike schemes and anxious to set
the guns roaring even if it meant fabricating evidence, disregarding the law and sending
Americans to certain death. During the Gulf of Tonkin affair, he charges, the Joint Chiefs
of Staff had become "a sewer of deceit." Strong language indeed.
Another proposal Bamford mentions involved astronaut John Glenn's orbital flight in 1962.
If his rocket should explode and Glenn be killed, it was suggested, Cuba should be blamed,
evidence should be manufactured to back up the claim, and a full-scale war launched.
Fortunately, Glenn's flight went off without mishap, but the very idea is certainly
chilling.
Other sections of this exhaustive book, though perhaps just as important, are less
compelling. Bamford has done enormous research and seems determined to leave out none of
it. He goes into staggeringly minute detail, and his prose sometimes becomes a clotted
alphabet soup of military acronyms, government jargon, codenames, and spookspeak. He
describes NSA's "secret city" outside Washington, DC in numbing detail,
virtually room by room. The military and civilian leaders who have run the agency since it
was created in 1952 are characterized in detail --- but some of them are decidedly more
interesting than others. NSA's budget troubles are analyzed minutely, and there are
lengthy investigative reports into some of the arcane equipment the agency has used
through the years.
Bamford is rightly concerned about the possibility that NSA's fearsome secret powers could
be turned toward, and perhaps against, American citizens. This has almost happened once or
twice, notably during the Nixon administration, he says. But the impact of his warning is
blunted by the sheer mass of technical detail in which it is imbedded.
Elsewhere Bamford's style is almost novelistic, giving the book as a whole the air of an
uneasy combination of spy thriller and dry governmental reportage. He concludes that today
the NSA, hit by budget cuts, may be drowning in a massive volume of intercepted
communications from all over the world coupled with a lack of trained personnel to
interpret them.
This is an important and unsettling book --- keep in mind, though, it is not easy reading
for the bedside table.
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn (Robertfinn@aol.com)
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