Code Breakers and Spies of the Cold War [1 ed.] 9781502638588, 9781502638564

Citation preview

HURT

CODE BREAKERS

AND

SPIES

CODE BREAKERS

AND

SPIES

Code Breakers and Spies of

the American Revolution the Civil War

Code Breakers and Spies of

the Cold War

Code Breakers and Spies of

the Vietnam War

Code Breakers and Spies of

the War on Terror Code Breakers and Spies of

World War I

Code Breakers and Spies of

World War II

Code Breakers and Spies of the Cold War

Code Breakers and Spies of

Code Breakers and Spies of

the Cold War

AVERY ELIZABETH HURT

CODE BREAKERS

AND

SPIES

Code Breakers and Spies of

the Cold War AVERY ELIZABETH HURT

Published in 2019 by Cavendish Square Publishing, LLC 243 5th Avenue, Suite 136, New York, NY 10016 Copyright © 2019 by Cavendish Square Publishing, LLC First Edition No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Request for permission should be addressed to Permissions, Cavendish Square Publishing, 243 5th Avenue, Suite 136, New York, NY 10016. Tel (877) 980-4450; fax (877) 980-4454. Website: cavendishsq.com This publication represents the opinions and views of the author based on his or her personal experience, knowledge, and research. The information in this book serves as a general guide only. The author and publisher have used their best efforts in preparing this book and disclaim liability rising directly or indirectly from the use and application of this book. All websites were available and accurate when this book was sent to press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hurt, Avery Elizabeth. Title: Code breakers and spies of the Cold War / Avery Elizabeth Hurt. Description: New York : Cavendish Square, 2019. | Series: Code breakers and spies | Includes glossary and index. Identifiers: ISBN 9781502638571 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781502638564 (library bound) | ISBN 9781502638588 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Cold War--Juvenile literature. | Espionage--History-20th century--Juvenile literature. | Cryptography--Juvenile literature. Classification: LCC D843.H87 2019 | DDC 327.1209’045--dc23 Editorial Director: David McNamara Editor: Stacy Orlando Copy Editor: Alex Tessman Associate Art Director: Amy Greenan Designer: Joe Parenteau Production Coordinator: Karol Szymczuk Photo Research: J8 Media The photographs in this book are used by permission and through the courtesy of: Cover John Davis/Stocktrek Images/Getty Images; p. 4 USAF/Wikimedia Commons/File:Bletchley decrypt.jpg/Public Domain; p. 9, 23 Hulton Archive/ Getty Images; p. 12 Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; p. 16 U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command/Wikimedia Commons/File:Arlington Hall 1943.jpg/Public Domain; p. 18 H. F. Davis/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images; p. 22, 32 Bettmann/Getty Images; p. 26 Courtesy www.cryptomuseum. com; p. 37, 47 Sovfoto/UIG/Getty Images; p. 39, 45 NSA/Corbis/Getty Images; p. 42 Lockheed Martin/Getty Images; p. 52 Alain Pierre Hovasse/AFP/Getty Images; p. 55 Shepard Sherbell/Corbis/Getty Images; p. 58 Chute Du Mur Berlin/ Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images; p. 60 NiP photography/Shutterstocl.com; p. 65 Barton Gellman/Getty Images; p. 69 People Images/E+/Getty Images. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

1 Old Enemies, New Techniques . . . . . 5



2 East versus West . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19



3 Spies and Madness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33



4 Endings and New Beginnings . . . . 53





Chronology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71





Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73





Further Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74





Selected Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . 76





Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78





About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

CHAPTER 1

, S E I M E N E D L O NEW TECHNIQUE S

S

pying and cryptography were rampant throughout the almost half century between 1947 and 1991 during the Cold War. The story of the adversaries, how they came to be enemies, and how they developed and used ciphers and espionage in conflict began well before the Cold War started. Since the war of intelligence was fought primarily between the United States and the Soviet Union, it is important to take a look at why these two superpowers were so distrustful of each other in the first place.

OPPOSITE: German codes like this were decrypted at Bletchley Park during World War II.

Old Enemies, New Techniques

5

Reluctant Allies An old proverb says, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and that is a good description of the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union during World War II. The two nations were allies, but reluctant ones. They agreed to help each other only because they had a mutual enemy: Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union, officially known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR), was formed in 1922, after communist revolutionaries overthrew Russia’s Czar in the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. The new government abolished private property and free enterprise, severely limited individual rights, and paid only lip service to free elections. The government controlled all economic activity and actively suppressed dissent. This type of system was abhorrent to the values of the United States—a nation founded on principles of individual rights and private ownership of business and industry. The communists who had taken over Russia were equally appalled by the economic and social systems of the United States. Russians condemned capitalism for exploiting workers and putting too much power and wealth in the hands of corporations and business owners at the expense of the population.

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Clearly, the two nations had very different ideas about how society should function.

Deal With the Devil The enmity between the Western capitalist countries and the new communist government in Russia was not merely philosophical. In 1939, Stalin, the Soviet leader, entered a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany that allowed the USSR to annex Estonia, Latvia, western Lithuania, and eastern Poland, and gave Hitler free run of western Poland. It was perhaps somewhat understandable that the Soviets were keen to keep the treaty and build a buffer zone between themselves and Germany. But it was also clear that the USSR was more than willing to divide Europe with Germany in what the West saw as a deal with the Devil. The communist leaders made it very clear that their goal was to spread the socialist revolution throughout the world. Until Hitler violated the agreement and invaded Russia in 1941, Nazi Germany was the USSR’s closest ally. Although the Soviet Union and the United States joined the Allies in 1941, the Soviets remained distrustful of the western countries. The United States and Britain had attempted to stop the Russian revolution in 1918, making it quite clear to the Soviet

Old Enemies, New Techniques

7

government that both reluctant allies were more than willing to support the enemies of the USSR when it suited capitalist interests. Just as communists hoped to spread their worldview and political system worldwide, Western nations were convinced that worldwide capitalism would spread prosperity and prevent another worldwide Great Depression, which had been one of the main drivers that lead to World War II. So while the United States and the Soviet Union worked briefly with the Allies to fight the Nazis, the two never really trusted one another. As they shared resources and intelligence necessary to defeat the Nazis, they also kept a very close eye on each other’s operations. When it came to espionage and cryptography, both countries had been developing some excellent techniques.

To Solve an Enigma Major battles usually come to mind when one thinks of World War II, such as the Battle of Midway and the D-Day invasion. But one of the most significant factors in allowing the Allies to win the war (both in Europe and in Japan) was what historian Paul Johnson called, “the skillful marriage of creative brainpower and new technologies to break enemy codes.” The

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Various models of the electro-mechanical rotor cipher machine Enigma were used by the Germans and the Axis powers.

British had been developing code and code breaking techniques for over fifty years, and used cryptanalysis quite effectively in World War I.

Old Enemies, New Techniques

9

Ultra In World War II, the British upped the signals intelligence game considerably. About 50 miles (80 kilometers) outside of London is a country estate known as Bletchley Park. During World War II, the British government made this the home of the Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS) and the Secret Intelligence Service (also known as MI6). The Bletchley Park organization began in 1939, with a crew of only about 150 people. Eventually the project would involve 10,000 people, but the core of this group was the code breakers. Talented people were recruited from a variety of places. Some were academics, scholars, or students of mathematics or linguistics. Others were pulled from the military and civilian government service. They came from all walks of life. By the end of the war, 75 percent of the staff at Bletchley Park were women. What these people had in common was a gift for mathematics, puzzles, and for cracking codes—and one of the most difficult and important jobs in the world. The intelligence the code breakers uncovered through intercepting and deciphering signals and communications became known as Ultra, due to the level of importance and secrecy of the information.

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Code Breakers and Spies of the Cold War

DID YOU KNOW? Both US and British intelligence agencies used puzzlesolving contests to recruit code breakers and spies. Often people who are good at solving puzzles are also good at breaking codes.

(Almost) Unbreakable By 1939 Germany was clearly winning the war. Things didn’t quite look hopeless for the allies, but the situation was bad. The Nazis used a code machine called Enigma. The device looked a lot like a typewriter, but was specially designed to encrypt messages. The British had known about it for years, and thanks to help from the Polish Cipher Bureau, even had a reconstruction of the machine. As World War II progressed, the Germans changed the key to the codes daily, occasionally more than once a day. This proved a huge challenge for the code breakers, and breaking the Enigma code was essential. The Germans believed the Enigma to be unbreakable (and it very nearly was), so it was used to transmit all sorts of important information. Coordinates for bombing attacks, troop locations, and information

Old Enemies, New Techniques

11

shared within the German Secret Service were all sent in messages coded by Enigma. Perhaps most important, the Germans used Enigma to direct their U-boats. These submarines were one of the most powerful weapons of the Third Reich. If the Allies could break the code, they would know where these German subs were headed and could destroy them before they were able to sink Allied troop and supply ships. The British code breakers used sophisticated mathematics—and a little bit of luck—to break the Enigma code. As will be explored later, sometimes human error creates a weakness in the encryption, but in order to take advantage of those errors, code

The German Unterseeboot, or U-boat, caused immense damage at sea during World War I and World War II.

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breakers have to be prepared and alert. In the case of Enigma, code breakers took advantage of the fact that Enigma was designed such that no letter could be encrypted as itself. In other words the letter “A” would never be “A” in the decoded message. This gave the cryptanalysts a place to start. The teams at Bletchley Park also gathered clues from mistakes in messages sent by tired, overworked operators. But even when they had the information they needed, it took more than a day to compute all the possibilities for the code. By the time they had cracked it, the Germans were using different codes. Then Bletchley Park member and mathematician Alan Turing designed a computing machine that was the forerunner of today’s multi-use computers. This machine could run through the possibilities of the code fast enough to break it within the roughly twenty-fourhour window before the Germans changed the code. At last, there was a breakthrough in solving the Enigma, but the work did not stop there. Branches of the Japanese and German militaries utilized various Enigma machines and encoding methods, and both the British and the Americans had multiple teams dedicated to deciphering intercepted messages. Experts have estimated that breaking the Enigma code shortened the war by two full years, and consequently saved millions of lives.

Old Enemies, New Techniques

13

Pay Attention to the Music In the race to defeat the Nazis, everyone who could lend a hand did—and spies worked in some very unexpected places. Josephine Baker was an AfricanAmerican singer and dancer. She got her start on the Vaudeville circuit and on Broadway in the United States. She became a star, however, after moving to France. When the Nazis invaded France, Baker worked as an operative for the French resistance. Because of her job as an entertainer, she was able to travel widely throughout Europe without arousing suspicion. She often attended events at embassies where she would pick up bits of useful political or even military information. When she came across some information that might be useful to the Allies, she wrote it in invisible ink on her sheet music and passed it on to her contacts. No one thought to check the popular singer’s sheet music when she crossed borders. Baker also used her home in France to hide Jews from the Nazis.

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Code Breaking in the USA The United States didn’t get into the code and cipher business quite as early as Great Britain, but when it did, efforts were made with the same energy and enthusiasm that characterizes so much of American endeavor. Arlington Hall was a girls’ school in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, DC. In 1942, under the War Powers Act, the US Army took possession of the campus to use for its code breaking division, the Signal Intelligence Service (SIS). Arlington Hall was very much like Bletchley Park. It was an assembly of some of the brightest minds the government could recruit. People from all walks of life ended up at Arlington Park. By the end of World War II, 80 percent of the cryptanalysts employed by the US Navy were women. However, where the British were mostly concerned with German signals, the Americans focused more on Japanese codes, at least at first. Thanks to Arlington Hall code breakers, the US military was able to shoot down the airplane of Isoroku Yamamoto, one of Japan’s most capable admirals and the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, when he made an inspection trip to the Solomon Islands in 1943.

Old Enemies, New Techniques

15

US Army SIS cryptologists at Arlington Hall focused most of their energy on cracking Japanese code systems.

Keeping an Eye on Friends As the war progressed, the team at Arlington Hall began to work on the codes of other countries— including the USSR. When the Soviets joined the Allies in 1941, Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of England, ordered his intelligence services to stop monitoring Soviet communications. However, in 1943, Arlington Hall, despite being nigh overwhelmed by Japanese codes, turned a great deal of its attention and personnel to work on Russian communications. Since the USSR was at that time an ally, intercepting and decoding Russian transmissions was not necessary to

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Code Breakers and Spies of the Cold War

the war effort, but the US government had concluded that it was not enough to just keep up with what its enemies were up to. A special projects division was initiated in order to learn as much as possible about potential enemies and even allies. Every country was a legitimate target of intelligence gathering and no aspect of any country was deemed unimportant. Monitoring Russian communications proved to be a smart move. Stalin was extremely distrustful of his allies. The Russians had a long history of distrust and secrecy, even within their own nation. While the USSR was much less technologically advanced than the other allies, Russians were old pros at the spying game. The Soviets had planted spies in Bletchley Park and Arlington Hall before the end of World War II, and that was a serious problem. In order to defeat the Japanese and bring the war in the Pacific to a close, the United States had a research and development initiative that was one of the biggest secrets in its history: the Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear weapon. The development of the atomic bomb would change the power balance in the world. Soviet spying accelerated the development of their own nuclear weapons and led to the Cold War—a war in which the opposing nations never engaged in direct conflict, but did take the arts of espionage to new heights.

Old Enemies, New Techniques

17

CHAPTER 2

EAST

S U S R VE WEST

W

orld War II devastated both the infrastructures and economies of most European nations. Germany was in ruins politically as well. Before World War II, power in the world had been divided among several nations, but afterwards, only two significant world powers surfaced: the United States and the Soviet Union. Though the USSR was not in much better shape than its European neighbors, it still had the world’s largest army. Meanwhile, the United States had emerged from the war with the world’s largest and healthiest economy. The process of reorganizing the world after

OPPOSITE: London suffered immense damage during the German blitz of World War II.

East versus West

19

the war, solidified by the Warsaw Pact and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), turned the two reluctant allies and nascent superpowers into outright enemies.

A Divided Europe During World War II, the Soviet army liberated several Eastern European nations that had been taken over by the Nazis. Stalin had promised that once the war was over, he would free these countries, but he did not keep this promise. Stalin was concerned about another invasion from the West, and was disturbed by the Allies’ efforts to rebuild Germany’s economy. He used these Eastern European nations as a buffer zone between Russia and the rest of Europe. Rather than freeing these countries to form their own

DID YOU KNOW? The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was formed in 1947. Its first operation was to influence elections in Italy to prevent the election of a communist government.

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Code Breakers and Spies of the Cold War

governments, as promised, the Soviets installed “puppet” governments that agreed with the policies of the USSR and were dependent on its military. East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Poland, Bulgaria, and Albania formed a line of Soviet-allied countries that essentially divided Europe in two. Churchill called this the Iron Curtain.

Germany, East versus West The most immediate problem for the Allies was, of course, what to do about Germany. The United States and Great Britain believed that key to peace in Europe was prosperity. Helping Germany rebuild and develop a democratic government were therefore primary aims. In a meeting in Potsdam, Germany, in 1945, Truman, Churchill, and Stalin attempted to work out a plan for post-war Europe. They decided to temporarily divide Germany into four zones. The western two-thirds of the country would be administered by the United States, Britain, and France. The Soviets would oversee the Eastern third of the country. Berlin, the capital, which was in the Soviet zone, would be administered jointly by the four nations. However, the city was divided into four sectors to make administration easier. Stalin also broke from the Allies in Germany. He installed a pro-Soviet communist government in the

East versus West

21

Joseph Stalin, Harry Truman, and Winston Churchill (left to right) attended the Potsdam Conference in 1945.

Soviet zone of Germany. What was meant to be a part of a united democratic Germany became the German Democratic Republic, known as East Germany. The Soviet sector of Berlin was the capital, and became known as East Berlin. The battle lines of the Cold War had been drawn.

Blockades and Bombs As the other Allies were trying to strengthen and rebuild Germany with the aim of making it an independent nation once again, the Soviets became

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increasingly concerned. They had been invaded by Germany more than once, and were worried that despite their buffer of friendly nations, it could happen again. In 1948, Stalin imposed a blockade on West Berlin that kept supplies from getting to the city. (The western sector of Berlin was surrounded by Soviet controlled East Germany.) This was an attempt to weaken the Allies efforts to rebuild Germany. Stalin hoped that the Western nations would pull out of Berlin, and indeed many advisors recommended that Truman do just that. Instead, Truman ordered supplies airlifted into the city, rendering Stalin’s blockade useless. Though the United States won this first skirmish of the Cold War, it convinced the

The Berlin Wall divided Germany and became a symbol of the Cold War.

East versus West

23

United States that the USSR was a serious threat to democracy. In 1961, the Soviets built a wall around West Berlin, which physically separated the East from the West and proved to be a powerful symbol of the Cold War. .

Nuclear Threat There was one aspect of the Cold War that could make the conflict very hot indeed: nuclear weapons. During the last few years of World War II, the United States, with help from Canada and Great Britain, secretly developed an atomic bomb. US President Harry Truman waited until July 17, 1945, less than a month before the United States dropped the first atomic weapon on Hiroshima, Japan, to inform his ally Stalin about the nuclear program. Truman, Stalin, and Winston Churchill were gathered in Potsdam, Germany, to work out the details of post-war Europe, and Truman causally mentioned that the US now had an unimaginably powerful new weapon. However, this was not news to Stalin. His vast spy network had been keeping him abreast of developments. Yet Stalin was resentful that Truman had kept this a secret. Even more irritating to Stalin was that Truman seemed to use the news as leverage in the negotiations about how to rebuild post-war Europe, and to get the

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Soviet leader to commit to joining the war against Japan. Stalin did help eventually. The USSR declared war on Japan on August 8, 1945; two days after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The Soviet army launched a devastating surprise attack on the Japanese army in Manchuria. Some historians have speculated that Japan surrendered when they did, not because the United States had used nuclear weapons against them, but because they did not want to surrender to the USSR, who would likely have imposed much harsher terms on the defeated Japanese. Truman may have thought he was dropping a small bomb himself when he took Stalin aside at Potsdam and told him about the new weapon. If Stalin seemed unfazed by the news, it was because he knew something else that Truman didn’t know. His country would soon have an atomic bomb of their own.

Spies Everywhere During World War II, the US government was concerned that despite being an ally, Stalin would make a separate peace with Hitler. The two nations had made a pact not too long before (1939), and there were rumors that they might be about to do it again. That was the main reason the US SIS ordered code

East versus West

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breakers at Arlington Hall to begin monitoring Soviet diplomatic communications. A counterintelligence program initiated in 1943 continued for nearly four decades into the Cold War; this undertaking was code-named Verona. Deciphering the messages proved difficult even for the talented code breakers at Arlington Hall. The code the Soviets used was theoretically unbreakable. The key to the cipher was on a pad. Each page contained one key, which could be torn off and destroyed after it was used. In order to break the code, you had to have both the encoded message and the sheet with the key. This technique, called one-time pad (OTP), made it impossible—or nearly so—to break a code.

The one-time pad method offered theoretical perfect secrecy for the encryption of messages.

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We Should Get One of Those! It’s not uncommon these days for parents to put a baby monitor in their children’s bedrooms. Many people also place security cameras in and around their homes in case of intruders. Almost everyone carries a camera hidden inside a cell phone, although these are not so secret. Technologies like these have been available to the average citizen only recently, but spies have had these kinds of tools for decades. What spies trade in, of course, is intelligence. In the modern world, a great deal of information is passed over computer networks. Eavesdropping methods have become more a matter of computer hacking than spying in person. But not too long ago, intelligence gathering required old-fashioned snooping—listening in on conversations and snapping pictures of documents. In order to keep spies safe, agencies developed gadgets like Q might have made for James Bond. The technologies and innovations used for espionage gradually became available to the rest of us. Digital photography, pioneered in the 1960s by the militaries of both the United States and the Soviet Union in order to retrieve surveillance images from satellites, is just one example. Cameras got smaller, home security got easier, and babies are safer in their cribs — in large part because spies needed the technology to do their jobs.

East versus West

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However, everyone makes mistakes. It takes only a few errors to give code breakers a crack to exploit, especially cryptanalysts as good as the ones working on the Verona project. Another factor benefitting decryption efforts was that at the end of World War II, the Soviets were suffering from a shortage of paper, and began to reuse the pages of their key pads.

Nuclear Espionage World War II was over by the time the Russian OTP code was broken, but the Verona messages decoded in 1946 indicated something more sinister than a secret peace between Stalin and Hitler. Instead, code breakers revealed that communications between the Soviet foreign office and diplomats posted in the United States were in fact messages from the KGB (the Soviet Intelligence Agency) to a network of spies. The Soviets had spies in almost every branch of the US government. Most disturbing of all, spies had infiltrated the Manhattan Project. The spies were able to share information about the technology and design of the bomb that helped the USSR get its own atomic weapon far faster than it would otherwise have been able to do. Many of these spies were not exposed and sentenced until years later. The Verona project discovered that at least 350 spies were giving information to the KGB. However,

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decoding the messages did not always reveal who the agents were since they were mentioned only by code names. Even today we aren’t sure of the full extent of the information stolen from the United States. The identities of all the infiltrators were not discovered, but it was clear that many were in positions to do a lot of damage to US security. Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall were high-ranking physicists on the Manhattan Project. Both shared sensitive information with the Soviets. Both were questioned by the FBI in the 1950s, but only Fuchs was sentenced, and Hall’s involvement was not made public until 1995. Other spies who were identified were quietly removed from positions where they would have access to secret information. But that still left many more spies working in the United States. According to Verona documents, an operative code-named Muse worked in the OSS (the Office of Strategic Services and the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, the United States’ intelligence agency). Muse was expected to transfer to the State Department, and her eventual whereabouts remain a mystery. Another unknown spy was in a position senior enough to have met privately with Churchill and US President Franklin Roosevelt at a conference in which they discussed the invasion of France in World War II.

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DID YOU KNOW? Most of us use the terms “code” and “cipher” interchangeably. But to experts, there is a difference. Codes replace words with symbols; ciphers replace letters with other letters or symbols.

The Verona project was also able to help identify some Soviet agents working in Great Britain. Perhaps the most famous spies who were found to have been feeding the Soviets useful information about the US nuclear project were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs were a married couple who were members of the Communist Party. Julius was very active in recruiting spies. He also got sensitive technical information about the nuclear project from Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, who was an engineer on the Manhattan project. Ethel was less involved. Apparently her job was limited to typing reports to be passed on to the KGB. The Rosenbergs were convicted in 1951 and eventually executed in 1953. It can be difficult to understand why so many American and British citizens were willing to betray their countries. It can be helpful to remember that at

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the time of the Manhattan Project, the USSR was technically an ally of the United States. Some of the spies, the Rosenbergs for example, were motivated by ideology; they truly believed in the communist system. Some were coerced into helping by blackmail or other means. Others were motivated by a desire to prevent nuclear war. After all, the United States had atomic weapons, and used them. Making sure that the USSR had one too may well have seemed like a good way to prevent either side from using this horrific weapon. The fear of nuclear destruction combined with conflicting ideologies prolonged global tensions and distrust. Verona’s exposure of a vast and skilled spy network did not ease the situation. In fact, as the Cold War progressed, espionage techniques would become even more sophisticated.

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CHAPTER 3

SPIES AND MADNESS

“A

re you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” Thousands of Americans, the vast majority of them innocent of any wrongdoing, were confronted with this question as a part of aggressive congressional hearings during the 1950s. In a witch hunt that came to be known as the Second Red Scare, US Senator Joseph McCarthy launched an investigation to find and prosecute Soviet spies in the United States. Although it seemed the western world was teeming with eastern spies, many of McCarthy’s accusations were made without evidence, and worse, fostered widespread fear and hatred. OPPOSITE: Senator McCarthy’s crusade fostered an America filled with fear and suspicion.

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The Red Scare Though many of the spies discovered in the 1940s and 1950s were or had been members of the Communist Party, most Americans who were sympathetic to the communist cause were not spies. Certainly, it was not illegal to believe in communism. Yet the United States had a previous history of paranoia when it came to communism; the First Red Scare occurred just after World War I. McCarthy and his supporters shaped propaganda and propelled that fear to new heights. Americans were already understandably nervous. The United States and the Soviet Union had enough nuclear power to destroy the world. Each government was busy convincing its population that the other was bent on world domination. It was an easy situation to manipulate for political gain, and that’s exactly what McCarthy and others did. Neighbor turned against neighbor and loyal American against loyal American.

Loyalty under Review Government workers, educators, union activists, people in the entertainment business, and eventually military personnel were all targets of McCarthy. When someone was accused of being a communist or sympathetic to communist ideals, he or she was

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hauled before congressional committees, such as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), or the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS). Most notably, HUAC launched a large investigation into the Hollywood film industry, which resulted in a blacklist of individuals accused of communist sympathies. Hundreds of people from all areas were asked to testify against friends and colleagues. Many brave people refused, even just being named often cost them their jobs. The careers and reputations of innocent people were ruined. Some citizens were even imprisoned for refusing to cooperate. The actions of the McCarthy era were facilitated by federal laws. The Alien Registration Act or Smith Act of 1940 was eventually repealed in 1952, but during its time as public law, it was used to prosecute and convict both communist leaders and sympathizers. The McCarran Internal Security Act passed into effect in 1950, and was used to revoke the passport of actor Paul Robeson, who was also a victim of blacklisting. Finally, with support of both houses of Congress and signed into law by President Dwight Eisenhower, the Communist Control Act of 1954 restricted the Communist Party of the United States and any support of communist action organizations.

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In the late 1950s, the people of the United States realized that these investigations were far more unAmerican than the targeted individuals. Support of McCarthyism waned in part due to a series of court decisions and public figures speaking out. McCarthy lost the backing of the people, and in 1954, the US Senate officially condemned his actions. McCarthy died in May 1957, and by 1958, the witch hunt was over. Meanwhile, real spies carried on doing their work and sending messages to the KGB.

MAD-ness American media may have fueled a public overreaction to the threat of communism, but it was absolutely understandable to be terrified of nuclear weapons. As mentioned earlier, the United States was the first nation to develop nuclear weapons, and the Soviet Union was not far behind. The USSR tested its first atomic bomb in 1949. Each nation continued to build up its stockpiles of nuclear warheads and the means to deliver them as the Cold War progressed. This quickly became an arms race as each nation tried to amass a larger and more powerful military than the other. By 1956, the United States had over two thousand nuclear warheads. The USSR had eighty-four. At the peak of

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The USSR held military parades like this one in Moscow (1985) to showcase surface-to-air missiles.

the arms race in the late 1980s, the United States had thirteen thousand warheads; the Soviets had a little over eleven thousand. The possibility of a devastating nuclear war between the Eastern Bloc (the Soviet Union and aligned countries) and the Western Bloc (the United States and NATO) was one factor that kept the Cold War cold, and made accurate intelligence gathering and espionage the main weapons of choice. Of course, the two nations didn’t announce technological and military advances to the world. To stay ahead in the arms race, as well as to have the information necessary to prevent a deadly miscalculation that could lead to nuclear war, each nation needed solid

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information about what the other was doing. Spies during these years spent much of their time gathering and analyzing information about each nation’s nuclear capabilities and the political will to use them. Despite the tremendous stockpiles of arms, each superpower knew that if one launched a nuclear device, the other nation would retaliate. If this happened, both sides—and most likely the rest of the world—would be annihilated. This was called Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD—a very apt name indeed.

Indirect Warfare Though the USSR and United States never went to war directly with each other during the Cold War, they did fight indirectly in what are known as proxy wars. In many conflicts around the world, the USSR and the United States supported opposite sides, sending money, non-nuclear weapons, and soldiers. Wars in Korea and Vietnam as well as less well-known wars in Central and South America, Africa, and the Middle East are examples of proxy wars between the Cold War superpowers. Neither nation wanted nuclear war, but for decades those in power were unable to sit down and agree to a plan to rid the world of weapons that made horrific war possible, and come up with a way to share the planet peaceably.

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des The NSA, Where Co ken Are Made and Bro The CIA of the United States and the KGB of the USSR were the two main intelligence agencies of the Cold War. The CIA was formed as a result of the National Security Act signed by President Truman in 1947. A main motivator in the creation of the CIA was the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the agency’s purpose was to work directly with senior US government officials – including the President – and collect and decipher foreign intelligence. In 1952, US President Truman created another intelligence agency, the National Security Agency (NSA). At the time, the agency’s very The headquarters of the NSA is existence was secret, located in Fort Meade, Maryland. though its origins can be traced back to the Cipher Bureau of World War I. Working under the US Department of Defense, the primary job of the NSA remains to design codes and ciphers for the protection of United States’ information, and to intercept and decrypt messages of other countries in order to defend the nation. In 1972, at the height of the Cold War, the Central Security Service (CSS) was created to coordinate the intelligence work of the NSA with the military. Because the NSA was created by the president and not Congress, it is not subject to the same level of Congressional review as other agencies. It is the most secretive of all US intelligence agencies. Even so, it too has been penetrated by spies on several occasions.

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Spy Rings The fiendish difficulty of coding methods was not the only thing that made spying against the USSR difficult. Unlike Western nations, the Soviet Union was a closed society. The government kept close watch even on its own citizens, and people were not allowed to move freely in and out of the country. It was much harder for Western spies to infiltrate Soviet society, much less the government. The Soviets were experts at catching American and British spies and executing them before they could pass on any useful information.

Eyes in the United Kingdom Along with the group known as the atomic spies, who stole information from the Manhattan Project, the Soviets had a lot of other help from organized spy rings. Kim Philby was perhaps the most successful of the spies in a group that operated in the United Kingdom known as the Cambridge Five. Philby was a high-ranking member of British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in charge of the anti-Soviet division, and the main liaison with US intelligence. From the 1930s until 1951, he was also an incredibly effective Soviet spy. Though Philby eventually fell under suspicion in the 1950s, he was never prosecuted. He became the

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most famous of the ring when it was discovered he was a double agent, but he was not the only spy. During the ’50s and ’60s, more Soviet spies were thought to be working in British Intelligence or the government. This included the other members of the Cambridge Five as well as the Portland Spy Ring. With the aid of information from the CIA, the British security service put under surveillance several residents of Portland, England, who were believed to be spying on naval testing in the area. The Portland Spy Ring was unique in that the members were illegal and without cover from an embassy, but they, just like the others, passed military secrets and exposed British and American secrets to the KGB.

Spies in the Skies The arms race was also a technology race. In 1956, the United States developed the U-2 spy plane. It was a reconnaissance aircraft that would change the way spying was done. The new plane could conduct surveillance at altitudes beyond the reach of either Soviet bombers or surface-to-air missiles. Despite its altitude, it could make astonishingly detailed photographs of the territory below. Over the next few years, repeated missions by U-2 planes revealed

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that the Soviets were further behind the United States in the arms race than had previously been believed. The Soviets were, however, making progress on anti-aircraft capabilities. On May 1, 1960, the Soviets shot down a U-2 spy plane and captured the pilot, Francis Gary Powers. Nikita Khrushchev, who was then the leader of the USSR, announced that the plane had been shot down, but did not reveal the pilot had been captured. Under the assumption that the plane had been destroyed, US President Dwight Eisenhower said that the aircraft was a weather plane that had strayed off course. Khrushchev responded with photos of Powers and evidence of spying, which was recovered from the wreckage. It was particularly bad timing, because in less than a fortnight, the two leaders were scheduled to join Britain and France for a meeting to discuss a possible agreement on arms and nuclear testing limitations. Khrushchev announced that he could no longer trust Eisenhower and the talks failed before they even began. Powers U-2 planes were used for intelligence-gathering missions. was convicted of spying

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DID YOU KNOW? The most popular place for the superpowers to exchange captured spies was the Glienicke Bridge between West Berlin and Potsdam, East Germany. It was known as the Bridge of Spies.

and sentenced to ten years in a Russian prison. He served less than two years, however. In 1962, in the first prisoner exchange of the Cold War, he was released in exchange for the release of Rudolf Abel, a Soviet agent the United States had caught. After the U-2 was shot down, both superpowers began to focus reconnaissance efforts using satellites. The Americans got the jump on the USSR with the U-2, but the Soviets were the first to put an artificial satellite in Earth’s orbit. It was called Sputnik 1 (there were a series of Sputniks), and it was the beginning of the space race. If the Soviets were capable of launching a satellite, then they were likely to be able to launch nuclear-armed ballistic missiles that could reach the United States. The United States responded with its own satellite program and the establishment of NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), an ongoing scientific and exploration agency that eventually had nothing to do with war.

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A Close Call In 1959, the government of Cuba was overthrown by left-wing revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro. The formation of the new socialist government placed further strain on Cuba’s relationship with the United States. America had already placed severe restrictions on trade with Cuba during the revolution, and Castro turned to the USSR for support. This was particularly troubling to the United States because Cuba is only 90 miles (144.8 kilometers) off the coast of Florida. Under the leadership of President Eisenhower, and later President John Kennedy, the CIA developed a secret plan to invade Cuba and overthrow the Soviet-supported government. In April of 1961, a group of CIA-trained Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. The invasion was a disaster. All of the invaders were killed or captured. The incident increased the distrust the Soviets had for the United States and drove Castro deeper into the arms of the USSR.

The Cuban Missile Crisis A year and a half later, President Kennedy was shown reconnaissance photographs taken by US spy planes. The photos clearly showed Soviet missiles in Cuba. While the missiles were not armed, they were right

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Intelligence photos like this revealed Soviet missile silos being built in Cuba in 1962.

in the United States’ backyard. This was probably the closest the United States and the Soviet Union came to actual nuclear war. If Kennedy sent the US military to destroy the missiles, he would almost certainly provoke the Soviets to retaliate. If he did nothing, the USSR would have the perfect place for launching a nuclear strike on the US mainland should it ever decide to do so. Kennedy had additional pressure to respond in some way because he had promised the American people that if Cuba should be in a position to launch an offense against the United States, he would act. What Kennedy did not want to do was provoke war. After deliberations with the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOMM), Kennedy decided to quarantine Cuba, and the US

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Navy surrounded the island with warships. This gave Kennedy time to talk with Khrushchev. After thirteen incredibly tense days, the two leaders came to an agreement. The Soviets removed the missile sites in Cuba, and the United States removed missiles that it had in Turkey. The crisis was over. Had it not been for the US spy program, the United States would not have known about those missile sites until it was too late. Fortunately, diplomacy worked, and disaster was averted.

A Man Who Had to Do Something During most of the Cold War, the USSR struggled to keep up with the West when it came to technological advances. They particularly struggled when it came to radar that could detect low-flying aircraft. Adolf Tolkachev was a Soviet radar engineer working to create a better radar system. In his position with the military, he had access to very high-level state secrets. Though he appeared a loyal citizen, he harbored deep doubts about his government. In the early days of the USSR, Stalin ordered the execution of anyone who was deemed to be anti-Soviet or in any way opposed to the government or Stalin’s

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policies. Millions of people were declared “enemies of the people” and killed. The parents of Tolkachev’s wife, Natasha, had been victims of Stalin’s purges. Natasha’s mother was killed because she visited her father in Denmark. He was a capitalist businessman, and this caused her to be suspected of disloyalty to the communist regime. Natasha’s father was arrested and sent to a labor camp because he refused to denounce his wife. Natasha grew up in an orphanage. The communist promise of a worker’s paradise had not manifested in the USSR. Tolkachev saw from within what the totalitarian regime was truly like. Khrushchev instituted some reforms, and condemned the worst of Stalin’s excesses. For several years people

Soviet trucks pulled ballistic missiles through Red Square, Moscow, during the annual parade in 1969.

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like Tolkachev, had some hope. In 1964, Khrushchev was ousted, Leonid Brezhnev assumed command, and the USSR became more repressive. Tolkachev became increasingly convinced that he should to do something. Speaking out in opposition to the government would be useless. He knew that would only get him arrested and killed. Instead, he left notes on the car windshields of US diplomats in Moscow, letting them know that he was interested in meeting with people from the CIA. In 1976, Tolkachev began working with US agents. He used a 35-millimeter Pentax camera to photograph plans, specifications, and test data on Soviet missiles and aircraft, both those that already existed and those still in the planning stage. For almost a decade, he passed these photos along to his CIA contacts. Though the United States had other operatives in the Soviet Union—including a double agent in the KGB—Tolkachev was one of most valuable. In 1985, someone in the CIA betrayed Tolkachev to the KGB. He was arrested and executed in 1986—less than five years before the end of the Cold War. Before he was caught, Tolkachev managed to give the United States information that saved billions of dollars in research and development, and prevented fighter jets and cruise missiles from being shot down.

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Technology in Action Spy gadgets were not just for fictional characters. Umbrellas that shot poisoned pellets; guns hidden in gloves and tubes of lipstick; listening devices and transmitters hidden in the heel of a shoe; secret cameras tucked away in fountain pens, watches, and the buttons of coats; a device that can pull a letter out of an envelope without breaking the seal; and even pens that write in disappearing ink. These are just some of the technological tools used by spies during the Cold War. As fantastic as these devices may seem, agencies used these tools to assist their agents in the face of new challenges when it came to intelligence gathering in the modern age.

The Digital Age Today the vast majority of spying is done electronically—for example, hacking web sites and email accounts and installing malware on computers that can upload files and use the computer’s camera for surveillance. But the technological advances that make this kind of spying possible were developed during— and in large part because of—the Cold War. In fact, the internet itself was a product of the Cold War. When it became clear that the Soviets had the ability to launch a nuclear strike, the US Department

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Colossus and ENIAC Today we take computers and hand held devices for granted. This book was written on one; you may even be reading it on one! But at the beginning of the Cold War, computers were very new—and rather primitive. The first two electronic computers were developed by people working for government agencies during World War II. In 1944, British code breakers built the first electronic digital computer. It was called Colossus, and was used to break enemy codes. Meanwhile, computer scientists in the United States were working on an Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC). ENIAC wasn’t just developed for code breaking. This “giant brain” could be programmed to do a variety of tasks, and the first was designed to analyze the likelihood of a thermonuclear weapon. ENIAC wasn’t completed until 1946, after World War II was over. However, it inspired a new world of computing. ENIAC is considered by some as the father of computers used during the Cold War, and the ones we use today.

of Defense realized that it was foolhardy to have all the government’s computers in one place. A single strike could put out all communications and the computers that controlled the weapons; this would make a response impossible. However, the many researchers,

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DID YOU KNOW? Code breakers take advantage of the fact that in all languages some letters are used more often than others. Also, some letters appear frequently in combination with other letters.

academics, defense contractors, and government and military personnel who worked with the Defense Department needed to be able to communicate quickly and easily with each other—in the event of a war, as well as for routine operations. So in 1969, the military developed a computer network called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) to link the various computers. This system evolved and eventually became the internet. Decentralizing information was not only good protection in the event of a war. It was an excellent way to keep one organization from controlling access to information. In other words, it made it more difficult for the US government to use the same repressive techniques its enemy used to control its population. The Cold War was a tense stalemate between two very different nations. For almost four decades, it seemed as if there were no way out. Then quite suddenly, everything changed.

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CHAPTER 4

A N D S G N I END S G N I N N NEW BEGI

A

dolf Tolkachev did not live to see it, but his dreams of a freer and more democratic country did come true, at least for a while. After many years of isolation from the rest of the world, a devotion to the principles of communism, and the Cold War with the United States, the USSR quite suddenly changed course. The country opened up, and very soon after that, ceased to exist.

A Moral Imperative For nearly four decades, the USSR had poured enormous amounts of money into the military. This had done a great deal of damage to the Soviet OPPOSITE: The lowering of the Soviet flag at the Kremlin in 1991 signified the end of the USSR.

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economy. In addition, the centralized control of the economy—one of the hallmarks of communism—had not been very successful. In 1985, a new leader came to power in the USSR. Mikhail Gorbachev was young, idealistic, and unlike any Soviet leader before him. Members of Gorbachev’s family had been killed or imprisoned during Stalin’s time in power. Gorbachev knew intimately how people suffer when leaders use coercion and violence to control the population. Gorbachev was a committed communist, but had very different visions for his nation than previous leaders. He introduced a series of economic reforms, called perestroika. Perestroika allowed for a limited amount of free markets and less central planning. He hoped that this would revitalize the economy and make life better for the Soviet people who had long suffered from poverty, food rationing, and shortages of basic goods. The standard of living in Russia was much lower than in the rest of Europe. Gorbachev intended to improve that. Perhaps more important, he introduced glasnost. Glasnost means openness, and allowed more freedom of speech and access to information for the Soviet people. For the first time since the Communist Revolution, people in Russia could read whatever they wanted to. Television and newspapers were given more

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independence. People could express their opinions and criticize the government without fear of being shot. Gorbachev saw this not just as prudent policy, but as a moral imperative When announcing his program of glasnost, he said, “A new resigned as moral atmosphere is taking Gorbachev president when the USSR shape in the country.” He dissolved. called it a “reappraisal of values.” He demanded a “break away from the past malpractices.”

Walls Come Down One of the “malpractices” Gorbachev wanted to break away from was the Cold War’s dangerous accumulation of nuclear weapons. Within a few months of coming to power, Gorbachev stopped deploying nuclear missiles in Europe. In 1984, a year before Gorbachev became head of the USSR, US President Ronald Reagan had discussed his dream for complete nuclear disarmament—an end to the arms race and the Cold War. Gorbachev, it seemed, would be able to help him achieve this goal.

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Diplomatic Breakthroughs However, Reagan was inconsistent in his approach to accomplishing his dream. He called the USSR “the Evil Empire,” and was committed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The SDI was a complex spacebased anti-ballistic missile system intended to shoot down missiles aimed at the United States. Although its purpose was defense, the USSR saw the SDI as an aggressive move that would dangerously escalate the arms competition by militarizing space. Gorbachev was willing to make tremendous concessions if the United States would abandon the SDI. Reagan was very attached to the SDI plan, though. He believed it was necessary for defense as long as there were nuclear weapons in the world. Even though experts said it was technically unfeasible, he was unwilling to abandon it. Diplomacy seemed to have been dealt a setback. Nonetheless, the two leaders continued to talk. Both were committed to freeing the world of the horrors of nuclear weapons, as well as ending the economic drain of the arms race. Eventually, after a great deal of delicate negotiation, the United States and the USSR signed a historic nuclear arms limitations treaty in 1987. The treaty did not remove nuclear weapons from the world, but the agreement did greatly reduce the chances that the world would

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DID YOU KNOW? In 1990, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for leading the peace process that led to the end of the Cold War.

be destroyed by nuclear war in the near future. When George H. W. Bush became US president in 1989, he continued work with Gorbachev toward further arms reductions. Meanwhile, Gorbachev continued his reforms, introducing a multi-party system and free democratic elections to the USSR.

Further Reforms Gorbachev had a powerful vision for his nation, yet he refused to use the techniques of Stalin and his other predecessors to enforce that view of government and society. When demands for social and economic reforms spread beyond the Soviet Union to its satellite nations in Eastern Europe and East Germany, Gorbachev quickly realized that tanks were not the answer. Very quickly, like dominoes falling, the communist governments of Eastern Europe were overthrown. In November of 1989, the guards opened the gates of the Berlin wall. The citizens of

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Crowds throughout the world celebrated the opening of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

East Berlin could pass freely from the East to West for the first time since the Cold War began. Jubilant crowds tore down the wall. George H. W. Bush said to Mikhail Gorbachev, “We don’t consider you an enemy anymore.” The Cold War had come to an end.

End of an Empire We cannot know what would have happened had Gorbachev been able to continue to lead the USSR. The idealistic leader was caught between a pluralist

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movement in his country that wanted democratic reforms to move even faster and a faction of hardliners that wanted a return to the old ways. In 1991, hardliners staged a coup and placed Gorbachev and his family under house arrest. While Gorbachev was out of the picture, Boris Yeltsin, leader of the pluralist movement, rallied popular support and seized power. Yeltsin replaced the communist party with a democratic government. Gorbachev walked past his captors, drove into Moscow, and resigned. On December 25, 1991, the Soviet hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered, and the Russian flag was raised over the Kremlin. The Soviet Union was no more. The end of the Cold War brought an immediate end to the balance of terror that for four decades had kept the world’s two superpowers one tragic miscalculation away from destroying the world. It did not, however, rid the world of nuclear weapons. Despite treaties limiting the proliferation of such weapons, both the United States and Russia still had more than enough nuclear firepower to destroy the world. The fact that they were no longer threatening each other was only small comfort. As of 2017, nine nations have nuclear weapons, and the likelihood of terrorist groups getting their hands on them only increased when the Soviet Union broke up.

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The End of Privacy An expectation of privacy was one of the casualties of the Cold War. In 1929, US Secretary of State Henry Stimson said, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” This expressed the feeling among most Americans at that time, in government and out of it. Spying was considered improper and uncivilized. If nations were to work together, there must be some level of trust. When the Cold War began, the United States was far behind the USSR in spy craft and intelligence. Russia had long been a secretive and paranoid society, and had many years’ experience in the arts of espionage. Americans were appalled at first

Modern people strive to balance the connection and convenience of the internet with the need for privacy.

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by some of the techniques used to gather information about the enemy. Some people believed that spying simply lowered us to their level. Soon, however, Americans became convinced that espionage was necessary to protect us from our enemies. Perhaps more crucial, spying was needed to protect the world from nuclear war. The disapproval around gathering intelligence on individuals was less about effective diplomacy than a general belief in most democratic countries that personal confidentiality was valuable and should be respected except in the most urgent and dire situations. People in Western nations have in modern times expected and assumed a great deal of personal privacy. However, that expectation has deteriorated in recent years. Ironically, privacy has not been taken away so much as abandoned. The general paranoia of the Cold War led to a willingness to sacrifice autonomy for protection. The idea that the government might need to know everything in order to protect the people from possible threats and spies was certainly reinforced during the Cold War.

Sacrificing Privacy for Convenience The first smartphone was released in 1992, and over the few decades since, consumers have traded privacy

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Eyes in the Sky If you look up on a clear night, you might see a lot of stars. But some of the lights you’ll see are satellites. Satellites are bodies that orbit a planet. The Moon is a satellite of Earth, though most if what we see now is man-made. Artificial satellites transmit telephone and television signals, monitor the weather, or, like the International Space Station, serve as work places for astronauts. Some satellites are used for spying. Cameras orbiting the Earth—the descendants of Sputnik 1—can take extremely detailed photos of the planet. A top-secret project called Corona operated from 1960 to 1972 (and was not fully declassified and made public until 1995). Corona missions were a series of satellites that took aerial photographs of the USSR (as well as China and other nations). This was long before digital images could be downloaded electronically. The film from a Corona satellite was dropped back into Earth’s atmosphere in capsules, which were caught mid-air by airplanes.

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for convenience, and perhaps for connection. People are willing to share on the internet and unsecured phone and computer lines intimate details about their lives, perhaps willfully ignoring or indifferent to the apps and internet browsers that track information, which can be used by advertisers, political campaigns, and possibly even more nefarious uses in the future. In an essay published on the online magazine The Conversation, Professor John Beck has this to say about our modern world: We move under a canopy of invisible cameras and sensors, where our personal details and likenesses, our associations, preferences, and transactions lie waiting to be called upon—by friends, strangers, employers, or snoops. And so what? We all do it. … We have already become agents, checking up on people by rifling through social media accounts or poking around on Street View … The world we are in is, in many ways, the world the Cold War made for us.

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The End of Trust Ironically, even as Americans choose to give up more of their personal privacy in social media, they have increasingly lost trust in the government and the corporations who now have near unlimited access to their personal information. In efforts to defend itself against the USSR, the United States ultimately used similar methods of the totalitarian state it was philosophically opposed to. This amounted to a chilling compromise of the basic values—openness, freedom, and the rule of law—that the United States was supposedly opposed to in the Cold War, and reading other gentlemen’s mail was only a part of it.

Influence over the Public During the Cold War, US intelligence agencies were directed to engage in propaganda, economic warfare, and activities that would weaken communist governments (even governments that had been democratically elected). The CIA paid editors and reporters both in the United States and abroad to run articles that supported its policies. US intelligence agencies spied on US citizens. When these activities, as well as information about other

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Who Are You Looking At? The Cold War was long over, but the NSA was still very busy and they weren’t just watching the nation’s enemies. In June 2013, the London newspaper The Guardian and the US Washington Post broke a story that stunned the world. According to information provided by Edward Snowden, a CIA systems analyst, the agency had been collecting the telephone data of tens of millions of Americans. To a lesser degree, Britain’s spy agency, the GCHQ, was also gathering phone records. Both nations agreed to make some changes in their Many debate whether surveillance programs. Snowden is a traitor or a patriot. However, the biggest changes have come from communications companies. Google and Facebook began encrypting user data, and other companies have taken similar steps. Some people called Snowden a traitor; others called him a patriot. The United States government wants to prosecute him for espionage. As of this writing, he was living in Russia, where he had been granted sanctuary.

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covert operations such as the Bay of Pigs invasion, were made public, Americans began to quickly lose faith in their government. In 1958, three quarters of Americans said they trusted their government to do the right thing most of the time. By the 1980s, only 25 percent of Americans felt that way. Even with spikes during times of national emergency, such as after the terrorist attacks in 2001, the number has never again approached 75 percent. In 2017, that figure was hovering in the low 20s. There have been many reasons unrelated to the Cold War that US citizens are distrustful of their government. The Watergate scandal in the 1970s and the economic collapse of 2008 were times when people felt betrayed by their leaders. Yet it is clear that not since 1958 have a significant majority of Americans felt an ease with their leaders. Trust in government was the other major casualty of the Cold War.

Still Spying When the code breakers at Arlington Hall were told to begin monitoring Soviet communications, they were told to “get everything.” US intelligence officials wanted to take no chances. Any bit of information gleaned from any source—enemy or not—might

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one day be useful. That attitude about intelligence gathering did not change simply because the Cold War was over. However, for the United States, the targets of that espionage did change. As the threat from the Soviet Union (now the Russian Federation) declined, other threats emerged. Terrorist groups such as the Taliban and ISIS occupied a great deal of the attention of US intelligence. There seemed less need for agents who were fluent in the Russian language and Russian culture. Russia, on the other hand, never really took its eyes off the West, and the United States in particular. During the first couple of decades after the Cold War, the United States and Russia had good relations. The fact that both countries still “read each other’s mail” was just an unacknowledged fact of doing business. Neither nation was naive enough to think the other country had stopped spying on them. However, the United States was again a little behind the Russians when it came to the spy game. In recent years, US intelligence has scrambled to catch up. It was not only the targets of spying that changed, so did the methods. These days the “codes” being broken are more likely to be internet passwords and firewalls than substitution ciphers. Foreign agents are

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more likely to infiltrate social media than community organizations. Cameras and recorders hidden in suit buttons have given way to facial recognition programs, retinal scanners, and computer programs that commandeer cell phone microphones.

Benefits not without Consequences Today’s world has become so complex and often morally ambiguous that some people yearn for the simplicity of the era of Cold War. The stakes may have been high, but at least the ideologies were clear. The United States stood for freedom and democracy; the Soviet Union was a repressive, totalitarian government. The USSR had a centrally controlled economy; the United States was committed to free enterprise whatever the cost. It wasn’t hard to figure out who the enemy was or to understand what the conflict was about. The Cold War certainly did provide the catalyst for a few benefits. The space race led to many technological developments, and as we saw in the last chapter, the digital age was certainly spurred on by the conflict. The military-industrial complex that supported the Cold War provided many jobs and opportunities for

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technological training. Of course, there are many more reasons to be relieved that the Cold War is over, even if the world isn’t all that much safer. The reason the conflict is called the Cold War is because fighting never broke out between the superpowers, at least not directly. Millions of lives were lost or destroyed in a war that was “cold” only in the sense that it never went nuclear, but the United States and the USSR fought many proxy wars in other nations over the forty-plus years of tensions. Both nations also accumulated tremendous debt subsidizing other wars and keeping up in the arms

Methods for creating codes, and the means for cracking them, have changed.

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race. During that time, the world was ever on the brink of annihilation should the superpowers use those nuclear weapons. In 2017 the threat of nuclear war comes from other places—for instance North Korea, or a terrorist group having gotten access to nuclear weapons. Yet even so, the world is a great deal more peaceful since the end of the last proxy war between the superpowers. Those who fought in Korea, Vietnam, Central America, and elsewhere will tell you that the Cold War could get very hot indeed. Perhaps the most troubling thing about the Cold War was the same thing that made it simple. Both nations saw the conflict as a zero-sum game—a game in which one side can win only when the other loses. There was no room for compromise. Winning the Cold War meant the elimination of one or the other system: either liberal democracy or communism had to go. Hopefully in future conflicts there will be more room for negotiation. One thing is certain, however. The spies and code breakers of the Cold War—whichever side they were on—were one of the main reasons the Cold War ended without nuclear annihilation. Not all heroes wear uniforms. Sometimes they sit in the dark reading other gentlemen’s mail.

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Chronology – 1917 The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia overthrows the Czarist government and replaces it with a communist government. – May The Germans surrender, ending the war 1945 in Europe. – Aug. US President Harry S. Truman gives 1945 permission to use the world’s first atomic weapon again Japan in the bombing of Hiroshima. World War II ends. – 1946 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill makes his Iron Curtain speech. The Verona project successfully deciphers KGB messages. – 1947 HUAC subpoenas witnesses and investigates communism in the Hollywood film industry. The CIA is formed. – 1948 Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin orders the blockade of West Berlin. The States Information and Exchange Act is passed allowing the Office of International Information to control US State Department propaganda. – 1949 The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is formed with western nations to stand against Communism. The USSR tests its first nuclear weapon. – 1952 The NSA is formed.

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– 1954 Senator Joseph McCarthy makes claims that communists have spies in the CIA. – 1955 The Soviet Union and eastern European countries sign the Warsaw Pact. – 1957 Sputnik 1 and Sputnik 2 are launched. – 1959 Fidel Castro becomes the leader of Cuba after a revolution. The United States launches Explorer satellites for Corona surveillance. – 1961 CIA-supported rebels invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in an attempt to overthrow the Castro government. The Soviets begin building the Berlin Wall. – 1962 The Cuban missile crisis occurs. – 1972 The first arms limitation treaty between the United States and the USSR is signed. – 1979 The second Strategic Arms Limitation Talks agreement is signed. – 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev is chosen as leader of the Soviet Union. – 1989 The Berlin Wall falls. – 1991 Gorbachev resigns. The Soviet Union is dissolved.

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Glossary capitalism  An economic and political system in which a nation’s wealth is controlled by private owners rather than the state. communism  An economic and political system in which there is no private ownership and a nation’s wealth is controlled by the state. dissent  To hold or express an opposing opinion; disagree, especially with those in power. encrypt  To put something into a code. enmity  Hostility or ill-feeling toward someone or something. espionage  The practice of spying. glasnost  A set of reforms in the former Soviet Union that included more openness and freedom of information. ideology  A system of deeply held ideas and beliefs that inform political or economic policy. imperative  Something that is necessary, urgent. infrastructure  Buildings, roads, and other physical structures of a society. intelligence  Political or military information that is collected by governments, often by means of spying. nascent  New, just coming into being. perestroika  A set of economic reforms in the former Soviet Union that included more free markets. purge  To remove, often violently. reconnaissance  the observation and study of a place or situation.

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mation Further Infor Books Bryan, Bethany. The Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York: Cavendish Square, 2018. Johnson, Bud. Break the Code: Cryptography for Beginners. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2013. Lonely Planet Kids. How to Be an International Spy: Your Training Manual, Should You Choose to Accept it. Victoria, Australia: Lonely Planet Kids: 2015. McKay, Sinclair. The Secret Lives of Codebreakers: The Men and Women Who Cracked the Enigma Code at Bletchley Park. New York: Plume, 2012. Richardson, Eric. NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and the Iron Curtain. New York: Cavendish Square, 2018.

Websites Bletchley Park https://bletchleypark.org.uk The official site of the Bletchley Park Heritage attraction has photographs and historical information about the operation at Bletchley Park.

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Corona Satellite Imagery from the US National Reconnaissance Office http://www.nro.gov/history/csnr /corona/imagery.html At this site, you can see real images capture by Corona satellites. Crypto Museum http://www.cryptomuseum.com This website has lots of information about the history and science of cryptography, along with some great photos. PBS NOVA, the Verona Intercepts http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova /venona/intercepts.html This site has images of the actual documents of the Verona project.

Further Information

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graphy o i l b i B d e t c e Sel Aron, Leon. “Everything You Think You Know about the Collapse of the Soviet Union is Wrong.” Foreign Policy, June 20, 2011. http://foreignpolicy. com/2011/06/20/everything-you-think-you-knowabout-the-collapse-of-the-soviet-union-is-wrong/. Accessed October 2017. Budiansky, Stephen. Code Warriors: NSA’s Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War against the Soviet Union. New York: Knopf, 2016. Evans, Richard. “Why Hitler’s Grand Plan during the Second World War Collapsed.” The Guardian. 8 September 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2009/sep/08/hitler-germany-campaigncollapsed. Accessed August 2017. Fink, Carole K. Cold War: An International History. Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 2014. Gladwell, Malcolm. “Trust No One: Kim Philby and the Hazards of Mistrust.” The New Yorker, July 28, 2014. https://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2014/07/28/philby. Accessed September, 2017. Haynes, John Earl and Harvey Klehr. Verona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Hoffman, David E. “What Made this Man Betray His Country?: How a Troubled Past Turned a Soviet Military Engineer into One of the CIA’s Most Valuable Spies.” The Atlantic, August 8, 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/ archive/2015/08/adolf-tolkachev-cia-kgb/400769/. Accessed October, 2017.

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Johnson, Paul. A History of the American People. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. New York: Penguin, 2005. Levy, Stephen. “A Brief History of the ENIAC Computer. Smithsonian, November 2013. https:// www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-briefhistory-of-the-eniac-computer-3889120/. Accessed October 2017. McKay, Sinclair. The Spies of Winter: The GCHQ Codebreakers Who Fought the Cold War. London: Aurum Press, 2016. Pew Research Center. “Public Trust in Government: 1958-2017. May 3, 2017. http://www. people-press.org/2017/05/03/public-trust-ingovernment-1958-2017// Accessed October 2017. Stavridis, James. “Are We Entering a New Cold War? It’s Not a Strong Russia We Should Fear, but a Weak One.” Foreign Policy, February 17, 2016. http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/02/17/are-weentering-a-new-cold-war-russia-europe/. Accessed October 2017. Taubman. William. Gorbachev: His Life and Times. New York: W. W. Norton, 2017. Theoharis, Athan. Chasing Spies: How the FBI Failed in Counterintelligence but Promoted the Politics of McCarthyism in the Cold War Years. Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 2002. Winkler, Alan M. The Cold War: A History in Documents. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000. Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.

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Index Page numbers in boldface are illustrations. Arlington Hall, 15–17, 26, 66 arms race, 36–38, 41–42, 55–56, 69 Baker, Josephine, 14 Berlin Wall, 23, 24, 57–58, 58 Bletchley Park, 5, 10, 13, 15, 17 blockade, 22–23 British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), 10, 40 cameras, 27, 48–49, 62–63, 67 capitalism, 6–8, 47 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 20, 39, 41, 44, 48, 64–65 Churchill, Winston, 16, 21, 22, 24, 29 ciphers, 5, 11, 26, 30, 39, 67 code, 4, 8–13, 15–16, 26, 28–30, 39, 50, 67 communism, 6–8, 20–21, 30–31, 33–36, 47, 53–54, 57, 59, 64, 70

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computers, 13, 27, 49–51, 63, 68 Corona, 62 cryptography, 5, 8 Cuba, 44–46 dissent, 6 distrust, 5, 7, 17, 31, 44, 66 double agent, 41, 48 encrypt, 11–13, 65 Enigma, 8, 9, 11–13 enmity, 7 espionage, 5, 8, 17, 27–28, 31, 37, 60–61, 65, 67 gadgets, 27, 49 glasnost, 54–55 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 54–59, 55 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 35 ideology, 31, 68 imperative, 53, 55 infrastructure, 19 intelligence, 5, 8, 10–11, 15–17, 20, 26–27, 29, 37, 39–40, 49, 60–61, 64, 66–67 internet, 49, 51, 63, 67

Code Breakers and Spies of the Cold War

Iron Curtain, 21

Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, 30–31

KGB, 28, 30, 36, 39, 41, 48 Manhattan Project, 17, 28–31, 40 McCarthy, Joseph, 32, 33–36 Mutually Assured Destruction, 38 nascent, 20 National Security Agency (NSA), 39, 39, 65 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 20, 37 nuclear weapons, 17, 24–25, 34, 36–38, 42–43, 50, 55–56, 59, 69–70 one-time pad (OTP), 26, 28

satellites, 27, 43, 57, 62 Second Red Scare, 33–34 Signal Intelligence Service (SIS), 15, 25 Snowden, Edward, 65, 65 spy network, 24, 31, 40–41 Stalin, Joseph, 7, 17, 20–21, 22, 23–25, 28, 46–47, 54, 57 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), 56 surveillance, 27, 41, 49, 65 technology, 8, 17, 27–28, 37, 41, 46, 49, 68 Tolkachev, Adolf, 46–48, 53 Truman, President Harry S., 21, 22, 23–25, 39 Turing, Alan, 13

perestroika, 54 Philby, Kim, 40 privacy, 60–61, 63 proxy wars, 38, 69–70 purge, 47

U-2 spy plane, 41–43, 42 U-boats, 12, 12 Ultra, 10

reconnaissance, 41, 43–44

Warsaw Pact, 20 women, 10, 15

Verona, 26, 28–31

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hor About the Aut Avery Elizabeth Hurt grew up during the Cold War. That may be part of the reason for her fascination with US-Soviet relations. In college she minored in political science and took several courses on the USSR and Soviet bloc nations. She loves to work crossword puzzles, but is rubbish at breaking codes.

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HURT

CODE BREAKERS

AND

SPIES

CODE BREAKERS

AND

SPIES

Code Breakers and Spies of

the American Revolution the Civil War

Code Breakers and Spies of

the Cold War

Code Breakers and Spies of

the Vietnam War

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the War on Terror Code Breakers and Spies of

World War I

Code Breakers and Spies of

World War II

Code Breakers and Spies of the Cold War

Code Breakers and Spies of

Code Breakers and Spies of

the Cold War

AVERY ELIZABETH HURT