35 Years Ago in TIME

The U.S. is grappling with how to reform its intelligence agencies, which have been hit by leaks and questions about tactics. As during the cold war, THE SPY's job, if sometimes unglamorous, remains vital to national security.

The heroes, if there are any at all, sit behind gray desks in Moscow; Langley, Va.; and London. There they must sift through tons of material provided by hundreds of different sources before they can, with luck, piece together a picture of, say, the locking mechanism on a swing-wing fighter ... It is work that occupies tens of thousands of mathematicians and cryptographers, clerks and military analysts, often with the most trivial-seeming tasks. Yet it is work that no major nation feels it can afford to halt ... In the U.S., espionage was grossly neglected until the advent of the cold war. In 1929, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson was shocked to learn that the State Department had a cryptographic bureau. He fired the founder of the code-breaking agency, observing: "Gentlemen do not read other people's mail." But since then, the U.S. has overcome these and other scruples. TIME, Oct. 11, 1971

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