INTELLIGENCE: NSA: Inside the Puzzle Palace

The National Security Agency is like the Jorge Luis Borges fable of the infinite library in which all of the planet's knowledge and information reside, maddeningly encoded. Into the NSA's heavily guarded, three-story headquarters outside Washington every week the world's secrets flow from U.S. spy ships, surveillance planes, satellites and hundreds of electronic listening posts round the globe. Unlike the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies, the NSA's mission is strictly communications—electronics and cryptology. It is the ultimate bug, the source of most of the nation's foreign intelligence information and, like the CIA, a source of growing controversy.

Compared with the NSA, the CIA is as open as a New Hampshire town meeting. The NSA welcomes its confusion with NASA and the National Security Council. It is the one federal agency that claims—and gets—total exemption from the Freedom of Information Act. When Harry Truman started the NSA under the Defense Department's authority in 1952, only a handful of people even knew of his order.

Four Missions. By one estimate, the NSA spends $1.2 billion a year and employs 25,000 people, compared with the CIA's $750 million and 16,500 workers. At its Fort Meade, Md., headquarters, variously known as "Disneyland" and "the Puzzle Palace," the NSA labors in extraordinary anonymity to monitor communications throughout the world and then decipher the coded messages. In that task it is reputed to employ everything from the world's largest bank of computers to blind people whose acute hearing can pick up signals on tapes that sighted people might miss.

The NSA has come under increasing congressional attention. The troubles began last June when the Rockefeller commission revealed that the NSA had fed 1,100 pages of material on U.S. citizens to the CIA's "Operation Chaos," which was aimed at uncovering foreign influences among U.S. radical groups. Last week despite vigorous White House lobbying against it, the Senate intelligence committee called NSA Director Lew Allen, 50, an Air Force lieutenant general with a doctorate in nuclear physics, to explain some of his agency's operations. It was the first time an NSA chief has ever testified in public about the agency's specific activities.

The committee was most interested in the NSA'S monitoring of international telephone and cable traffic involving American citizens from 1967-1973. Allen testified that the NSA, under "Project Minaret," received "watch lists" of U.S. citizens about whom other agencies such as the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the FBI wanted information. In all, said Allen, the NSA intercepted the international calls or cables of 1,680 American citizens and groups and of 5,925 foreign nationals and groups.