Digging Behind the U.S. Intelligence Scene

It was born in secrecy, the creation of an executive order issued by President Harry S. Truman in 1952. The National Security Agency has remained in the shadows ever since: Its budget, for instance, is buried in Defense Department accounts. And even today the Truman executive order is stamped "Top Secret/7 Still, tantalizing hints of its technological prowess to break codes and to collect signal intelligence have surfaced, first in a 1964 book, "The Invisible Government/' and then in "The Codebreakers" in 1967. But it took the persistent sleuthing of lawyer-turned-investigative reporter James Bamford to reveal the massive intrusive abilities of NSA, the nation's largest intelligence organization. In one detail-packed page after another, Bamford's 'The Puzzle Palace" chronicles the origin of NSA from America's Black Chamber (the civilian cryptology unit that formerly had been the Army's Ml-8 intelligence unit) in the 1920s through its transformation as the Armed Forces Security Agency to its present organi...