3 Ways to Read 'Code Warriors’

Code Warriors: NSA's Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union by Stephen Budiansky

Published in June of 2016.

There are (at least) three ways that you can read Stephen Budiansky’s excellent new book Code Warriors: NSA's Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union.

First, you can read this book to learn about the history and science of cryptography.  Budiansky is very strong at explaining the mathematical and technical fundamentals of code making and code breaking.  Code Warriors starts with a concise account of how the Allies were able to crack the Nazi Enigma code.  Understanding how the three-rotor German Enigma enciphering machine works, and how Turing and his colleagues at Bletchley Park were able to decipher the coded messages, provides an excellent foundation for understanding the NSA’s later work on tackling Soviet coded communications.

Code Warriors also provides an excellent history into the origins of the National Security Agency, and the role of the NSA in the American postwar intelligence community.  How NSA became America’s largest spy agency - by budget and employees - is a fascinating story.  The fact that much of the computing and communications technology that powers much of the modern economy has it roots in NSA investments in signals intelligence is still not widely known.  

Secondly, Code Warriors takes a deep dive into the early successes of the NSA in terms of developing the capacity for worldwide, real-time signals capture, decryption and analysis - as well that many failures of the Agency.  These failures include an inability to break Soviet high level communications in a way that would have allowed an earlier warning of Russian intentions to place missiles in Cuba in 1962.

Finally, Code Warriors offers a terrific study of the costs of a dysfunctional organizational culture.  The extreme insularity and secrecy of NSA ultimately degraded its ability to generate meaningful intelligence for policymakers. 

Budiansky shows how an unwillingness to bring new ideas into the Agency, and an extreme wariness of providing any transparency into the workings of the organization, limited NSA’s ability to adopt techniques that would have enhanced the Agency’s effectiveness. 

The roots NSA’s post 9/11 illegal domestic data collection initiatives go much further back than 2011.

I recommend Code Warriors to anyone interested in cryptography, the history of the NSA, and in the relationship between institutional culture and organizational effectiveness.  There are important lessons to be learned from the history of the NSA about the benefits of transparency and open communications.  

What books would you recommend to learn more about the NSA?

What are you reading?