Intelligence: June 5, 2003

Archives

On October 29, 1948, known as "Black Friday" in the American intelligence community, the Soviet Union and it's allies changed all of their codes, ciphers and communications procedures. This was a disaster because the U.S. and Britain had cracked Soviet military codes and were reading all the Soviets secret messages. At the time, it was known who tipped them off. It was an American soldier, William Weisband, who worked in the army security organization that later became the National Security Agency. At the time, Weisband was not prosecuted, because it was felt that too many still secret items would come out in court. Weisband was booted out of the army and died of natural causes in 1967. Now, details of that code breaking effort are starting to come out, but not all of them. At the end of the war, American intelligence agents obtained one of the Soviet cipher machines and, working with the British experts who had cracked the German Enigma machine, were soon reading Russian encrypted messages. Other Russian codes were cracked as well. What is left unsaid, for the moment, is which Russian ciphers were cracked after 1948. The National Security Agency has had the tightest security of any American intelligence organization, and has been most successful at keeping its secrets. 

X

ad

Help keep us a float!

Your support helps us keep our ship a float. We appreciate anyway you chose to help out. Visit us daily, subscribe, donate, and tell your friends.

You can support us in the following ways:

  1. Subscribe to our daily newsletter. We’ll send the news to your email box, and you don’t have to come to the site unless you want to read columns or see photos.
  2. You can contribute to the health of StrategyPage.
  3. Make sure you spread the word about us. Two ways to do that are to like us on Facebook and follow us on X.
Subscribe   Contribute   Close