Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency Read Online Free

the
principal focus was always on strategic military traffic, not routine
diplomatic communications. "Intelligence on the Holocaust was NOT critical
to Allied strategy," said Hanyok [emphasis in original]. "Did Comint
reveal the Holocaust, and, especially, its final aim?" he asked. "The
real problem," he concluded, "was not interpreting the intelligence,
but the attitude by the Allies, and the rest of the world, that the unthinkable
was actually happening."
    In March
1945, as the damp chill of a long English winter began to fade, TICOM teams
began to fan out across Germany in search of codebreakers and their books and
equipment. "One day we got this frantic call," said Paul E. Neff, a
U.S. Army major assigned to Bletchley Park. "They had run across these
people, Germans, in this castle . . . [who] had been in the cryptographic
business, signals intelligence, all of them. Bongo. Quickly Bletchley sent
me." Within a few days, Neff was at the castle, in the German state of
Saxony.
    "The
war was still going on and we were pretty far forward," Neff said.
"We sorted the people out, interrogated, tried to find out what they were
working on, where they had stood with it, tried to get our hands on all the
papers that were left. . . . But my problem became, What are we going to do
with them? Because they apparently had a lot of good information. . . . These
Germans, as you might know, had been working on the Russia problem too."
Neff had stumbled into a gold mine, because not only had the codebreakers
worked on Russian codes and ciphers, but the castle contained a German Foreign
Office signals intelligence archive. Neff's dilemma was the location of the
castle, which was located in territory assigned to the Soviets—and Russian troops
were quickly moving into the area. Neff needed to get the people and
codebreaking materials out fast.
    Neff
contacted Colonel George Bicher, in charge of the American TICOM unit in
London, and suggested shipping the documents—and the German codebreakers—to
England. But the issue of transporting the prisoners across the English Channel
became very sensitive. "Apparently they had a hard time when this thing
hit London because they couldn't decide what to do. They had to clear it [up
to] the attorney general or whatever he's called over there. Is it legal to
do?" Eventually the British agreed to have the Germans secretly
transferred to England. "We got a plane one day," said Neff,
"escorted this crowd down to the airfield, put them on the plane, and flew
them over to London. The British picked them up over there and gave them a
place to stay, fed them, and interrogated the hell out of them. Now, what
happened to those TICOM records I don't know." Two days later, Russian
troops overtook that same area.
     
    The May
morning was as dark as black velvet when Paul K. Whitaker opened his eyes at
4:45. Short and stout, with a thick crop of light brown hair, the American Army
first lieutenant slowly began to wake himself up. For two years he had been
assigned to Hut 3, the section of Bletchley Park that specialized in
translating and analyzing the decrypted Enigma Army and Air Force messages.
    At
thirty-eight, Whitaker was considerably older than his fellow junior officers.
For more than a decade before joining the Army in 1942 he had studied and
taught German in the United States as well as in Germany and Austria, receiving
his doctorate from Ohio State. While doing graduate work at the University of
Munich in 1930 he often dined at a popular nearby tavern, the Osteria Bavaria.
There, at the stark wooden tables, he would frequently see another regular
customer enjoying the Koniginpastete and the russische Eier. Seated
nearby, always at the same round table and surrounded by friends and
associates, was a quiet but ambitious local politician by the name of Adolf
Hitler.
    The first
dim rays of light illuminated a fresh spring snow, surprising Whitaker as he
stepped out of his quarters. Like dusting powder, the