She is interviewed by ted olson, former solicitor general in the george w. Bush administration. Our after Words Program begins at 10 00 p. M. This evening. Ceo and president of the new york times, Mark Thompson sits down with Arianna Huffington to discuss his new book about political language. Its called enough said and we wrap up booktv in primetime at 11 00 p. M. Pulitzer prizewinning historian allen taylor examines the american revolution. Now that all happens tonight on booktv on cspan2. [inaudible conversations] okay let me check the mic first. Did you hear in the back row . Okay comment rates. I am Barbara Meade one of the founders of politics and prose and i just wanted very much to come in and introduce Stephen Budiansky because i enjoyed this book so much. I just thought it was such an impressive accomplishment and to write this book steven had to delve deep into mathematics, linguistics, engineering as well as the technical history of code making and code breaking. From those early electric calculating machines that al turing was instrumental in that were used during the Second World War. Some of this is local history or at least the Second World War part of it is local history because at that time the nsa was right here on nebraska avenue where nbc is. And it wasnt until 1957 that they moved out to fort meade, so in that long history of Tech Knowledge he that stephen had to master, he started with those machines that were manufactured by the National CashRegister Company in toledo, ohio. And he moved on to digital computing which is how code raking is done today. I have to add also he had to become knowledgeable enough about organizational behavior to understand the behavior of the people of talented individuals within the organization of the nsa who often very behaved in a very dysfunctional way. So it was a wide specter of knowledge that he had to have and out of that added so much knowledge. Publishers we we said about his book budiansky is lucid and describing the science and art of breaking complex ciphering. He leavens the technology and history with colorful profiles of cryptographers and spies. The result is a lively account of an engrossing history, so that is a wonderful complement for a book that is so heavy in the subject matter that you need to wade through but it is truly a lively account. Stephen has previously written 17 books ranging from such subject matter as biography. The composer to military history and the history of intelligence, science, Natural History and that includes animals including lions, horses, dogs and cats. I told him i just ordered his boat called the character of cats. He is widely versed as you can see. All this started back when stephen received his bachelor of science degree from yale and a master of science from harvard university. He is in the National Security correspondence and u. S. And new symbol support as well as editor of world war ii magazine. He is also the washington editor of Nature Magazine and has written for the atlantic month they come, the economist, the Washington Post and the new york times. I told Stephen Wright before we started that besides enjoying his book very much one reason i wanted to introduce him was that when i was a senior in college and essay was to ring college campuses, recruiting prospective employees and i interviewed with nsa and two weeks or three weeks later i got a formal letter from nsa offering me a job as a beginning cryptographer. I mulled that over for probably about a month, maybe a little bit longer but then i turned them down and accepted a job with National Geographic instead. So if i had taken that job and i have been in stephens book, i might have been, but none of that came true so stephen is going to tell us about the whole history of the nsa over this past, both starting preworld war ii but its a fascinating history so here is stephen to tell us about code warriors. [applause] thank you. Thank you very much. I will read all of your messages. Well thank you. In the branch of showbiz that im in which his writing serious history timing is of course everything and in the wake of the revelations of Edward Snowden which is certainly focused unprecedented attention on the nsa, this couldnt be a better time to i think spring on the book as a serious account of codebreaking. On the other hand it probably could have been a worse time to research a serious account of codebreaking in the cold war. Back in 1999 when i wrote my book battle of wits which was about codebreaking in world war ii and essay was that the time in an unprecedented move towards openness, releasing Historical Documents and retired codebreakers who had worked on the japanese and german codes in world war ii were thrilled at being given the green light for the first time to speak publicly of their wartime exploits and were even allowed to go into considerable technical detail about the scientific story behind their remarkable achievements. But in the postnote in world as nsa officials always denote our present moment on earth, i found almost no one willing to say anything about anything they did at nsa or its predecessor agencies even during the first years of the cold war some 70 years ago. To be sure, relying on the recollections and tales of participants is always a Risky Business when it comes to intelligence history. I recently reviewed for the wall street journal that hastings new book about secret operations in world war ii, and at the start of this book he quotes the cautionary words of Malcolm Muggeridge who worked for the secret secret service during the war before going on to a distinguished career as a man of letters and British Television broadcaster. Muggeridge said intelligence necessarily involves cheating, lying and betraying that it has a deleterious effect on the character. I never met anyone professionally engaged in it. My trust in any capacity. And muggeridge went on to say the temptation to exaggerate particularly goes with the territory as the more observer they put its writers of thrillers tend to gravitate to secret service as surely as the mentally unstable become psychiatrist for the impotent pornographer. My apologies to all the spies psychiatrist and pornographers in the audience. So given allah this, i thought for this book im going to try to tell the story of his more recent period of nsas history, as much as i can just using documentary evidence that had been officially declassified and released. Combined only with my general understanding of codes and codebreaking and piecing together what is admittedly often a very fragmentary public record. There is a lot out there now from the cold war period but as anyone who has worked with classified antiossified materials knows, its a real through the looking group last experience to figure out any rhyme or reason why some think gets unclassified and why the things remain classified. If it still exists as classified or secret or top secret soviet cipher machines that were used in 1946, 70 years ago. These devices have mechanical rotors that turned like the nazis of world war ii machine. If you owned a cell phone you now have in your pocket and encryption device that is a quadrille he and, quadrille yen, quadrille yen, quadrillion times more powerful and more resistant to deciphering than any of these antisoviet relics from the early cold war. And even more interesting in the meanwhile some considerably more sophisticated soviet code machines from the 70s and 80s have actually come on to the market and have been purchased by private individuals, have been analyzed and described by academic cryptologist in literature. And essay still treats their very existence as secret information. Now again its worth emphasizing that these cold war era cipher machines are cruel in ancient history and the practice of cryptology. Im talking the nsa wants nsa wants a nicety relies 70 years, thats the same interval of time that separates the end of the American Civil War and the start of world war ii during which time if you innovation such as electricity, the automobile, the airplane and the radio appeared in the last 70 years have if anything brought about an even more technological revolution in computing and electronics. Another example, for the longest time and essay stuck to a hard and fast rule that while it might be okay to talk about how we keep the germans and japanese in world war ii was absolutely forbidden to ever breathe the hand that the u. S. Had ever listened in on the communications of the nation that was not actually at war with. This included france during world war ii. We were monitoring their communications and even japan before world war ii. I was very puzzled in the course of my research for this book when i started reading and nsa study on signal intelligence during the vietnam war that was released not too long ago. I saw that they had repeatedly cut out from the classified version of what were apparently references to dates with u. S. Intelligence gathering operations in southeast asia. I was wondering what are the dates and why did they cut this out . A few years later in response to an appeal that was filed by someone at will less extricated version was released and lo and behold it turned out that nsa censors had gone through the first time around and carefully sniffed out anything that might give away the shocking and highly damaging secret that the United States was monitoring north Vietnamese Communications before the year 1961 which was when the first u. S. Soldiers stepped foot there. You have ever seen one of these extricated or socalled adaptive classified documents its a sight to behold. They used to have some guy in the declassification literally armed with a magic marker would go through and cross out anything that was still classifiable. This of course is all very scary looking and sometimes the whole page would be completely black. Now thanks to the wonders of modern technology they have nice tasteful why did out boxes with soul rolls around them. The result either way is enough to drive a researcher to distraction. You know you keep thinking of coi have something great in my hands and you find every other word has been chopped out and its like trying to solve it crossword puzzle created by some demented version of wills shorts or something. For a while i kept a collection of some of the more wondrous worth back to documents i received and theres one i dont have anymore but there was this one sentence that read Something Like blank was the most blank sources of blank during the period blank to blank and i thought okay someone worked hard at this one. Okay, nonetheless i have some small triumphs. Sometimes the same document with the reviewed for release by two different agencies or even to people in the same agency at slightly different times. Each move had different ideas about which 65 eutzy good would imperil our nations security. In one report from 1950 the reviewer cut out the locations of the u. S. Intercept stations picking up soviet radar signals that left in their radio frequencies they were operating on. In another dig us by version of the exact same document another nsa reviewer this time cut out the frequencies but left in the locations. Then there was one historical study for which the d class office had carefully cut out most of the entries from a table showing numbers of u. S. And british cryptanalyst working on russian codes from 1948 to 1949 but they left uncensored and accompanied statement in the text describing the percentage increase of some of the missing figures. This ended up providing two operations and to variables which i was happy to deal with put my Junior High School algebra ii use solving. Let me speak about what i was able to find out from the swiss cheese collection of archival materials. Following the great triumph of u. S. British codebreaking in world war ii they quickly became apparent that codebreaking and signals intelligence was going to continue to be a crucially important source and emerging cold war struggle like the soviet union. The paranoia, internal security measures, seal borders and extreme secrecy of soviet society made conventional espionage extremely difficult if not impossible. Even the most basic facts about the soviet government organizations, the countrys economy and the military were considered state secrets under stalins regime. In the early years of the cold war the cia was optimistically dropping agents behind the iron curtain would later be learned that her chilly 100 of them were immediately captured, shot or against the west. The only thing you are proving by parachuting agents into soviet controlled one army agent told the chief in berlin was the law of gravity. Well the soviets development of their atomic 1949 gave signal intelligence a greater urgency as signals were almost the only source that could detect military preparations within the soviet union that might signal an imminent soviet attack. The huge challenge and exploiting the source was that in november of 1948 the soviets abruptly instituted a sweeping chordata changed and all of their military code systems and it was such an Unprecedented Development that washington and london if we feared that this itself was an indication that the soviets were about to launch a military attack. The new soviet code system proved far more challenging than anything the u. S. British code breakers had finished before and indeed most of the highlevel soviet codes remained unbroken probably until 1979 when supercomputers and it didnt spent what one nsa paper refer to is the height of american cryptologic success of the cold war around the time of the invasion of the afghanistan. Throughout the cold war and roughly five year intervals and essay brought in out side panels leading mathematical and scientific experts to review the state of the russian problems and its solutions in these evaluations are almost nothing but a tale of woe and pessimism. 1958 the panel headed by the Vice President last concluded that quote no National Strategy should be based on the hope or expectation that we will be able to read, well the rest of the sentence was redacted by classification but it was obvious it was referring to highlevel soviet encrypted traffic. At one point in the 1950s and essay had 15 specialpurpose Computers Running nonstop for five years searching through 1 million intercepted soviet messages that had been enciphered and make machine called up out the trust trying to find any flaw that could be exploited and the project ended in failure. Incidentally whatever nsa successes or failures and breaking soviet codes one thing being questioned again im not saying this facetiously about at all but it provides a huge stimulus of u. S. Computer industry. The first magnetic drum memory, the first magnetic core memory the first highspeed the first all transistor computer and the first computer workstation and the first Desktop Computers first highspeed modems in the first Server Computers worth built to meet nsa contracts and requirements and only later made their way to the commercial market. One other consequence of this great difficulty in breaking soviet code was the reinforcement of nsa institutional belief that amassing sheer quantities of data could make up for a multitude of families elsewhere and this is the credo we have seen in action in a recent controversies over nsa bull telephone in Internet Data collection efforts. This belief in trying to get everything goes back even to the prensa days. He was really striking to me to come across memos written in 1943 by the u. S. Army and Navy Officials and charged and essay predecessor agencies and they were argued that their job literally was to get everyone to come as close as humanly possible as one official put it, to collecting every single transmitted by those associated with us and against us. This frequently led to nsa simply being overwhelmed with more intercepts than it received and even physically stored much less analyze. Even as early as 1955 and essay was receiving her to seven tons of paper printouts a month from intercept stations around the world along with 30 Million Words urgent traffic sent by radio teletype. It was not unusual for nsas machine section to punch a million ibm postcards a month on just a single problem and nsa resource sending or receiving 70 of all coded message traffic going into or out of washington. Yet on occasion quantity could indeed make up for quality. In the aftermath of the 1948 soviet changes that i mentioned that shut off the u. S. Ability to break highlevel soviet codes a huge effort was put in by nsa to go through plain language unemployed at cagle cables sent on internal radiograph. This was a real needle in the haystack effort to bed early early 50s and essay was processing 1. 3 million of these messages a month and of course as you can imagine most of them dealt with incredibly mundane things get by piecing together details about railcar loadings, coal supplies, Bank Accounts going to various state industries and the fan was working on the plain language cables were able to establish the locations of major arms factories and the soviet union, produce basic statistics on soviet steel, chemical and Oil Production available nowhere else at the time and for years the source provided the only reliable information on the soviet Atomic Weapons Program and the only reliable set of warning indicators that could signal soviet mobilizations for a full scale war. And later reading the plain language transmissions and other types of signals did not depend on codebreaking such as direction finding, fixes on r