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198 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

of the communications of its adversaries. Even though the Cold War
had been declared over after the collapse of the Soviet Union a quar-
ter of a century earlier, the age-old enterprise of espionage did not
end with it. Russia and China still sought to blunt the edge that the
NSA gave the United States. The Snowden breach therefore needs to
be considered in the context of the once and future intelligence war.

The modern enterprise of reading the communications of other
nations traces back in the United States to military code-breaking
efforts preceding America’s entry into World War I. The invention
of the radio at the end of the nineteenth century soon provided the
means of rapidly sending and getting messages from ships, subma-
rines, ground forces, spies, and embassies. These over-the-air mes-
sages could also be intercepted from the ether by adversaries. If they
were to remain secret, they could not be sent in plain text. They
had to be sent in either code, in which letters are substituted for one
another, or, more effectively, a cipher, in which numbers are sub-
stituted for letters. Making and breaking codes and ciphers became
a crucial enterprise for nations. By 1914, the U.S. Army and Navy
had set up units, staffed by mathematicians, linguists, and crossword
puzzle solvers, to intercept and decode enemy messages. After the
war had ended in 1918, these units were fused into a cover corpora-
tion called the Code Compilation Company, which moved to new
offices on Thirty-Seventh Street and Madison Avenue in New York
City.

Under the supervision of the famous cryptographer Herbert O.
Yardley, a team of twenty code breakers was employed in what was
called the Black Chamber. Yardley arranged for Western Union,
which had the telegraph monopoly in America, to provide the Black
Chamber with all the telegrams coming into the United States. “Its
far-seeking eyes penetrate the secret conference chambers at Wash-
ington, Tokyo, London, Paris, Geneva, Rome,” Yardley wrote about
the Black Chamber. “Its sensitive ears catch the faintest whispering
in the foreign capitals of the world.” But in 1929, at the instructions
of President Herbert Hoover, Secretary of State Henry Stimson
closed the Black Chamber, saying famously, “Gentlemen should not
read each other’s mail.”

The moratorium did not last long. With war looming in Asia and

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