Binary code: Mystery number one - стр. 4

Since the intelligence services are aware that they know everything about each other, there is an agreement on secret cooperation, but since everyone "puts a spoon in his mouth", everyone tried to hide something. For example, according to the treaty on the reduction of nuclear weapons, an intercontinental missile should have one charge, but in circumvention of this treaty several charges were placed. Naturally, the presence of systems affecting the nervous system, psyche and consciousness of a person was always concealed.

This is how Rutra, working as an analyst and then as head of the external center, spent several years. To hide it, everything was made up as business trips, errands, or just tourism. Sometimes he had to dispatch agents, to keep an eye on sites whose purpose he didn't think were important. For some reason they were important to the Center.

In fact, the bulk of information was obtained from open sources. In the West, it was easy to do this, you could even brazenly collect information under the guise of a good, professional activity. In Russia, especially in the USSR, for this, at best, you could be "sent to the zone". But there everything was simpler. For example, there was a case that Rutra was told about by his guru during his internship in the United States.

In the 1970s, law school graduate James Bamford was bored with practicing law, so he chose the profession of a reporter and worked as a detective in a private detective agency. The idea to write a book about the NSA came to the journalist in 1979, when he noticed that there are many books on the Central Intelligence Agency, but there is almost nothing about the National Security Agency.

In those days, the vast majority of Americans had no idea that such an intelligence agency existed. Nor had they heard of it at Houghton Mifflin, where Bamford approached with his proposal. However, the assertive reporter believed, gave an advance of 7,500 dollars and a term of three years. As Bamford later recalled, his legal education and experience as a detective helped him enormously in the process of writing The Palace of Mystery.

Bamford began his search by reading everything he could find about the NSA in public libraries. But that turned out to be negligible. Since data on NSA personnel and facilities were missing from official Pentagon directories, Bamford began digging up related reports and records of congressional hearings. In notes to the reports of Sen. Frank Church's committee investigating the intelligence community in the mid-1970s, Bamford found references to dozens of specific documents. These documents became the basis for his first three-page Freedom of Information Act-FOIA request to the NSA. It was immediately discovered that the NSA was almost entirely exempt from FOIA under an earlier law protecting the organization from any attempt to disclose its activities. So Bamford's first request was rejected outright.