The Puzzle Palace

 by

James Bamford

Houghton Mifflin Company

 1982 1st Edition

 Hardcover with dust jacket 465 Pages

very good condition 

Binding is solid and square

Pages clean and unmarked

Book has maroon cloth boards and spine with gold lettering on spine

Dust jacket ha as little edgewear/shelfwear

The book the NSA tried to suppress

The National Security Agency is the largest, most secretive, and potentially most intrusive American intelligence agency. It dwarfs the CIA in budget, manpower, and influence. In the three decades it has existed, the NSA has demonstrated a shocking disregard for the law.

Until now, the inner workings of this agency have eluded public scrutiny. In this remarkable tour de force of investigative reporting, however, James Bamford penetrates the NSA's vast network of power-the acres of computers, the electronic listening posts worldwide, the intelligence-gathering satellites, and the people who control them.

The Puzzle Palace is a brilliant account of the use and abuse of technological espionage and of the frightening Orwellian potential of today's intelligence communities.

It is the most secret agency within the United States Government. For many years, the government denied that it even existed (and, according to a Washington joke, the initials NSA stood for "No Such Agency"). It was established not by law but by a top secret presidential memorandum that has been seen by only a very few officials. Yet it is many times larger than the CIA, spends many billions of dollars more per year, and its director is possibly the most powerful official in the American intelligence community. It is the National Security Agency.

In the three decades since President Truman secretly created the agency in 1952, the NSA has managed to elude publicity to an extraordinary degree. Now, in the first book ever written on the National Security Agency, James Bamford traces its origins, details its inner workings, and explores its far-flung operations.
He describes the city of fifty thousand people and nearly twenty buildings that is the Fort Meade headquarters of the NSA—where there are close to a dozen underground acres of computers, where a significant part of the world's communications are monitored, and where reports from a number of supersophisticated satellite eavesdropping systems are analyzed. He also gives a detailed account of NSA's complex network of listening posts—both in the United States and throughout much of the rest of the world.

When a Soviet general picks up his car telephone to call headquarters, when a New York businessman wires his branch in London, when a Chinese trade official makes an overseas call, when the British Admiralty urgently wants to know the plans and movements of Argentina's fleet in the South Atlantic—all of these messages become NSA targets. James Bamford's illuminating book reveals how NSA's mission of Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) has made the human espionage agent almost a romantic figure of the past.

JAMES BAMFORD holds a Juris Doctor degree and specializes in investigative writing. He lives in Natick, Massachusetts.

Front jacket photograph of Menwith Hill installation by Peter Dunne, The Sunday Times of London.

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