2023/10/17 by David C. Easter · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Eastern European Communism and Reforms #Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics #Intelligence, Security, War Strategy
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/02684527.2023.2269512
openalex publication_date 2023/10/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/03/09
From 1944 the State Department attempted to improve its communications security by creating a Division of Cryptography and mechanising the encryption process.This article assesses the effectiveness of these reforms and shows that State's new cipher equipment had cryptographic vulnerabilities.Moreover, the department was unable to maintain physical security at the Moscow embassy and through espionage and technical surveillance the KGB broke the ciphers and read American communications.The paper concludes by analysing the impact of this security failure, including the claim that intercepted messages influenced Stalin's decision to approve the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950.It has been well established that in the first four decades of the 20th century the State Department struggled to keep its correspondence secret.David Kahn and Christopher Andrew have shown that the department had weak codes and feeble physical and personnel security. 1Communications security appeared not to be a priority for the department; Daniel Larsen recently examined cultural attitudes towards secrecy and diplomacy in the State Department during the Wilson administration and found that at the start of the First World War State exhibited 'virtually no concern for the quality of its codes or the confidentiality of its communications'. 2The United States was in effect conducting open diplomacy, with other great powers like Russia, France and Britain able to read American diplomatic telegrams.Even in the inter-war period, State Department cryptography was small scale and inert.The head of the Division of Communications and Records was responsible for creating and maintaining all of State's cryptographic systems, and codes and ciphers were updated or replaced very infrequently. 3 What has not been studied is whether State Department communications security noticeably improved with the coming of the Cold War.This lack of attention is probably due to the difficulty of accessing sources since many of the relevant documents of the State Department and the National Security Agency (NSA) are still classified, making research on the post-1945 period challenging.However, some of the secrecy was lifted in 2015 when the NSA released over 50,000 pages of official documents formerly held by the American cryptologist William Friedman. 4There remain gaps in the historical record but with this material it is possible for the first time to trace the development of State Department communications security in the early Cold War.So drawing on the Friedman archive, as well as other sources, this article will assess how effectively the State Department protected its communications between 1944