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The View From the Summits
I did over half of my Air Force hitch in USAF Security Service, which in those days was the USAF branch of the National Security Agency. It was our job to hoover up as much radio traffic from the other side of the Iron Curtain and near the battlefields of the proxy wars as we could get. Then we had to translate the untreated sludge and prepare reports that the generals could hand to the civilians running the show.
The Pueblo, that Navy vessel that got grabbed by North Korea in 1968, was part of the Navy branch of NSA. It was there to put the Big Ear on North Korea.
Our mission meant that USAF had some really wonderful assignments on the translation and report writing side — Hawaii, Germany, the UK — -and some less wonderful assignments on the Big Ear side. There was a listening station in Alaska reachable only by dog sled or snowmobile. This was many years before we could deputize Sarah Palin to run the Big Ear from her front porch in Wasilla. Then there was the assignment I drew to a little listening post north of Da Nang so close to the DMZ the Big Ear could pick it up if Ho Chi Minh farted in his sleep.
I’ve still got pals in the business and I got the transcript you are about to see from a NSA source. There is only one side of the conversation because I’m told all the classified stuff is on the other side. Even though the email that brought…
