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News & Features > National Cryptologic Museum |
National Cryptologic Museum Offers Peek at Cold War Technologyby Pete Sypher, Scanner Editor An interesting place to spend a half day on a hot Saturday this summer is the National Cryptologic Museum on a corner of Fort George G. Meade near Laurel, Maryland. The museum is in Building 9900 of Fort Meade, but there are no guards or checkpoints to pass when visiting the museum. Anyone with an interest in radio communications, cryptography, code breaking, or the picket flights we made during the Cold War will enjoy this museum. Many of the displays, and the special aircraft at the adjacent National Vigilance Park, involve the reception of radio signals. Interception and radio direction finding go back to World War I days, as shown by the then state-of-the-art receiver in the “direction-finding tractor.” There is a wall display on the Zimmermann Telegram, in which the Imperial German Foreign Minister proposed an alliance with Japan and Mexico during WWI. The promised reward for Mexico was the return of part of the American Southwest. There is a lot of electronic equipment for code-breaking intercepted signals, dating from World War II days. The German Enigma and Japanese Purple encryption/decryption devices are on display with explanatory materials. Our actions in both the European and Pacific theaters of WWII were greatly aided by our interception and code breaking of radio and cable traffic. The outcome of the naval Battle of Midway depended on our code-breaking efforts. You can see a movie about this battle and the role of code breaking in a small theater in the museum. The museum, opened December 1993, is one result of an attempt to “demythologize” the National Security Agency (NSA). In the past, NSA was shrouded in almost complete secrecy. In the post-Cold War era, some revelation of NSA’s activities was thought to be in the best interests of the agency, particularly with congressional appropriations in mind. The museum is a creation of NSA, with some assistance from the Smithsonian. The display quality and interpretation of the museum’s holdings equal or exceed the Smithsonian’s. The museum has a good audio tour available. By stopping at the gift shop and surrendering your driver’s license, you get a “porta-phone” that has over 60 topics, selectable by a keypad. Exhibits include a Cray supercomputer, mass-storage devices, and many encryption-decryption devices. These include the venerable KY-3 and the KW-7, and more recent crypto boxes, such as the KG-27, KG-81, KG-84, KG-85, KY-57, KY-65/75, KY-99, KY-100, the HY-2 vocoder, and the currently used STU-III. I would venture to say that there are many current and former workers in communication security in our membership who could show their families the crypto boxes they used or installed. Other displays feature espionage and aerial reconnaissance, and honor those who lost their lives flying in the vicinity of the totalitarian countries during the Cold War. The museum has a library, and you are free to wander through the stacks. Near the entrance are free pamphlets on cryptography, the KGB, aerial reconnaissance and the role of women in cryptography. Near the old motel building housing the museum is National Vigilance Park. A footpath winds though a wooded area between the museum and the park. Three aircraft are on display, a RU-8D, a C-130 Hercules, and an EA-3B. The Army RU-4D is a modified Beechcraft L-23D twin-engine piston plane with a vertical dipole antenna on each wing, and the C-130A had an extensive suite of radio interception equipment aboard. The Navy EA-3B Skywarrior played a role in the Navy's secret reconnaissance war against the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries. The museum's hours are 9:00 am to 4:00 pm Monday through Friday, and 10:00 am to 2:00 pm on the first and third Saturdays of each month. The museum is closed on all federal holidays. It is behind the Shell station at the northeastern corner of the intersection of Maryland Route 32 and the Baltimore-Washington Parkway (Route 295). Admission is free. The museum's website can be viewed at www.nsa.gov/museum. Return to eScanner News index. Please send meeting announcements, corrections and comments
Updated 7/29/05 |