You.

NSA. NSA. NSA. Few acronyms can evoke so much awe, so much fear. ISIS maybe, or CCP, or YMCA.

Ah, that song haunts my nightmares.

The NSA is worthy of just about every adjective

denoted to it over the years.

But it wasn't always a big and scarier place

as it is today.

In fact, it wasn't always that important. The organization was formally

established just six weeks after a bug was uncovered in the US Ambassador's office in Moscow, a story

we described in detail on episode 17 of our show.

The thing, as it was affectionately named, was a listening device so sneakily

hidden inside a large wooden plaque that it hung in that Ambassador's office undetected for nearly seven years. You're going to be. Hi and welcome to malicious life in collaboration with Cybarism.

I'm Ren Levy.

The NSA wasn't created because of the thing, but these two events coincided in a convenient way. The new NSA was tasked with organizing the U.S. government's cryptologic capabilities,

particularly with regards to communications security.

That meant, for example, securing communications at embassies abroad.

So when in the mid-1960s, the US and USSR began to make plans for building new embassies in each other's respective

capitals, this new organization was well positioned to comment.

A high-ranking NSA official wrote to the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow, quote,

In past Soviet building activity, in to quote unquote fix the materials and construction.

Experience has shown that some of the fixes can only be found by extensive destruction.

In the case of the Moscow site, every attempt should be made to use U.S. building materials and construction personnel.

...