After 30 Years of Silence, the Original NSA Whistleblower Looks Back

[WilliamPitt]

After 30 Years of Silence, the Original NSA Whistleblower Looks Back
By Adrian Chen

The four-story brownstone at 141 East 37th Street in Manhattan has no remarkable features: a plain building on a quiet tree-lined street in the shadow of the Empire State Building. In the summer of 1920, Herbert O. Yardley, a government codebreaker, moved in with a gang of math geniuses and began deciphering intercepted Japanese diplomatic telegrams. This was the Black Chamber, America's first civilian code-breaking agency. From this was born the American surveillance state, and eventually the sprawling National Security Agency, which you may have heard about recently.

I was standing on the sidewalk outside the building, on a sweltering summer Friday afternoon, waiting to meet a man named Perry Fellwock, also once known as Winslow Peck. Four decades ago, Fellwock became the NSA's first whistleblower, going to the press to explain the spy agency's immense scope and mission to a public that had barely been allowed to know such an organization existed. His revelations in the radical magazine Ramparts were picked up by the front page of the New York Times. He went on to be a key player in the turbulent anti-surveillance movement of the 1970s, partnering with Norman Mailer and becoming the target of CIA propaganda. But today he's a semi-retired antiques dealer living in Long Island, as obscure as the Black Chamber once was.

The old Black Chamber site was my suggestion. It was my third attempt to meet Fellwock. He insisted on meeting on neutral ground, and kept canceling. Now I stood on the sidewalk, memorizing the pattern of splotches on the globe lantern above the brownstone's door, trying my best not to look like a spy. An elderly man walked by, and I watched him, half-expecting he'd circle back after scoping out the area. Fellwock had already demonstrated he'd be wary enough to do this.

He did not trust journalists. "If you go back to the Church Committee, you'll find that many, many of your colleagues worked for the intelligence agencies," he told me over the phone. He spoke deliberately, in a warm, authoritative-sounding Midwestern baritone, like a documentary narrator. "I believe that you're honest, but who knows about the people in your office? Who knows about your boss, what kind of deals he's doing?"

The rest: http://gawker.com/after-30-years-of-silence-the-original-nsa-whistleblow-1454865018/

Amazing read.

[Blue_Tires]

1. k+r

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

2. K & R. nt

[riderinthestorm]

3. Bookmarking. Fascinating article. Thanks Will!

Edited to add the breathtaking Mailer quote that the CIA is really a white Christian Protestant organization manufacturing evil doers for the rich elites to keep the MIC going.

That it was communists in his day. Islam today.

[snot]

4. K&R'd!

[truedelphi]

5. Hope to see another few hundred

K and R's for this article.

[WillyT]

6. K & R !!!

[rhett o rick]

7. k&r thanks for posting. nm

[WilliamPitt]

8. Up