Spooks in the Woods

In Cold War West Berlin in the early 1960s, it seemed that every third person you met was some sort of spy. These were the days before the Berlin Wall, when President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev were going head to head over the spread of Communism in Europe. It was also the days before computers, data banks, cell phones and the other electronic marvels that helped replace human intuition with automated surrogates.

In this rarified atmosphere, the National Security Agency (NSA) desperately needed well trained, highly intelligent operatives to intercept and analyze the communications of the Soviet Union and East Berlin.

They tapped into a well-established resource, the Army Security Agency, or ASA, to train and supply Electronic and Communications (ELINT and COMINT) Intelligence Specialists to intercept and monitor the electronic and voice communications between the Soviet Union and East Germany.