23 October 1997
Source:
http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/aces/aaces002.html
[Congressional Record: October 22, 1997 (Senate)]
[Page S10996-S10997]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
[DOCID:cr22oc97-150]
RETIREMENT OF WILLIAM P. CROWELL
<bullet> Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, the National Security Agency has
recently lost to retirement its deputy director, William P. Crowell. As
David Kahn has recently written in Newsday, Mr. Crowell has taken NSA
and ``brought the super-secret spy organization into its public, post-
Cold War posture.'' For too long, we have been learning our cold war
history from Soviet Archives. Bill Crowell set about to change that at
the National Security Agency. He directed the establishment of the
National Cryptologic Museum, which I have visited and commend to my
colleagues, and helped to make public the hugely important VENONA
project.
The VENONA intercepts comprise over 2,000 coded Soviet diplomatic
messages between Moscow and its missions in North America. The NSA and
its predecessors spent some four decades decoding what should have been
an unbreakable Soviet code. Led by Meredith Gardner, these
cryptanalysts painstakingly decoded these messages word by word. They
would then pass on the decoded messages to the FBI, which conducted
extensive investigations to determine the identities of the Soviet
agents mentioned in the messages. The resulting VENONA decrypts detail
the Soviet espionage effort in the United States during and after the
Second World War.
We need access to much more of this type of information. Not only
does VENONA allow us to learn our history, but in releasing it to the
public, not insignificant gaps in the government's knowledge of this
material are being filled. For instance, the identity of one of the
major atomic spies at Los Alamos was recently discovered by clever
journalists using the published VENONA messages. Joseph Albright and
Marcia Kunstel of Cox News and, working independently, Michael Dobbs of
The Washington Post, identified the agent codenamed MLAD as Theodore
Alvin Hall, a 19-year-old physicist working at Los Alamos. Hall
provided crucial details of the design of the atomic bomb which enabled
the Soviet Union to develop a replica of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
Bill Crowell recognized the historic value of VENONA and played an
important role in getting this material released, along with Dr. John
M. Deutch, and with the gentle prodding of the Commission on Protecting
and Reducing Government Secrecy. Mr. Crowell should receive a medal for
his work.
Mr. Crowell retires after a long career of government service. He
served as a senior executive of the National Security Agency for 17
years. He was appointed Deputy Director of the agency by the President
in 1994. In addition to his work which has already been described, Mr.
Crowell has worked in recent years to help craft a responsible
Administration policy regarding encryption technology. I ask to have
the article by David Kahn in Newsday, which announces his retirement
and highlights some of his accomplishments, printed in the Record. I
salute Mr. Crowell for his dedicated service and wish him well in his
future pursuits.
The article follows:
[From Newsday, Oct. 6, 1997]
National Security Official Retires--Helped Refocus Agency's Aims
(By David Kahn)
The National Security Agency has said goodbye to its
retiring deputy director, who largely brought the super-
secret spy organization into its public, post-Cold War
posture.
William P. Crowell was the force behind the establishment
of the National Cryptologic Museum, which exhibits what had
been some of the nation's deepest secrets; the revelation of
the VENONA project, which broke Soviet spy codes early in the
Cold War; and the National Encryption Policy, which seeks to
balance personal privacy with national security.
Succeeding Crowell will be Barbara McNamara, who, like
Crowell, is a career employee of the agency, which breaks
foreign codes and makes American Codes for the United States
government.
McNamara is the second female deputy director of the
agency. The first, Ann Z. Caracristi, who served from 1980 to
1982, is the sister of the late Newsday photographer Jimmy
Caracristi.
More than 500 present and past members of the agency
attended Crowell's recent retirement ceremony at its glossy,
triple-fenced headquarters at Fort Meade, Md. They applauded
as he was presented with awards for his intelligence and
executive services and with a folded American flag that had
flow over the agency.
[[Page S10997]]
They laughed as a picture, claimed to be his retirement
portrait, was unveiled: It was a photograph of Crowell,
notorious for his love of motorcycles, astride his fancy
bike. During his acceptance speech, Crowell choked up when he
thanked his wife, Judy, a former agency employee and fellow
motorcyclist, for her help.
The agency director, Air Force Lt. Gen. Kenneth Minihan,
recited some of the administrative landmarks of Crowell's
career.
Crowell, 58, a native of Louisiana, began in New York City
in 1962 as an agency recruiter. In 1969, when he sought an
assignment to operations, he became instead an executive
assistant to the then-director. He eventually got to
operations, where he rose to be chief of W group, whose
function remains secret, and then chief of A group, which
focused on the then-Soviet Union. After a year in private
industry, he rose through other posts to the deputy
directorship on Feb. 2, 1994.
Among his organizational accomplishments were conceiving a
crisis action center and linking the agency with other
producers of intelligence to improve information exchange.
His more public initiatives included the museum and the
VENONA disclosures, which sought to maintain public support
for the agency after the disappearance of the Soviet Union.
The National Encryption Policy seeks to enable the agency to
read the messages of terrorists and international criminals
who use computer-based, unbreakable ciphers while enabling
individuals to use good cryptosecurity to preserve such
rights as security on the Internet.<bullet>
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