Puzzle place : America's national security agency and its special relationship with Britain's GCHQ

The National Security Agency, nicknamed the Puzzle Palace, is the most secret agency within the US Government. For many years, the government denied that it even existed-and, according to a Washington joke, the initials NSA stood for 'No Such Agency! It was established in 1952 not by law but by a top secret presidential memorandum that has been seen by only a very few officials. Yet it is many times larger than the CIA, spends billions more dollars annually, and its director is possibly the most powerful official in the American intelligence community.

In this, the first book on the NSA, James Bamford describes its origins, details its inner workings, and explores its far-flung operations a complex of electronic eavesdropping stations exercising round-the-clock surveillance on Russia's clandestine activities. This expanded edition of the American best-seller also contains full details of the British intercept organization known by the deliberately misleading name of Government Communications Headquarters based at Cheltenham in Gloucestershire and of Geoffrey Arthur Prime, the first known spy to be apprehended within GCHQ.