By Adrian Chen. This article was first published on Gawker. The four-story brownstone at 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 , Herbert O. Yardley, a government codebreaker, moved in with a gang of math geniuses and began deciphering intercepted Japanese diplomatic telegrams.
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. 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 s, partnering with Norman Mailer and becoming the target of CIA propaganda. 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. He did not trust journalists. He spoke deliberately, in a warm, authoritative-sounding Midwestern baritone, like a documentary narrator.
He was a participant in the deadly international fencing match that goes on daily with the Soviet Union, plotting their air and ground forces and penetrating their defenses.
Quite a few people in NSA are into illegal activities of one kind or another. You know, enhancing your pocketbook. People inside NSA got involved with the slave trade. Here was the same self-assurance, bordering on arrogance, that was coming from Snowdenβthe urgency of an oath broken in the name of some more essential principle. What had happened to Fellwock to make him turn to Ramparts , and what happened after?
