[ index | 1970 ]

Louis William Tordella

NSA vice director: August 1958 - April 21, 1974

[The period 1958-1974] can be only described as the reign of Dr. Louis Tordella, who ran the Puzzle Palace for sixteen years as seven DIRNSA appointees came and went. Never before or since has any one person held so much power for so long time within the American intelligence community. Yet even withing that community, he managed to remain a man hidden in shadows.

Louis William Tordella was born on May Day, 1911, in the small Indiana town of Garrett. His university was Loyola in Chicago, where he excelled in math and chemistry, took a master's degree, and became a member of the faculty after getting his doctorate at the University of Illinois. When he joined the Navy in 1942, just after Pearl Harbor, he was assigned to cryptologic duties, and he ended the war as Lieutenant Commander Tordella, commanding officer of the Navy Security Group listening post on Skaggs Island, California. It was a short step to a Navy Department job in Washington, where Tordella helped develop operational policy for the Armed Forces Security Agency and, later, blueprints for the future NSA.

From the very beginning, Tordella was the golden boy of the Puzzle Palace. He was the first employee selected to attend the National War College in 1953-1954. The next year, he represented NSA as senior liaison officer with the Office of the Secretary of Defense. In August 1958, Tordella was appointed to succeed Engstrom in the highest civilian job in NSA. That year he was forty-seven, and he was the youngest NSA deputy director to date.

Undoubtedly one of Tordella's greatest contributions to the Agency was a massive research and development program to advance the computer capabilities of both SIGINT and COMSEC. When Tordella cut the ceremonial ribbon on Harvest in 1962, he had brought to NSA what was then "the world's largest computing system."

Another major contribution was simply continuity. As a parade of directors came and went, serving an NSA tour en route to retirement or another assignment, Tordella stayed on, a familiar presence, reassuring the British, Canadians, and other cooperating governments that the fragile, supersensitive relations between NSA and it's foreign counterparts would not be disrupted. General Carter later remarked about his D/DIRNSA that "to [Tordella], the director was a transient," and Tordella's main worry was "Let's don't let him screw up the operation."

When Tordella retired in 1974, he was laden with honors. CIA director William Colby presented him with the CIA's Distinguished Intelligence Medal, and Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger awarded him the highest intelligence decoration of all, the National Security Medal. After his retirement, he stayed on as a sort of cryptologist emeritus and consultant. (pp.120-121)

-- James Bamford: THE PUZZLE PALACE, 1982.

[ index | 1969 ]