ON A JUNE AFTERNOON in 1992, two cars pulled up to the curb at Albert I. Murphy's split-level home in Beltsville. Three men emerged, one carrying a black briefcase.
They greeted Mr. Murphy at the door and then quickly went to work on his computer in a first-floor bedroom.
After nearly 40 years with the National Security Agency, the Boston-born cryptographer planned to write about his exploits, from his involvement in the Cuban missile crisis to his legal tangles with an NSA bureaucracy he labeled "a paper-swirling myopic colossus."
Former spies are required to submit everything from speeches to manuscripts to the agency before publication.
And while Mr. Murphy already had deleted from his computer what the agency claimed was sensitive information, the NSA team was there to scrub every trace from the computer's hard drive so material could not be retrieved even by high-tech spies.
Slipping in a special floppy disk, one NSA security man began to target offending words, first zeroing in on a chapter title: "The Inept Soviet Cryptographer." He deleted the words "Soviet Cryptographer."
It was the final chapter in an effort that had begun three months earlier. In a bid to protect NSA's secrets, untold tax dollars were spent to turn NSA managers into literary editors.
Seated around a conference table at NSA's operations building at Fort Meade in March 1992, at least a half-dozen agency officials proceeded to reject huge portions of the book, although all of it concerned decades-old events. They reduced his manuscript to a patchwork of black marks.
An agency official even axed his tentative title: "NSA vs. The Kid From Roxbury."
Mr. Murphy now believes his proposed project will never win agency approval. "I have no intention of going ahead."
Author unearthed dossier spies had collected on him
IN 1982, AFTER AUTHOR James Bamford published his landmark book on NSA, "The Puzzle Palace," he filed a Freedom of Information Act request for any files the agency might have compiled on him. He was told there was nothing.
Then, on a hunch, he repeated the request, this time asking for files that used the code name Esquire, a mysterious notation he'd spotted on another document.
He hit the jackpot. NSA officials nervous about his research had assigned the code name to Mr. Bamford, a lawyer. Over many months, he received hundreds of sanitized Esquire-related documents showing that dozens of employees, up to the NSA director, attorney general and national security adviser, had been involved in discussions of what to do about "The Puzzle Palace" and its author.
