The first book ever written on the National Security Agency from the New York Times bestselling author of Body of Secrets and The Shadow Factory. In this groundbreaking, award-winning book, James Bamford traces the NSA's origins, details its inner workings, and explores its far-flung operations. He describes the city of fifty thousand people and nearly twenty buildings that is the Fort Meade headquarters of the NSA-where there are close to a dozen underground acres of computers, where a significant part of the world's communications are monitored, and where reports from a number of super-sophisticated satellite eavesdropping systems are analyzed. He also gives a detailed account of NSA's complex network of listening posts-both in the United States and throughout much of the rest of the world. When a Soviet general picks up his car telephone to call headquarters, when a New York businessman wires his branch in London, when a Chinese trade official makes an overseas call, when the British Admiralty urgently wants to know the plans and movements of Argentina's fleet in the South Atlantic-all of these messages become NSA targets. James Bamford's illuminating book reveals how NSA's mission of Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) has made the human espionage agent almost a romantic figure of the past. Winner Best Investigative Book of the Year Award from Investigative Reporters & Editors "The Puzzle Palace has the feel of an artifact, the darkly revealing kind. Though published during the Reagan years, the book is coolly subversive and powerfully prescient."-The New Yorker "Mr. Bamford has emerged with everything except the combination to the director's safe."-The New York Times Book Review