Truman’s October 24, 1952 memo is now a public PDF of carbon paper

NSA does not make you take the origin story from a textbook. Its declassification page, titled Truman Memorandum, states the fact in one sentence: by memorandum of October 24, 1952, President Truman established the National Security Agency as the organization responsible for communications intelligence activities. The table under that sentence points at a single image, “Memorandum for the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, SUBJECT: Communications Intelligence Activities.”

The note above the file is the tell. NSA writes that these are PDF images of formerly classified carbon paper and reports that have been declassified, and that some of the images are in bad enough shape that a screen reader may not turn them into words. The agency gives a FOIA address, foianet@nsa.gov, and a public-affairs number, 443-634-0721, for anyone who needs the substance in another form. The secret is not that the memo existed. The secret, which the agency has now lifted on its own site, is that the founding order circulated as classified carbon.

On this register the department that houses NSA is the Department of War. The memorandum’s addressee line uses the title printed in 1952. This brief does not retype a classification banner or invent the day the public was first allowed to say the agency’s name. The page to read is the one that holds the image.

A publisher-desk brief of an NSA historical release. Not a signals-intelligence product, not a newspaper, and not Legal Publication.