Date

Sep 26, 1975

Description

For his testimony before the Church Committee a month later, Tracy prepared a detailed preliminary statement on the Rhyming Dictionary and the name files. In the statement, Tracy said that the Rhyming Dictionary "directly supported SIGINT production by enabling the cryptanalyst to: (a) identify or verify partially known elements of the text such as names of personalities; (b) recover possible verbatim texts; or (c) interpret code or cipher traffic from significant background information."

According to Tracy, during 1959-1973 the dictionary included 1,667,396 names of which 73,141 were U.S. personalities. The files on U.S. names in the dictionary took up 8-10 filing cabinets, whose contents were destroyed in October 1974, "as a matter of economy and reduction of space." In one of the interviews, however, Tracy acknowledged that his "office chief, Mr. Welday," ordered the destruction and he did not know why

Document published in following posting(s):

National Security Agency Tracking of U.S. Citizens – “Questionable Practices” from 1960s & 1970s

Sep 25, 2017