On 30-31 October 2003, the NSA Center for Cryptologic History (CCH) hosted the biennial Symposium on Cryptologic History. This year’s Symposium, the ninth sponsored by NSA, was held at the Maritime Institute of Technology in Linthicum, MD, and attracted over 200 attendees from across the United States and several foreign countries, representing dozens of agencies and academic institutions.

The Symposium, the world’s premier on-going forum for presenting open research in cryptologic history, features speakers from several countries and disciplines – from NSA officials and veterans to prominent scholars and intelligence authors. Significant papers among the more than fifteen presented on 30-31 October included:

  • David Kahn speaking about how he wrote his famous work The Codebreakers;
  • Nigel West addressing the topic of VENONA eight years after the NSA declassification of that famous project;
  • John Ferris (Univ. of Calgary) and Colin Burke (Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County) offered revisionist perspectives on the role of cryptology in Allied victory in WWII;
  • Mr. William Black, NSA Deputy Director, promised additional declassifications of NSA materials, and presented a new package of declassified COMINT: MAGIC Diplomatic Summaries from 1946;
  • a first-ever presentation by two NSA scholars on the case of William Weisband, a cryptologic insider and Soviet spy who was perhaps the most damaging spy in American history.

The 2003 Symposium was a great success thanks to the hard work of many people at NSA and at the National Cryptologic Museum Foundation, and CCH thanks all those who made the event possible and noteworthy. The next Symposium on Cryptologic History is planned for Fall 2005 – look here for details.