U.S. Air Force Security Service
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
The United States Air Force Security Service (often abbreviated USAFSS) was essentially the United States Air Force's intelligence branch; its motto was Freedom through Vigilance. It was created in October of 1948 and operated until 1979, when the branch was redesignated the Electronic Security Command (now the Air Intelligence Agency).
Composed primarily of airmen culled from the cream of the Air Force's enlisted recruits, the USAFSS was a secretive and tight-knit branch of Air Force cold warriors tasked with monitoring and interpreting military voice and electronic signals broadcast by former Eastern Bloc countries, primarily the Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Often, USAFSS intelligence was funneled to agents at the National Security Agency.
Individual airmen — stationed at locations scattered across the globe, ranging from Alaska to Berlin, Germany to North Africa — did a variety of jobs, almost all of them related to listening to and interpreting Eastern Bloc military communications. Some airmen were linguists who listened to Russian and Polish radio broadcasts, then translated them and evaluated them for their intelligence value. Others monitored Russian and Polish military Morse code broadcasts. Still others were cryptographers.
These jobs, which required top secret clearance, were extremely high pressure and were considered essential to U.S. cold war efforts. Members of the USAFSS were not allowed to discuss their jobs with outsiders — in fact, USAFSS members could not talk amongst themselves about their jobs unless they were in a secure location. Because of their value as targets (in Cold War Berlin, the capture of a USAFSS member was worth several thousand dollars), while stationed overseas their off-base travel was severely restricted. Many adopted "cover jobs" to more easily conceal their real work.
The activities of the USAFSS have only recently been declassified.
