Baltimore Sun

The super-secret National Security Agency, traditionally reluctant to share its code-breaking secrets, is joining a new, highly classified social network that links its analysts for the first time with thousands of colleagues at other U.S. intelligence agencies.

Gone are what used to be those rock-solid paradigms of intelligence: providing information only to those who need to know and limiting access to locked, specialized “compartments.”

Until now, a Pentagon analyst working on Afghanistan, for instance, might not know about highly sensitive NSA intercepts of opium smugglers discussing payoffs to Taliban insurgents.

For those struggling for answers within their own compartments and agencies, “it was tough noogies,” said Maj. Gen. John DeFreitas, chief of analysis for the NSA.

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Starting this month, NSA analysts will be able to post their photo, phone number and e-mail address on a secure, Facebook-like page accessible only to senior analysts at 16 other U.S. intelligence agencies. They will be able to search databases, post drafts of reports for comment or send around perplexing intercepts with a note that says, “Anybody have any idea what this means?”

They will be able to collaborate with analysts at the FBI, the State Department or the Defense Intelligence Agency working on similar problems, and they will be able to identify an expert with knowledge they lack. And, like any teenager, they can use the system to text-message suggestions, tips and professional gossip.

The system was launched quietly last fall by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the civilian secretariat that oversees all of the nation’s spy agencies. But it has taken the National Security Agency until now to swallow hard and join in.

“It breaks every policy they have,” said Michael Wertheimer, chief technology officer for the Director of National Intelligence and a Columbia resident who was the driving force behind the initiative. “But the leadership gets it.”

This highly secure network, called A-Space (the “A” is for analysts), was born from the recognition that the nation’s intelligence agencies held pieces of puzzles that no one was able to assemble quickly, if at all.