FORT MEADE, Md. — Even in a cavernous secret warehouse filled floor to ceiling with thousands of unique items, a mammoth cryptologic machine — its black paint long faded from decades of hiding away — stands out.
The machine is strikingly taller and wider than nearly all of the other National Cryptologic Museum (NCM) artifacts stored inside NSA’s 281,000-square-foot storage facility, which is located just a few miles from NSA headquarters. While its aging paper tag, illegible and falling apart, provides zero hints to the history behind the mysterious box, it’s the words, etched in colorless letters on the face of the machine that have the museum staff most eager to crack its code.