Source: Col. Clayton C. Swears, Acting Chief Central Information Center, Production Organization, to [Excised] Central Intelligence Agency, 13 March 1972, Confidential, Excised copy Date: Mar 13, 1972 Collection: National Security Agency Tracking of U.S. Citizens – “Questionable Practices” from 1960s & 1970s Sep 25, 2017

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Editorial Analysis

Original analysis by the DriftSeas editorial desk. The complete primary-source document, transcribed from the National Security Archive scan, appears in full below.

A Microfilm Index for the Cold War’s Hidden Census

On 13 March 1972 Colonel Clayton C. Swears, acting chief of the NSA’s Central Information Center, sent a terse cover letter to an unnamed CIA official. The attachment was a set of nineteen microfilm reels titled the “Rhyming Dictionary, 1959‑1969 (Part II – Reverse Alpha Sort).” Far from a literary curiosity, the so‑called rhyming dictionary was in fact a master index of every personal name that had ever appeared in the agency’s non‑Soviet personality files during a decade of intense surveillance. The index listed each name alphabetically, noted the individual’s nationality, and even flagged Soviet‑sounding surnames for cross‑checking. In other words, the document was a compact census of the people the United States intelligence community deemed worth tracking.

The memo references an earlier hard‑copy delivery (22 volumes) and a forward‑alpha microfilm set sent in September 1971. Swears’ letter announces the completion of the reverse‑alpha set, which together with the forward set would allow the CIA to destroy the bulky paper copies. The note about “special handling” and the prohibition on foreign‑national access underscores the sensitivity of the underlying data – a trove of biographic details that, if exposed, could reveal the scope of domestic and foreign monitoring.

The Project Millstream Context

The letter’s marginal annotation mentions “Project Millstream,” a 1970 initiative in which the CIA assumed responsibility for biographic information support to the NSA. Under Millstream, the CIA received duplicate copies of the NSA’s “Rhyming Dictionary Master Index.” This collaboration was part of a broader, often clandestine, data‑sharing architecture that linked the nation’s signals‑intelligence, human‑intelligence, and analytical arms. By the early 1970s, the NSA’s massive accumulation of personal identifiers—derived from intercepted communications, mail opens, and other surveillance methods—had outgrown its filing capacity. Microfilming offered a space‑saving solution and, crucially, a way to standardize the data for inter‑agency use.

The timing is significant. In 1970, the Pentagon Papers had begun to erode public trust, and congressional inquiries into intelligence overreach were on the horizon. The decision to produce a fully microfilmed index reflects both a pragmatic need to manage data and a strategic desire to keep the intelligence community’s “personality” files—essentially a pre‑digital big data set—under tighter, more controllable custody.

What the Index Reveals About Surveillance Priorities

While the letter does not enumerate any names, its structure tells us a great deal. The inclusion of Soviet surnames alongside non‑Soviet ones indicates the NSA’s attempt to flag potential espionage links within a broader pool of subjects. The fact that the index covers a full decade, including the turbulent years of the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and the anti‑war protests, suggests that the agency was systematically cataloguing activists, journalists, and perhaps ordinary citizens whose communications intersected with known foreign intelligence targets.

The document’s emphasis on “unique occurrences” implies that the NSA was not merely collecting repeated mentions of high‑profile individuals but was also cataloguing one‑off references—an early form of what modern analysts would call “signal‑to‑noise” filtering. The microfilm’s technical specifications (Stromberg Datagraphix 4060 Recordex, 3M Filmac “4000” reader‑printer) reveal an investment in ensuring the data could be accessed quickly by analysts, reinforcing the operational value placed on this index.

Legacy and Contemporary Relevance

The microfilm index survived the 1975 Church Committee hearings that exposed many NSA and CIA abuses, largely because it was classified as a technical product rather than a policy document. Yet its existence confirms that the United States built, in the pre‑digital era, a sophisticated system for aggregating personal data across agencies—a precursor to today’s big‑data surveillance programs.

Understanding this memo helps explain why modern debates over bulk data collection often invoke the “NSA personality files” as a historical antecedent. The same logic—centralizing disparate bits of personal information to create a searchable index—underpins contemporary programs like the NSA’s bulk telephony metadata collection and the CIA’s use of commercial data brokers. The 1972 microfilm set is a tangible reminder that the architecture of mass surveillance was not invented in the internet age; it was engineered, catalogued, and shared decades earlier under the veil of Cold‑War secrecy.

Bottom Line

Colonel Swears’ March 1972 letter is more than a logistics note; it is a window onto a hidden bureaucracy that sought to compress a decade’s worth of personal surveillance into a compact, sharable format. The document illustrates how inter‑agency data‑sharing projects like Millstream laid the groundwork for the integrated intelligence databases that continue to shape privacy debates today.

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