While America’s spies are shrouded in mystery, it appears they enjoy celebrating the holidays the same way as the rest of the us.
Ever since 2004, the National Security Agency (NSA) has held an internal design competition among its employees to craft each year’s annual holiday ornament.
Some, like 2016’s ‘Red, White and Blue’ Christmas present bow and 2024’s nutcracker, have leaned more into the full look and spirit of the holiday season.
Others, however, have celebrated the agency’s ‘cloak and dagger’ history, like 2019’s replica of the famous World War II encryption device, the ‘Enigma’ machine, and 2004’s haunting model of the NSA’s granite pyramid memorial to its fallen agents.
One NSA ornament from the 1990s even worked as a functional encryption and decryption device for encoding secret messages: NSA’s 1998 Cipher Disk ornament.
‘The Cipher Disk has been used for secure communications since its invention in Italy around the year 1470,’ a booklet that accompanied the gilded spy wheel explained.
‘The Cipher Disk came into widespread use in the US during the Civil War [and] about a half century later, the US Army adopted a simplified version of the disk.’
Even by ‘turn of the century’ standards, however, as this simplified version of the device saw deployment in World War I, the Cipher Disk only gave ‘a few hours of protection to tactical messages’ intercepted by America’s foes.
It’s unclear when the NSA’s ornament tradition officially began, as its National Cryptologic Museum declined multiple requests by DailyMail.com for comment.
‘We have nothing to offer you on this,’ a spokesman for the NSA’s National Cryptologic Museum told DailyMail.com when asked about the ornaments.
But former NSA network specialist Jeremy Duffy was more candid: ‘Some people complained about them being really cheap and badly designed some years.’
For example, as one eBay seller noted in their auction listing a golden ‘NSA satellite dish’ ornament, made in 2000: ‘The antenna has bends. See pics.’
But even as a strong agency critic today, Duffy still holds some of the NSA’s holiday decorations — like 2008’s etching of the NSA’s Fort Meade HQ — in high regard.
‘The ornament [was] top notch,’ he said.
While the NSA’s ornament design contest is a new 21st Century tradition at the agency, according to The Dallas Morning News, the annual holiday ornaments themselves stretch back at least a decade prior.
In his over a dozen years with the NSA, Duffy said the ornaments were treated like any other piece of company swag: meaning that opinions varied on their value.
‘Regarding the ornaments,’ he told DailyMail.com, ‘they were something some people liked to get and others didn’t care about.’
But that hasn’t stopped civilians from obsessing over the clandestine crafts, reveling in years worth of the NSA ‘Secret Santa’ holiday tchotchkes.
Vintage spycraft and memorabilia collector Richard Brisson, who runs the site ultrasecret.ca from Canada, suspects that the agency’s holiday ornaments included more than one each year in some years.
‘I believe there were many more ornaments (without assigned years) produced since the early 1990’s,’ Brisson told DailyMail.com via email.
His own collection goes only as far back as 1994, an NSA ‘snowflake’ ornament, but he’s seen a few undated ornaments — including an elaborate ‘filigreed star’ ornament similar to the 2009 edition, but with no date, and another undated ‘Peace’ and ‘Unity’ ornament possibly from 2014.
‘For 2014 […] I have been unable to find someone who can confirm the actual ornament for that year,’ Brisson said. ‘The one listed there has no year that I can find — unless it is sneakily encoded in some way!’
NSA historians revealed that the ultra-secretive spy agency began with an extremely meager, Scrooge-like Christmas holiday policy.
Starting in December 1952, the then-director of the NSA permitted only one tightly designated 1.5 hours between 3pm and 4:30pm on December 24th for any and all Christmas parties for the agency’s cryptographers, staff and field agent spooks.
Free Christmas trees were available for each unit, ‘flame-proofed prior to distribution,’ but had to be removed from the building promptly by 5:30pm on Christmas Eve, an hour after the short holiday party allotment.
By 1963, the NSA was offering its staff a ‘(whopping!) $0.25 per person, twice a year, toward the cost of a mid-season activity and a Christmas party,’ per the agency’s historians.
‘That might buy you, in 2018, one large bottle of iced tea in the Agency vending machine,’ this NSA history explained, ‘with three cents left over.’
Adding insult to injury, these miserly ‘Fun Funds’ had to be requested by filling out a special ‘Memorandum Request Form.’
These were years in which even the very existence of the NSA was hidden from the public — it wasn’t even until the post-Watergate era when Senate hearings not only that the NSA existed but that it was spying on Americans.
‘When I tried to do an on-camera report for CBS standing outside the NSA gate,’ journalist Daniel Schorr remembered of that era, ‘a US Marine warned me I would be shot if I didn’t go away.’
This year, almost 50 years later, the NSA has launched its own podcast, ‘No Such Podcast,’ titled after a play on the old joke about what its acronym stands for (‘No Such Agency’).
