1961
The NSA purges 26 employees as “sexual deviates”
On July 29, 1961, The New York Times ran the headline “U.S. Security Unit Ousts 26 Deviates.” The National Security Agency had dismissed twenty-six employees as sexual deviates, adding the clarification that not all of them were homosexuals - a sentence that tells you exactly how elastic the category was, and how little evidence was required to be placed inside it.
The purge had a cause. The previous summer, two NSA cryptologists, William Martin and Bernon Mitchell, had vanished and reappeared at a Moscow press conference in September 1960, handing the Soviet Union the worst security humiliation in the agency’s history. Someone had to explain how it happened. Homosexuality was the explanation reached for - men with something to hide could be blackmailed, the reasoning went, so the men with something to hide had to go.
Martin and Mitchell were not gay. The agency’s own investigations found their sexuality had little to do with why they went.
Twenty-six people lost their careers for a theory about two men that was not true.
Salon: “Before Edward Snowden - sexual deviates and the NSA”