NSA’s analytic achievements against the Soviet target in the 1980s would not have been possible without the development work performed by Frank Allen.
Allen served in the US Army as an intercept operator and was hired by NSA as a civilian in 1955. His first assignments were as a traffic processor, but because of his skill in multichannel traffic analysis, he was asked to work the Cuban problem just prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Upon his return to the Soviet problem, Allen became the principal NSA member of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) conceptual study of communications intelligence, or COMINT, payloads. He was involved with the earliest efforts at mapping from overhead.
In the heady first years after a significant early 1970s analytic breakthrough Allen led efforts to identify all known communications links carrying an important signal of interest. Because of this work, he can be considered the father of modern Signals Intelligence, or SIGINT Development, commonly referred to today as SIGDEV.
The deep understanding Allen and those who worked for him acquired of Soviet signals contributed to every phase of NSA’s work against the Soviet target from 1960 through the fall of the USSR in 1991. Allen provided key knowledge not only to analysis and reporting, but to development of sophisticated collection and processing systems. He created the series of Soviet Telecommunications Handbooks, guidebooks of the parameters of the wide variety of Soviet systems that were used worldwide by collectors and analysts alike.
Francis N. Allen was inducted into NSA's Cryptologic Hall of Honor in 2024. The Cryptologic Hall of Honor was created in 1999 to pay special tribute to the pioneers and heroes who rendered distinguished service to American cryptology.