Now, it spreads its wings over teddy bears, tie-dye shirts and nail-trimmers sold to tourists, part of an effort to let Americans get a glimpse of what the nation's premier eavesdropping agency does.
Competing with a dozen other agencies for intelligence dollars, the largest and most secretive of them wants to spread the word about itself _ without revealing too much.
Most of its work _ absorbing intelligence gathered from spy-plane flights like those near China, for example _ is still plenty hush-hush.
But its openness around the edges is a departure for the 49-year-old organization jokingly called "No Such Agency" and perhaps best known for efforts not to be known at all.
"It's changed all right," said author James Bamford. Twenty years ago he faced threats of prosecution for publishing NSA-related documents; recently he faced a crowd of agents at his book launch on the NSA campus.
"Instead of putting me in jail," he said, "they're throwing me a book party."
The NSA's director, Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, accelerated the change after his 1999 appointment, perhaps most dramatically by making public two lacerating reports on agency deficiencies.
"There are some things that we can say, that we ought to say," he commented in an unusual interview with the History Channel.
The end of the Cold War led some to question the need for a national eavesdropper and subjected intelligence budgets generally to a harder look.
"Like everyone else in the intelligence community, the NSA is being forced to reveal more than it wants to about itself," said Norman Polmar, who wrote "Spy Plane: The U2 History," an NSA-related exploit gone wrong.
The internal NSA reports released by Hayden said that "ineffective leadership" and "our insular, somewhat arrogant culture and position" had led Congress to cut money to the agency, which gets the largest share of the $30 billion intelligence budget.
Openness only goes so far. A European Union team angrily left the United States last week when NSA and CIA officials refused to meet with its members. The team is investigating whether the United States engages in economic espionage.
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