K9APE’s Bookshelf

K9APE’s Bookshelf

The Reader of Other Gentlemen’s Mail

Herbert O. Yardley and the Birth of American Code Breaking

David Kahn

ISBN 0-300-09846-4

David Kahn is author of The Codebreakers : The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet. He is well qualified to write what appears to be the first authoritative biography of Herbert Osborn Yardley (1889-1958), who was father and one of the most controversial figures of American cryptography.

Yardley was the son of a small-Indiana-town railroad station agent and telegrapher. Shortly after Yardley graduated high school, he passed a government Civil Service examination and was posted as a telegraphy clerk in the State Department. After receiving his first raise, he married his high school sweetheart and established their home in Washington. They both were 25 years old. The year was 1914.

Yardley’s duties were to decode diplomatic telegrams received at the State Department. With more time than work on his hands, he taught himself how to decode messages and began to wonder whether other countries were able to read U.S. Government traffic. There being no agency responsible for encrypting official traffic and few U.S government or military publications on the subject, Yardley decided to devote his life to cryptography.

Friends brought Yardley encrypted messages from foreign embassies. He started analyzing them using basis statistics (e.g. counting frequencies of certain coded groups) and soon found that he could read some of the messages. By Spring 1915, he was able to solve a supposedly secure message sent by the White House.

The year 1917 brought declarations of war between Germany and the United States following the submarine torpedoing of the S.S. Lusitania. In June, Yardley transferred from the State Department to the Army and was commissioned a First Lieutenant in the Signal Corp. His mission was to establish MI-8 as a center for American cryptology. His problem was that he had no personnel, no organization and no clout. The government at that time was depending on Colonel (honorary title) George Fabyan’s Riverbank Laboratories in Geneva, IL (http://www.geneva.il.us/riverbnk/riverpag3.htm) for decipherments. One of its employees was William S. Friedman – of whom more will be written.

Kahn then proceeds to describe Yardley’s development of MI-8 into an effective military intelligence unit and his rivalry with Friedman at Riverbank Laboratories. By the end of the Great War, Yardley is held in very high esteem and his organization becomes a focal point for the interception and solution of foreign encrypted messages.

The end of the war was basically the end of MI-8 as it was then constituted. It had cracked 10,735 messages and solved 50 codes and ciphers of 8 governments. It had also established a need for a permanent and expanded American cryptographic organization, which Yardley would coin a name – The American Black Chamber.

In 1919, the War Department and the State Department agreed to accept Yardley’s recommendations for a new and expanded organization. For legal reasons, it could not remain in Washington and because it had to have access to foreign cable traffic it needed to be in New York. Its name was the Cipher Bureau and it was funded by both Departments.

Yardley’s career then reached it peak in 1920-21 with his solutions to Japanese diplomatic traffic at the Washington Naval Conference (also known as the Washington Armaments Conference) where the United States, Great Britain and Japan were negotiating ratios of battleships. Japan sought a ratio of 10:10:7, which the United States and Great Britain found unacceptable. Because of Yardley’s successful decryptions, U.S. diplomats learned that the Japanese would accept a 10:10:6 ratio rather than have the Conference end in failure. [That the U.S. never built its full allotment of battleships and the reasons for it are subjects for another book and review.]

By 1922 Yardley had been promoted to Major and had been awarded a Distinguished Service Medal. He may have recognized that his career had reached its zenith as Yardley seems to have lost his zeal for cryptography and focused on maximizing his income. He obtained a real estate broker’s license and began speculating in Queens properties. He also spent less and less time at the Cipher Bureau and did little to advance his cryptographic skills.

The year 1929 brought two monumental changes to Yardley’s life. Herbert Hoover was inaugurated as President and he appointed New York attorney Henry L. Stimpson as Secretary of State. Yardley had worked with Stimpson during WWI. Nevertheless, Yardley was anxious about what Stimpson’s response would be when, in June, he informed Stimpson about the existence of the Cipher Bureau and the purpose of its work in cracking foreign diplomatic messages.

Stimpson was aghast and ordered the Cipher Bureau closed because, as he stated, Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail. [Stimpson would then encourage his nephew, Alfred Loomis, to support the development of radar with Loomis’ private funds. See Conant, Tuxedo Park : A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II.] Stimpson went on to become Secretary of War during WWII and a strong supporter of William Friedman’s work to build his Purple Machine that cracked high level Japanese military and diplomatic codes.

Yardley refused a transfer to another government position and was out of a job. Then in October the Stock Market crashed and its consequences wiped out Yardley’s real estate investments.

Yardley went down several avenues of money-making without success. By Spring 1930, he was broke and back in Worthington, IN. He considered writing; but, he had no connections in publishing. He was given the name of George T. Bye – a powerful New York agent – and finally managed to obtain an interview in December. Bye obtained an advance of a $1000 for a book about Yardley’s career in military intelligence and Yardley set about writing. He completed the draft in February 1931 – about two weeks after he resigned his commission as a Major in the Military Intelligence Reserve to avoid a possible court-martial relating to publication of some of his book’s contents.

The book was published in May and was an instant success. Its name was The American Black Chamber and it contained a description of how the Cipher Bureau had solved Japan’s Naval Conference messages. [My 2002 review of this book appears at http://www.k9ape.com/publicservice/American%20Black%20Chamber.html] Reviews correctly criticized the book as Yardley’s tale of how he won the war; however, Yardley’s writing style and the subject matter brought demands for lecture dates and fueled the book’s sales.

Curiously, Kahn does not mention in the body of his text one important event that may or may not have occurred at about the time Yardley’s book was published. According to a Central Intelligence Agency review of Kahn’s book [http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/vol48no2/article13.html], Yardley sold to the Japanese Embassy for $7,000 copies of Japanese messages that the Cipher Bureau had decrypted. In his footnote for Page 131, Kahn states that the story was fabricated to denigrate [Yardley] and save Japanese face.

Publication of The American Black Chamber made Yardley persona non grata in the inner sanctums of the U.S. government – especially its cryptographic bureaus where disclosure of past successes is still considered a mortal sin. However, it did not end his cryptographic career. Kahn abstracts Yardley’s employment in China by the Nationalists and his later employment in Canada by the Canadians. But, like Charles Lindbergh –who led the America First campaign to keep the U.S.A out of war before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor – he was to play no role in World War II defense.

Yardley’s career and life continued to spiral downward. Yet, he lived to write a second successful book that is still in publication; namely, The Education of a Poker Player. The book continues to receive excellent reviews and some consider it to be the best written about how to play the game.

Yardley’s remains lie in Arlington National Cemetery. As seen from web searching, his life remains a subject of considerable debate and interest. David Kahn’s well documented book adds much to the discussion and is well worth your reading.

Sheldon L. Epstein, K9APE