Posted on 08/19/2002 5:20:07 PM PDT by dighton
Meredith Gardner, who has died aged 89, was the American codebreaker responsible for breaking the ciphers that led to the arrests of the atom spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and the break-up of the Cambridge spy ring.
During the late 1940s, Gardner was the main cryptanalyst working on the Venona material, messages sent between the KGB’s Moscow Centre and its agent handlers abroad using the theoretically unbreakable one-time pad system.
Fluent in French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Lithuanian, Russian and Spanish, Gardner joined the United States Army’s codebreaking organisation, the Signals Security Agency, early in the Second World War.
He worked initially on German ciphers and then on Japanese super-enciphered codes, in which messages were first encoded in five-figure groups taken from a code book and then enciphered by adding a series of randomly produced figures, known as an additive, which was taken from a second book.
The techniques needed to break these messages were to be extremely useful to Gardner when, in late 1945, he was assigned to work on what was then known simply as “the Russian problem”.
KGB messages were produced in exactly the same way as Japanese super-enciphered codes. But where the Japanese gave the codebreakers a way in by repeatedly using the same sequences of additive, the Russian system did not.
As its name suggests, the additive appeared on separate sheets of a pad. Once a stream of additive had been used, that sheet was torn off and destroyed, making the message impossible to break.
But because of wartime shortages, the Russians made a critical mistake. Several pads had been duplicated and sent to different KGB stations abroad. Although it was still not easy to break, the American codebreakers had the help of a partially burned codebook abandoned in Finland.
The intelligence which they produced represented the crown jewels for the FBI and MI5, vital information on the many Soviet agents operating against the West. The breakthrough came on December 20 1946, when Gardner read part of a message that contained a list of leading scientists working on the Manhattan Project, the development of the atomic bomb.
Sent two years earlier, the message was the first hint that there might be Soviet spies working at the Los Alamos atomic weapons plant. By August 1947, when he produced his first report on the Venona messages, Gardner had found a number of agents all referred to by codenames.
One, codenamed Liberal, had appeared in six separate messages. The only clue to his identity lay in the name of his 29-year-old wife. Gardner, a lifelong fan of crossword puzzles, was particularly pleased with the way in which he had come up with the wife’s name.
The KGB cipher clerk had spelt the name of Liberal’s wife out in single letters but there were only three groups, the first representing E and the third L. “I had never come across a three letter meaning in the spell code,” he later recalled. “Then I said: ah, but they anticipate sending a lot of English text, and the most common word in the English language is ‘the’.”
The name of Liberal’s wife was Ethel, one of the key clues that led to the uncovering of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who, in 1953, were sent to the electric chair.
Another wartime Venona message, which Gardner was finally able to break in 1949, revealed that a scientist at Los Alamos codenamed Rest, was passing atomic secrets to the Russians. The message contained a Los Alamos report written by the British scientist, Klaus Fuchs.
By now Fuchs was working at the British atomic research establishment at Harwell, Oxfordshire. He was questioned by MI5 officers and five months later admitted that he had passed atomic weapons information to Moscow. He pleaded guilty in court and, on March 1 1950, was jailed for 14 years.
Probably the most important atom spy that Gardner uncovered was never prosecuted. Theodore Hall, codenamed Mlad (Young), was the star pupil at Harvard of Professor John Van Vleck, an authority on quantum theory who had been secretly recruited by Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific head of Los Alamos, to help to design the atomic bomb.
Recommended by Van Vleck, Hall was soon put in charge of the team designing the implosion trigger for one of the experimental bombs. With access that even Fuchs and certainly not Rosenberg enjoyed, Hall was the best source the KGB had inside Los Alamos.
Although the FBI knew that Hall was Mlad, he was never put on trial, largely because, unlike Fuchs and Rosenberg, he never confessed and the American authorities were wary of making public the evidence from Venona until 1995. Hall left America for Britain where he became a leading Cambridge scientist.
But probably Gardner’s greatest triumph was to break the message that led to the demise of the Cambridge spy ring. It was in January 1949 that Gardner broke a number of messages from the KGB station at the Soviet consulate-general in New York to Moscow Centre referring to an agent with the covername Homer.
This spy had been in Washington in mid-1945 and gained access to the secret messages between Truman and Churchill on the fate of the leaders of the Polish Home Army.
It was Donald Maclean, a senior British diplomat, who had been posted to Washington the previous year. Crucially, in mid-1945, his American wife Melinda was pregnant and living with her mother in New York.
Kim Philby, who was posted to Washington as an intelligence liaison officer shortly after the messages on Homer were deciphered, described how the FBI concluded that it could be one of 6,000 people.
“It had so far occurred neither to them nor to the British that a diplomat was involved, let alone a fairly senior diplomat,” he said. “Instead, the investigation had concentrated on non-diplomatic employees of the embassy.”
But slowly, MI5 narrowed those names to a handful of people who would have had access to the top-secret exchanges between London and Washington. Then in April 1951, the Venona decoders found the vital clue in one of the messages. For part of 1944, Homer had had regular contacts with his Soviet control in New York, using his pregnant wife as an excuse. The names had been narrowed down to just one - Donald Maclean.
Tipped off by Philby, who had access to the Venona material, he fled to Moscow with Guy Burgess, another of the Cambridge spies. The hunt for the so-called Third Man, who had tipped them both off, began and very soon Philby fell under suspicion. It was the beginning of the end for the Cambridge five, made up by Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross.
Robert Lamphere, the FBI officer who worked with Gardner, recalled how he would bring him some material, and Gardner would print in a new word over a group of numbers, then give a little smile of satisfaction.
Meredith Knox Gardner was born in Okolona, Mississippi in 1913. He studied at Texas University and then Wisconsin, where he received a Masters degree in Languages. He went on to teach at Akron, Texas, and Wisconsin until he joined the Signals Security Agency.
He retired from the National Security Agency, in 1972, to solve crossword puzzles and trace his Scottish ancestry. He always expressed regret that the Rosenbergs had been executed; there was little evidence that Ethel Rosenberg had done anything and he felt that they had at least believed in what they did.
Gardner, who died on August 9, is survived by his wife and two children.
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2002.
Up until this sentence, he seemed to be an admirable man.
Damn! I was thinking this was a helluva guy...right up until this last paragraph.....oh well.
Why does this not surprise me?
Rosenburg comment aside, it's amazing he learned so many languages. May he rest in peace.
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