Free Republic

CAMBRIDGE, England – The papers spent years hidden in a milk churn beneath a Russian dacha and read like an encyclopedia of Cold War espionage. Original documents from one of the biggest intelligence leaks in history — a who's who of Soviet spying — were released Monday after being held in secret for two decades.

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...

Anger has greeted plans for a new film that will portray Kim Philby, one of Britain's most notorious and damaging traitors, as a romantic husband motivated by idealism.The £10 million film, A Different Loyalty, will star Rupert Everett as the spy who betrayed secrets to Russia for 30 years, costing the lives of countless British agents. Kim Basinger, the actress who won an Oscar for her role in LA Confidential, will play Philby's third wife, Eleanor.The film will concentrate on the couple's life together in the late 1950s in Beirut, where Philby had fled in 1955 after arousing suspicions that...