Meredith Gardner

Meredith Gardner was born in Okolona, Mississippi, on 20th October, 1912. He graduated from the University of Texas and earned a master's degree in languages from the University of Wisconsin.

A shy and reclusive figure he taught languages after leaving university. It has been pointed out that he "an astounding armoury of language skills - from German and Spanish to Lithuanian, Sanskrit, old and middle high German, and old church Slavonic." (1) As Robert J. Lamphere pointed out: "Meredith Gardner... was unusual and brilliant, not only as a cryptanalyst but also as a linguist. He spoke six or seven languages and was one of the few Western scholars who read Sanskrit." (2)

On the outbreak of the Second World War Gardner was professor of German at the University of Akron. In 1942 the United States Army's Signals Intelligence Service recruited him to work on breaking German codes. During this period he also taught himself Japanese so that he could also work on their codes as well. He spent the rest of the war studying messages between Germany and Japan. "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." (3)

Meredith Gardner & Venona Project After the war he was assigned to help decode a backlog of communications between Moscow and its foreign missions. By 1945, over 200,000 messages had been transcribed and now a team of cryptanalysts attempted to decrypt them. The project, named Venona (a word which appropriately, has no meaning), was based at Arlington Hall, Virginia. (4) Soviet messages were produced in exactly the same way as Japanese super-enciphered codes. However, "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." (5) According to Peter Wright, the author of Spymaster (1987): "Meredith Gardner... began work on the charred remains of a Russian codebook found on a battlefield in Finland. Although it was incomplete, the codebook did have the groups for some of the most common instructions in radio messages - those for 'Spell' and 'Endspell.' These are common because any codebook has only a finite vocabulary, and where an addresser lacks the relevant group in the codebook - always the case, for instance, with names - he has to spell the word out letter by letter, prefixing with the word 'Spell,' and ending with the word 'Endspell' to alert his addressee. Using these common groups Gardner checked back on previous Russian radio traffic, and realized that there were duplications across some channels, indicating that the same one-time pads had been used. Slowly he 'matched' the traffic which had been enciphered using the same pads, and began to try to break it." (6) As David C. Martin pointed out it was slow work: "When the cryptanalysts discovered that the same series of additives had been used more than once, they had all the leverage they needed to break the Soviet cipher system. Having used guesswork to deduce the additives for a Soviet message intercepted in one part of the world, they could test those same additives against the massive backlog of messages intercepted in other parts of the world. Sooner or later the same additives would appear and another message could be deciphered. It was an excruciatingly tedious task with less than perfect results. Since only a portion of the code book had been salvaged, many of the 999 five-digit groups used by the Soviets were missing. Knowing the additive might yield the proper five-digit group, but if that group could not be found in the code book, the word remained indecipherable. Whole passages were blanks, and the meaning of other phrases could be only vaguely grasped." (7)

Breaking the Code It was not until 1949 that Meredith Gardner made his big breakthrough. He was able to decipher enough of a Soviet message to identify it as the text of a 1945 telegram from Winston Churchill to Harry S. Truman. Checking the message against a complete copy of the telegram provided by the British Embassy, the cryptanalysts confirmed beyond doubt that during the war the Soviets had a spy who had access to secret communication between the president of the United States and the prime minister of Britain. The Armed Forces Security Agency requested copies of all transmissions handled by the British Embassy and began matching them against the encoded messages in the New York-to-Moscow channel, working backward through the code book and arriving at the additive. Gradually they were able to transcribe these messages. It now became clear that there had been a massive hemorrhaging of secrets from both the British Embassy in Washington and the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

FBI and the Venona Code Robert J. Lamphere was the leading expert in the FBI on Soviet espionage. He therefore worked closely with Meredith Gardner and together they were able to catch several Soviet spies. "The ASA offices were at Arlington Hall, across the Potomac from the District of Columbia, in Virginia, at what used to be a girls' school. Gardner met me in one of the brick-and-wood-frame buildings, and as we sat down to talk I soon realized that Rowlett's description of him was accurate. Gardner was tall, gangling, reserved, obviously intelligent, and extremely reluctant to discuss much about his work or whether it would progress any distance beyond the first fragments that the FBI had already received. I asked him how I could be of assistance to him; he seemed not to know. I told him I was intensely interested in what he was doing and would be willing to mount any sort of research effort to provide him with more information; he simply nodded. I offered to write up a memo about one of the message fragments because I thought the FBI might have a glimmer of understanding of the subject matter being discussed by the KGB; he was noncommittal." Lamphere recorded in his autobiography, The FBI-KGB War (1986): "From that day on, every two or three weeks I would make the pilgrimage out to Arlington Hall. Meredith Gardner was indeed not easy to know, and was extremely modest about his work, but eventually we did become friends. Neither the friendship nor the solution to the messages was achieved overnight, but steady progress was made. Little by little he chipped away at the messages, and I helped him with memoranda that described what the KGB might be referring to in some of them. The ASA's work was further aided by one of the early, rudimentary computers." (8)

Klaus Fuchs One message revealed that one of the scientists working on the Manhattan Project who was spying for the Soviets had a sister at an American university. This scientist had not been born in the United States. When the FBI carried out a full investigation into the scientists working on the project they found that Klaus Fuchs had a sister, Kristel, who had briefly attended Swarthmore College during the war. After the war Fuchs returned to England where he became head of the physics department of the British Nuclear Research Centre at Harwell. The FBI told MI5 about their suspicions and Fuchs was brought in for questioning. Fuchs denied any involvement in espionage and the intelligence services did not have enough evidence to have him arrested and charged with spying. However, after repeated interviews with Jim Skardon he eventually confessed on 23rd January 1950 to passing information to the Soviet Union. A few days later J. Edgar Hoover informed President Harry S. Truman that "we have just gotten word from England that we have gotten a full confession from one of the top scientists, who worked over here, that he gave the complete know-how of the atom bomb to the Russians." (9) Fuchs was found guilty on 1st March 1950 of four counts of breaking the Official Secrets Act by "communicating information to a potential enemy". After a trial lasting less than 90 minutes, Lord Rayner Goddard sentenced him to fourteen years' imprisonment, the maximum for espionage, because the Soviet Union was classed as an ally at the time. (10) Hoover reported that "Fuchs said he would estimate that the information furnished by him speeded up by several years the production of an atom bomb by Russia." (11)

Spies in Manhattan Project Following further information provided by Meredith Gardner and Klaus Fuchs, the FBI arrested Harry Gold and David Greenglass in July, 1950, Greenglass was arrested by the FBI and accused of spying for the Soviet Union. Under questioning, he admitted acting as a spy and named Julius Rosenberg as one of his contacts. He denied that his sister, Ethel Rosenberg, had been involved but confessed that his wife, Ruth Greenglass, had been used as a courier. (12) Gardner was also provide information to the FBI to trace another Soviet spy in the Manhattan Project. He was an American scientist, Theodore Hall, who was now teaching at the University of Chicago. He was interviewed by Alan H. Belmont in March 1951. "Although FBI agents put pressure on him to confess he gave nothing away, and they could find no other evidence against him beyond the Venona documents. Since Venona was still yielding fresh secrets at that time and promised to be a counter-intelligence gold mine for many years to come, the US security authorities believed they could not afford to let Moscow know they were cracking the code... So it was that, in the expectation that they might catch other fish in future, the FBI let Theodore Hall swim free." (13) In fact, the Soviets already knew about the breakthrough because of information provided by William Weisband, who worked with Gardner at the Armed Forces Security Agency. Peter Wright met Meredith Gardner in London after the arrests of the atom spies: "He was a quiet, scholarly man, entirely unaware of the awe in which he was held by other cryptanalysts. He used to tell me how he worked on the matches in his office, and of how a young pipe-smoking Englishman named Philby used to regularly visit him and peer over his shoulder and admire the progress he was making. Gardner was rather a sad figure by the late 1960s. He felt very keenly that the cryptanalytical break he had made possible was a thing of mathematical beauty, and he was depressed at the use to which it had been put." Wright revealed that he was upset that his research had resulted in McCarthyism and the executions of Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg. Wright quotes Gardner as saying: "I never wanted it to get anyone into trouble." Wright added that Gardner "was appalled at the fact that his discovery had led, almost inevitably, to the electric chair, and felt (as I did) that the Rosenbergs, while guilty, ought to have been given clemency. In Gardner's mind, VENONA was almost an art form, and he did not want it sullied by crude McCarthyism." (14)

Cambridge Spy Ring Meredith Gardner and his team were able to work out that more than 200 American citizens become Soviet agents between 1930 and 1945. (15) They had spies in the State Department and most leading government agencies, the Manhattan Project and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). However, they were at first unable to discover the identity of a spy with the codename Homer. His name was found on a number of messages from the KGB station at the Soviet consulate-general in New York to Moscow Centre. The cryptanalysts discovered that the spy had been in Washington since 1944. The FBI concluded that it could be one of 6,000 people. At first they concentrated their efforts on non-diplomatic employees of the embassy. In April 1951, the Venona decoders found the vital clue in one of the messages. Homer had had regular contacts with his Soviet control in New York, using his pregnant wife as an excuse. This information enabled them to identify the spy as Donald Maclean, the first secretary at the Washington embassy. Unknown to the FBI, the man MI6 had sent them to help with identifying British spies named in the Venona project, Kim Philby, was also a Soviet agent. Meredith Gardner later recalled that Philby was a regular visitor to Arlington Hall. He observed the strange intensity with which Philby had observed the decryption teams at work: "Philby was looking on with no doubt rapt attention but he never said a word, never a word." (16) As Ben Macintyre, the author of A Spy Among Friends (2014) pointed out: "Philby immediately relayed the bad news to Valeri Makayev (Philby's Russian contact in America), and demanded that Maclean be extracted from the UK before he was interrogated and compromised the entire British spy network - and more importantly Philby himself." (17) As a result of Philby's warning, Maclean and fellow spy, Guy Burgess, were able to escape to Moscow.