The Man Who Picked the Lock Story of How an Unknown American Linguist Broke Soviet Wartime Spy C9de y Emerges From Shadows (Oj By Michael Dobbs Without the cryptological discoveries of Washington Post Stiff Wliter Gardner, and others like him, dozens of Sovi- et spies in the United States and Western Outside the intelligence community, Europe; including the atom spy Klaus Fuchs where he is regarded as a living legend, few and the British intelligence officer Kim Phil- people have heard of Meredith Knox Gard- by, might never have been unmasked. The ner. Now 84, he lives with his wife of 53 FBI would not have received the original tip- years in a modest condominium on Connecti- off that led to the espionage convictions of cut Avenue. When neighbors ask' what he Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, whose double once did for a living, he replies vaguely that he worked in the office of the thief signal of- execution in 1953 still troubles Gardner. , ficer." Today, in frail health, Gardner spends Yet the history of the Cold War might much of his time tracing his genealogical have been very different had it not been for roots back to the kings and queens of Scot- Gardner. His pioneering, often mind-numb- land and visiting his two children and 11 ing work breaking Soviet wartime codes en- grandchildren. The one clue to his former ' abled the United States to achieve one of its line of business is his daily battle to solve the greatest counterintelligence coups of the crossword puzzle in The Times of London, past half-century. See CODE, All, CoL 1 ,

• . BY LARRY MOIMIS-DIE WASHINGTON POST Meredith Knoic Gardner spent decades dcbding "Venom," producing spy leads for the FBI. there was, their grateful a "Gennan problem," a CODE, From Al The Fabulous Five' by "Japanese problem," and so on. Soviet controllers. It took the British more than three decades to match the Meredith Gardner spent 27 years which has the reputation of being searching for a solution to the "Rus- actual spies to the code names provided Die most difficult in the world. sian problem." .** -"You have to remember that the pus- by Venona. says The Venona trail eventually led back A former languge teacher at the da are designed by Englishmen," universities of Texas and Wisconsin, Gardner, a shy, slight man with specta- to the code-breakers themselves. At the Venona conference, the National Secu- Gardner was recruited by the Army cles, who speaks in halting, sometimes Security Agency (a forerunner of the rity Agency released documents show- disjointed sentences, interspersed with NSA) shortly after the Japanese at- ' it laughter. "You have to know a lit- ing that one of its own operatives, a lin- -guist named Wiliam Weisband, had also tack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The * bit about...." agency was looking for people fluent Here he pauses and drops his voice, been working for Soviet intelligence. By peering over Gardner's shoulder, Weis- in languages. Gardner spoke not just as if imparting a professional secret. German, but Old High German and ftricket. Cricket terms, and soon." band was able to alert the Soviets to. Gardner's discoveries at a time when Middle 'High German. He also knew :*;Farber this month, Gardner emerged Sanskrit and Lithuanian, not t6 men- gam a lifetime of anonymity to tell his even President Harry S. Truman was _kept in the dark. tion Spanish, French and Russian. 'shzy at a conference devoted to the "You skipped over my Japanese," ,Dozens • of spies who appear in the Nome code break. After being intro- he' said reproachfully when the list duced to the audience by Sen. Daniel Venooa documents under code names were never identified by Western corn- was read out at the Venom confer- Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) as an im- ence, sponsored by the NSA, the simg hero of the Cold War, Gardner de- .. terintelligence, including an aide to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and an- CIA, and the Center for Democracy, scribed how he broke into lists of code an independent Washington-based mimes in telegrams sent by the Soviet 'other atomic scientist These imsolved mysteries helped to feed an atmosphere Consulate in New York to Moscow be- Gardner's facility at languages tween 1943 and 1945. r" paranoia in the CIA and the British , secret counterintelligence service MI5, quickly turned him into a legend at That smelled of espionage Gardner Arlington Hall, a former girl's school told the audience at the National War as spy hunters Re James Jesus Angle- ton and Peter Wright attempted to across the Potomac from Washing- College. "Otherwise, why would you go ton, where the ASA had its head- to the troubled using something other track down presumed Soviet moles from the ranks of their own colleagues. quarters. (ItnOw houses the Foreign than someone's real name?" Service Ins,titirte.) "They had two Although the Venom code break was It was Wright, a former assistant di- rector of MI5, who first referred to • workers thr Who were regarded , "ecelmed to a very small percentage of as real centimes," recalls his wife, *Viet able traffic during World War II, Blanche, MAW., a former ASA em- it laid dm basis for decades of coimterin- ployee. "One was just a walking teffigenoe work. It was during this peri- Gardner's work in public in his, 1987 1 brain with -legs, and the other was od, immediately after the Nazi invasion book "Spycatcher," which sought to very humair; I the. human. GU the Soviet Union, that Americans prove that a former head of British in- Gardner' " was hired to were moat disposed to cooperate with telligence had been a Soviet spy. Wright I work on and German die Kremlln. Soviet prestige was partic- described Gardner as "a quiet, scholarly problems ended,' he Mk* high amcog left-wing intellect*- man, entirely unaware of the awe in transferred t6 the Rii9a ••Mem. els, many of whom questioned why the which he was held by other cryptana- which had become atop .'United States would want to keep se- lysts." Alarmed, NSA officials alerted the ASA Twu`yea a.earlier, a ',crets from its wartime ally. Gardner and warned him not to reveal analyst named-Richert • The Venona cables proved that Mos- anything more about Venona. For discovered A.flavii* cow had recruited dozens of agents in weeks afterward, Gardner had visions pherment <. White House, the State Depart- of mobs of journalists besieging his.con- The task,A deciphering 35,000 ; :went, the Office of Strategic Services (a dominium and trying to "break the door pages of 0;00 messages, which ;predecessor of the Central Intelligence do were sent *MO commercial tele- 1-Agency). the Treasury Department and There was not a tinkle. You would graph companies hire RCA radio be- ?the Justice Department. The revela- have thought that someone who re- tween 1943 .and 1945, was tedious :tihns triggered a massive manhunt for viewed the book in the paper •would and repetitive,,TOdars supercompu- ,--Poviet spies in the late '40s and '50s have thought, wonder if this man ters could dispoie of the chore in an that turned the government upside instant But the .„1.94.0s,,teams of 4own and contributed to the excesses of Gardner is still in Washington.' But He sighs and chuckles softly. government analYitS,, moSt .o the McCarthy era. Work on Venona no. -- "Oh dear." women, would sit for days birched ",.continued up until 1980. ("Verona" is a . : over work sheets, searching' for fa- 7 purely invented code word.) Flaw in the Code mffiar patterns. Ai the work 'pro- Apart from the Rosenbergs, Soviet gressed, more and more' people agents mentioned in the Venona docu- It is hard to imagine a drier, more were hired. By 1946, between 500 ments include Harry Dexter White of abstract subject than cryptography. and 600 people were poring over the Treasury Department, Judith Co- Analysts spend years scrutinizing Venona decrypts. - of the Justice Department, Duncan pages full of numbers, living for the As a senior rmguist, Gardner had, Lee of the OSS, and the atomic spies moment when real words emerge the job of recreating a RiiSsian node": Fuchs, Theodore Hall and David Green- from a seemingly senseless jumble book, and translating the Russian: glass. In Britain, Venom' was key to the of figures. In cryptographic jargon, messages into English. He attribute* names,* of the group of Cambridge projects Wm Venona are known as University spies who were nicknamed "problems." During World War II, dogged. He was obviously obsessed with his work." Most of the time, working on the Russian problem was hire working on a gigantic crossword puzzle. Ven- ona was almost mathematical in its abstract beauty. It was not until March 1949, with the arrest of Ju- dith Coplon, a Justice Department analyst mentioned in Venona under the code name SIMA, that Gardner felt real life intruding into Arlington Hall. "Politically, I knew I was having an impact," he recalled. "But it came to me as reality, not theory, when I passed a newsstand and saw a head- line about Judith Coplon. Before that, it was all in the office, as it were. Now it was out in real life. . That encouraged me. It made me feel that I might be helping in the defense of the country." BY LARRY MORRIS-THE WASHINGTON POST Reality intruded rather more un- Michael Meeropol, one of the pleasantly on June 19, 1953, when Rosenberg sons, at conference on the Rosenbergs were electrocuted the Venona code breaking. for espionage. They had two young sons. Gardner had provided the FBI his success to logic, a gift for lan- with the original tip-off that led to guages, and "a sort of magpie atti- their arrest and conviction. Although tude to facts, the habit of storing there was no doubt hi his mind that things away that did not seem to Julius was a Soviet agent, he ques- tions the extent of Ethel's guilt. The have any connection at all." Venona decrypts had only spoken of. In December 1946, he decoded a Ethel's "knowledge" of her hus- message containing the names of band's work. leading scientists working on the "I thought it a great tragedy, it atomic bomb project, America's depressed me greatly," said Gard- greatest wartime secret. A few a pas- ner, who still speaks in the soft months later, he came across drawl of his native Mississippi. "I sage about an agent code-named was very much downcast. It was a LIBERAL with a 29-year-old wife very unpleasant thing to feel that I named ETHEL. This turned out to was a link in the chain of events that be references to Julius and Ethel Ro- got them there. Of course, my will senberg. had nothing to do with it. I had no When the scale of the Soviet espi- choice but to let the judicial system onage network became apparent, take its course. I would have been the government ordered the FBI to fired immediately, I might even have follow up the leads uncovered by been given a jail sentence, had I vio- Venona. An FBI agent, Robert Lam- lated my oath of secrecy." , phere, was appointed liaison officer He waves in the direction of an to Arlington Hall. Gardner would entire bookcase of literature devoted supply Lamphere with lists of Soviet to the subject of Soviet espionage in agents. Lamphere reciprocated by the United States, including a dozen providing Gardner with information or so books about the Rosenbergs. about FBI investigations that could 'The books about it later made it help him crack open the Soviet code. sound even more ghastly. It took so "I would bring Meredith some ma- long for the actual deaths to occur." terial, and he would print in a new The issue of the double execu- word over a group of numbers. Then tions provided the most emotional he would give a little smile of satis- moment of the recent Venona con- faction," recalled Lamphere. "He ference. The older Rosenberg son, was a brilliant cryptanalyst. Very Michael Meeropol, an invited partici- pant, challenged the FBI's Lem- News of Gardner's diaiooveieieu phere about the reasons for execut- devastated the Soviets. *I luiew ing both his parents. Lamphere re- stinctively that the game woad anon plied that he had recommended be up, and I prepared clemency for Ethel on the, grounds logically to save whatn r_ .saileff licb). front that the evidence against her was the ruins," wrote Yuri Modin, the relatively slight and she would be Soviet case officer for "The Falin-I leaving behind two orphans. He said lous Five." "We were at a loss trio his • recommendation was endorsed know how to handle this dew*. by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, meat.. We could have dosed dowsh„, but overruled by President Dwight our networks, of courae, but that D. Eisenhower. wis well-nigh imposidile, given thn; sheer size, of thespider's web we Another Mole had woven since the war." ' 7 But while the Soviets were grip': In the winter of 1946, Gardner piing with the Venona 'revelation,1 sensed someone reading over his NSA historians have been unable ,10#: shoulder as he worked on decipher- come up with any evidence thitJ: ing a list of scientists working on the President Truman was ever, Manhattan Project. The "prowler" formed of the project Mystery tiles turned out to be Bill Weisband, a continues to surround the:govern-,,4 gregarious Russian emigre who had ment's failure to prosecute Theo-6, been hired to help out on Venona as dare Alvin Hall, a Harvard physiciet4, a linguistic adviser. Gardner would working at Los Alamos, N.M., whont occasionally consult him on obscure the Venom documents identifY points of Russian grammar. the Soviet agent MLAD (Ruasianfirl' Counterintelligence officials are "youngstee). Hall has been living in;.).: now convinced that Weisband, who Cambridge, England, since 1962, died in 1967, was a Soviet spy. At but makes frequent tripe to the 11n160. the Venona conference, the NSA de- ed States. classified the 1950 confession of a The FBI and the Justice DetierW Los Angeles aircraft industry work- irent have refined to cOrnMent op; er, Jones Orin. York, who named their handling of the Hall and , as*, Weisband as his KGB handler. Weis- band cases. The, most Mcely band was fired from the Venona pro- lion for the -failure to Prosecute; ject and served a one-year sentence the view of independent' experts IOC for contempt of court after refusing former officials:is the unwEingneee ' to testify about his Communist con- of the intelligence agenciet to reVind necticns. He was never prosecuted anything about their sources and- for espionage, perhaps becalm the Methods. The government did not case was too embarrassing. want to talk about the code-brenkise "There is no doubt in my mind operation in open court. - that be was spying on us the whole Moynllian, who, as &skean of, a time," said Cecil Phillips, another congressional conunission on god cryptanalyst who knew Weisband ernment secrecy, played a key yds:: well. 'He managed to roam around in getting the Venom dec:rypts de- with great ease. He cultivated peo- classified, believes Truman.would& ple who had access to sensitive in- not have been so quick to &amiss al-f} formation. He used to sit near the legations of Soviet penetrationin the boss's secretary, who typed every- early '50s had he lmown aboat the thing we did of any importance." The Venom revelations.. At the canter- Venona documents contain a refer- ence, Moynihan accused portions d : ence to a Soviet agent code-named the American government of "liegin-„, ZVENO ("link" in Russian), whose •-ning to gat a bit ]aloe the. KGB:" , profile closely resembles that of ' Gardner, who retired in 1972, bejt Weisband. Heves that the intelligenee chide The Soviets had another impecca- withheld the infonnation, fiant,W ble source: the mole Kim Philby. As man because they were afraid thee an MI6 British intelligence liaison cd- he would "give away the secret.' ficer posted to Washington in 1949, "You can't imagine," said the mini' Philby would occasionally drop by who kept silent for half a centurn't Arlington Hall to check on what was "how the intelligence agencies guar& going on• secr ecY." the linbr

ModXte 'a large intrease in cable traffi- By Michael Dobbs This turned out to be the fatal flaw that Waikato. Past Ma Writer made the American code break possi- Soviet spy chiefs thought they had ,:.devised an unbreakable code for com- In ihe 'fall of 1943, an American '.;7'inimicating with agents in World War cryptanalyst, Richard Hallock, found H. The system consisted of several evidence of the use of duplicate key, „layers; each of which had to be sys- pads by searching through the cable tematically "stripped. away' by crypt- traffic for repetition of the same num- 7-imalYsts: ber. A colleague, Cecil Phillips; made in Cover names concealed identities statistical observations that enabled the 1=arid places. For example; Lt. Gen. Pav- codelireikera to break into the cipher, 7e1 Fltin, the head of foreign intelli- sykeitiiied by Soviet intelligence. gence in Moscow, was code-named Hallock, Phillips, and their col- VIKTOR. Ifashmgton was known as ,- leagues eventually discovered 35,000- CARTHAGE, Julius Rosenberg as AN- ' pages of duplicates in traffic between TENNA (later changed to LIBERAL), and President Franklin D. Roosevelt Moscow,,New York; Washington, San. as CAPTAIN. Francisco, London, Montevideo, and ■ Soviet cipher clerks used a code Canberra. By looking for repetitive book to translate a message into num- !Anises, American cryptanalysts were hers, expressed in four-digit. groups. gradually able to "strip" away the ci- ,.„Using. this system, the group 0956 O'er. stood for. VIKTOR., the group 1653 The key padi had been randomly din- Signified a period, and so on. trixted to Soviet intehigenc:e, tracle E. In order .to further disguise the and dl atnc, missions.. .it was thit, .COdes, the added tOtligni stuns the cpsbbwc, fa ly ,1 tune hers frit jireViaitilY diStiKintectdipher of the trade messages that helped the:. -pads. A code clerk in New York took cryptanalysts break into the intelli- digits from the pad and added them to '.. gel= =wages. ,ffe code, without-carrying number's' Workeia, mostly women recruited di- 73briPhircL If tbe nett digits were 0359,, :iect from civilian life, tested mMions of •Ior example, VIKTOR (0956) would, differint permutations with the help of become 0205. Each word' in the cable IBM punch cards. Once the additive key was assigned its own cipher, so even if had been stripped away, cryptlinguists " 'the word VIKTOR was repeated in a .lice Meredith Knox Gardner were able 'clielegraiii, it 'mild look different. to sloily compile a Ruisian code book. -clerk in Moscow per- '''',‘The code Gardner broke the special subcode the same operation in reverse, for individual English letters in late = using an identical cipher pad as the en- coder. Had the Soviets consistently 1946, which enabled him to read a list .used each pad only once, the. system of scientists associated with the Man- `would have been impregnable. In 1942, batten Project on Dec. 20. The follow- however; they began duplicating some ing year, he translated the first refer- .'t,of;. the pads, probably in order to accosts . ences to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.