by Howard Blum
Although there were raised eyebrows in the Bureau, for Bob, being a bachelor again was liberating. He got out of the stifling Queens apartment, found a room for forty-five dollars a month in a hotel off Gramercy Park in Manhattan, and, as he happily recalled, “footloose, I began to enjoy the city’s distractions.” He discovered the smoked-filled, late-night glamour of nightclubs: Café Society and the Astor Roof were his frequent haunts. And in wartime New York, a city whose young men had gone off in droves to fight the Nazis, Bob encountered armies of abandoned women. He felt, he’d concede, a bit of guilt that he was still on the home front while their boyfriends were off in distant places waging war, but with a pragmatic shrug and a wry smile, he came to terms with the situation. A handsome fox turned loose in the chicken coop, he did his best to console the many lonely women he met.
To his surprise, Bob was now having a wonderful time in New York. There was only one drawback—his job.
THE NEW YORK FIELD OFFICE has always been the Bureau’s largest and busiest; in the 1940s, it employed more than a thousand of the FBI’s approximately seven thousand agents. Bob felt diminished, painfully insignificant, in this sea of white shirts and snap-brim hats. And while in Alabama Bob had been given the latitude to run his cases as he saw fit, in New York he was just one small voice in a large chorus. The bosses set the tune, and he was expected to sing along.
Still, he was kept busy. In three and a half years, he made more than four hundred arrests. Nearly all involved Selective Service cases, Bob doggedly traipsing through the streets of New York to track down draft dodgers. It was an assignment that reinforced Bob’s growing misgivings about “missing the war.” The city’s sidewalks were a long way from the front lines, and he couldn’t help feeling he was shirking his duty, especially since his brother Art was in the thick of things in the Pacific. He was giving serious thought to quitting the FBI and volunteering for the army; with his experience he’d get assigned to G-2, the intelligence division, he expected.
But that was before the incident in Chinatown.
NEW YORK LOCAL SELECTIVE SERVICE Board Number 1 had more delinquent cases than any local board in the country. This statistic, however, was deceiving. Since the Lower Manhattan board’s authority extended to both the flophouses of the Bowery and the immigrant tenements of Chinatown, not every man who failed to report for service was trying to shirk his patriotic duty. The young men living a troubled, down-and-out life on the Bowery rarely got around to checking their mail. And many of the recent arrivals from China had offered up an invented name to the immigration authorities when they entered America, and then immediately reverted to their old family name once they were living and working in New York; draft board notices, as a consequence, often went undelivered.
FBI agents, though, didn’t want to hear any stories. They routinely insisted ignorance was no excuse: you break the law, you get hauled off to jail. Bob, however, was sympathetic. His treatment of these nuanced cases was more understanding, more shaped by a sagacious diplomacy than the strict a-law-is-a-law arrests carried out routinely by other G-men assigned to Board 1.
And his demeanor was noticed. His tact was appreciated. He developed a growing reputation for evenhandedness among the family groups who ruled Chinatown. He was often a guest at elaborate dinners where exotic delicacies were served, foods that Bob could not have even begun to imagine in his Idaho boyhood. The On Leong Tong, the Hip Sing Tong, and the Chinese Merchants Association all saw this young broad-shouldered, round-eyed FBI agent as someone they could trust.
It was these elders who told Bob about Thomas John Whelan. Whelan, as Bob observed firsthand when he checked out the story he’d been told, was a U.S. Treasury agent who was running a lucrative shakedown racket in the back rooms of Chinatown.
Flashing his badge, Whelan would charge into businesses, demanding to inspect the books. “I want to see the records of the Social Security payments you’ve been making for your employees,” he’d order. When these records could not be produced (because, almost invariably, the required payments to the government had not been made), Whelan would huff and puff with indignant authority that he had no choice but to cart the merchant immediately off to jail. You’re facing five years, he’d growl. You’ll be deported. Then having brandished the stick, he’d offer the carrot. Of course, he’d go on conspiratorially, he would be willing to forget about the whole thing in exchange for a cash payment of five hundred dollars, or a thousand if he thought the merchant could afford it.
Whelan had successfully pulled this routine about a dozen times before Bob was alerted. And the next time Whelan tried it, Bob was hiding in an adjacent room, listening to it all go down. As had been previously agreed, the merchant paid his money, and Bob, now a witness to the crime, waited until Whelan was back out on the street to make his arrest.
Bob announced, “FBI. You’re under arrest!” And then Whelan drew his service revolver.
Bob pulled out his .38.
It was a standoff. Two government agents, guns drawn, facing each other on a busy Chinatown street.
Only now, Whelan, with a shrewdness born out of desperation, began to appeal to the gathering crowd. I’m a Treasury agent. You know me. This man is trying to rob me. He’s not with the FBI. And the gathering multitudes took one look at the two armed men and quickly decided that age trumped youth: the Treasury agent had to be the one telling the truth.
All at once Bob could feel the crowd closing in on him. Later, he would say, it was fortunate that he was too scared to think. Instead, he tightened his pull on the trigger of his gun and declared in what he hoped was a clear, steady voice, “Whelan, you have two choices: either you lower your gun or I’m gonna shoot you straight through the heart.”
Whelan lowered his gun.
In the aftermath of Bob’s gutsy showdown, the Bureau, as the now laudatory appraisal in his new fitness report indicated, began to realize that maybe they had been wrong about Lamphere. Perhaps he was the sort of agent who embodied the staunch virtues of fortitude and commitment that Hoover had decreed. And Bob, exhilarated by the moment’s sudden challenge and proud of his finding the instincts to live up to its demands, began once again to believe that he had a meaningful future in the FBI.
Only the Bureau, wanting to reward him for both his ingenuity and courage, assigned Bob to the Soviet Espionage (SE) squad. And Bob at once felt betrayed. His suddenly promising career had just as suddenly been channeled into a very dead end. He was being relegated to an obscure and inconsequential Bureau outpost. The Russians, after all, were our wartime allies. They weren’t cooking up any nefarious plots. Getting assigned to SE, he was bitterly certain, was like being “shipped off to Siberia.”
3
AS BOB, GRUDGING AND UNCERTAIN, was beginning his new job, a stone’s throw across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., in a former junior college for fashionable young women that had been hastily transformed into a top-secret government facility, Meredith Gardner was moving into his own new battle—the Blue Problem. But unlike Bob, Meredith was excited by the prospect of throwing himself into the midst of this baffling challenge. The truth was, in so many ways Meredith was the personification of everything that the gun-toting, good-time-loving, nightclub-hopping FBI agent was not.
Just a quick glance revealed the deep, fundamental differences. Meredith was long, lanky, and ascetic, a man whose very thinness seemed to suggest that all the fun had been long ago squeezed out of him. He had a fondness for tweed sport coats, rep striped ties, and button-down white Oxford shirts—a deliberately donnish attire. Dark horn-rim glasses and a shock of unruly black hair that fell across his forehead as if blown by a sudden gust of wind further helped to evoke the image of a grad student perpetually heading to his next seminar.
Proudly, Meredith was a thinker, a man who took refuge in ideas. He collected them with an indiscriminate passion. Yet always orderly, whenever he found something that caught his interest—a curious fact about beetle morphology, the p
ast-tense conjugation of a Japanese verb, a tasty brand of biscuit—he’d jot down these little treasures on index cards, and then when he could find the time, transcribe them into one of his many gray-covered schoolboy notebooks. It was his habit to quote Lucretius’s prescription for a life well lived: “He knows what it is to know.” Meredith, too, strived to reach a similar state of grace. He infused his own life with a deep, constant, joyful pursuit of knowledge. And like the pensive Lucretius, he found beauty in abstractions: he enjoyed thinking about thought.
And while Bob seemed to come to life in a crowded, smoke-filled barroom with a glass of scotch in his hand, Meredith’s demeanor, even after a drink or two, was private to the point of being totally self-absorbed. This shyness was both a natural reticence and a well-developed defense against any boor who might try to penetrate his decidedly inward existence. People, especially those who didn’t know him well, had a tendency to dismiss his detachment as arrogance, but that was too rash and too shallow an appraisal. More often than not, it was simply that he wasn’t interested in what anyone else had to say; what was going on in his mind was enough for him.
Still, he could be judgmental, even haughty. Meredith insisted on precision in thought and in expression. Let someone offhandedly complain that “it was a million degrees outside,” and he couldn’t help but point out that “if that were indeed the case, we’d all evaporate.” Similarly, he’d pounce when “decimate” was used imprecisely. And all he had to do was hear “at this point in time” and he’d explode with a grouchy lecture about the annoying and unnecessary redundancy in the phrase. “Meredithisms,” his coworkers, more often with indulgent shrugs than not, called these frequent corrections.
Given his stiff, on occasion even hostile, demeanor, it’s perhaps understandable that Meredith didn’t make friends easily. But that never concerned him. He could not see the need. And as for conversation, he made do by talking to himself. (One of his colleagues waggishly passed this small joke around: “A gardner’s best friend is his mutter”—the punch line, such as it was, predicated on Mutter being the German for “mother.”) His was a circumspect life: he liked ideas, words, genealogy, crossword puzzles, a glass of sweet sherry, his pipe or, if that wasn’t handy, an unfiltered Camel, and solving unsolvable problems. And because Meredith knew he was very good at what he did, he was, in his solitary, undemonstrative way, quite content.
But most strikingly, of all the polar differences between these two young men, between the gregarious plow horse and the solitary deep thinker, when Meredith arrived at the former girls’ college, Arlington Hall, he was, at just thirty, already a legend.
EVERY GENIUS, IT HAS BEEN said, needs the spark that will ignite his unique mind, and for Meredith this catalytic moment occurred when he was eight. The year was 1920, and he was living in a down-at-the-heels clapboard rooming house in Austin, Texas, that his mother, Corrine, ran because it was the only way she could think of making ends meet. Just a year earlier, the Gardners, a family that could proudly trace their roots back to Queen Margaret of Scotland, had been settled happily in the Deep South cotton belt town of Okolona, Mississippi. But then Daniel Gardner suddenly died, leaving his widow and their two boys nearly penniless. Corrine made her way to Austin, somehow scratched together the money to buy a rickety home that desperately needed a fresh coat of paint, and put out a sign announcing “Rooms to Let.”
In the years after World War I, Austin was beginning to flex its muscles as a city: businesses were opening and newcomers kept arriving, and the rooms were quickly taken. And Meredith, though enrolled in grade school, was expected to help out. One of his responsibilities was to deliver the mail to their boarders. That was how he saw the newspaper.
It was a Yiddish-language paper that was received by a tenant whose name and occupation have long been forgotten. But what was remembered, and decades later Meredith shared the memory with his son with a genuine trace of bewilderment, was how the exotic Hebrew letters and the strange words had fascinated the young boy. It was all a perplexing puzzle, and so he set out to solve it. He had no plan of attack, but nevertheless it all—a sudden presto!—soon fell into place. It was like when he first learned to read as a precocious three-year-old; it just sort of happened. And so it wasn’t long before the nimble-minded eight-year-old taught himself Yiddish and even Hebrew, and now confident of his newfound talent, went on to teach himself German. Next he got his hands on a Spanish textbook, and he quickly mastered that, too. He just had the knack; languages never remained foreign to him for long.
By the time he was twenty-three, Meredith was fluent in at least a dozen languages, including Sanskrit. At the University of Texas, he breezed through his undergraduate degree and then went on, without pause, to pick up his master’s. His professors considered him a scholar of uncommon promise; there was a good deal of talk that it wouldn’t take much more work to prepare his master’s thesis for publication. But years later, what remains, arguably, most striking about the essay—“A Semasiological History of High German”—is its epigraph. Meredith chose a well-known bit of Horace, and its opening words, if one bothered to translate the Latin, seemed to sum up the young, defiant outsider quite well: “I hate and spurn the profane crowd.” Yet it was the quotation’s final lines that, years later, after all Meredith had accomplished, would prove prescient: “I, the priest of the muses, sing the songs not having been heard before.” And indeed he would.
But in preparation for that still unimagined calling, in 1938 Meredith went off to the University of Wisconsin to earn his doctorate in German. It was, apparently, a troubled period for the young scholar. Was he having doubts about his calling? Was he, at last, beginning to sow his long-dormant wild oats? Meredith kept his own counsel, and so any answers can only be speculation. But what is known is that often enough to be remembered, and often enough to draw concern, Meredith would sit in seminars with his head cradled in his hands, a man sullenly nursing a massive hangover. And what would his professors say about this unscholarly behavior? A distinguished member of the faculty one morning turned to the room full of students, gestured toward Meredith, who sat hunched in an almost fetal position, and explained to the class with benevolent understanding, “Mr. Gardner is our genius—but a genius with a bit of spice.”
Meredith’s intellectual journey next took him in 1940 to the University of Ohio in Akron. He taught German to the undergraduates and was universally feared as a demanding and uncompromising taskmaster; don’t sign up for Gardner’s course unless you are prepared to work harder than you’ve ever worked before, was the warning passed around campus. And when he was not terrorizing undergraduates, he was putting the finishing touches on his dissertation, a long, deep journey into the fundamental meanings of words in High German.
But as much as Meredith enjoyed being locked away in the groves of academe, after the attack on Pearl Harbor he knew he’d soon have to enter a more dangerous world. And, not least, he was a patriot; he wanted to do his duty. So in a way Meredith was already prepared when the head of the department suggested to him, with a transparent vagueness, that he knew some people in Washington. They’re doing some things with codes. Someone who knows German might come in handy. Would you be interested?
“Yes, I think I’d like that very much,” Meredith answered. He would always tell people it was a decision he made without hesitation.
In the winter of 1942, Meredith reported to Arlington Hall.
4
MEREDITH, TO HIS SURPRISE AND discomfort, entered a world of women. The nation’s premier code-breaking facility, the Signal Security Agency, was nearly entirely staffed by female civilians. (It would be renamed in 1945, with proprietary pride, the Army Security Agency—ASA—but the intelligence mandarins before and after referred to it simply as Arlington Hall.) Row after row of young women sat hunched over desks performing the painstaking task of cataloguing the mountains of intercepted enemy messages; or, after some rudimentary training, worked as linguists; or simply buzzed a
bout doing clerical chores. At the height of the war, the ASA would employ over five thousand women. But while the handful of men like Meredith—mathematicians, foreign-language specialists, anthropologists, even a few undergraduates with impressive scores on IQ tests or simply a fondness for puzzles—who had signed on for the top-secret work knew what they were getting into, the brigade of women, although volunteers, had been pretty much shanghaied.
One typical recruiting center, for example, had been set up in the midst of the daily bustle of the fortress-like Lynchburg, Virginia, Post Office building on Church Street. Comfortably nestled between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the James River, Lynchburg was considered a friendly, all-American sort of town by the Army brass and so Lieutenant Pasvo Carlson, a young Signal Corps officer, had been dispatched to troll for civilian female volunteers. He was armed with Nordic good looks, a bright smile, and a largely vague and often specious bill of goods.
The job, he’d begin truthfully enough, was with the Army in the Washington area. And the pay would be attractive; you’d enter at the grade of SP-5 and earn $1,800 a year, plus a bonus for Saturday work, and for most of the women, many of them schoolteachers, this would be a considerable raise. But in response to the eventual question of what the job would entail, the lieutenant’s lips were tightly sealed. Under orders from his superiors, he’d explain with a terseness made even weightier by the drama of wartime, he could not reveal any details. The specifics were top secret.
Yet before any potential recruit’s imagination could fill this void with a bleak vision of work in a subterranean bunker, Carlson jumped in with a cheerier prospect. Like a carnival barker zeroing in on his mark, he’d produce impressive brochures and picture postcards of a workplace that seemed more like a Virginia hunt-country resort than a secure Army outpost. There was a shimmering outdoor swimming pool, stables filled with sleek-coated horses, a pillared yellow-brick colonial mansion as large and impressive as any they had seen in Gone With the Wind, and all these goodies were scattered about, as one brochure boasted, “a 100-acre campus offering . . . interesting variety with its open lawns, landscaped gardens, and wooded sections.”