by Howard Blum
Nudged on by the enticing promise of a sojourn at a well-groomed country estate and attractive pay, not to mention their own earnest desire to have a chance to help the Allied cause, hundreds of women signed on for this unexplained, hush-hush Army work. Then, after a brief indoctrination in Army offices in downtown Washington—a few maddeningly nonspecific hours at most—the new recruits would make their own way, quite often by taxi, to the address on Glebe Road in Virginia that had finally been revealed. And as soon as they arrived at the front gate, they’d feel betrayed. What they saw was nothing like what had been dangled in front of them.
In its heyday Arlington Hall had indeed been the manicured junior college for pampered young ladies pictured in the postcards and the brochures. But the school had already lost much of its gloss (as well as a sizable chunk of its enrollment) when the Army, brandishing the War Powers Act, purchased the property in 1942 for the court-ordered price of $650,000. Soon the pool was drained and the stables emptied. Rows of dingy barracks now lined the unkempt lawns. The interior of the mansion building had been subdivided into a maze of cramped, closet-like rooms separated by plywood walls, or simply by rows of filing cabinets. And a steel-mesh fence topped with curling circles of razor-sharp barbed wire encircled the grounds. By the time Meredith, as well as the hundreds of new female recruits, arrived, the Army had firmly imposed its brutal aesthetic on Arlington Hall.
But while there were grumblings from many of the arrivals that they had been seduced with false promises—a guilty Lieutenant Carlson made it a point to hurry off whenever accusatory stares were shot his way—once the top-secret work was revealed, its undeniable wartime urgency put a damper on their complaints. The Army wranglers—as the teams of cryptanalysts were known—were doing nothing less than breaking both the German and Japanese ciphers. The ability to read the enemy’s encoded messages would undoubtedly save lives, shorten the war, and, if exploited with ingenuity and blessed by luck, help pave the way toward an Allied victory on both fronts. An empty swimming pool no longer seemed like a hardship when measured against the opportunity to play a supporting role in this grand effort.
As for Meredith, he threw himself with his customary focus and insight into every problem that was thrown his way. The British had already made extraordinary headway on the Wehrmacht codes before he came onboard, but his fluency in German helped to smooth a few lingering rough edges. Impressed, his superiors decided to turn him loose on the Japanese cables.
The code breakers here, too, had already worked wonders. First, they had untangled the new, sophisticated Japanese cipher, codenamed “Purple,” and then they went on to build a replica of the Purple encoding machine that employed a complex electrical rotor system along with a twenty-five-character alphabetic switchboard without, miracle of ingenious miracles, ever having seen the actual Japanese device; their inspired deductions were all intuitive suppositions. But they still needed readers who could make sense of the unlocked text. Of course, the ability to translate Japanese with effortless fluency was a prerequisite for the team, and Meredith, while he could claim expertise in Lithuanian, Sanskrit, and Old Church Slavonic, as well as the more mundane European languages of German and Spanish, did not know a single word of Japanese. So, to the amazement of his superiors, while he was also busily laboring away on the German messages, in his spare time, hunched day and night over his monastic desk in the main building, in three months he taught himself Japanese. As if in an instant, he was fluent. He became a key member of the unit deciphering the cables traveling in and out of the Imperial War Command in Tokyo.
And while Meredith’s accomplishments were soon attracting curious attention from the Army Signal Corps brass who ran Arlington Hall, they were no surprise to one of the new recruits. From the moment Blanche Hatfield learned that he was working with the wranglers, she had been keeping a curious but discreet eye on him. After all, it wasn’t every day that you got to observe a legend.
BLANCHE WAS NOT THE TYPICAL Arlington Hall female recruit. She not only knew before volunteering—“fully cognizant” was how it read in her file—what the Army was up to, but she had ample reason to believe she could lend a hand. It was as if, as she’d confidently informed the examiner when she’d applied, the job had been conceived with her nimble talents in mind.
Not that anyone would know it to look at her. While Meredith had the brooding, rumpled mien of quirky genius, a quick glance at Blanche suggested nothing so eccentric. A precocious twenty-three-year-old, she might have been dismissively categorized as another of those pearls and twin-setted coeds who had populated the corridors of Arlington Hall in its previous gilded life. Hazel-eyed, and with bobbed hair that, when the light hit it full force, had a bold reddish sheen, she embodied a mix of breeding and material comfort that animates women of a certain background. A well-mannered smile, yet full of a jaunty charm, completed the pretty picture.
But while Blanche had indeed grown up in a big Victorian house in Evanston, Illinois, and her pedigree included well-heeled generations of prominent church and university officials, she also had a wonderful mind. Her father was chairman of the German Department at Northwestern University (the “Keep Off the Grass” signs that surrounded his acres of lawn were posted in a pedantic variety of languages); her brother would go on to become chairman of the German Department at Harvard; and Blanche had also begun to make her way in the family business. At Mount Holyoke College she had majored in German, getting elected to Phi Beta Kappa in the process. Then she went on to earn her M.A. at the University of Wisconsin, again in German.
It was while she was working on her master’s that, as she would one day tell her children, her professors had regaled the students with heady tales about one of their predecessors in the department. How he had the sort of mind that appears once in a generation. How he could grasp impossibly difficult concepts in a flash, make connections that had eluded other linguists, offer insights that were nothing less than stunning in their uniqueness and clarity. The way they talked about this grad student, he might as well have been a god; and in time he would become a sort of deity in Blanche’s feverish imagination. And now here was Meredith Gardner in the (ghostly pale) flesh, laboring in the same top-secret code-breaking facility as she was.
Blanche knew she had to meet him. She spent considerable time mulling over her approach. And even then, when she had worked out what she thought would be an appropriate introduction—flirtatious, while also making clear that she was a woman of accomplishment—she still hesitated. It was not so much that Meredith seemed intimidating. Rather, gazing at him bent over his desk, deep in some arcane yet no doubt vital puzzle, she wondered if he would even hear her voice. He appeared totally self-contained, completely detached from all that was going on around him. An intrusion into his very private world could be doomed from the start.
For days she made excuses to put off the encounter. Finally, with a sudden burst of courage, she pounced.
“Ich dachte, Sie wären eine Legende!” she announced. (And she knew there was no need to offer a translation: “I thought you were just a legend!”)
When Meredith finally looked up, as Blanche would always tell the tale, he did not speak for what seemed ages. She waited, all the time fearing that by barging into his isolation she had committed an unpardonable sin. He must think me the silliest of young women, she decided. But then he smiled, and a conversation, small and trivial, followed. It was only after Blanche returned to her own desk that she realized they had spoken to each other entirely in German.
Fraternization at Arlington Hall was not specifically prohibited, but it was frowned on; it was a military facility, after all. And so their courtship remained one more closely guarded secret among all the many others that they protected.
BUT IT WAS THE NATURE of that covert world that there was always at least one more bit of hush-hush activity swirling around in the shadows than was guessed at. And so it was at Arlington Hall. While Blanche and Meredith did their best to make sur
e no one knew about their blossoming relationship, in one of the few private offices in the main building, a two-member team had secretly begun to examine the Blue Problem.
5
COLONEL CARTER W. CLARKE WAS, depending on the way one looked at the world, either a realist or a deeply suspicious fellow. But since he was the deputy chief of the Military Intelligence Service this was a caution that had its practical advantages.
And so it was that even as the war in Europe continued, the colonel found himself thinking that Arlington Hall shouldn’t be focused on just the German and Japanese codes. America needed to read Russia’s mail, too. It was crucial, all his professional and personal instincts rose up to warn him, that the nation knew precisely what the Russians were up to.
THE UNITED STATES ALREADY HAD filing cabinets bursting with Soviet message traffic gathering dust. With intermittent assiduousness, the government had been collecting copies of Russian cables—diplomatic and trade—sent to and from Moscow for years. The program had begun modestly in the more languid prewar days when a half-dozen or so undermanned Signal Corps monitoring stations spread from Fort Monmouth (in New Jersey) to Fort McKinley (in the Philippines) began pulling Russian cable traffic in sporadic bursts from the airwaves. Then in 1940, in a clandestine arrangement made possible by David Sarnoff, who, conveniently, was both the chief executive of RCA (then the nation’s major commercial telegram cable company) and a reserve Signal Corps officer, Russian cables sent from and received in RCA offices in New York, Washington, and San Francisco were routinely photographed. Working in the back rooms of RCA offices, supplied with flimsy cover stories, the Army photo technicians were, unlike the monitoring station staff, able to get perfect copies of every message. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, a wartime America quickly instituted rules for the censorship of all international mail and communications; telegraph companies were now required to turn over copies of every foreign communication. By 1942, the file cabinets at Arlington Hall were bulging with a nearly complete inventory of all recent message traffic sent to and from Moscow.
Not that it did the spymasters any good. There was never much thought or energy put into reading these cables. Early on, when the array of monitoring stations first began gathering the Russian messages, the head of the Signal Intelligence Service, Major D. M. Crawford, threw up his hands in defeat after only a half-hearted fight: “Judging by what is known of Russian cryptographic methods,” he as good as moaned to his superiors, “the Russians are employing complicated, scientifically constructed systems designed to resist the organized efforts of expert cryptanalysis.”
Besides, in those halcyon prewar years, knowing what the Russians were up to struck the deep thinkers in military intelligence as an abstract, largely irrelevant, exercise; the national interest in the late 1930s was defined in defiantly parochial terms. Later, in the wake of the German army’s blitzkrieg across Europe, Congress, with America on the sidelines and largely hoping they could keep it that way, passed the Lend-Lease Act in 1941. A staggering fortune of armaments and supplies—over $11 billion worth by the war’s end—was sent under the terms of the act to the assailed Soviet fighters, matériel that was to be repaid in kind after the war. In this arm’s-length way, the U.S. government tacitly cheered the Soviet army on, all but formally acknowledging they were fighting the nation’s battles, too. And once the country entered the war, it found itself locked in common cause with the Russians. Both U.S. and Soviet soldiers shed blood in the shared battle to defeat Hitler. The two nations, if not friends, were allies.
But Colonel Clarke’s apprehensive mind was, even as the war was still being fought, focusing on the inevitable peace conferences. A Friday-night poker player, the colonel had a metaphor handy: the sessions would be high-stakes contests. It was imperative that America walk away from the table with its fair share—or better—of the pot. And past experience had taught him that the odds of coming out ahead certainly increased if one knew what cards the other player was holding. He confided this game-winning strategy in a carefully oblique memo to a G-2 colleague in May 1942:
“The end purpose [is] enabling an American peace delegation to confront the problems of the peace table with the fullest intimate knowledge possible . . . to secure the purposes and attitudes, overt and covert, of those who sit opposite them.”
Eight months after this hope of obtaining “the fullest intimate knowledge possible” had started gnawing at him, in January 1943, a small kernel of intelligence crossed his desk. It was a memo churned out by the code breakers toiling on the Japanese problem at Arlington Hall, a minor revelation they had stumbled upon; in other circumstances it might have gone unnoticed in the constant flow of more valuable tactical information. But at this moment it held the prospect of just the sort of game-winning advantage the cagey colonel was seeking.
It was a message from the General Staff in Tokyo to the attachés in Berlin and Helsinki. It began: “We have commenced the study of Russian diplomatic codes and obtained the following results. . . .” The results, as outlined, were at best modest. The Japanese had not broken the Russian codes. However, with the help of the Finns, who had been exchanging cryptographic material they had recovered after the Red Army’s 1939 invasion with Tokyo’s code breakers, they had made some progress. The Japanese had, as one impressed Army code breaker acknowledged, “uncovered clues.”
That was all the encouragement Colonel Clarke needed. In the first months of 1943, it was becoming possible to envision the long endgame that would lead to the defeat of Hitler. With an expedient practicality, he now looked toward a more complicated future. And he began to ponder how Signals Intelligence—“sigint,” to use the professionals’ word—might help.
On Monday, February 1, 1943, just one day before the official surrender of the besieged German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, the colonel ordered the Army Signals Intelligence command to start work on “the Russian problem.” A special “compartment” was established at Arlington Hall.
THE PROGRAM WAS TOP SECRET. And the staff was minimal—just two recent arrivals at Arlington Hall. Second Lieutenant Leonard Zubko had an engineering degree and had just completed Infantry School at Fort Benning. His only qualification for this assignment, as best he could surmise, was that he spoke Russian (both his parents were born in the Ukraine). Gene Grabeel, his coworker, had even less apparent skills. A graduate of Longwood College in Farmwood, Virginia, she had been an unhappy high school teacher when the affable Lieutenant Carlson approached her in the Lynchburg Post Office. She had listened to his pitch, discussed it with her father, who agreed that it might make sense to go to Washington “and shuffle papers,” and as soon as a replacement teacher was found, she reported to the duty officer at Arlington Hall. Four weeks later she was sitting at a wooden table across from a bewildered Lieutenant Zubko in the corner of a tiny room in the main building. And lining an entire wall of this claustrophobic space were eight shoulder-high filing cabinets crammed with years of Russian cable traffic.
They couldn’t make sense of a single one.
6
WHICH WAS PRECISELY WHAT THE Russians had intended. The messages had been encoded in an unbreakable code. It was by shrewd design, much more sophisticated, much more ingenious than either the German or Japanese systems. The Soviet cryptologists had, in effect, locked the door once; then they locked it again; and, finally, just to be sure no one could get in, they threw away the key.
The system worked, in its plodding, laborious, and seemingly foolproof way, basically (and hypothetically) like this:
A Russian spy, call him Paul Revere, came in from the cold to the New York rezidentura (as the Soviet diplomatic missions were known) with an important message that needed to reach Moscow without delay: “The British are coming.”
The cipher clerk grabbed the message from the secret agent and jumped into action. Like a diligent copy editor, he smoothed Paul Revere’s unpolished prose, taking care that it conformed to all the elements of style that had been drumme
d into him in cipher school. He must, he knew straight off, disguise the source. The security-conscious KGB prohibited the mention of an agent’s actual name in a cable; only aliases could be transmitted. So the dutiful clerk checked a top-secret list for Revere’s code name. He found it: Silversmith.
The rest of the brief message needed some sprucing up, too. There is no “the” in Russian; the article is a notion alien to the language. Also, verbs were often deleted in cables, the logic being that they were implicit and only slowed down the recipient’s unbuttoning of an urgent message. Finally, per another stylistic convention, certain nouns with Western national and ideological affinities, such as “British” (or, say, “CIA” or “FBI”), were replaced with an insider’s jargon, a practice rooted more in a jaunty spy fellowship than any security concerns. Thus, “British” became “Islanders.”
The edited message the clerk transcribed on his work sheet—the verbs deemed necessary—now read: “Silversmith reports Islanders coming.” (Of course, KGB-trained clerks wrote in Russian, using Cyrillic characters; this example, for clarity’s sake, is playing out in English.)
With the editing of the plaintext—i.e., the original message—completed, the clerk was ready to take the codebook out of the safe. The codebook was a secret dictionary that allowed the members of the club—in this case, KGB officers—to communicate with fellow clubmen without outsiders being able to understand. It was employed to translate the information into the secret language—to encode it.