by Howard Blum
It was that question, he further explained to the code breakers who were now rushing along with him to the same giddy realization, that had brought him to his great discovery: Moscow Center was announcing the page number of the one-time pad they were using to encipher the message.
Since the team already knew that the one-time pads—the name now a fiction—were used for multiple messages, all they had to do was hunt for the traffic that had been enciphered with the same keys. The IBM sorter did most of the work. Still, it took several months to find the matches. Then they attacked.
It was a communal effort, with new readers being hurriedly brought on to the team. Shrewdly, they focused on cables that were Moscow’s order lists for Lend-Lease supplies. The formats were identical, as were the commodities and quantities; this “item cycling,” as it was known, gave the cipher strippers further advantage.
It was the edge they had needed. “The repetitious nature of the trade texts made it possible for the large cryptanalysis staff of fifty to seventy-five people, mostly young women, slowly to recover the code text,” Phillips would explain.
But this was only the end of the beginning. Unraveling the Soviet code was similar to playing with a Russian nesting doll: you removed one, only to find another laying inside. The wranglers at Arlington Hall had, against all expectations, succeeded in stripping the cables of their encipherment. Yet that only revealed another deep mystery—the unreadable encoded message. The code breakers had traveled all this long, taxing way, and yet were still as far off as when they’d started the journey.
WHEN THE WAR ENDED, THE deep thinkers in military intelligence began to focus their attention, as well as their growing fears, on the Soviet Union. As a result, old hands from the other units at Arlington Hall were reassigned to the Blue Problem. In January 1946, Meredith Gardner was given a desk among dozens of others in the Russian unit that spread out across a large, open space in Building B. He was newly married to the woman, a fellow code breaker, who already thought him a legend, but now Meredith would prove it to the rest of them.
12
BOB LAMPHERE WAS ALSO NEWLY married, and, in the fall of 1947, was also off to a new posting. But he couldn’t bring himself to feel the sort of unequivocal exhilaration that Meredith experienced in his love and work. For Bob, both these sudden changes in his life, he’d confide, had left him grappling if not with second thoughts, at least some moments of disquiet. Not for the first time, he feared he had gotten things all wrong.
After all, he had thought he loved his first wife, Geri, the college sweetheart whom he’d married five years earlier. But their marriage had quickly turned into a battle of wills; they were too alike to get along, he’d say. And for a gleeful spell he’d thoroughly enjoyed his nights as a bachelor on the prowl in wartime New York. But then—maybe it was growing up, or maybe it was just growing old, he’d wonder—Bob had reached the stage when he suddenly decided it would be nice to settle down again. And in this determined mood, all his thoughts turned to rekindling the flame of an old memory. Bob, in fact, persuaded himself that he had been seriously in love with someone else all along.
He had met Sarah Hosch when he was a young, footloose novice field agent in Birmingham. It was an energetic time, when his badge was still shiny and he could hightail across the state chasing down wartime desperadoes and also look forward to the long, playful evening ahead. Sarah had beauty, an infectious Southern charm, and when he was with her it was easy to be convinced that life held nothing better than hanging out till the wee hours in smoky roadhouses. Their glasses would be swiftly refilled, the band would mix honky-tonk with torch songs, and late into the evening they’d be dancing cheek-to-cheek. And come the new day he’d head out a bit red-eyed, but still basking in the fresh thrill of being a G-man. Throughout those dizzying months, one constantly recollected moment seemed to center all his thoughts with a pull as strong as gravity: Sarah singing “Linger in My Arms a Little Longer, Baby,” her soft voice barely audible, yet still coaxing, and Bob at that perfect instant thinking he’d be happy to linger with her forever.
Yet as things worked out, their youthful relationship was destined to fall apart. Sarah married, and had a daughter. It was then that Bob, on the rebound, or so he now began to think, had married Geri, the adventurous woman he’d met at a college party in Idaho, only to wind up quickly divorced, living in New York, and once again passing his evenings in nightclubs and hotel bars, a drink in front of him, a smile on his handsome face, and doing his devilish best to chat up any woman who caught his wandering eye.
It was late one driftless night at the Astor Roof, a scotch resting on the bar and a singer with the face of an angel easing into “linger in my arms a little longer, baby, don’t think twice . . . ,” that a once familiar memory reclaimed its place in his mind. All it took was a single long-distance call to find out that Sarah was divorced. And in the clear light of morning their reunion still seemed like a good—no, a fated—idea.
And now it was five whirlwind months later, September 1947, and, while Sarah’s daughter remained with her father, they were newlyweds living, at least until they found something better, in a small, stifling room on East Capitol Street in muggy Washington, D.C. In the mornings their pillows would be damp with sweat and neither of them felt much like lingering. Adding to his woes, he’d doubted whether his new bride had the remotest idea of what life with him would now be like. How was fun-loving Sarah, he fretted, ever going to fit into his new straitlaced nine-to-five life as a supervisor in the Espionage Section at FBI headquarters? But for that matter, he was also wondering if he’d fit in, too.
THERE WERE THREE DISTINCT WORLDS in the FBI, Bureau veterans liked to remind young agents. There were the field offices, which offered an eclectic caseload and the much-prized autonomy to agents to pursue them pretty much as they saw fit. Then there was New York, where the possibility always loomed of being part of an investigation that would deliver career-making headlines. And then there was headquarters, which was totally unlike anyplace else in the Bureau. You sat at your desk all day, praying that whenever the director hurled one of his frequent thunderbolts down from Olympus, it wasn’t aimed at you. “Dreamland”—that was what many who had done their time in the fortress-like Art Deco building on Pennsylvania Avenue called headquarters. It was a place where you went and dreamed about what your career might have been.
Bob, of course, had heard all this. He would never claim that when he’d filed his FD-638—the form requesting a promotion to a supervisor’s role—he hadn’t weighed any of the derogatory talk about what life at headquarters offered. But Bob had remained undeterred. He was convinced that all the verbal signals he’d been receiving about the changes in Bureau doctrine regarding the Soviet threat were sincere. He believed that not only did the top floor want to put an end to, as he called it, “the watch and wait philosophy,” but that with his field experience and knowledge, he’d be the right man in the right spot to help wage the aggressive counterattack.
He had been recruited by Bill Harvey, the Bureau’s counterintelligence “eminence rouge,” as those on the SE squad called him because of his suspiciously rosy-cheeked glow. It was just after Bob had added to his growing reputation by representing the Bureau at the deportation trial of Gerhart Eisler, a balding, diminutive, ostensibly unemployed middle-aged man living in a third-floor walk-up in Long Island City, Queens, but who secretly was an active Comintern agent, crisscrossing the country to push the Kremlin’s political agenda. The Eisler case demonstrated to the skeptical lawyers at the Justice Department that at least one FBI agent could provide them the sort of watertight evidence they’d need to get a conviction in the always problematic security cases. It also showed his Bureau bosses that Agent Lamphere, when he was shoved into a corner, would ball up his fists and fight his way out.
It was toward the end of what had proved to be a raucous trial, when Eisler’s frustrated lawyer jumped to her feet, pointed to Bob, and roared, “This is a frame-up by
you!” Without skipping a beat, Bob shot back, “You’re a goddamned liar!” The press was all over the hot exchange, and so a very tentative memo went up to the director reporting on Bob’s outburst. People in the Bureau held their breath, waiting for Hoover’s response, and the consensus was that the intemperate Lamphere was toast. But when the director wrote back that “the agent is to be commended,” Bob’s star at the Bureau rocketed into its full ascendancy.
After the jury brought in a guilty verdict, Harvey made his pitch. Bob listened, and he immediately felt as if Harvey had read his own brash and impatient mind. The Bureau was “hamstrung, facing an enemy that did not fight by rules of decency or fairness”—that had been Bob’s longtime mantra to his buddies on the SE squad. Now at last one of the bosses was chanting it, too! Even better, Harvey promised he’d back up his tough talk with all the naughty goodies he had at his disposal—hidden microphones, telephone taps, electronic surveillance, even black-bag jobs, as the warrantless “surreptitious entry” ops were known. Harvey needed, as he flatteringly put it to Bob, “new blood,” knowledgeable supervisors who’d sit by his side in Washington and help him direct the troops as they went off into battle. Bob signed on without reservation.
But no sooner had he arrived at his new desk at headquarters, than he found that Bill Harvey was no longer with the Bureau. Mr. Harvey, Bob was succinctly informed, had decided his talents could best be put to use at the newly formed CIA. After poking around a little, Bob discovered what had actually happened. Harvey had gone off to a party, enjoyed himself too much, and on his unsteady way home, pulled his car into Rock Creek Park with the plan of sobering up before continuing on. Only he promptly fell asleep. He never made it home. In the early hours of the morning, his distraught wife, Libby, raised the alarm. When Hoover learned that his missing counterintelligence chief had not been sandbagged by the Russians but had just been sleeping it off in his car, he fired the errant Harvey. And so the Bureau’s loss became the CIA’s gain.
Bob’s new boss, Lish Whitson, he soon recognized, was “almost the polar opposite” of the hard-charging Harvey. Whitson was a reserved, academic presence. He possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of the Russians working in the United States; throw a name at him and he’d give you the diplomat’s or trade official’s ostensible job, years of service, and marital status without consulting the file. But Bob couldn’t help fearing that Whitson’s studious approach to counterintelligence would result in only more of the same largely ineffective, largely passive responses to the KGB. Bob was left shaking his head, wondering about the rightness of his choice to walk away from the streets to sit behind a desk.
THEN THERE WAS HOOVER—AND, AS improbable as it was disconcerting, the director’s apparent concerns about Bob’s new wife.
In any circumstances, a summons from Hoover loomed as a nerve-wrangling encounter. Bob had no idea what had precipitated the director’s wanting to see him, but he prepared for the appointment as carefully as if he were going into battle, which, he knew, might very well be the case. His suit pressed, shoes shined, tie precisely knotted, Bob was led down the long corridor by Sam Noisette, the director’s unsmiling staff assistant. As instructed, he waited until Noisette announced his name, and then, feeling as reluctant as if he’d been ordered to step into a vat of boiling water, he crossed the threshold into the director’s office. At once the door closed behind him. Hoover approached, shook his hand perfunctorily, and directed Bob to a black leather chair.
The seating arrangement was pure theater. Hoover’s desk was mounted on a platform, and Bob had no choice but to look up at him, a supplicant gazing at the king on his throne. He waited in intimidated silence for Hoover to begin.
What came forth was a diatribe about Bob’s wife. Or was it about Bureau wives in general? Bob was too blindsided to tell. He simply nodded and grunted judiciously, as the director went on and dogmatically on. While all the time Bob’s racing mind was screaming: Can this be really happening?
The gist of the nearly thirty-minute rapid-fire lecture was this: Wives talk. And when they do, their ill-considered chatter often jeopardizes ongoing investigations, and no less damaging, can also dent the Bureau’s scrupulously crafted image. Wives, the famously unmarried director lectured, should never, ever be told by their husbands what they were working on. It was true for all agents, but even more for those in counterintelligence, he added emphatically.
The next thing a perplexed Bob knew, Noisette had once again materialized, and he was being escorted to the door.
On the way back to his desk, two floors below, a stampede of questions galloped through Bob’s mind. Had Sarah said something to someone? Did this mean the wives routinely spy on one another? Could it be that Hoover was suggesting, however obliquely, that Sarah might not be a suitable Bureau spouse? Did he actually know something? Or perhaps, Bob tried to convince himself, it might not have been about him at all. It very well could have been a cautionary lecture Hoover routinely dished out to everyone at headquarters.
Bob had no answers, and lots of suspicions. But that night, and not for the first time, he had a sickening notion. He lay in bed next to Sarah unable to sleep, his thoughts circling from his new job to his new marriage and then back again. And once again he wondered what he had gotten himself into.
BUT, BOB DISCOVERED, THERE WERE at least two pleasing advantages to life at headquarters. First, he now had regular access to the Bureau’s voluminous files. Shoot off a query slip with a subject’s name and aliases, and before you knew it, a mountain of material would be piled on top of your desk. And, second, though not least to a grateful Bob, he was assigned a young clerk to help dig through the landfill of information.
Their paper chases—always a team effort—often proved gratifyingly productive. Take, for example, the time Bob was pulling together information on Mikhail Chaliapin, a particularly slow-witted KGB thug whom Elizabeth Bentley had first ID’d. Bob had been going down that long trail when, unexpectedly, he found himself doglegging off in pursuit of another Soviet contact Bentley had encountered when she was with Chaliapin.
For the past three years, Bob, who was convinced Bentley’s 107-page confession was full of clues that would lead to buried treasure, had been trying to get a handle on “Jack.” All they had was this cover name and Bentley’s intriguing description of a man with “dark-blond kinky hair, unusually thick eyebrows” and who “walked with a slight limp in his left leg which was noticeable when he moved rapidly.” Jack’s identity, though, remained a mystery.
But Bob’s clerk noticed something that had been previously overlooked in the thick Chaliapin files. Bureau watchers had been tailing the KGB man when he met up with an unidentified subject—“unsub,” in Bureau-speak—on a New York street corner. On a hunch, or perhaps simply out of boredom, they abandoned Chaliapin and followed the unsub to a brownstone in Greenwich Village. And that’s where the trail ended. There was no further follow-up on the man Chaliapin had met on the street. But the report included a brief description: he had a limp.
When his assistant pointed this out, Bob was quickly on the phone to the New York office. That day an agent, hiding behind a routine cover story to justify his inquiries, spoke to people in the building on West Eleventh Street. And the man with the limp was given a name: Joseph Katz. When Katz’s photograph was shown to Bentley, she confirmed that he was “Jack.” A long-running mystery was finally solved. And Bob, although still straining against the shackles binding him to his desk, couldn’t help but enjoy a small sense of triumph for the role he’d played in bringing another covert member of the KGB operation out of the shadows.
BOB ALSO HAD THE FRUITS of another weapon at his disposal—and it was a secret one. In fact, it was so secret it wasn’t officially supposed to exist. A strident Bureau memo made that clear: “We do not obtain authorization for ‘black bag jobs’ from outside the Bureau. Such a technique involves trespassing and is clearly illegal.” Only Hoover or Clyde Tolson, his deputy, could sign off on a
surreptitious entry—an op undertaken without a legally required warrant—into Soviet facilities. The authorization memo would be prominently marked “Do Not File,” and it carried the instructions that the paper must be destroyed once the operation had been completed.
Nevertheless, as Harvey had promised, the black-bag teams were kept busy. In the dead of night, sound teams spiked the Soviet consulate in New York with microphones. And after posing as New York City elevator inspectors to get the lay of the land, over a series of weekends another crew targeted the office of the Soviet Government Purchasing Commission. With the lock-school agents leading the way, they succeeded in breaking into the code room. Then the photo teams took over, and they had a field day, snapping shots of everything that the Soviet cipher clerks had filed away. By dawn they were gone, without leaving a trace.
Bob was cheered that the Bureau was beginning to fight back. But at the same time, he didn’t know what to make of the information that was coming in. The wires seemed to produce nothing of any operational value; the Soviets were apparently too canny to talk openly. And he’d look at the photographs of encoded cables and shrug. Then he’d get on with other work.
IT WAS AN UNCOMFORTABLE TIME for Bob. He knew he should be proud of what he’d accomplished—at twenty-nine he was both newly remarried to a pretty wife and already a supervisor at Bureau headquarters. Outwardly, as he went about his days, Bob was his usual stolid, hardworking, pipe-smoking self. But inside he was having difficulty coming to terms with a sense of his own uselessness.
Bob was convinced that, as he unhesitatingly put it, “the Soviets were the enemy.” He had envisioned himself as “a man on a mission”; that was why he’d come to Washington. But now he had come to suspect that he had been sidelined. Supervisors must live by the golden rule of their profession: Don’t get your hands dirty. Bob, however, wanted to get into the thick of things. He wanted to break away from his desk and check the flow of evil. He wanted to make a contribution, and he blamed the Bureau for not knowing how to use him.