by Howard Blum
Fact: The message was political, an explanation of how Roosevelt would lose the election in the Electoral College despite receiving more votes in the ballot boxes.
Fact: This meant that the traffic on the cable circuit he was attacking—designated JADE by Arlington Hall—was not concerned with trade but with diplomatic issues. And this offered the encouraging possibility that future decoded cables might provide significantly more interesting reading.
Fact: Since it was transmitted in English, that suggested the unknown source who was being quoted was an American. Which could mean the Russians had signed on a journalist or even a politician as an asset.
And finally, his one great, glittering fact: He had done it! He had broken the Soviets’ spell code for English words. He had demonstrated that what had previously been impossible was indeed possible.
It did not matter to him that the decoded message was trivial. Meredith had little interest in what the men in impressive military uniforms who ran Arlington Hall portentously called “strategic importance.” The value of the information he’d unearth, where it fit in the push-and-pull game being played out between the Americans and the Russians, was irrelevant. He simply solved puzzles. And now, spurred on by this first heady success, he would continue to recover more code groups. He would hunt for other repetitions, and then chart their interplay. He would go forward, and he would go back. He would not stop until he could read entire messages, not just the words from the Soviets’ English spell dictionary. He’d stay at it until every blank was inked in. That was all that mattered.
YET AS THE MONTHS PASSED and Meredith continued to fill in the blanks more, he began to suspect that all his initial instincts had been too parochial. His success remained limited; a word here, a phrase there. Decoding entire messages was still beyond him. Nevertheless, what Meredith read started to fill him with apprehension. Word after decoded word woke up a new suspicion. Yet stubbornly he refused to acknowledge it. But in the spring of 1947, after he succeeded in reading a message sent from New York to Moscow, he could no longer deny the larger significance of the puzzle he’d been piecing together. He could no longer take refuge in the belief that he’d been toiling away at a purely academic pursuit.
He read, in part: “For correspondence with Arthur a book in the Spanish language, ‘Una Excursion a Los Ranqueles,’ was used as a code.
“For correspondence with Aleksandr the books ‘My Sister Eileen’ and ‘Defense Will Not Win War’ were used as codes.”
It was now clear to Meredith that he had broken into Soviet espionage traffic, most probably KGB. He was reading a cable announcing the book code that Soviet spies would use to transmit messages. He had no inkling who the well-read “Arthur” and “Aleksandr” were. But he knew these were the code names of Russian agents.
Over the weeks that followed, as Meredith continued to grow more confident in deciphering the cable traffic, the trail of incriminating footprints led him deeper and deeper into the secret world. Yet once again, there were mysteries buried within other mysteries. For even after he’d managed to turn numbers into words, he was left staring dumbfounded at a new, seemingly incomprehensible language. There were cover names for agents, for politicians, for sources, for locations. It was an entirely new vocabulary of intrigue.
When Meredith had first started grappling with the Blue Problem, he’d told himself, This is going to be fun. The prospect of cracking a big, complicated code, a problem that had defied all previous attempts, had filled him with a childlike joy. But now his assignment had taken him into unsuspected territory. He had stumbled onto something chilling, even dangerous. He wasn’t all the way there. There were still plenty of loose threads that remained to be tied. Yet he knew it was not too early to sound the alarm.
On August 30, 1947, Meredith wrote the first in what would be a series of top-secret memos. With a deliberate vagueness, it was headed, “Special Analysis Report Number 1.” And the subtitle was only a bit more forthcoming: “Cover Names in Diplomatic Traffic.”
The memo opened with a careful diffidence, full of caveats that were intended to batten down tight restraints on any reader’s expectations.
“Any report at this time on the contents of traffic encrypted by the system,” Meredith cautioned in his opening sentence, “must necessarily be fragmentary and subject to correction in detail.” And if that weren’t warning enough that this was very much a work in progress, he offered yet another dose of candor: “Only about 15 per cent of the equivalences [of the Soviet codebook] are identified, some only tentatively.”
But once the qualifications were out of the way, his hesitancy vanished, and the report rolled on with a compelling speed. Readers were rewarded with not merely theory or speculation about the enemy’s tradecraft, but the real thing—an insider’s tour of the KGB.
Meredith had pulled a long list of cover names from the cable traffic. Some were used for locations. Others indicated either the senders or the recipients of the messages. And, most ominous, there were dozens of work names of Soviet penetration agents, living and breathing enemies buried deep in the nooks and crannies of American life.
Still, the report offered lots of clues but no specifics. At that preliminary time, it was impossible to infer what sort of espionage activity these networks were conducting; the targets of specific KGB operations remained frustratingly beyond Meredith’s grasp. Equally infuriating, the traitors were well protected by their cover identities; it was impossible to put a name or face to any of them. All that could be established was that they were out there, working in the shadows.
Yet in retrospect, one clue, although thin and stuttering, stands out. Years later, when events would give his report a riveting clarity, Meredith would recall what he had written with a shudder:
“LIB?? (Lieb?) or possibly LIBERAL: was ANTENKO [ANTENNA] until 29 Sept. 1944. Occurs 6 times. 22 October–20 December 1944. Message of 27 November speaks of his wife ETHEL, 29 years old married (?) 5 years, ‘. . . . husband’s work and the roles of METR(O) and NIL.’”
But back then, this was as far as Meredith’s analysis could go. And after having stirred things up, after having as good as shouted its implicit warning that networks of Soviet spies were running pell-mell about the country, the report ended by taking a big, admonitory breath. “In its present state,” Meredith reminded his readers, “the traffic tends to arouse curiosity more than it does to satisfy it. This unsatisfactory state of affairs makes it imperative this report be supplemented at intervals.”
Then having said his piece, Meredith, quite happily, went back to work.
AS MEREDITH CONTINUED HIS DAILY struggle to make further inroads into the code, the Signal Corps spymasters at Arlington Hall pondered what to do with his report. They were suspicious by both nature and profession, and Meredith’s findings had only reinforced their doubts. They no longer knew whom they could trust. But one thing, they felt, was a certainty: the larger the distribution list, the larger the chances the Soviets would learn what they were up to.
They discussed sending a copy to the president, but this was quickly rejected. The White House, it had to be assumed, was riddled with Soviet spies. And the newly formed CIA? Its wartime predecessor, the OSS, had leaked too many valuable secrets. Why should things be any different merely because the initials had changed? After a good deal of heated debate, it was grudgingly decided to share a single copy, along with a few supporting pages containing the cryptic phrases and sentence fragments that Meredith had so far been able to extract, with the Army colonel running G-2. But before they handed this package over, they made it clear that their concession was bound by a strict understanding: the documents would not leave his office at Military Intelligence. Colonel Harold Hayes agreed.
The deputy chief of Military Intelligence, however, did not. Colonel Carter Clarke thought the FBI might be able to help lift the masks concealing the faces in Meredith’s report. On his orders, the memo and the challenging pages were hand-delivered by special
military messenger to the Bureau’s Washington headquarters.
Pat Coyne, the head of the FBI Soviet Espionage section, read the documents. There was a brief discussion with two of his deputies, but it was swiftly decided the clues were too slight and too fragmentary to be of any operational value. Satisfied, Coyne locked the papers in his office safe.
15
THE SAFE WAS BIG, OLD, and battered, a Mosler with a spin-dial combination lock and a handle as long as a child’s arm that you’d push down to open the creaking door. And every time Bob Lamphere went into Pat Coyne’s office, he felt it pulling him like a magnet.
He’d heard the stories same as everyone else on the SE desk. How more than five months ago the Army Security Agency had sent over a top-secret report including a few pages of the cryptographer’s work notes; apparently they had made some inroads into a KGB code. But it had turned out to be just scraps of messages, sentence fragments, really, and some cover names. Nothing worth pursuing. And so the dull pages had been shoved into the Espionage Section chief’s safe, and that was that.
Still, Bob was curious. These days he had been shunted off to the side, assigned to monitoring the low-grade Soviet satellite states. And at home, things with Sarah had gotten off track, too. Often he found himself complaining about her drinking, and then she’d shoot back with digs at his hair-trigger temper—and they both knew the other had a point. Yet neither felt like changing, neither felt like learning from past mistakes. They had moved out of the stuffy downtown apartment to a new development in Silver Spring, Maryland, which was probably a good thing. Now they had more space to hide from each other. So perhaps, as Bob would later concede, he was just looking for something. He certainly had no specific sense of what was in the safe, nothing tangible that he could even hang a suspicion on. At best, Bob would hedge, he had an “operational intuition.” But whatever the reason, even before he’d read a single page that Meredith had written, he was intrigued. Every professional instinct he’d nurtured in the field, as well as all his unsatisfied ambitions, were shouting to him they held promise.
Then one afternoon Bob finally got up the nerve to confront Coyne. He might have been a prisoner approaching his jailer; the section chief, after all, was the boss who had locked him away in the backwater that was the satellites desk. But Bob was no timid supplicant. His pitch was surprisingly blunt; it just wasn’t in his nature to kowtow.
“I’d like to take charge of the messages the ASA sent over. See what I can do with them,” he said straight out.
“Which I suppose means you’re asking to be relieved of your present duty?” Bob would remember Coyne shooting back.
That led to some further sparring. But when Bob walked out of Coyne’s office, it was with the agreement that he no longer had to put in any time monitoring the low-priority Soviet satellite countries. He had Meredith’s pages clutched tightly in his hand. And he had Coyne’s parting warning ringing in his head: You have your chance, now you’d better deliver. Bob hurried to his desk to read the prize that had fueled his imagination.
It didn’t take him long. What he read, Bob judged as his heart sank, was not just thin—it was useless. He could not see how he—how anyone!—could be able to make sense of these meager, incomprehensible scraps. Not for the first time in his roller-coaster life, Bob wondered if he’d made a colossal—and this time perhaps career-ending—blunder. He’d gambled his professional future on the contents of the safe, and he’d lost.
He lived with these wretched thoughts for the rest of the afternoon. On the commute back to Maryland that evening, still locked in this dismal mood, he decided to seek refuge in some dark bar.
One scotch helped to level things off. And by the time he’d drained the second, his whole world had started to come back into focus. Now raised from the depths, he found the perspective he needed.
All things considered, he told himself as his spirits rallied, he’d accomplished a very large victory that day. He was “back to fighting the main threat—Soviet intelligence.” That was the important thing, he felt. For how long had he been saying that it was “every counterintelligence man’s dream to be able to read the enemy’s communications?” Well, now he’d been given that very opportunity. True, the cards he’d been dealt were not very encouraging; the odds were stacked high against success. But, Bob reprimanded himself, he’d always been a battler. When had he ever backed away from a challenge? You don’t grow up doing pick-and-shovel work in the bowels of a silver mine and expect things to be handed to you. Besides, what was the alternative? To rot doing the hackwork on the satellites desk? He decided: this was the bright, shining opportunity he’d been waiting for. He’d take those scant pages and do something with them.
OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, as he sat in his distant corner in the sprawling SE section, his commitment grew into a plan of action. Bob realized: if he was going to assist the code breakers in widening their narrow breakthrough into something more substantive, he’d need to meet with them. This, however, became a more complicated process than he had imagined.
The FBI’s bureaucratic fiefdoms were protected by vengeful lords, and Bob knew it would be a mistake not to pay them the homage they expected; otherwise, they’d make his life hell. So he sent off a request to meet with Wes Reynolds, the sleepy-eyed agent who was the Bureau’s designated liaison to the ASA. According to headquarters protocol, Reynolds would need to make the initial contact with Frank Rowlett, the chief intelligence officer at the signals agency. Yet it must have been the busy time of year at Bureau headquarters, because a week passed before Reynolds could find the time to see him.
When Bob was finally granted a face-to-face, their conversation was stiff, but mercifully quick. A man who had more important things to get on with, Reynolds agreed to reach out to Rowlett, and then briskly escorted Bob to the door.
The meeting took place nearly three long weeks later, and it was, at Rowlett’s insistence, “on neutral ground.” Bob, mystified but wise enough not to look for a fight, especially one he knew he wouldn’t win, went as directed to the Pentagon. He entered a small, windowless room as clean as a surgical theater, just a metal desk, two straight-back chairs, and nothing else.
Rowlett was a gruff, confident man who had no time for fools, yet even those who had felt the brunt of his disdain would concede that he’d earned the right to his arrogance. In 1930, Rowlett, barely twenty, had been hired as one of the three civilian cryptanalysts at the fledgling Signals Intelligence Service, and over the subsequent decade, despite having no formal training, he’d been a key player on the team that had broken the Japanese code. Now he sat behind a desk in an office that Bob assumed had been borrowed for the occasion and, without any of the usual niceties, launched straight off into a lecture on security.
Rowlett must have been aware that the man across from him was an experienced Soviet hand who held the rank of supervisor, yet he made no concessions. All Bob could do was listen, and silently bristle.
They were meeting off-site, Rowlett explained, because before Agent Lamphere could be allowed entry into “the facility”—a euphemism meant to suggest that even its name was classified—he had to agree to the ASA’s rules. First, and this, Rowlett made clear, was the holiest of holies: the attempt to break the Soviet code system was top secret. It could not be spoken about, nor could its existence even be hinted at. The other rules, all recited in Rowlett’s rapid machine-gun way, were stringent corollaries of the initial one: the FBI could not quote directly from a deciphered cable. The source of the paraphrased information could only be described as “a highly sensitive source of known reliability.” And the actual messages could only be shared with individuals who had a special top-secret clearance, regardless of the rank they held at the FBI.
Do you agree to all these conditions? Rowlett demanded.
Bob agreed. Nevertheless, as if he had not heard the response, Rowlett repeated his speech, rule after dogmatic rule. When he finished, he once again asked if Bob accepted the cond
itions. Growing weary of this game, Bob offered a curt yes. But this time Rowlett seemed satisfied, and so he moved on to new ground.
“The man you’ll need to work with is Meredith Gardner,” Rowlett announced, according to Bob’s vivid memory of the meeting. “He’s unusual and brilliant. He speaks six or seven languages, and is one of the few Western scholars who reads Sanskrit.” And in the prickly silence that followed, Bob couldn’t help but complete Rowlett’s thought: While you, Agent Lamphere, are neither unusual nor brilliant.
When Rowlett continued, he picked at the same sore spot. His words were another deliberate taunt. “You’ll find Meredith Gardner to be a shy, introverted loner. You’ll have a hard time getting to know him.”
Bob listened, but he was not about to let Rowlett’s warnings throw him. Instead, he chose to focus on a more hopeful reality: the operation, his chance to do something of consequence, was moving forward. Besides, when had he ever met someone whom, when he put his cheery heart into it, he couldn’t charm? A code breaker stuck at his desk all day would probably be glad for a little company, some convivial conversation.
The next morning, Bob headed off to Arlington Hall. The day was bright, and as he drove his Bureau car into Virginia, his foot heavy on the pedal, the window cranked open so he could enjoy the breeze, he felt certain he was driving down the road that would take him back into the thick of things.
16
BOB WAS NOT SURPRISED BY the security, the barbed wire, the armed guards, the checking and rechecking of his credentials each time he entered another of the brick-and-wood-frame buildings on the Arlington Hall campus. After Rowlett’s harangue, he had anticipated finding things under tight control. But he had not been prepared for the legions of young women scurrying about. They seemed to be everywhere. Walking about the grounds, striding officiously through the halls, poised over the long tables that served as communal desks—a secret female army hidden in the Virginia woods, he happily observed. As he made his way along the path that led from the main building, he took sly measure of one passing woman after another. A few, he noticed with a small ripple of vanity, openly stared back. On a different day he might have felt a stronger pull, contrived an excuse to dawdle, perhaps spark a conversation by asking for directions, but not this morning. His gaze remained alert, and he continued walking briskly to Building B.