by Howard Blum
Meredith, in recognition of his accomplishments, and no doubt with a nod to security, now had his own office. Bob gave a knock on the door, waited for a response, and when there was none, he simply entered.
The room was tiny and as dark as a cave. A man sat hunched over a wooden table that served as the desk, papers strewn all about, and he was so motionless that Bob’s first thought was that he had caught him napping. His second thought, as he stepped closer, was that Rowlett’s description had been altogether accurate: Gardner was tall and gangly. And when he finally raised his head to look up at Bob, his eyes were brimming with hostility.
Meredith still hadn’t spoken, and for an uneasy moment Bob wondered if he had been informed an FBI agent would be coming by. But then he remembered that he had been present the day before when Rowlett had called Gardner. It had been agreed; ten a.m. sharp. So Bob decided to plow on.
He introduced himself, then improvised a small speech about what an honor it was to work with Meredith, and how eager he was to do all he could to help. Bob believed he had a gift for hail-fellow intimacy, and he laid it on with thick, florid cheer. He was determined to win Meredith over.
If Meredith had heard any of it, he gave no indication.
Bob didn’t retreat. But he didn’t press, either. Instead, more instinct than strategy, he offered his hand, and Meredith politely reached out and shook it.
A small victory, Bob decided, and he swiftly tried to build on it. Without waiting to be asked, he brought the wooden chair that had been shoved against the wall up to the table and sat down opposite Meredith. Their eyes were now on the same level, and Bob felt they would be able to talk as one professional to another.
He asked if Meredith had made any further progress on the codes.
A moment passed in heavy silence. When Meredith finally spoke, the words came slowly, and with great reluctance. “I don’t think it’s appropriate to discuss that.”
At least a dozen possible responses shot through Bob’s mind, but none of them were polite. He waited until his rash mood had passed. Then he tried another tack.
“How can I be of assistance to you?” he asked, hoping to sound both eager and considerate.
Meredith once again appeared to give the question considerable thought. But whether that was really the case, or perhaps something else was going on in his mind, Bob could only guess. He found the man across from him inscrutable.
“I don’t know,” Meredith announced an eternity later, or so it seemed to Bob. The words were flat. Not plaintive. But neither were they dismissive. So Bob tried again. “I could mount a research effort to help you get information.”
Meredith nodded. But whether that meant yes or no was far from clear.
Bob, though, soldiered on. “I could write up a memo about one of the message fragments. The FBI might have a glimmer of understanding on the subject matter being discussed by the KGB.”
Again Meredith was noncommittal.
Bob considered trying another approach, but Meredith had apparently lost interest. His eyes had returned to the papers on his desk, signaling that the dismal conversation was over.
But Bob was determined not to betray his annoyed mood. He acted as if things had gone swimmingly. He told Meredith that it had been a pleasure to meet him and that he looked forward to their working together. “Think about my offer to help,” he suggested, all the time feeling like some nagging salesman trying to close a deal.
At the door, he announced that he’d return soon. “I look forward to continuing our chat,” he lied.
Meredith’s head remained hovering over his papers. For all Bob knew, his thoughts were a million miles away. Bob walked back on the twisting, pebbled path leading to his car. Unlike his earlier cross-campus trek, now he was too upset to pay attention to the people passing by. Worse, his anger had slid into despair.
YET BOB REFUSED TO GIVE up. He returned to Arlington Hall a week later. “You give any thought to how I might be able to help?” he asked.
Meredith looked past Bob toward the opposite wall, his eyes fixed on an invisible target. At last his gaze focused on Bob, and he offered a small shrug.
When Bob left minutes later, he chose to remember that Meredith hadn’t said no. He hadn’t totally rejected the possibility of their working together.
ANOTHER WEEK, AND AGAIN THE same question. “You give any thought to how I might be able to help?” Bob asked. As he spoke he tried not to sound too beseeching, as if he’d not abandoned all of his pride.
Again the interminable silence. And then Meredith responded.
He did not explain why he finally chose to answer. That would come later. Only in retrospect would Meredith reveal that at the time he had run out of alternatives. He had taken the deciphering as far as he could on his own. Stymied, with nothing to lose, Meredith had decided he might as well try anything. Even the FBI.
Was there any possibility, Meredith wondered, his words so hesitant they might as well have been dragged out of him, of obtaining the plaintexts of Soviet cables? Perhaps traffic that had been transmitted from New York to Moscow? Say, oh, in 1944?
Bob understood the significance of the request. If Meredith had the before as well as the after, he could really go to town. The comparison of the same texts, one in Cyrillic and the other wrapped up tight in its blanket of encipherment, would be any code breaker’s dream come true. Give it to someone like Meredith, and he’d tear the Soviet code apart.
“Let me see what I can do,” Bob responded, trying to appear confident. But even as he offered this small assurance, he knew it was hollow. In truth, he had no hope at all. The texts Meredith wanted were over three years old. How was the Bureau going to get their hands on them?
Still, like Meredith, he was willing to give anything a try. When Bob returned to headquarters, he sent a flash request to the New York office: “Need soonest plaintext Soviet cables circa 1944.” And while you’re at it, he felt he might just as well have added, “How about the key to the vault at Fort Knox?”
A thick package from New York arrived a few days later. It was sitting on top of Bob’s desk when he came in. There was no accompanying note, nothing to hint at the contents other than the “Classified Material” stamp on the standard gray Bureau envelope. Could it be? He ripped open the seal as eagerly as any child attacking the wrapping on a Christmas Morning present.
Inside were photographs of hundreds of cable messages from the Soviet Government Purchasing Commission on West Twenty-Eighth Street in Manhattan. All before they had been enciphered. And all had been transmitted to Moscow in 1944. How, he wondered, had the New York field office happened to have this pile of goodies sitting in its files?
An SE colleague with whom he had worked surveillance details years ago on the streets of New York gave him an oblique answer. There’s no explanation, his buddy said carefully, because officially these photographs don’t exist. Get what I mean?
At once Bob did. They were the warrantless, forbidden fruits of a black-bag job. Worthless—no, less than worthless—in any American courtroom. But the only judge Bob had to go before sat in a tiny room in a barracks-like building in Virginia.
Later that day he presented the package to Meredith. Bob did not know if the photographs would prove helpful; breaking a Soviet code, as Rowlett had pointed out in his superior way, required the sort of brain that belonged to someone else. All Bob said was that he hoped this was what Meredith had wanted.
Thank you, Meredith answered in his dead-fish voice.
Bob dropped the package on the desk, and turned to leave.
TWO WEEKS PASSED, AND BOB had counted every day. But he had deliberately waited before returning. He wanted to give Meredith time to go through all the plaintext messages; he could only begin to imagine the complexities of the trial-and-error process that would be Meredith’s hunt for matches with the encoded cables. Also, Bob was in no hurry. He suspected his first chance could end up being his last one. If he had failed to provide the valuable
information Meredith needed, he knew the code breaker would never come to him for help again. Their partnership would have ended before it had truly started. It was with considerable trepidation that Bob entered Meredith’s room.
At once Meredith looked up from his pages. “We hit the jackpot,” he said. His voice was still soft and hesitant. His posture as he sat at his desk remained so stiff and so self-contained that in someone else it would’ve been judged as downright antagonistic. But Bob didn’t care. A single word, a word received as gratefully as any answered prayer, kept echoing in his mind: We, we, we. We hit the jackpot!
They sat and talked, and for all operational purposes it was their first conversation. Meredith was careful to avoid making any guarantees. The small accomplishments he did share were couched in his natural modesty. But despite these restraints, Meredith managed to reveal that he had made some real progress. His efforts to reconstruct the Russian codebook were beginning to pay off. And he acknowledged that the plaintexts Bob had provided were invaluable.
“Thank you,” Meredith said. This time he was the one who offered his hand.
When they shook, Bob felt the moment had its own deep solemnity, and a kinship had been forged.
A WEEK LATER WHEN BOB returned to Arlington Hall, he was greeted by what he immediately recognized as a different Meredith. It was not the reticent, inaccessible code breaker of their initial encounters. Nor was it the man who at their last meeting had, in his guarded way, allowed himself a small victory lap. Meredith’s mood today was something totally different, and for reasons he could not identify, it left Bob unnerved.
Look at this, Meredith finally got around to saying. He handed Bob a thin piece of paper. It was a deciphered cable sent from the New York KGB station to Moscow Center. The date was December 1944. Bob glanced at the cable; and as he did, he grew filled with alarm. He read:
“Enumerates the following scientists who are working on the problem—Hans Bethe, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi. . . .”
The list ran on for a total of seventeen names. Each was a physicist and each had worked on America’s most closely guarded wartime secret—the construction of the atom bomb. Their identities, as well as their top-secret laboratories, had been so classified that they were only referenced even in U.S.-government documents by their cover names. Yet the Soviets had penetrated the Manhattan Project. They knew who had directed the critical research and fabrication laboratories in the New Mexico desert at Los Alamos. They had the names of the scientists who had made the essential breakthroughs at the university centers of Berkeley, Chicago, and Columbia. They had the names of key scientific personnel at the massive Oak Ridge, Tennessee, compound with its mile-long electromagnetic separation plants that provided the uranium-235 needed to make a bomb.
It was at that moment that all Bob’s professional suspicions, the sporadic drumbeats of clues he’d been collecting over the years, hardened into a new resolve. Any lingering doubts that it was a false peace, any attempts at denial, any bouts of indecision were cast permanently aside. “It became immediately obvious to me that the Russians had indeed stolen critical research from us,” he recalled. At the same time this clarity brought with it another profound conclusion: Bob was equally certain the Russians were still at it. And now when he looked at Meredith, he was able to put a name on what the code breaker had been feeling, because he felt it, too. It was fear.
Six days later, on October 19, 1948, a meeting took place that made their partnership official. With Frank Rowlett and Colonel Hayes there to give the ASA’s blessings, and a sullen Wes Reynolds representing the FBI, it was formally agreed that Agent Lamphere would work hand-in-hand with Mr. Gardner to exploit the deciphered Russian cable traffic.
Then Bob and Meredith walked off together, returning to the dark little room in Building B, the light of battle shining in their eyes.
MEANWHILE, ON THE STREETS OF New York, two old friends, each as committed to their cause as Bob and Meredith were to theirs, already had much to show for their collaboration. Alexander Feklisov (Sasha to his comrades) and Anatoly Yatskov, the two KGB handlers who had been running the Operation Enormoz networks, had dispatched “about 3,000 pages,” according to the Center’s proud count, of stolen documents to Moscow.
The flow of reports, a detailed how-to collection of diagrams, mathematical formulae, and atomic theory, had been so constant that their boss at the New York rezidentura, Leonid Kvasnikov, became skeptical of the entire enterprise. A man whose suspicious mind ran to plots within plots, he feared that the haul might be too good to be true. He wondered if the foxy Americans had concocted a load of fake science with the aim of putting the Soviet physicists off the scent.
His concern was understandable. “If this is disinformation, I’ll send you off to the basement,” Lavrenti Beria, the chairman of the new Special Committee on the Atomic Bomb, had threatened. And Kvasnikov, the old KGB hand, knew only too well that it was a journey from which you didn’t return.
But the product passed all the tests with flying colors. The team of scientists at Laboratory Number 2, the official report announced, “had conducted the research and experiments necessary to confirm that the information provided by intelligence was true and not disinformation.” And Igor Kurchatov, the young physicist directing the Russian bomb makers, went even further, nearly swooning with glee: “Wonderful materials, they fill in just what we are lacking.”
Formal notification was sent to the Special Committee: Laboratory Number 2 would proceed to construct a Soviet atomic bomb “on the basis of materials received from the KGB.”
Part II
“In the Enemy’s House”
17
THEY WERE NOW A TEAM. Huddled in Meredith’s monklike cell, an isolation that reinforced the realization that they were on battle footing, the two men began to search for a way to move forward. As in any new relationship, there was a tentativeness to their conversations, an elaborate politeness born out of caution, an unwillingness to offend. This awkwardness was further reinforced by the large differences in both demeanor and natural talents that shaped their approaches to the looming challenge, as well as to each other.
But as they got to know each other, as each took appreciative measure of the other’s unwavering commitment, what separated them began to recede. The contrasts became unimportant. Instead, they acquired an informed, increasingly respectful admiration for what the other had to offer. It was almost as if they each sized up the man across the room, one the prideful brawler and elbow-on-the-bar carouser, the other the devotee of unfathomable puzzles who hid behind an armor of social inhibition, and wondered, What if I could walk in his shoes? What if I could bring such gifts to my duties? Who knows what I’d accomplish?
In this curious way, a union of shared purpose was forged. There was no grumbling, no censorious judgment made by one partner of the other. Rather, these were extraordinary days. Working together, they filled the dismal space with an electric intensity.
And in time they did nothing less than re-create the KGB codebook. Bob would venture out into the real world of official Washington and track down the texts of documents—cables from Churchill to Truman, wartime notices—that had been transcribed with meticulous care in the KGB cables and, like a hunting dog returning from the field, drop these goodies on Meredith’s crowded desk. Then he’d sit back and marvel at the alchemy.
“I’d give him something,” Bob would recall, “which was, say, the real text of something that was in his message, and that would give him a new word in his codebook. Right away, he’s over there with his pen writing it in there. He was as pleased as a little kid. One more word!”
In that workmanlike way, one valuable word at a time, there was a constant thrust toward tangible progress. Slowly, the KGB codebook took fuller shape on Meredith’s desk. And as this dictionary grew, as it provided more and more of the vocabulary they needed, they began to succeed in reading nearly complete texts of Moscow Center’s cables that had been sent years earli
er.
The military intelligence generals, soldiers who had little if any hands-on experience with code breaking, were astounded by this accomplishment. That a lone, and for that matter, rather eccentric, bookbreaker and a plodding FBI agent had pulled off such a feat was nothing short of a wonder. Yet both Bob and Meredith knew better than to indulge in self-congratulatory outbursts. This was not the time. They had read the cable that hinted at the Russian penetration of the top-secret American project that built the atom bomb. They knew what was at stake. They understood the severity of the covert threat aimed against America.
Grimly, Bob and Meredith weighed the significance of their accomplishment in strictly operational terms. They both realized they were stationed on the front lines in a secret war. And now they could launch their counterattack.
“I stood in the vestibule of the enemy’s house, having entered by stealth,” Bob would later say, although such was their shared intensity of purpose that he could very well have been speaking for Meredith, too. “I held in my hand a set of keys. Each would fit one of the doors of the place and lead us, I hoped, to matters of importance to our country.”
They had—quite literally—filing cabinets full of clues. But at the same baffling time, they had no way of knowing which of Moscow Center’s newly revealed twisting trails might lead to a mission involving the theft of atomic secrets, which led to other, still unimagined precincts of intrigue, and which ones, no less a possibility, led to an inconsequential dead end. The chase itself would be another mystery.