by DAVID KAHN
By now [he wrote] I had worked so long with these code telegrams that every telegram, every line, even every code word was indelibly printed in my brain. I could lie awake in bed and in the darkness make my investigations—trial and error, trial and error, over and over again.
Finally one night I awakened at midnight, for I had retired early, and out of the darkness came the conviction that a certain series of two-letter codewords absolutely must equal Airurando (Ireland). Then other words danced before me in rapid succession: dokuritsu (independence), Doitsu (Germany), owari (stop). At last the great discovery! My heart stood still, and I dared not move. Was I dreaming? Was I awake? Was I losing my mind? A solution? At last—and after all these months!
I slipped out of bed and in my eagerness, for I knew I was awake now, I almost fell down the stairs. With trembling fingers I spun the dial and opened the safe. I grabbed my file of papers and rapidly began to make notes.
These promptly proved his intuitions correct. The repetitions of RE for do, BO for tsu, OK for ri, and UB for i in his equivalences confirmed it:
For an hour Yardley filled in these and other identifications and then, convinced that the opening wedge had been driven, went upstairs, awoke his wife, and went out to get drunk. Actually, considerably more work had to be done before the Black Chamber could read anything approaching sentences. Much of this was done by Livesey, who achieved an important secondary breakthrough when he identified the Japanese plaintext jooin (“Senate”) and jooyakuan (“draft treaty”).
Yardley encountered unexpected difficulties in finding a translator for the exotic language, but finally located a kindly, bewhiskered missionary. He looked jokingly incongruous in the Black Chamber, but he enabled Yardley to send the first translations of Japanese telegrams to Washington in February of 1920. He quit after six months when he finally realized the espionage nature of the work, but by then Livesey had accomplished the almost unheard-of feat of learning Japanese in that time.
Yardley called the first code “Ja,” the “J” for Japanese, the “a” a serial for the first solution. From 1919 to the spring of 1920 the Japanese introduced eleven different codes, having employed a Polish expert, Captain Kowalefsky, to revise their cryptologic systems. Kowalefsky taught the Japanese how to bi-, tri-, and tetrasect their messages: to divide them into two, three, or four parts, shuffle the parts, and then encipher them in transposed order to bury stereotyped beginnings and endings. Some of the codes contained 25,000 code groups.
During the summer of 1921, the Black Chamber solved telegram 813 of July 5 from the Japanese ambassador in London to Tokyo. It contained the first hints of a conference for naval disarmament—an idea that powerfully gripped the imagination of a war-weary world. Another indication came when Japan suddenly introduced a new code, the YU, for their most secret messages. On solution, it was dubbed “Jp”—the sixteenth solved since Yardley’s original break.
A few months before the November opening of the disarmament conference in Washington, daily courier service was set up between the Black Chamber and the State Department. An official grinningly remarked that State’s upper echelons were delighted with the cryptanalysts’ work and read the solutions every morning with their orange juice and coffee. The conference sought to limit the tonnage of capital ships, and as negotiations were proceeding toward its chief result—the Five-Power Treaty that accorded tonnages in certain ratios to the United States, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan—Yardley’s team was reading the secret instructions of the negotiators. “The Black Chamber, bolted, hidden, guarded, sees all, hears all,” he wrote later, rather melodramatically. “Though the blinds are drawn and the windows heavily curtained, its far-seeking eyes penetrate the secret conference chambers at Washington, Tokyo, London, Paris, Geneva, Rome. Its sensitive ears catch the faintest whisperings in the foreign capitals of the world.”
Each nation naturally tried to obtain the most favorable tonnage ratio for itself; the most aggressive in its efforts was Japan, which even then was dreaming expansionist dreams in Asia but feared to offend the United States. At the height of the conference, when Japan was demanding a ratio of 10 to 7 with the United States and Great Britain, the Black Chamber read what Yardley later called the most important telegram it ever solved.
“It is necessary to avoid any clash with Great Britain and America, particularly America, in regard to the armament limitation question,” the Japanese Foreign Office cabled its ambassador in Washington on November 28. “You will to the utmost maintain a middle attitude and redouble your efforts to carry out our policy. In case of inevitable necessity you will work to establish your second proposal of 10 to 6.5. If, in spite of your utmost efforts, it becomes necessary in view of the situation and in the interests of general policy to fall back on your proposal No. 3, you will endeavor to limit the power of concentration and maneuver of the Pacific by a guarantee to reduce or at least to maintain the status quo of Pacific defenses and to make an adequate reservation which will make clear that [this is] our intention in agreeing to a 10 to 6 ratio. No. 4 is to be avoided as far as possible.”
Each 0.5 in the ratio meant 50,000 tons of capital ships, or about a battleship and a half. With the information in this message telling the American negotiators that Japan would yield if pressed, all they had to do was press. This Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes did, and on December 10 Japan capitulated, instructing its negotiator, in a cable read by the Black Chamber, that “there is nothing to do but accept the ratio proposed by the United States.” As signed, the Five-Power Treaty allotted capital ships to the United States, Great Britain, Japan, France, and Italy in the ratio of 10:10:6:3.3:3.3. It was considerably less than Japan had hoped for. Hughes sent Yardley a letter of commendation.
During the conference, the Black Chamber had turned out more than 5,000 solutions and translations. Yardley nearly suffered a nervous breakdown, and in February went to Arizona for four months to recover his health. Several of his assistants had already had trouble in this regard. One babbled incoherently; a girl dreamed of chasing around the bedroom a bulldog that, when caught, had “code” written on its side; another could lighten the enormous sack of pebbles that she carried in a recurring nightmare only by finding a stone along a lonely beach that exactly matched one of her pebbles, which she could then cast into the sea. All three resigned.
Security was a constant preoccupation. Mail was sent to a cover address; Yardley’s name was not permitted in the telephone book; locks were often changed. Nevertheless, some foreign government must have discovered the organization’s activities, for there was at least one attempt to subvert Yardley and, when this failed, the office was broken into and the desks rifled. After this the Black Chamber moved to a large office building at 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, where, by 1925, it had set up the Code Compiling Company as a rather unsubtle cover. The firm, with Yardley as president and Mendelsohn as secretary-treasurer, actually compiled the Universal Trade Code, which they sold, together with other commercial codes. Behind this front office, in a locked room, worked the cryptanalysts. Though each piece of paper was scrupulously locked away each night so that nothing was left on the desks, the cryptanalysts were allowed, in those more informal days, to take home problems on which they were working.
Yardley’s appropriation had been severely cut in 1924, and half the staff had to be let go, reducing the force to about a dozen. Despite this, Yardley said, the Black Chamber managed to solve, from 1917 to 1929, more than 45,000 telegrams, involving the codes of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Costa Rica, Cuba, England, France, Germany, Japan, Liberia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, San Salvador, Santo Domingo (later the Dominican Republic), the Soviet Union, and Spain, and made preliminary analyses of many other codes, including those of the Vatican.
Suddenly it all ended. Yardley, who had been obtaining the code telegrams of foreign governments through the cooperation of the presidents of the Western Union Telegraph Company and the Postal Telegraph Company, was encount
ering increasing resistance from them. Herbert Hoover had just been inaugurated, and Yardley resolved to settle the matter with the new administration once and for all. He decided on the bold stroke of drawing up “a memorandum to be presented directly to the President, outlining the history and activities of the Black Chamber, and the necessary steps that must be taken if the Government had hoped to take full advantage of the skill of its cryptographers.” He waited to see which way the wind was blowing before making his move—and found that it was not with him. Yardley went to a speakeasy to listen to Hoover’s first speech as President and sensed, in the high ethical strictures that Hoover expressed, the doom of the Black Chamber.
He was right, though its actual closing came from elsewhere. After Henry L. Stimson, Hoover’s Secretary of State, had been in office the few months that Yardley thought would be necessary for him to have lost some of his innocence in wrestling with the hardheaded realities of diplomacy, the Black Chamber sent him the solution of an important series of messages. But Stimson was different from previous Secretaries of State, on whom this tactic had always worked. He was shocked to learn of the existence of the Black Chamber, and totally disapproved of it. He regarded it as a low, snooping activity, a sneaking, spying, keyhole-peering kind of dirty business, a violation of the principle of mutual trust upon which he conducted both his personal affairs and his foreign policy. All of this it is, and Stimson rejected the view that such means justified even patriotic ends. He held to the conviction that his country should do what is right, and, as he said later, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” In an act of pure moral courage, Stimson, affirming principle over expediency, withdrew all State Department funds from the support of the Black Chamber.* Since these constituted its major income, their loss shuttered the office. Hoover’s speech had warned Yardley that an appeal would be fruitless. There was nothing to do but close up shop. An unexpended $6,666.66 and the organization’s files reverted to the Signal Corps, where William Friedman had charge of cryptology. The staff quickly dispersed (none went to the Army), and when the books were closed on October 31, 1929, the American Black Chamber had perished. It had cost the State Department $230,404 and the War Department $98,808.49—just under a third of a million dollars for a decade of cryptanalyis.
Yardley, whose job experience had been rather specialized, could not find work, and he went back home to Worthington. The Depression sucked him dry. By August of 1930, he had had to give up an apartment house and a one-eighth interest in a real estate corporation; indeed, he complained that he had to sell nearly everything he owned “for less than nothing.” A few months later he was toying with the idea of writing the story of the Black Chamber to make some money to feed his wife and their son, Jack. When his old MI-8 friend, Manly, with whom he had been in contact all during the 1920s, had to turn down his request for a $2,500 loan at the end of January, 1931, Yardley, in desperation, sat down to write what was to be the most famous book on cryptology ever published. He described the composition of it in a letter to Manly in the spring of 1931:
I hadn’t done any real work for so long that I told Bye, my agent, and the Sat Eve Post that I would need some one else to write the stuff. I showed a few things to Bye and Costain, the latter editor of POST, and both told me to go to work myself. I sat for days before a typewriter, helpless. Oh, I pecked away a bit, and gradually under the encouragement of Bye I got a bit of confidence. Then Bobbs Merrill advanced me $1000 on outline. Then there was a call to rush the book. I began to work in shifts, working a few hours, sleeping a few hours, going out of my room only to buy some eggs, bread, coffee and cans of tomatoe juice. Jesus, the stuff I turned out. Sometimes only a thousand words, but often as many as 10,000 a day. As the chapters appeared I took them to Bye who read them and offered criticism. Anyway I completed the book and boiled down parts of it for the articles all in 7 weeks.
The Bobbs-Merrill Company, of Indianapolis, published the 375-page book on June 1, but parts of it had already appeared in three articles at two-week intervals in The Saturday Evening Post, the leading magazine of the day, which thought so highly of them that it used the first of the series to lead its April 4 issue. Yardley was a superb storyteller, and his narrative skill did not desert him on paper. Largely owing to this and to his vigorous and pungent style, the book itself, The American Black Chamber, was an immediate success, and it instantly fixed itself in popular lore as the epitome of books on cryptology. Even today, it is invariably mentioned in any cocktail-party discussion of the subject, and copies remain in demand among secondhand-book dealers. Reviews of it were unanimously good. Critic W. A. Roberts, in a commendatory review, summed up the prevailing opinion: “I think it the most sensational contribution to the secret history of the war, as well as the immediate post-war period, which has yet been written by an American. Its deliberate indiscretions exceed any to be found in the recent memoirs of European secret agents.” Reporters hastened to governmental bureaus to inquire whether it was all true. The State Department, with masterfully diplomatic double-talk, was “disposed to discredit” Yardley’s statements. At the War Department, officials lied straightforwardly and said that no such organization had been in existence in the past four years.
But beneath this bland surface American cryptologists seethed. Friedman was incensed at what he regarded as an unwarranted slur on the A.E.F. cryptologic effort. Yardley had learned from a report by Moorman about Childs’s test-stripping of the superencipherment from the proposed but never used A.E.F. Trench Code and about the telephone monitoring of the messages that allowed the G.2 A.6 monitor to deduce the American attack on the St. Mihiel salient. He inadvertently combined them into a highly dramatic tale in which the Germans knew from cryptanalysis about the American effort to flatten the salient, which consequently “represents only a small part of what might have been a tremendous story in the annals of warfare, had the Germans not been forewarned. The stubborn trust placed in inadequate code and cipher systems had taken its toll at the Front.” Yardley was not entirely to blame, for Moorman’s report is extremely confusing and does not clearly separate the two episodes, but he ignored the frequent replacement of codebooks, unwarrantedly assumed that the Germans cryptanalyzed the messages, and in general did not check out his facts.
Friedman circularized his A.E.F. colleagues to ask their views. Moorman replied, “I started to read the Yardley articles, but finding that their object seemed to be exaggeration of the importance of the writer with little regard for the truth, I did not finish. I have been surprised at the number of individuals who can write quite plausibly on the subject, ‘How I Won the War,’ and it was with some regret that I discovered Yardley had joined them.” Hitt wrote, “I have never seen in a reputable magazine any series of articles so full of misstatement of fact, uncalled for criticism and innuendo as those by Yardley. A great national weekly has permitted him to pose before its readers as one of the outstanding heroes of the war, poor fellow, and he had to lie to do it.”
Manly, who at first had warned Yardley that “you might incur very serious criticism if you disclosed the fact that you had been reading the official messages of the Foreigner,” told him after the articles appeared that “I approve the articles and think that they are well done.” To Friedman, who had compared Yardley’s disclosure of American cryptanalysis to a lawyer’s breach of ethics by disclosing confidential material of his client, Manly wrote that he himself would not have revealed any of the cryptanalytic matters dealing with friendly nations, but felt that Yardley’s motive was to force the government to set up a cryptanalytic bureau. Friedman replied that “In my opinion the great harm he has done our country will not become fully apparent for many years to come.” Some was probably apparent almost immediately, for at least some of the 19 nations named as having their codes broken must have changed them. One Army cryptanalyst recalled that publication of the book caused him and his colleagues considerable extra work at the time.
Yardley himself seems to have
been taken a bit aback by the storm he had kicked up. He had at first admitted frankly to Manly that “if I didn’t dramatise them [the book and articles] in some manner the reader would go to sleep” and “To write saleable stuff one must dramatise. Things don’t happen in dramatic fashion. There is therefore nothing to do but either dramatise or not write at all.” But when he saw he had a tiger by the tail he assumed a sanctimonious attitude. “Would it not appear,” he rhetorically asked in a letter to the editor of the New York Evening Post, “that if such practices [reading other nations’ messages] are to be eliminated from the considerations of diplomacy the first step toward such elimination must be an airing, publicly, of the situation? … It seems to me that my book may possibly render a real public service in at least pointing out the conditions existing as the first step toward achieving their remedy.” He took the offensive against his critics with an article in Liberty magazine entitled “Are We Giving Away Our State Secrets?” In this he accused the Department of State of gross negligence in cryptographic matters—“sixteenth-century codes,” he had, with some justice, called them in his book—and asserted that his book should have been taken, not “as a story of romance,” but “as an expose of America’s defenseless position in the field of cryptography.”