Reference / Paper · 1981
The Many Lives of Herbert O. Yardley (Cryptologic Spectrum)
Profile of Herbert O. Yardley, the American Black Chamber and its reading of Japanese codes at the 1921–22 Washington Naval Conference.
Reference / Paper · 1981
Profile of Herbert O. Yardley, the American Black Chamber and its reading of Japanese codes at the 1921–22 Washington Naval Conference.
UNCLASSIFIED (b) (3)-P.L. 86-36 The Many Lives of Herbert O. Yardley This story may be only 80 percent true. The rest is somewhat doubtful because of incomplete records and the fallibility of human memory, and because the story attempts to trace the career of a man who was by all odds the most colorful, controversial, enigmatic figure in the history of American cryptology. He worked as a cryptanalyst for three countries, was commended by the U.S. government for his cryptanalytic achievements, then saw the same government summarily abolish his organization and, with it, his job. For later publicly revealing his successes in cryptanalysis and secret writing, he was generally acclaimed by the press but reviled by the cryptologic community. He wrote melodramatic spy novels and radio programs, and traveled the country speaking on cryptology and espionage. He hobnobbed with movie stars, famous authors, a future presidential candidate, and a future prime minister and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. He played championship golf; he played winning poker all his life and wrote a best-selling book on the subject. Motivated, probably, by bitterness and a need for money, he apparently sold cryptanalytic secrets to a foreign power, with results that, together with his other exposes, affected the course of U.S. cryptology for the next decade. Herbert Osborn Yardley 1 was born on 13 April 1889 in Worthington, Indiana, the second of four children. After graduation from high school, where he excelled in sports and debate and was president of his class, he became, like his father, a railroad telegraph operator. He took a year of English at the University of Chicago before becoming, in late 1912, a $900-peryear code clerk and telegrapher in the State Department's code room. There, while working the night shift, he became interested in the construction of State Department codes, and he began to try to solve them. According to his own account, written later,2 it took him less than two hours to solve a 500-word message to President Wilson from Colonel Edward M. House, the president's adviser and confidant, then in Europe. That he, a mere dabbler in cryptology, could so easily read the president's private communications both amazed and appalled Yardley. He was now more than ever determined to become a cryptologist: he would devote his life to improving the security of America's communications and solving the codes of other countries. Studying U.S. codes was, of course, a simple matter, since they passed through his hands every day. As for foreign codes, they came to him through "friendly connections previously established. " 3 He later explained what that meant: "I knew most of the telegraph operators in Washington, and got some of them to steal a few coded diplomatic messages of various governments; these I practiced on. " 4 In 1917, he submitted a 100-page memorandum titled" Solution of American Diplomatic Codes," which resulted in a new method of encoding State Department messages. This system, too, he solved, but by then the United States had declared war on Germany, and Yardley was preparing for bigger things. Maven of the American Black Chamber On 29 June 1917, Yardley was commissioned a first lieutenant in the Signal Officers' Reserve Corps. On 5 July he was ordered to active duty as head of M.1.8, the cryptologic organization of Military Intelligence. Known both as the Code and Cipher Section and the Cipher Bureau, M.1.8 (Military Intelligence Branch, Section 8) operated initially at the Army War College in Washington with only Yardley and two civilian clerks. During the next two years, as it gradually UNCLASSIFIED 5 UNCLASSIFIED for the record shows a steady flow of decipherments back to the State Department. Many of these messages, as well as those intercepted by Army radio units, were to and from Mexico, a fact reflecting America's preoccupation with that country during the early 1900s. From the Navy came morse traffic from the powerful longwave station at Nauen, near Berlin. Some of this was intercepted by ships, for example, the U.S. S. San Diego, and some by the quaintly named "Listening-In Stations," one of which was located at City College in New York. The FBI sent Yardley such things as a suspicious message written on a postcard addressed to San Francisco. Similar material was forwarded to M.I.8 by the U.S. Postal Censorship organization. Lieutenant Yardley in 1917 or early 1918. As its responsibilities increased, the Cipher Bureau was organized into five subsections-Code and Cipher Compilation, Communications, Shorthand, Secret Ink, and Code and Cipher Solution. At its peak-in November 1918, the last month of the war-M.1.8 had 151 people: 18 officers, 24 civilian cryptographers, and 109 typists and stenographers. 5 One of the civilian employees was the poet Stephen Vincent Benet, who served in November 1918 for seven days. 6 He was but one of many famous people with whom Yardley would be associated during the next forty years. expanded, Yardley's organization moved several times to various locations in Northwest Washington, D. C. M.l.8 was responsible for examining and, if possible, reading all secret communications corning to the attention of the War, Navy, State, and Just ice Departments, Postal Censorship, and other official and semiofficial agencies. In addition, Yardley began a course of inst ruction in cryptology for new people roming into the organization. Most of M.l.8's material came from the War and State Departments. The latter, under provisions of the wartime censorship laws, had access to all messages carriPd by the commercial telegraph and cable companies. The rest of Yardley's material camp from radio intercept and surveillance of overseas and domestic muil. Typical of the requests made of "Yardley's bureau," as it was later known, is a letter of 8 February 1918 from Leland Harrison, Ottlce of the Counselor at the State Department, which reads: "Dear Mr. Yardley: I beg to enclose herewith copies of two ~uspicious telegrams, and would appreciate your making an effort to ascertain their content,;." In most cases. lw was apparently able to read th<· messages, Captain Yardley spent the last few months of the war in Europe, observing the work of the British and French cipher bureaus and learning their methods of solving enemy codes and ciphers. After the Armistice, he remained in Paris to head a small cryptologic support group attached to the American delegation to the Peace Conference. On his return to the United States, in April 1919, he found demobilization in full swing and M.1.8 being rapidly dismantled. Convinced of the necessity of maintaining a peacetime cryptologic capability in the government, Yardley encouraged the Director of Military Intelligence in his efforts to establish a "permanent organization for code and cipher work" to be funded jointly by the War and State Departments. The supporting arguments-probably written by Yardley-claimed that M.1.8 had, during the past eighteen months, read almost 11, 000 messages in 579 systems. This was in addition to "the enormous number of personal codes and ciphers submitted by the Postal Censorship" and the letters examined for secret writing; these were said to number 2,000 per week for several months. The section was also said to have compiled cipher tables and code books and to have trained military attaches, code clerks, and cryptographers. \ 6 LJNCLASSIFIED UNCLASSIFIED The arguments for a permanent cryptologic organization were summed up this way: If it is worth while to know exactly what instructions foreign powers give to their representatives at Washington, it is important to maintain M.I.8 with a sufficient personnel in time of peace. If the impressions and opinions of diplomatic representatives at other capitals and the instructions they receive as to attitudes and actions are of importance for the maintenance of peace, the cheapest, indeed the only, way to keep constantly and promptly informed on these matters is to preserve M.1.8 with a suitable personnel. Intimate knowledge of the true sentiments and intentions of other nations may often be an important factor in determining whether we are to have peace or war. 7 The plan called for a code and cipher bureau to be headed by Yardley and staffed by fifty civilians. Yardley's salary was to be ~,000 per year. There would be twenty-five "code and cipher experts," ten of whom would be paid $3,000 each; the other fifteen would each receive $2,000. There would be twenty-five clerks at $1,200. The proposed annual budget was $100,000, of which $40,000 would come from the State Department. The War Department would supply the rest on "confidential memorandum," that is, on vouchers not subject to review by the Comptroller General. Acting Secretary of State Frank L. Polk approved the plan on 17 May 1919, followed two days later by Army Chief of Staff Peyton C. March. M. I. 8, later to become famous as the American Black Chamber, 8 was now officially in business as a permanent, peacetime organization. The Move to New York During the summer of 1919, Yardley, now a major, 9 moved his organization to a four-story brownstone at 3 East 38th Street, just off Fifth Avenue and across the street from the Bonwit Teller department store. Just why he left Washington is not known with certainty. The generally accepted reason was given by Yardley: "I was told," he said, "that there was a joker in the Department of State special funds: they could not legally be expended within the District of Columbia. " 10 Nothing in the existing records confirms this, and Yardley himself later gave another reason for the move: it was necessary, he said, to get away from Washington because it "was overrun with spies. " 11 A third possibility is that Yardley decided on New York because his close friend and head of M.I.8's Shorthand OFFICE OF CABLE CENSOR From For Cab!e Censor Date_ ll/l8/l7 __ Check Nol6_2_'IBR__.RG, Code Used __________ _ From: , _____'.V~e.10te:r..n Union___ Cable Company For information:- P etr.o.grad. _________________ i Address" (Name) To: 1-l e·:flTOrk-B.u.sskomit_.P-iotrovskoIDU--- ---1.l"ame: tTo be Unpacked) _Translated __ (Address) Decoded Translation: Prosbu uskorit vysylku avto~obilei Pakk:ard I K nim zapasnyia. tsr~asti posled.nia. osobenno nujny cilia. ranee prio'::lrcten:1h ?akksrd 6-venazati cilind.rovy r:iodelli Umateh Ka.pnist 12428 Vose:;_nadsatyi Russian message sent to Yardley's Cipher Bureau for translation, November 1917. Petrograd (Leningrad) is asking New York to expedite the shipment or some Packard automobiles and spare parts. UNCLASSIFIED 7 UNCLASSIFIED Subsection, Franklin W. Allen, had operated there during the war. 12 Due to budget cuts, Yardley's bureau never reached the size planned for it. Rather than twenty-five cryptologists, there appear to have been, in the early days, only nine, and instead of twenty-five clerks, there were seven. Even this number was later reduced when appropriations were slashed during the mid1920s. The organization operated under deep cover. All ties to the government were cut. Employees were paid in cash ~rom a secret payroll and had no civil service status. Official mail from Washington was received, at least occasionally, at a post office box-number 354, Grand Central Station. New locks were installed throughout the building and other security precautions were taken. Yardley and his wife occupied one floor of the house, a guard or custodian lived in the basement, and the cipher bureau occupied the rest of the space. If questioned about their work, employees were advised to say that they worked for the War Department's translation section. As a cover for their real work, Yardley and a part-time German linguist, Charles J. Mendelsohn, later formed a business called the Code Compiling Company, which produced commercial code books, one of which, the Universal Trade Code, sold in fairly large numbers. The public could visit the company's office but was of course not allowed in, nor was even aware of, the secure area behind it. Administratively, the bureau was part of the Communications Section of the Military Intelligence Division, which, together with the State Department, paid the salaries and rent. The State Department's contributions, which began 15 July 1919, varied from $1,250 to $3,333 per month, with the largest amounts coming in 1921-23. Contributions from Military Intelligence began 30 June 1921 and remained constant at $833.33 per month. Total support thus ranged from $15,000 to $50,000 per year. The procedure apparently was for the State Department to transfer its share of the funds to the War Department, which deposited the combined payment in Yardley's bank account. (It is unfortunately impossible to reconstruct Yardley's expenditures because his financial records were inexplicably destroyed in 1950.) 13 Operationally, the emphasis was on foreign diplomatic communications. During the first year, for example, the bureau worked primarily on Latin American countries, plus Germany, Spain, and Japan. Traffic came from the commercial telegraph companies-Western Union and Postal Telegraph, possibly others-through an arrangement with the State or War Department, although other methods of obtaining 8 UNCLASSIFIED material, including stealing or photographing code books, were considered. 14 Decrypted, translated messages were forwarded to Military Intelligence, which in turn sent copies to the State Department. In July 1919, Yardley promised his boss, Brigadier General Marlborough Churchill, Director of Military Intelligence, that if he could not solve the Japanese diplomatic code within a year, he would resign. Considering thati neither he nor anyone on his staff knew Japanese, this' was a somewhat rash promise on Yardley's part. But he did what he said he would do-within five months he had identified enough groups to know that he had the correct solution, although he could still not read the decoded messages. As he put it, in a letter to General Churchill: ... I have passed through various periods of confidence and depression, but it was not until Saturday morning, about One A. M., that I locked my safe, and with it the correct solution of the code .... With the aid of a good Japanese scholar there is no doubt but that I can have the Japanese code complete for you and probably some important messages before you go to Congress for the MID [Military Intelligence] appropriation .... With the exception of clerical assistance I have worked practically alone, and it is the first thing that I have ever done which I feel really proud of. 15 Several things then happened in quick succession: General Churchill telephoned his congratulations; Yardley, now concentrating on Japanese, made one of his analysts, Frederick Livesey, the bureau's Japanese specialist; 16 and he hired a former missionary, the Reverend I. H. Correll, as a Japanese linguist, at a salary of $4,000 per year. With Correll's help, the bureau translated its first Japanese message in February 1920; Military Intelligence called it the "most remarkable accomplishment in the history of code and cipher work in the United States. " 17 This was one of several expressions of appreciation which Yardley received from the War and State Departments during 1920-21. When the lease to Yardley's house was sold, he and his staff moved, on 1 July 1920, to another brownstone, at 141 East 37th Street. The Reverend Correll, disillusioned with espionage work, resigned at about this time, and Frederick Livesey, a fine linguist who had added Japanese to his other languages in only six months, took over Correll's duties. Japanese communications were now the bureau's first priority, and work was begun on military and naval attache codes, which, along with diplomatic systems, were to figure decisively in the Limitation of Armament Conference soon to open in Washington. UNCLASSIFIED "Exceptionally Meritorious and Distinguished Seruices" Yardley considered it "the most important and farreaching telegram" that ever passed through the doors of his bureau. It was message number 700, Tokyo to Washington, dated 28 November 1921, and received, decoded, and translated by Yardley's group on 2 December. Addressed to Admiral Baron Kato, head of the Japanese delegation to the Washington disarmament conference-a kind of early SALT conferencethe message contained Japan's fallback position on the relative tonnages of capital ships of the naval powers. Japan had been insisting on a 10--7 ratio with the United States and Britain, but now, wishing, as the message put it, to "avoid any clash with Great Britain and America, especially America, in regard to the armament limitation question," Tokyo told its representatives that, if pressed, they were authorized to accept a ratio of 5-5-3 for the United States, Britain, and Japan, respectively. Armed with this knowledgethanks to Yardley-Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes had only to continue to press the Japanese, knowing that in the end they would agree to our terms, which they did about a week later. Yardley, the master poker player, later said, "Stud poker is not a very difficult game after you see your opponent's hole card." It had been a trying time for the head of the Black Chamber and his staff of fourteen people. They frequently worked nights and weekends during the three months the conference was in session; they produced several thousand translations, and when it was over they were exhausted. Yardley, suffering from a mild case of tuberculosis, left for Arizona to rest and regain his health. For their hard work during the conference, Yardley and his group received a Christmas bonus in 1921. (This kind of reward, normally unheard of in government, was possible because Yardley's funds came from a secret, nonaudited account.) The ~98 bonus was distributed according to salary, and ranged from $37 to $184 per person, with Yardley receiving the $184. This amounted to a little more than 2.5 percent of each one's salary, which at the time ranged from $1,400 to $6,900 per year. 18 Yardley also received a letter of appreciation from Secretary of State Hughes. Early in 1923, he was awarded the Army's highest noncombat decoration, the Distinguished Service Medal, "for exceptionally meritorious and distinguished services in a position of great responsibility.... " The citation of course said nothing about his role in providing highly important intelli- gence during the arms conference, but referred instead to his military service during the war. The next few years saw the bureau decline in size and importance. A reduced budget for 1924 forced Yardley to cut his staff by more than 50 percent. The six who remained-Yardley, two analysts, two cryptanalytic clerks, and a secretary-moved to more modest quarters in an office building at 52 Vanderbilt Avenue. 19 They continued to work such material as was available, but traffic was becoming harder to get, apparently because the telegraph companies were becoming increasingly reluctant to provide copies of messages. Some traffic was by now coming from radio intercept, but it was too limited and sporadic to be of much value. According to Yardley, in The American Black Chamber (p.368), he was "forced to adopt rather subtle methods" of obtaining traffic, methods not always supported by his superiors. He was presumably referring to illegal means-break-ins, theft, bribery. Nothing in the existing records supports his claim, but that is not to say that such attempts were not made. In 1926, Yardley received another Distinguished Service Medal, again with a citation referring to his wartime service; the real reason for his receiving it is not known. During the waning years of the 1920s the bureau reported successes against Japanese, Mexican, Nicaraguan, Peruvian, and Chinese cryptosystems. During its twelve years of operation, in Washington and New York, the Black Chamber read messages of some thirty-five or forty countries, a rather remarkable achievement considering the small size of the organization. The Coming of the End Telling what happened is easier than explaining why it happened. Briefly, what happened is that the State Department suddenly decided to withdraw financial support from Yardley's bureau effective 1 November 1929; since State was supplying most of the money, this meant that the Black Chamber would have to go out of business, leaving the United States with no cryptanalytic capability against foreign diplomatic communications. (It was not until 1932 that the Army resumed cryptanalytic work, and then only on a limited, part-time basis.) Exactly why the operation was closed down is still not clear, but, of the various theories, two are most frequently propounded. They might be called the Standard Version and the Revised Standard Version. The Standard Version holds that when the new Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson, learned what Yardley was doing he ordered funding discontinued on UNCLASSIFIED 9 UNCLASSIFIED the grounds that it was unethical for the United States to engage in such unprincipled activities. This is the view later expressed in the famous statement attributed to Stimson: "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail." The Revised Standard Version seems to have originated with Yardley. By the early 1930s, a few years after his bureau was abolished, he had come to believe that, in closing down the operation, Stimson was carrying out orders from President Hoover. Yardley's source for that information was "a famous woman correspondent"-never identified-who reportedly heard it directly from President Hoover at the latter's weekend retreat at Rapidan, Virginia. 20 Years later, New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, then the Republican candidate for president, added a new dimension to the theory by claiming that Stimson himself had acknowledged that he had acted on Hoover's orders. Moreover, said Dewey, Stimson had sent Yardley a letter of apology for the abusive manner in which he had been fired. 21 ~~.i·(.i'~,. ~':1~'' 7"""' ._.... ' • ''.J ,.---.,, Although probably coincidental, it happened that in the spring of 1929 the Army undertook to transfer its cryptanalytic functions to the Signal Corps, which was then responsible for compiling but not breaking codes. The first known correspondence on the subject is dated 18 March 1929, 22 or ten days before Stimson took office and anywhere from several weeks to several months before he learned of Yardley's bureau and ordered it abolished. On 4 April 1929, the proposal was approved by the Secretary of War, and on 10 May it was incorporated into a change to Army Regulations 105-5. Ladislas Farago, in his book The Broken Seal: "Operation Magic" and the Secret Road to Pearl Harbor (page 63), attributes the change of functions to the influence of William F. Friedman, then chief of the Signal Corps' Code and Cipher Compilation Section. Farago gives no source for his claim, and it is not substantiated elsewhere. 23 It is of course true that Friedman was the principal beneficiary of the demise of Yardley's bureau. In October 1929, he was sent to New York to take over Yardley's files and records and to supervise their transfer to Washington. From that modest beginning evolved the Signal Intelligence Service, which, greatly expanded and renamed, became the Army predecessor of the National Security Agency. It was also the beginning of Friedman's ascendancy in the Signal Intelligence Service and later in the Armed Forces Security Agency and NSA. He would eventually become known as the dean of American cryptology. For all practical purposes, Yardley's bureau had ceased operation in June or July 1929, though it was 10 UNCLASSIFIED not officially closed until November. Yardley and his five employees were given three months' advance pay; two of his analysts, Ruth Willson and Victor Weiskopf, were offered jobs with the Signal Corps, but they preferred not to ·move to Washington. Yardley was offered a temporary position paying considerably less than he was then receiving. The officials making the offer believed it "highly probable that this offer will be inacceptable, in which case this office [the Office of the Chief Signal Officer] is free to go ahead and reorganize from the very bottom, with no entanglements from the past. " 24 They had, in other words, made Yardley an offer they knew he could not accept, and he didn't. On 1 June 1930, he was again offered a job as a cryptanalyst, at a salary of $3,750 per year, exactly half of what he had been making in New York. 25 (Friedman's salary at the time was $5,600 per year.) He again declined the offer. Sometime in 1930, he sought employment as an instructor in the Navy's cryptanalytic research section, but was turned down, probably on the grounds that he lacked experience in Japanese naval cryptosystems. 26 A Bombshell in 375 Pages Yardley, with no civil service status or retirement benefits, found himself unemployed just as the stock market was collapsing and the Great Depression beginning. He left Queens and returned to his hometown of Worthington, Indiana, where he began writing what was to become the most famous book in the history of cryptology. There had never been anything like it. In today's terms, it was as if an NSA employee had publicly revealed the complete communications intelligence operations of the Agency for the past twelve years-all its techniques and major successes, its organizational structure and budget-and had, for good measure, included actual intercepts, decrypts, and translations of the communications not only of our adversaries but of our allies as well. The American Black Chamber created a sensation when it appeared on 1 June 1931, preceded by excerpts in the Saturday Evening Post, the leading magazine of its time. The State Department, in the best tradition of "Mission: Impossible," promptly disavowed any knowledge of Yardley's activities. Secretary Stimson, whose offended principles had reportedly led to the closing of the bureau, was now said never to have heard of it, and State Department spokesmen indignantly denied that Yardley had broken Japanese codes during the Washington arms conference of 1921-22. UNCLASSIFIED The War Department declined public comment except to say, curiously, that Yardley's bureau had not operated in the last four years. Privately, however, officials in Military Intelligence and the Signal Corps were seething. What we today would call a damage assessment was immediately begun, led, in the Signal Corps, by William F. Friedman, who was by now the principal cryptologist in the newly formed Signal Intelligence Service. The verdict? Yardley's action was highly improper and a breach of confidence, America's relations with other countries would be damaged, and the book was full of distortions and exaggerations designed to glorify Yardley at the expense of others. Reaction Around the World In Britain, the Black Chamber was published first under its original title and later as Secret Service in America. If the British reviewers noticed that Yardley obviously had been reading British diplomatic codes, that fact went unmentioned in the reviews. The book also appeared in French, Swedish, and Canadian editions, but it was in Japan that it created the greatest furor. A translation of the Burakku Chiyemba, as it was called, sold by the thousands for one yen (about fifty cents), and two major newspapers, the Osaka Mainichi and the Tokyo Nichi-Nichi, serialized the book, along with reports of interviews with Yardley conducted by the papers' New York correspondents. A few newspaper headlines will suggest the sense of outrage felt in Japan: "Betrayal of International Trust," "Treachery at the Washington Conference," "Disgrace to the Convener of the Conference." Many in the government blamed Baron Shidehara, Japanese ambassador to the U.S. at the time of the Washington Conference, for Japan's reverses at the conference because he hadn't changed the diplomatic code. This charge became the basis for attacking not only the liberal, pro-American Shidehara, by now the Foreign Minister, but the entire Cabinet. The continued charges, denials, and countercharges threatened to produce a governmental crisis. A wave of anti-American feeling swept Japan. Relations between the two countries, already strained, worsened with the appearance of Yardley's book. The increased hostility probably contributed to the difficulties encountered by the American fliers Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon when they reached Tokyo on a round-the-world flight in August 1931. Because of a communications breakdown, Japanese officials were not aware that the Americans were on the way; then, to make matters worse, it was discovered that they had overflown and photographed Japanese forti- tied zones while enroute. They were fined and, despite American protests, were detained in Japan for six weeks. The ill-will toward America did not dampen the enthusiastic welcome accorded Colonel and Mrs. Charles A. Lindbergh, but it was felt by individual American teachers and military officers living in Japan. Not surprisingly, improved Japanese cryptographic security soon followed. In Auguo~ 1931, the Foreign Ministry's communications deparh~ent requested permission to purchase 138 copies of Yardley's book for distribution to Japanese embassies and legations in order to alert them to the vulnerability of their codes. 27 More importantly, the Foreign Ministry soon began to replace its manual systems with a newly developed cipher machine. This was probably the M-1, a Navy-developed predecessor of the Red machine, for its time a sophisticated device which remained the mainstay of Japanese high-level diplomatic communications until later replaced by the famous Purple machine. Aware, thanks to Yardley, of how insecure their communications had been during the Washington Conference ten years before, the Japanese were determined not to make the same mistake again: they would use cipher machines at the next armaments conference, scheduled to open in Geneva early the following year. 28 The U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service, still a very small organization, did not begin working on the Red machine until 1936, but once it did, the solution came in fairly short order. It was not only on diplomatic circuits that communications security was improved. In October 1931, the U.S. Navy reported that whereas it had previously been able to readily obtain "information regarding the naval activity of a foreign power," it could no longer do so because "the systems of conveying this information have undergone a complete change." This, too, was undoubtedly a result of the introduction of cipher machines on Japanese naval circuits. Reconstructing the new systems would, according to the Navy, require "the entire efforts of our personnel for a period of at least two years. " 29 Yardley's book was widely reviewed in the American press, and the reviews were generally favorable. The New York Times, for example, said it could "almost be regarded as a treatise on cryptography." The Saturday Review of Literature said it was "written with sprightliness and interspersed with startling and amusing tidbits," although it was "quite impossible to check up on many of its statements and incidents." There were, however, a few dissenting voices. The Japanese-American, a New York biweekly, called it UNCLASSIFIED 11 UNCLASSIFIED "an immoral book," one which no decent-minded person could read "without a sense of revulsion." The New York Herald Tribune, while generally praising the book, pointed out that such an expose could not have been published elsewhere; only in the United States were the authorities "so naive as to permit a Major Yardley to pass out of their service with a carte blanche to tell all that he knows." An editorial in the New York Evening Post stated, "We wish Theodore Roosevelt were alive to read to the author of this book a lecture on betraying the secrets of one's country." Going even further, the Boston Post suggested editorially that Congress revoke Yardley's Distinguished Service Medal. It was not revoked; in the final analysis, nothing was done because nothing could be done. When asked, Yardley had declined to submit his manuscript to Military Intelligence for review before it was published in the Saturday Evening Post, and he was vague in describing the exact nature of its contents. He said only that he would not publish anything which, in his opinion, would be prejudicial to the best interests of the War Department. 30 The Judge Advocate General advised Military Intelligence that, based on the information then available, little if anything could be done to prevent the articles from being published. 31 Meanwhile, Yardley was preparing to resign his commission in the Army Reserve because, as he put it, "I do not approve of the policies of Military Intelligence Division and therefore no longer wish my name identified with this division. My resignation is unconditional and without rancor of any sort. " 32 He explained it differently many years later: "I resigned it [the commission]," he said, "so they wouldn't court-martial me when the Black Chamber book came out. " 33 After some discussion, the Army accepted his resignation effective l April 1931, just twenty-four hours before the first of his Saturday Evening Post articles appeared on the newsstands. Why Did He Do It? Yardley gave several reasons for publishing the book and magazine articles. He reportedly told William Friedman that his family's financial needs left him no other choice. 34 He told an old friend and colleague, J. Rives Childs, that he felt he had been badly treated by the government and therefore had no compunctions about revealing the operations of his bureau. 35 He also apparently believed that inasmuch as the government had removed itself from the business of cryptanalysis, there was no harm in disclosing what he had done-it was, after all, now only of academic interest. A 12 UNCLASSIFIED corollary to that was his belief, apparently quite sincere, that the American people needed to know that the United States was at a serious disadvantage vis-avis other countries, especially since our refusal to engage in cryptanalysis was not likely to persuade others to follow suit. He seems to have been voicing this feeling, almost wistfully, when he dedicated The American Black Chamber " ... to Our Skillful Antagonists, The Foreign Cryptographers, who still remain behind the Curtain of Secret Diplomacy." He expressed the same view in Liberty magazine (19 December 1931), saying that he regretted that the Black Chamber had not been sufficiently recognized "as an expose of America's defenseless position in the field of cryptography." He had also hoped that the book would alert the country to the woeful insecurity of our diplomatic communications, which he considered to be little better than those used in the sixteenth century. Finally, did Yardley fully realize the security implications of his disclosures? We will probably never know with certainty, but the evidence is strong that he had taken a secrecy oath 36 and that he was once very security conscious. There is, for example, a letter of 22 October 1924 to a Major C. M. Milliken, presumably of Military Intelligence, in which Yardley says: "Ever since the war I have consistently fought against disclosing anything about codes and ciphers. My reason is obvious: it warns other governments of our skill and makes our work more difficult." He was in the habit of warning his staff and consumers of the dangers of security compromises. The warnings sometimes took the form of notes added to decrypts, and sometimes were apparently fashioned into posters put up around the office. Some examples: "SECRET! If enemies learn that we can decipher their present codes, they will try to devise more difficult forms. Let's keep them ignorant of our success." "SECRET! Remember that making public a single code message deciphered by M.1.8 may lead to a discontinuance of the code and thereby nullify the labor of months." He was unknowingly prophetic when he wrote, in a letter of 19 May 1920: "If the Japanese should learn that we can read their messages they may make such a violent change in their codes that we could never read them." That didn't happen-the United States eventually solved the best systems the Japanese could devise, but time had been lost and we unquestionably suffered to some degree from Yardley's indiscretions. 37 Early in June 1931, Yardley became a code and cipher consultant to Northwestern University's Scientific Crime Prevention Laboratory. He was said to be ready to drop everything to help in the effort to clean UNCLASSIFIED up crime in Chicago. Compared to the systems used during the war, "codes used by gangsters are of the crudest kind," he said. It is not known how long he remained a consultant to Northwestern, but while advising the crime laboratory-he was working from his home in Indiana-he was again preparing for bigger things. Author, Lecturer, Outcast Another of his articles, a historical survey of cryptology, appeared in the Saturday Evening Post toward the end of 1931. His next published book, after the Black Chamber, was called Yardleygrams, a collection of cryptologic puzzles with accompanying narrative intended to teach readers the rudiments of cryptology; the same or similar puzzles were serialized in Liberty magazine. The Yardley book that had some of the most farreaching effects is, ironically, one of the least known today, for it was never published. It was Japanese Diplomatic Secrets, 1921-22, an account of the diplomatic maneuvering behind the Washington arms conference as revealed through translated Japanese communications. The book was ghostwritten in 193132 by Marie Stuart Klooz, a young journalist who met Yardley through a literary agent, Viola Irene Cooper. Miss Klooz wrote the book from carbon copies of translations given her by Yardley, who told her that the messages had been "intercepted," and that if the government learned what he was doing it would disapprove. The Bobbs-Merrill Company of Indianpolis, the publisher of The American Black Chamber, declined to take the book, possibly because the Justice Department, at the request of the War Department, had asked the company to forward to the War Department any possibly classified material which Yardley might submit for publication. 38 The manuscript was next submitted to the Macmillan Company in New York, where, on 20 February 1933, a U.S. marshal seized and impounded it under Section 32, Title 50 of the U.S. Code, which prohibited the taking of secret documents. (The request to obtain the manuscript came from General Douglas MacArthur, then Army Chief of Staff, via the State Department to the Justice Department.) A company official, together with Yardley's literary agent, was ordered to appear before Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas E. Dewey, later governor of New York and twice Republican candidate for president. After testifying before a federal grand jury, the men were released. It is not clear whether Yardley testified, but it is known that when he learned that the government was looking for the manuscript, he insisted on removing his name from it and replacing it with that of the ghostwriter, Miss Klooz. She was willing to have the book published in her name, but it was too late-it had already been seized. 39 Dewey later said that it was he who persuaded Yardley, over drinks in a New York speakeasy, not to publish the book; he added that he and Yardley had, in the process, become good friends. 40 The book owes its fame to the legislation it created, legislation that Yardley called the "Secrets Act" and which is officially known as "An Act for the Protection of Gov