Bye’s new discovery turned out to be a former Hoosier named
Herbert O. Yardley. Born and raised in Worthington, Indiana, Yardley, who had
been a star athlete and an expert in the game of poker, had served as head of one
of the federal government’s first secret decoding departments, known as the
American Cryptographic Bureau or the “Black Chamber.” During its twelve years
of existence from its office in New York City, the bureau, which received
funding from the U.S. State and War Departments, had specialists working around
the clock to decipher the codes of the governments of England, France, Germany,
Japan, and the Soviet Union. The bureau’s sophisticated decoding of intercepted
diplomatic messages aided the U.S. government in winning vital concessions from
Japan during a 1921 naval disarmament conference.
Yardley’s proposal to write about his days with the Black
Chamber caused considerable excitement and concern at Bobbs-Merrill. Chambers
expressed his gratitude to Bye for putting George Shively of the firm’s New
York editorial department in touch with Yardley and awaited Shively’s report,
he wrote Bye, “with the liveliest interest. This sounds very much like the big
book you promised me, and I hope it proves as much.” At first, Shively
expressed some trepidation about the publishing firm’s involvement with such
sensitive government material. “The thing is startling,” Shively wrote to
Chambers. “Maybe we’d all be charged with treason and shot at sunrise.” Shively
seemed impressed, however, after his meeting with Yardley and when he reviewed an
outline of the proposed manuscript. “It is full of dynamite,” Shively said in a
memo to Chambers, “but if we can escape the charge of treason or some such
thundering offense of that kind, we could have lots of fun with the book. It
ought to be first page news in a good many cities of the world.”
Shively’s memo proved to be on the mark. Released to the
reading public in early June 1931, Yardley’s The American Black Chamber received nationwide media attention and
attracted front-page coverage in every daily newspaper in Washington, D.C.
Fueled in part by a series of articles written by Yardley for the Saturday Evening Post, sales of the book
soared, and it became a top seller in a number of New York bookstores, as well
as in such major cities as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New Orleans,
Cleveland, and Indianapolis. Famous Kansas newspaper editor William Allen White
of the Emporia Gazette called
Yardley’s work “the most important book of the year.” Foreign editions also did
well, particularly in Japan, where more than 30,000 copies were sold. Today,
Yardley’s book remains a classic in the field and, according to code-breaking historian
and writer David Kahn, is “the most famous book on cryptology ever published.”
Born on April 13, 1889, in Worthington, Yardley had shown
promise at an early age, winning praise for his intelligence and becoming known
as a voracious reader. He also won acclaim as an athlete, playing quarterback
on the high school football team and serving as its captain. Yardley described
himself as a “fair student with a definite flair for mathematics.” Writing
about his life, Yardley said his mother, Mary Emma Osborn, died when he was thirteen
years old “and thereafter I did pretty much as I pleased.”
With $200 he inherited from his mother and money from odd
jobs, he began to play poker at a local saloon Yardley called Monty’s Place,
where, according to Yardley, “everyone came to lose their money.” Those who
frequented the saloon, he added, included “itinerant trainmen, barbers,
magicians, actors, jugglers, owners of shows, drummers, coal operators, land
speculators, farmers, poultrymen, cattlemn, liverymen. And of course there were
the usual town bastards, drug addicts, idiots, drunkards, not to mention the
bankers, small businessmen, preachers, atheists, and old soldiers.” The only
exceptions were women, including the town’s prostitutes, who were banned so
“men could tell a dirty story without fear of offending feminine ears.” Yardley
soon won the friendship of the bar’s owner, James Montgomery, who backed him
financially and taught him the intricacies of the game of poker. “Set him up
with a bluff,” Montgomery advised the young man. “Then knock him [the opponent]
down with the winning hand.” Yardley learned enough to boast that he had won
consistently at poker all his life, having “never lost at over three
consecutive sittings.”
After graduating from high school, Yardley followed in his
father’s footsteps and earned a living as a railroad telegrapher. He
successfully passed a civil service examination in 1912 and earned a position
as a telegraph operator in the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C.,
working in the code room at the State-War-Navy Building (today the Eisenhower
Executive Office Building) that overlooked the White House. “By lifting my eyes
from my work,” Yardley noted, “I could see a tennis game in progress where a
few years earlier President [Theodore] Roosevelt and his tennis Cabinet had
played every day.” Although he said an “air of good-fellowship” existed in the
office, Yardley was bewildered by the casual attitude displayed by his fellow
code clerks about the work they undertook for the government. “Daily history
passed through their hands in one lone steady stream,” he said, “and they
thought less of it than of the baseball scores.”
Shifted to night duty, Yardley passed the time by reading
old diplomatic telegrams. He soon began wondering if the country’s diplomatic
codes were safe from the prying eyes of foreign governments, and wondered why
America had no department devoted to such endeavors. “As I asked myself this
question,” he said, “I knew that I had the answer to my eager young mind which
was searching for a purpose in life. I would devote my life to cryptography.”
Yardley set out to prepare himself for his new mission,
reading all the books on cryptography he could find in the Library of Congress,
searching through Edgar Allan Poe’s letters for hidden puzzles, and reading an
army pamphlet on solving military secret messages. The only problem with the
army pamphlet was that the types of ciphers it examined were “so simple that
any bright schoolboy could solve them without a book of instructions,” he
noted. It became obvious to Yardley that he would have to “do my own pioneer
work.” Through his connections in Washington, Yardley also obtained copies of
code and cipher communications from various foreign embassies. “I knew most of
the telegraph operators in Washington,” he said, “and got some of them to steal
a few coded diplomatic messages of various governments; these I practiced on.”
Yardley solved some, while others were far tougher to crack. “But I was
learning a new science, with no beaten path to follow,” he noted.
One of the coded telegrams Yardley worked on in his spare
time included a five-hundred-word message to President Woodrow Wilson from one
of his most trusted advisers, Colonel Edward House. Yardley believed that the communication
would prove to be useful to decode, as “surely the President and his trusted
agent would be using a difficult code.” A shocked Yardley, however, discovered
he could decipher the message in less than two hours. He next turned his
attention to solving the American diplomatic code, which “progressed slowly but
surely.” After working two years on the diplomatic code, Yardley produced a
hundred-page memorandum outlining his solution and turned it over to his
superior, David A. Salmon, who called it “a masterly piece of analysis” and
instituted a new method for encoding government dispatches.
With the United States’s entry into World War I, Yardley sought
release from his State Department duties for service as a cryptologist with the
army. With the assistance of Major Ralph H. Van Deman, who earned distinction
as the “Father of American Intelligence,” the twenty-seven-year-old Yardley
received a commission as a lieutenant with the Signal Corps and became head of
military intelligence branch, section 8 (MI-8), with offices at the U.S. Army
War College in Washington, D.C.
During the war, MI-8 had at its disposal a staff of
twenty-five dedicated cryptanalysts, many with doctoral degrees in such
subjects as English, Latin, and Spanish. The staff pored over a host of
diplomatic telegrams from counties in South America, as well as Germany and
Mexico. During an eighteen-month period, the section’s cryptographers reviewed
11,000 messages in 579 different code systems. MI-8’s greatest triumph came
when it solved a cipher letter taken from a suspected German spy, Lothar Witzke.
The decrypted letter implicated Witzke in the destruction in 1916 of American
ammunition supplies located at Jersey City, New Jersey, that were intended for
the Allied cause, and Witzke received a death sentence for his crimes
(President Woodrow Wilson commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, and the
United States deported Witzke to Germany in 1923).
With the war’s end, Yardley, who had traveled to Europe
during the conflict to learn all he could about code work in England and France,
returned determined to continue the bureau’s work and to create a “permanent
organization for code and cipher investigation and attack.” He wrangled
financial support for what became the American Black Chamber from the State and
War Departments and eventually set up shop with a staff of twenty in a
four-story brownstone at 141 East Thirty-Seventh Street in New York City.
“Practically all contact with the government was now broken,” said Yardley.
“All the employees, including myself, were now civilians on secret pay-roll.
The rent, telephone, lights, heat, office supplies—everything was paid for
secretly so that no connection could be traced to the government.”
As a cover for the bureau’s work, Yardley formed the Code
Compiling Company, which produced successful commercial codebooks. According to
Yardley, who received a $7,5000 yearly salary, in just twelve years (1917 to
1929) the Black Chamber decoded more than 45,000 coded telegrams from the
governments of such major powers as Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan,
Spain, China, and the Soviet Union, as well as a host of other countries. The agency’s
greatest success came when it broke the Japanese diplomatic code. Knowing in
advance what their opposite numbers were saying, American negotiators were able
to win favorable terms from Japan at a 1921–22 naval disarmament conference in
Washington, D.C. “The Black Chamber, bolted, hidden, guarded,” Yardley later
boasted, “sees all, hears all. . . . Its sensitive ears catch the faintest
whisperings in the foreign capitals of the world.”
The constant, focused work took its toll on the staff. As
Yardley noted, cryptography is something that “steals into the blood stream and
does curious things to people.” Mentally exhausted from his efforts, he had to
spend four months in Arizona recuperating from the stress. Other Black Chamber
staff members were close to nervous breakdowns themselves, with one dreaming
constantly that a bulldog was loose in her room. For hour upon hour she chased the
dog around the room and when she finally caught it, the dog had the word “code”
written on its side. Another staff member dreamed every night of “walking along
a lonely beach, weighed down by an enormous sackful of pebbles,” Yardley
recalled. She could only take a pebble from the bag when she found its exact
duplicate. “This was her only method of lightening the burden that weighed so
heavily upon her shoulders,” said Yardley.
There were some rewards. Not long after he returned from
Arizona, Yardley received a Distinguished Service Medal, the army’s highest
honor for noncombat service, directly from Secretary of War John W. Weeks, a
firm supporter of the Black Chamber. “I felt rather silly standing before the
Secretary of War, as he read my citation that seemed to have very little to do
with the breaking of codes of foreign governments, but I was relieved,” Yardley
recalled, “when he pinned the medal on my lapel, for with a twinkle in his eye
he winked at me. That wink pleased me immensely.”
A new presidential administration in Washington, however,
spelled doom for Yardley and the Black Chamber. Faced with dwindling financial
and staff support, Yardley decided to force matters by presenting a memorandum
outlining the Black Chamber’s history “and the necessary steps that must be
taken if the Government had hoped to take full advantage of the skill of its cryptographers”
for the new president, Herbert Hoover. It was another government official,
Henry L. Stimson, Hoover’s Secretary of State, however, who shut down the Black
Chamber. Receiving a set of messages decoded by the agency, Stimson expressed
shock at its activities, calling them “highly unethical” for the United States
to be reading the confidential messages of “our diplomatic guests.” Later, when
interviewed for his memoirs, Stimson simply said: “Gentlemen do not read each
other’s mail.” The Black Chamber officially ceased operations on October 31,
1929.
Finding himself expelled from the job he loved, Yardley
returned to Worthington, Indiana, with his wife, Hazel, and young son, Jack.
His financial affairs in difficulty because of the worsening economy following
the Wall Street Crash of 1929, Yardley attempted and failed to obtain a $2,500
loan from an old friend from his days at MI-8, John M. Manly. “I’m not at all
certain of what I shall do,” Yardley wrote Manly. Hoping to make some money
from his cryptography experiences, Yardley first tried to find a ghostwriter,
but, with encouragement from Bye, decided to write the story of the Black
Chamber himself. Yardley described how he tackled the task in a letter to Manly.
Yardley wrote:
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. . . . . 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 tomato 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.
Yardley sometimes strayed from the facts in writing his
manuscript, something he later admitted. “To write saleable stuff one must
dramatise,” he said. “Things don’t happen in dramatic fashion. There is
therefore nothing to do but either dramatise or not write at all.”
Ecstatic about what he read, Bye congratulated Yardley on
his achievement calling the manuscript “magnificent” and praising it as “ten
times better than my most optimistic expectations.” Before agreeing to publish
Yardley’s book, however, Bobbs-Merrill officials sent the manuscript for review
by its lawyer, Richard V. Sipe. On January 8, 1931, Sipe sent a memo to
Chambers with the opinion that there should be “no criminal liability attached
to the publication of this manuscript. I do not feel that it comes under the
statutes defining treason, sedition, or espionage.” Sipe said that Yardley
might very well be “guilty of dishonorable conduct and the violation of the
oath of his office, but I do not see where this would let the Bobbs-Merrill
Company in for liability under the criminal laws of the country.” The
publishing house accepted the manuscript and on February 23 sent its author a
$500 royalty advance. In addition, the Curtiss Publishing Company of
Philadelphia paid Yardley $2,250 for three articles based on the book to appear
in issues of its popular periodical, the Saturday
Evening Post.
Released on June 1, The
American Black Chamber received positive reviews from critics and sparked
controversy from the start. Some of Yardley’s cryptography colleagues bristled
at his revelations about their secret work, finding it unpatriotic, possibly
treasonous, and certainly dishonorable, while government officials did their
best to discredit his story. Bristling
at the backlash, Yardley wrote a letter to the editor in the New York Post defending his work, saying
the way to stop the practice of reading other nation’s messages would be to air
the matter in public. “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 said. The book certainly caused a stir
in Japan, which had been so deftly outmaneuvered at the naval conference years
before. W. Cameron Forbes, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, told his superiors in
the State Department that Yardley’s publication had “evidently made a great
impression in Japan. I often hear reference made to it in conversation with
various classes of Japanese.”
To help promote the book, Yardley signed on with W. Colston
Leigh, Inc., a New York lecture bureau, to give a series of talks on the Black
Chamber and his espionage experiences. He postponed his tour, however, when RKO
Pathe Studios wanted to turn his book into a film and offered him a guaranteed
$500 a week for five weeks of work. Having his author enmeshed in Hollywood
worried Bye, especially when his work there threatened the cancellation of some
planned lectures. “I am terribly afraid you are getting deeper and deeper into
some kind of a bad muddle,” Bye wrote Yardley. He reminded him that the lecture
tour “will help sell more books, and it would keep you in the public eye. In
Hollywood you are buried deeper than you will be when you solve the greatest
cryptogram of all time.” Chambers agreed with Bye’s assessment and Yardley
abandoned Hollywood for talks in such cities as Grand Rapids, Michigan;
Evanston, Illinois; South Bend and Indianapolis, Indiana; Bloomington and
Chicago, Illinois; and Denver, Colorado.
For his next project, Yardley, with the assistance of an
amateur writer named Marie Stuart Klooz, decided to tell the story of how the
Black Chamber had broken the Japanese diplomatic codes for the naval
disarmament conference, using copies of the actual intercepted messages. He
produced a massive 900-page manuscript, but Bobbs-Merrill balked at taking on
such a project, with Chambers telling Yardley his company did not believe such
a book would have any “widespread popular interest.” Yardley sent the manuscript
to the Macmillan Company in New York, but federal marshals seized the work on February
20, 1933. Following up on a request by the State Department, Congress passed a
bill making it a crime for government employees to publish material from
official diplomatic codes. President Roosevelt signed the bill into law (Public
Law 37) on June 10.
Yardley tried to maintain his writing career, publishing two
adventure novels, The Blonde Countess and
The Red Sun of Nippon (both 1934).
Both novels featured a main character named Nathaniel Greenleaf patterned after
himself, and he also based some of the book’s other characters and events on
his time with the Black Chamber. The books received generally positive reviews,
with the Saturday Review of Literature noting,
“Mr. Yardley knows his spy stuff and can tell a good story, though there are a
few rough edges.” The Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio paid Yardley $7,500 for the
rights to The American Black Chamber and
The Blonde Countess, which it turned into
a World War I spy movie set in Washington, D.C., titled Rendezvous (1935). The film starred William Powell, fresh off of
his renowned performance the year before in The
Thin Man as Bill Gordon, a cryptographer, and Rosalind Russell in her first
starring role as Joel Carter, a flighty socialite who manages to get herself
into trouble with a German spy ring. A mix of intrigue and comedy, the film,
although it had little to do with Yardley’s experiences with the Black Chamber,
received generally positive reviews, with one critic calling it “freshly
inspired entertainment.”
In 1938 Yardley returned to cryptography when Chiang
Kai-shek’s Chinese government hired him to help break the codes of the invading
Japanese army at a salary of $10,000. Using the pseudonym Herbert Osborn,
supposedly an exporter of hides, Yardley began his duties in China. He impressed
a young Harvard graduate who had obtained a job with the Chinese Ministry of
Information in Chungking. Theodore H. White, later known for his Making of the
President series of books, recalled that during his time in China Yardley “took
a fancy to me” and tried to instruct him in his main enthusiasms—drinking,
poker, and women. The most valuable advice, however, White gleaned from Yardley
came in how to behave during an air raid. “The chief danger of an air raid, he [Yardley]
said, was splintered glass from windows,” White said. “Thus, when one hears the
siren, one should get a drink, lie down on a couch and put two pillows over
oneself—one pillow over the eyes and the other over the groin. Splintered glass
could hurt those vital organs, and if the eyes or the groin were injured, life
was not worth living. It was good advice for any groundling in the age before
atom bombs; and I took it.” Another writer, Emily Hahn of The New Yorker, had a far different opinion. She described Yardley
as an “American with a loud manner of talking” who everyone knew was a “secret
agent.”
Returning to the United States in 1940, Yardley worked for a
time for a Canadian signals intelligence unit before returning to America for a
job as an enforcement officer with the Office of Price Administration. Back in
Washington, D.C., Yardley bought and managed a restaurant he named Rideau after
the Canadian lake country, but sold it for a loss in December 1942. He
continued to try his hand at writing, producing another novel, Crows Are Black Everywhere (1945), with
his friend, Carl Grabo, an English professor at the University of Chicago, and authoring
a manuscript about his days in China, later published as The Chinese Black Chamber.
Yardley’s most enduring success, however, came in 1957 with the
publication of his book The Education of
a Poker Player, which had such a great initial demand that its publisher,
Simon and Schuster, issued twelve printings of the deluxe hardcover edition.
White called the book “a major contribution to the American folk culture,”
adding it was as important to educating young poker players “as a sex manual is
to a college freshman.” In a 1997 article in Poker magazine, a writer said that Yardley’s book “belongs in every
poker player’s library simply because it is a true classic,” and discerning
viewers can see a copy of Education of a
Poker Player on the bookshelf of the character Mike McDermott (played by
Matt Damon) in the 1998 movie Rounders.
Shortly before his book on poker appeared, Yardley suffered
a stroke. He died at his home in Silver Spring, Maryland, on August 7, 1958, at
the age of sixty-nine. Just a few days after his death, he was buried with full
military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. Although sometimes credited as
the “father of cryptography in America,” Yardley can be more accurately seen as
the person responsible for bringing a profession often cloaked in secrecy into
the light of day, delighting readers for many years with his breathless tales
of adventures and intrigue.
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