Founder of U.S. Intelligence Cryptography and Military Intelligence Hall of Fame Member Herbert O. Yardley Less Than any Kind of Leaker or Whistleblower
With all the discussion as to whether or not Edward Snowden is a hero, traitor, leaker, whistle-blower or what, it is interesting to survey the career of Herbert O. Yardley, the founder of modern cryptoanalysis and some consider the real founder of the NSA.
From Wiki and other sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Yardley and http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/82-years-before-edward-snowden-there-was-herbert-o-yardley/282019/ and http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/cryptologic_spectrum/many_lives.pdf
Herbert Yardley
| Herbert Yardley | |
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Herbert O. Yardley
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| Born | April 13, 1889 Worthington, Indiana |
| Died | August 7, 1958 |
| Fields | Cryptology |
Herbert Osborne Yardley (April 13, 1889 – August 7, 1958) was an American cryptologist best known for his book The American Black Chamber(1931). The title of the book refers to the Cipher Bureau, the cryptographic organization of which Yardley was the founder and head. Under Yardley, the cryptanalysts of The American Black Chamber broke Japanese diplomatic codes and were able to furnish American negotiators with significant information during the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-1922. He later helped the Nationalists in China (1938–1940) to break Japanese codes. Following his work in China, Yardley worked briefly for the Canadian government, helping it set up a cryptological section (Examination Unit) of theNational Research Council of Canada from June to December 1941. Yardley was let go due to pressure from Washington.[cit
Yardley proved to be a very good administrator and during the war the people of MI-8 performed well even if they did not have any spectacular successes. After the war, the American Army and the State department decided to jointly fund MI-8 and Yardley continued as head of the “Cipher Bureau”. They located their operations in New York City for legal reasons.
Cracking Japanese codes was a priority. David Kahn states:[3]
The most important target was Japan. Its belligerence toward China jeopardized America’s Open Door policy. Its emigrants exacerbated American racism. Its naval growth menaced American power in the western Pacific. Its commercial expansion threatened American dominance of Far Eastern markets.
After almost a year, Yardley and his staff finally managed to break the Japanese codes and were still reading Japanese diplomatic traffic when Washington hosted the Washington Naval Conference in 1921. The information the Cipher Bureau provided the American delegation regarding the Japanese government’s absolute minimum acceptable battleship requirements was instrumental in getting the Japanese side to agree to a 5:3 ratio instead of the 10:7 ratio the Japanese Navy really wanted. This allowed Japan only 18 battleships to 30 for the U.S. and 30 for Great Britain instead of the 21 battleships Japan desired. This was the height of Yardley’s cryptanalytic career.
Unfortunately, Yardley spent much of his time in New York involved in unrelated activities. Also, the flow of diplomatic telegrams dried up as companies became less willing to break the law to help the government. In Washington, William Friedman was actively exploring cryptographic frontiers for the Army. The Cipher Bureau was becoming irrelevant. However, it was moral indignation that finally doomed the bureau. When Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of State under President Herbert Hoover, found out about Yardley and the Cipher Bureau, he was furious and withdrew funding, summing up his argument with “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail”.[4] Some believe that Stimson was most offended when Yardley bragged that he could read all traffic of the Vatican, for it was after this remark Stimson turned and left the room.
The American Black Chamber[edit]
MI-8 closed its doors for good on October 31, 1929, just two days after the stock market crashed. With Yardley’s esoteric skills in very low demand, he took up writing about his experiences in codebreaking to support his family. His memoirs, The American Black Chamber, were published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1931. The book outlined the history of the first U.S. Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) organization, described the activities of MI-8 during World War I and the American Black Chamber in the 1920s, and illustrated the basic principles of signals security.
This work was instantly popular. Its critics at the time concluded that it was “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.”[5] In the U.S., 17,931 copies were sold, with 5,480 more sold in the U.K. It was translated into French, Swedish, Japanese, and Chinese. The Japanese version sold an unprecedented 33,119 copies.
This book was an embarrassment to the U.S. government and compromised some of the sources Yardley and his associates used. Through this work an estimated 19 nations were alerted that their codes were broken. Much of the post-World War I codebreaking was done by obtaining copies of enciphered telegrams sent over Western Union by foreign diplomats, as was the custom before countries had technology for specialized communications devices. William F. Friedman, considered the father of modern American signals intelligence (SIGINT) gathering, was incensed by the book and the publicity it generated in part because sources and methods were compromised and because Yardley’s contribution was overstated.
While Yardley may have thought that publishing this book would force the government to re-establish a SIGINT program, it had the opposite effect. The U.S. Government considered prosecuting him, but he had not technically violated existing law regarding protection of government records. In 1933, the Espionage Act was amended, PL 37 (USC Title 18, section 952), to prohibit the disclosure of foreign code or anything sent in code.[6] Yardley’s second book, Japanese Diplomatic Codes: 1921-1922, was presented to the dynasty of royalty in full printed form and a part of the manuscript scribbled on, and also burnt and seized by U.S. marshals and never published. The manuscript was declassified in 1979.
The American Black Chamber represents an early example of the exposé national security books that would appear after World War II, such as The Codebreakers and The Puzzle Palace, which also focus on U.S. SIGINT operations and organizations.
In 1935, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released Rendezvous, a fictional film “based on a book by Herbert O. Yardley.” The film, starring William Powell and Rosalind Russell, and directed by William K. Howard, concerns a German spy ring stealing U.S. government codes during World War I, as well as U.S. Army efforts to crack German codes.
After the Black Chamber[edit]
Yardley did cryptologic work for Canada (although pressure from the U.S. on the Canadian government meant this was limited) and China during World War II, but he was never again given a position of trust in the U.S. government. Despite this, in 1999 he was given a place in the National Security Agency Hall of Honor.
None of Yardley’s many later attempts at writing were as successful as The American Black Chamber, though he published several articles and three spy/mystery novels (The Blonde Countess, Red Sun of Nippon, and Crows Are Black Everywhere). He contributed as a writer and technical advisor to several movies, including Rendezvous, based very loosely on one of his novels, The Blonde Countess. His 1957 book on poker, Education of a Poker Player, which combined poker stories with the math behind the poker strategies, sold well. Another book of cryptographic memoirs, The Chinese Black Chamber, about his work in China, was declassified and published in 1983.
Yardley died on August 7, 1958, nearly a week after having a major stroke. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, Grave 429-1 of Section 30.
Yardley is a member of the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame.
The National Cryptologic Museum‘s library has 16 boxes of Yardley’s personal files.
82 Years Before Edward Snowden, There Was Herbert O. Yardley
On the National Security Agency’s site, there is a timeline dedicated to the most significant events in cryptologic history. Among its many entries: November 4, 1952, the day the NSA itself was created; December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor; and the earliest event that is commemorated, the U.S. State Department’s decision to hire a 23-year-old Indiana native, Herbert O. Yardley, on November 16, 1912, just prior to the outbreak of World War I.
An ambitious young man with a background as a railroad telegraph operator, Yardley quickly showed a talent for breaking codes. After proving himself able to decipher an ostensibly secret message to President Woodrow Wilson, he decided to spend his career improving the security of U.S. government communications. Soon after, he began breaking the codes of other governments in anticipation of war. He would ultimately spy on the communications of foreigners and U.S. citizens in peacetime, and head a secret surveillance agency headquartered in a New York City brownstone.
But Yardley wasn’t just the progenitor of the trade practiced at the NSA today. He was also the surveillance state’s first betrayer, as loathed by insiders in his day as Edward Snowden is in ours. His 1931 book The American Black Chamber spilled secrets on a scale that a pre-Snowden-leak NSA described as follows:
In today’s terms, it would be as if an NSA employee had publicly revealed the complete communications intelligence operations of the Agency for the past 12 years–all its techniques and major successes, its organizational structure and budget–and had, for good measure, included actual intercepts, decrypts, and translations of communications not only of our adversaries but of our allies as well.
The same historical analysis declares that Herbert Yardley is “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 success 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 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.
What’s more, he published his book and lent his expertise to foreign governments partly because he lost his job just before the 1929 stock-market crash and needed money and work. Put another way, if you survey the evidence-free accusations that surveillance-state apologists lob at Edward Snowden, you’ll find that the father of American cryptology actually did perpetrate those very transgressions.
Little wonder that James Bamford, the leading journalistic chronicler of NSA history, spends the second chapter of The Puzzle Palace looking back at Yardley’s life. (The first chapter of that book is summarized in part one of this series.) Yardley’s triumphs and serve as proof that cryptology can be of tremendous strategic value. For example, after cracking the code Japan used in cables to its embassy, Yardley was able to intercept a message about ongoing treaty negotiations with the U.S. that would determine the ratio of naval assets that Japan, Britain, and the U.S. would maintain. Thanks to spying, American negotiators knew that Japan would ultimately agree to their initial position.
But the peacetime surveillance operation that Yardley built also contained cautionary tales and surveillance abuses that have been repeated in very recent history.
The end of WWI presented an institutional threat to Yardley’s surveillance agency: The end of cable censorship made it harder to get material to read, and the Radio Communication Act of 1912 applied again. “No person engaged in or having knowledge of the operation of any station or stations should divulge or publish the contents of any messages transmitted or received by such station,” the federal law stated, “except to the person or persons to whom the same may be directed …” Bamford explains the context and ensuing events:
This was a very significant step for the United States, since it represented the first international convention of its type to which the country had adhered. To the Black Chamber, however, it represented a large obstacle that had to be overcome—illegally, if necessary.
By the time Yardley returned to the United States in April 1919, the State Department was already busy trying to establish a secret liaison with the Western Union Telegraph Company. It was hoped that Western Union would cooperate with the Black Chamber in providing copies of needed messages. For six months the State Department got nowhere; the Radio Communication Act provided harsh penalties for any employee of a telegraph company who divulged the contents of a message. Then Yardley suggested to General Churchill that he personally visit Western Union’s president, Newcomb Carlton. The meeting was arranged in September, and Churchill, accompanied by Yardley, raised with President Carlton the delicate matter of his secretly supplying the Chamber, in total violation of the law, copies of all necessary telegrams. After the men “had put all our cards on the table,” Yardley would later write, “President Carlton seemed anxious to do everything he could for us.”
Under the agreed on arrangements, a messenger called at Western Union’s Washington office each morning and took the telegrams to the office of the Military Intelligence Division in Washington. They were returned to Western Union before the close of the same day.
In the spring of 1920 the Black Chamber began approaching the other major telegraph company, Postal Telegraph, with the same request. Officials of this company, however, were much more disturbed by the possibility of criminal prosecution than were their counterparts at Western Union. For this reason, negotiations with the Black Chamber were carried on through an intermediary, a New York lawyer named L.F.H. Betts. All letters were carefully written so that no outsider would be able to understand what was really being said, and to camouflage the negotiations even further, Betts in one case communicated with General Churchill through the general’s wife.
In the end an agreement was reached, and that left only the smaller All-American Cable Company, which handled communications between North and South America. Yardley, later that same year, began negotiations with it through W.E. Roosevelt and Robert W. Goelet, who himself had been a commissioned officer in Military Intelligence during the war. Regardless of whether All-American cooperated, by the end of 1920 the Black Chamber had the secret and illegal cooperation of almost the entire American cable industry.
American cryptology had lost its virginity.
Despite its willingness to break the law to ensure its institutional survival, the Black Chamber would face significant cuts to its secret budget in ensuing years, and in the winter of 1929, the secret agency faced the prospect of a new president. “To Yardley, any change in Washington was viewed as a potential threat to his Black Chamber, and he advised his liaison at the State Department not to reveal the existence of the organization to the new Secretary for a few months, in the hope that any idealism [Henry] Stimson may have had before taking office would be tempered by reality.” When Secretary of State Stimson finally found out, his reaction “was immediate and violent,” Bamford writes. He declared the Black Chamber “highly illegal” and is reported to have said, “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” Soon after, Yardley lost his job.
Not long after that, having spent years insisting his work must be kept absolutely secret for the sake of national security, he spilled all his secrets in print, enraging the government, which nevertheless declined to prosecute him. The State Department lied to the public by disavowing the truth of the book’s contents. And Yardley subsequently wrote another work that focused on Japanese codes, making heavy use of actual messages he’d intercepted from Japan. It was “the first and only manuscript in American literary history to be seized and impounded for national security reasons by the United States government.”
As Bamford goes on to relate, Congress then passed a law that survived for decades, only slightly amended. The language that FDR signed on June 10, 1933:
… whoever, by virtue of his employment by the United States, shall obtain from another or shall have custody of or access to, any official diplomatic code or any matter prepared in such code, and shall willfully, without authorization or public authority, publish or furnish to another any such code or matter, or any matter which was obtained while in the process of transmission between any foreign government and its diplomatic mission in the United States, shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.