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  • The Reader of Gentlemen's Mail: Herbert O. Yardley and the Birth of American Codebreaking
  • Frederick P. Hitz
The Reader of Gentlemen's Mail: Herbert O. Yardley and the Birth of American Codebreaking. By David Kahn (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2004) 318 pp. $32.50

This fey volume from the author of the best-selling book, The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing (New York, 1967), traces the life of a high-school educated federal civil servant from the Midwest who drank a lot, womanized, played poker, couldn't hold a job, and frantically chased a buck throughout a career that spanned the first half of the twentieth century. He also possessed that rare mind that could analyze columns of figures purporting to represent words in a foreign language and divine their meaning. Yardley was a $1000 a year code clerk in the U.S. Department of State in 1912 who chose to study cryptography. By virtue of hard work; an ability to charm, organize, and lead other bureaucrats; and the good fortune to meet an important need in time of war, he helped to create MI-8, the first cryptanalytic division in the U.S. government during World War I, and became its first head.

Yardley managed to keep his cryptanalytic office going in the State Department after the armistice was signed in 1918. He accomplished an extraordinary success in reading coded Japanese diplomatic traffic that detailed the Japanese negotiating position during the Washington Naval Disarmament Conference in 1921. Eventually, however, he and his office succumbed to bureaucratic rivalries in Washington and the displeasure with dirty tricks in American foreign policy that often surfaces after the whiff of wartime gunsmoke disappears. [End Page 291]

When the cryptanalytic bureau was disbanded in 1929, Yardley was forced to scramble for a living, first by writing about his code-breaking experience in a controversial book—The American Black Chamber (Indianapolis, 1931)—and later by selling articles to magazines and cryptograms to newspapers. In short, as Kahn writes in amusing but often inconsequential detail, Yardley's career as a cryptanalyst peaked with his work on the disarmament conference in 1921 and the publication of his book in 1931. Thereafter, having been blacklisted by the signals intelligence community in the United States and United Kingdom, he sold his cryptanalytic skills to the Chinese and Canadians without great success. Eventually, he had to settle for occupations largely removed from his pioneering achievements in code breaking.

Kahn consulted U.S. and foreign government archives for this work; letters to, from, and about Yardley; university collections; the National Security Agency, which is the successor of Yardley's MI-8; and even the FBI, for an absurdly humorous glimpse of his file when he was briefly shadowed at the beginning of World War II as a potential subversive. Little effort is made, however, to explain the nature of Yardley's gift. What is the skill that codebreakers possess? Is it a facility with numbers and foreign languages, or both? Why didn't Yardley apply or adapt his techniques to machine-generated codes as did William F. Friedman his subordinate and later rival and successor? Is it because he possessed only a limited cryptanalytic ability after all, and his real skill was in directing and inspiring others? This book reaches its crescendo with Yardley's book in 1931 and then peters out with sometimes entertaining personal anecdotes thereafter.

Frederick P. Hitz
Princeton University
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