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By Bart Barnes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Washington Post,Washington, D.C.
Thursday, August 15, 2002, Page B6
Meredith Knox Gardner, 89, an Army Signal Intelligence Service
code breaker whose work on encrypted KGB messages to and
from Moscow during and after World War II led to the exposure
of Soviet agents who spied on the U.S. atomic bomb project, died
Aug. 9 at the ManorCare facility in Chevy Chase. He had Alzheimer's
disease.
Mr. Garner's work included the discovery of lists of code names
in telegrams sent by the Soviet consulate in New York to Moscow
from 1943 to 1945, and it led directly to the unmaskings of Klaus Fuchs,
the German-born scientist convicted of spying for the Soviets; Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg; who in 1953 were executed for espionage; and British
intelligence office Kim Philby, who after defecting to Moscow in 1963
said he had been a Soviet spy for two decades.
Within the intelligence community, Mr. Gardner was said to have been a
living legend, and his work in penetrating Soviet codes is widely considered
one of the great U.S. counterintelligence coups of the last half-century.
But he remained unknown to the public for more than 50 years until 1996,
when he emerged from anonymity to tell his story at a conference on the
decrypting operation, which had its own code name, "Venona." At that
conference, which was sponsored by the National Security Agency, the CIA and
the Center for Democracy -- a Washington think tank -- Sen. Daniel Patrick
Moynihan (D-N.Y.) introduced Mr. Gardner as an unsung hero of the Cold War.
Describing his discovery of code names in the New York to Moscow Soviet
cables during and after the war, Mr. Gardner told the Venona conference:
"That smelled of espionage. Otherwise, why would you go to the trouble of
using something other than someone's real name?" In December 1946, his
suspicions were all but confirmed when he decrypted a New York to Moscow
cable sent two years earlier containing the code names of several leading
scientists working on the Manhattan Project, the U.S. effort to build an
atomic bomb.
Mr. Gardner, a gifted linguist who was fluent in German, Old High German,
Middle High German, Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Lithuanian, Slavonic, Spanish,
French, Italian, Russian and Japanese, came to Washington early in World War
II to work as a civilian for the Army Signal Intelligence Service, a
predecessor of the NSA.
A native of Okolona, Miss., he graduated from the University of Texas and
received a master's degree in languages from the University of Wisconsin.
Before World War II, he was a language teacher at the Universities of Akron,
Texas and Wisconsin.
He spent his early years with the Army agency working on telegraphic
messages involving Germany and Japan, especially communications between
Japanese military attaches in Berlin and other enemy capitals and the
Japanese general staff in Tokyo.
When the war ended, Mr. Gardner was reassigned to examine telegraphic
traffic involving the Soviet Union, the wartime ally of the United States
and Great Britain. With the end of hostilities against Germany and Japan,
Soviet matters were now a top priority, and by 1946 from 500 to 600 people
were assigned to decryption efforts on more than 35,000 pages of coded
Soviet cables.
As senior linguist, it was Mr. Gardner's job to re-create a Russian code
book and translate Russian messages into English. He told The Washington
Post's Michael Dobbs in 1996 that he attributed his success to logic, his
linguistic skills and "a sort of magpie attitude to facts, the habit of
storing things away that did not seem to have any connection at all."
A few months after decoding the message containing the names of scientists
working on the atomic bomb, he came upon a reference to an agent with the
code name of "Liberal" who had a 29-year-old wife named Ethel. They turned
out to be Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
As more Venona cables were decrypted, it became apparent that Moscow had
recruited dozens of agents at various levels of government, and the FBI was
directed to follow up leads. Robert Lamphere was the FBI agent named liaison
officer with Venona, and with Mr. Gardner he developed a symbiotic
relationship in which Mr. Gardner gave Lamphere lists of agents named in the
Venona cables while Lamphere gave Mr. Gardner information that might be
helpful in further decryption.
This led to a massive manhunt for spies in the late 1940s and early 1950s
and is said to have contributed to the Communist-baiting excesses of Sen.
Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.). Among the other Soviet agents mentioned in the
Venona documents were David Greenglass, the younger brother of Ethel
Rosenberg who received a 15-year prison sentence for passing along
information about the atomic bomb; and Theodore Alvin Hall, who was
recruited as a 19-year-old Harvard student to work on the bomb and was then
said to have passed along the vital secrets of this work to the Soviets.
Hall was never formally charged. He died in Cambridge, England, in 1999.
Information from the Venona operation also led to the exposure of Kim
Philby's British comrades in espionage, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and
Anthony Blunt.
From at least two sources, the Soviets learned that their U.S. espionage
net had been discovered. One was Philby, the British intelligence officer
and double agent. He was posted in Washington in 1949 and had a habit of
dropping in on Mr. Gardner's Venona operation.
The other was Bill Weisband, a Russian emigre who was hired as a
linguistic adviser for Venona. Mr. Gardner occasionally consulted him on
points of Russian grammar. At the Venona conference, the National Security
Agency declassified tapes of the confession of a Los Angeles aircraft worker
who identified Weisband as his KGB handler. Weisband was fired from Venona
and later served a one-year prison sentence for contempt of court for
refusing to testify about Communist connections. He died in 1967. U.S.
counterintelligence officials said they are convinced he was a Soviet spy.
In 1972, Mr. Gardner retired from NSA. The Venona operation was shut down
in 1980.
In retirement, Mr. Gardner lived quietly in a modest condominium on
Connecticut Avenue in Washington, where he traced his Scottish genealogy and
did the daily crossword puzzle in the Times of London, which is reputed to
be the most difficult in the world.
Survivors include his wife of 57 years, Blanche, of Washington; two
children, Arthur H. Gardner of Milwaukee and Ann Martin of Annapolis; and 11
grandchildren.
To view the entire original article, go to
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19880-2002Aug14.html
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