The Reader of Gentlemen's Mail: Herbert O. Yardley and the Birth of American Codebreaking (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "In 1890, the center of population of the United States moved into Indiana..." (more)
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Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post

Having a somewhat unusual surname is a mixed blessing. It's nice to be a tiny bit different, to be asked to spell one's name by sales clerks and ticket agents, but it can be a bit of a nuisance if someone mildly famous has or had the same name. Thus during two decades' residence in Baltimore I was frequently asked by old-timers if I was any kin to Richard Q. "Moko" Yardley, who for centuries drew very strange editorial-page cartoons for the Sun, and for as long as I can remember people have wondered if I am related to Herbert O. Yardley, the celebrated (and notorious) codebreaker and poker player.

The answer in both cases is: probably, but distantly at best. If there is a familial tie to Moko, it remains a mystery, but David Kahn's first-rate biography of Herbert O. suggests that there is indeed a connection. Herbert O. "could trace his family to a Thomas Yardley who had come from England to Pennsylvania in 1703" and may have descended from someone who was present at the negotiations in 1215 that produced the Magna Carta; my own forebears came from England to Pennsylvania in 1682, and it has been claimed over the years that one "William Yardley, L.M." was a witness to the Magna Carta, a claim best swallowed with large doses of salt.

In any event it is amusing to think that I, who have never been able to solve a cryptic puzzle, am kin in some fashion to the cryptographic whiz who was, in Kahn's judgment, "the most colorful and controversial figure in American intelligence" and, perhaps, its most influential, the man who in World War I "foresaw that the United States needed the information that could come from signals intelligence, established America's first permanent agency to intercept foreign messages and break codes, and ran it well enough to prove its importance." When he died in 1958 at age 69, he left a decidedly mixed legacy, not to mention a great many enemies, but on balance there is, or so Kahn concludes, much to admire in his record.

That there has not previously been a biography of Yardley is puzzling, as Kahn notes, though there are a couple of plausible explanations: He didn't leave much of a paper trail, and he wasn't an especially savory character. Biographers prefer to write about people with whom they can sympathize, even empathize, and there was much about Yardley that was, or bordered on, repugnant. Yet Kahn has found human sides of him that are attractive, and as one of the most distinguished scholars of military intelligence, he is ideally suited to tell the tale.

Yardley was born in 1889 and grew up in Worthington, a grain terminal in southwest Indiana where his father was "station agent and telegrapher" for one of the two railroads that ran through town. He was a smart boy, "fun to be around," who learned to play poker as a teenager and worked off and on at the train depot. After graduation from high school he "took a job as a railroad telegrapher, building on the training and experience he had gained while working for his father." When he was in his early twenties, he became a government telegrapher and in 1914 he moved with his new bride, Hazel, to Washington, where he became a clerk at the State Department.

His work exposed him to diplomatic cables and the codes in which they were written. He wondered how well the codes actually protected the messages and asked himself why the United States didn't have "an agency of its own to solve and read foreign messages." Later he wrote: "As I asked myself this question 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. Perhaps I too, like the foreign cryptographer, could open the secrets of the capitals of the world. I now began a methodical plan to prepare myself."

Because Yardley's loyalty to his country eventually came under fierce attack, it is useful to emphasize that at the time his motives seem to have been entirely patriotic. He saw that the United States was being sucked into the terrible European war, and he understood that with the rising use of radio, "communications intelligence was making intelligence into a significant instrument of war, no longer mistrusted but accepted and even welcomed by admirals, generals, and statesmen." He "faced a struggle against ignorance and inertia," but he was determined, and in April 1917 he went to the War College in Anacostia with "the idea that would forever change American intelligence."

He proposed that the Army set up "its own codebreaking agency in Washington," and the proposal was accepted. Within a couple of months he was made a lieutenant in the Signal Corps (he eventually reached the rank of major) "and soon thereafter he established and, as its sole officer, took charge of MI-8 -- military intelligence, section 8." This quickly became "the cradle of American cryptology," with Yardley on top:

"He was 28 years old, five feet five inches tall, 125 pounds. His head was round atop a short neck. His nose was straight and small; his hair was light brown, but his early baldness gave him a high forehead. He was convincing when he talked, tending to dominate a conversation, and he told stories well. He was bright. He had gained self-confidence and experience in organizing and running things. . . . He had broken some codes and believed he could crack others. He was ambitious. And now he had, via cryptology, a chance to be not an underling, but a boss. Sure that he could handle the opportunity, he seized it."

MI-8's "most spectacular achievement" in World War I was breaking coded documents that identified a German secret agent who was subsequently executed for espionage, but MI-8's most important long-term accomplishment was, in Yardley's words, "the large and constant stream of information it has provided in regard to the attitudes, purposes, and plans of our neighbors," friends as well as foes. He believed that the pursuit of intelligence should not be abandoned in peacetime, and persuaded the Army and State Department to underwrite "what was officially called the Cipher Bureau but has become known as the American Black Chamber."

It operated on both sides of the thin line between the legal and the illegal, since its operatives read cables believed by those who sent and received them to be protected by confidentiality guarantees. Chief among its targets was Japan, which was acting aggressively around the Far East and prompting the American military to prepare for war. When the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armament got under way in 1921, Yardley and his staff had already broken the very challenging Japanese code -- this, according to Kahn, "secured the future of codebreaking in America" -- and thus were able to provide information that helped the United States get a favorable outcome at the conference, "the chief contribution of Yardley's Cipher Bureau."

But in 1929 Herbert Hoover's secretary of state, Henry L. Stimson, put an end to the bureau. "Gentlemen," he famously said, "do not read each other's mail," at least not in peacetime. The bureau was shut down, and Yardley was put out of work. During the 1920s he'd moonlighted in New York real estate to his considerable profit, but the Depression shut down that market. In desperation, he decided to write a book about the bureau. He "had kept, illegally, many of its documents," and had a vast amount of inside information. Though doubts were expressed about the propriety of the enterprise, a contract was signed and the book was written. Entitled The American Black Chamber, it appeared in the spring of 1931, immediately causing a great furor.

Some accused Yardley of treason, a charge Kahn emphatically rejects: "He never sold information to Japan or to anybody else, and he never worked against the United States. He cheated by working for himself while being paid by the government. Later, he was indeed a hired gun, an opportunist, and he breached the trust his country had placed in him when he published his book. The action was despicable. It was rightly castigated by many people. But it cannot be characterized as treason. Yardley was a rotter, not a traitor."

The last three decades of Yardley's life were a never ending scramble. He sold cryptograms ("Yardleygrams"!) to magazines, he co-authored pulpy spy fiction, he got onto the Hollywood treadmill, he made and sold secret ink, he did a radio show called "Stories of the Black Chamber." He was a codebreaker-for-hire, in China and then Canada, he ran a restaurant on H St., NW in Washington for a while, and he capped things off by writing The Education of a Poker Player (1957), which immediately established itself as a classic and remains one to this day. All in all he was a pretty weird guy, but he was neither the first Yardley nor the last to claim that distinction.

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist

Instantly recognizable to buffs of intelligence history, Herbert Yardley became infamous in 1931 for telling a tale out of school. His The American Black Chamber romped through the exploits of the State Department's Cipher Bureau, which Henry Stimson abruptly closed in 1929, fastidiously intoning, "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail." Despite his notoriety-- Yardley's book ignited a furor in the halls of power, and he was blacklisted from further work in American intelligence--Yardley has not been the subject of a biography until now. Kahn tells Yardley's story with a cool eye for his reputation as a codebreaker (Kahn is the author of both general and technical works on cryptology). More important from the reading standpoint, Kahn has a decidedly interesting, angular personality to work with. Yardley was boastful and prone to exaggerating his accomplishments, a habit he accentuated in his projects to parlay his original expose into moneymaking entertainment schemes, including potboilers, Hollywood scripts, and radio dramas. Balanced and meticulous in its assessments, this biography will appeal to intelligence aficionados. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (February 9, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300098464
• ISBN-13: 978-0300098464
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #708,213 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Forgotten Intelligence Innovator, April 14, 2004

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Despite its current reputation, there were times when American intelligence (meaning spying) was an unalloyed success. For many, the most interesting part of the spy business is signals intelligence, tuning into or breaking into foreign messages and decoding them. There has been signals intelligence of some sort ever since there has been international conflict, but the field took off when messages could be transmitted wirelessly. Anyone could pick up the signal, so the trick was to encode it; the counter-trick was to crack the code. Cryptographers and other spies already know and respect the name of Herbert O. Yardley. He isn't well known by others, but almost fifty years after his death, he has gotten a full, instructive biography, _The Reader of Gentleman's Mail: Herbert O. Yardley and the Birth of American Codebreaking_ (Yale University Press) by David Kahn. Kahn is the perfect teller of this tale, having written both articles for scholarly journals as well as popular books about intelligence matters. There is not a great deal of detail about the procedures of decryption, which are described only generally, but there is a unique American life here. According to Kahn, Yardley better than anyone foresaw how important cracking signals could be to American intelligence. He created the first permanent agency to intercept messages and break them. He was "the most colorful and controversial figure in American intelligence," and his controversial actions are fully included here.

Yardley came to Washington DC in 1914, working as a telegrapher in the State Department. He was fascinated by the messages that came in and out, and determined that he would give his life to cryptography. His efforts within the Army Signal Corp were effective, but more important even than the wartime accomplishments was that Yardley convinced the Army and State Department to continue signal intelligence after Armistice Day. He believed that the stream of international communications could indicate the attitudes and plans of nations who were our friends as well as our foes. He was right; his work ensured that America knew what the aims of the Japanese were at the arms limitation talks in 1921, saving the government millions of dollars and buying some years of peace. Those who thought that "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail" eventually closed his bureau down. Yardley was, at different times in his life, to make up cryptogram puzzles for magazines, to go into the invisible ink business, to write novels, to write screenplays for Hollywood, to run a restaurant, and to attempt commercial orange-juice distillation, as well as to become decoder-for-hire for Canada and China. He made a hit with his first book in 1931, The American Black Chamber, which caused immediate furor, about his government decryptions. He showed what his bureau had done, and the reading public was very much interested. He was accused of treason, but Kahn shows that Yardley was merely trying to make big money, at which he never was very successful. It was his main character flaw: "Yardley was a rotter, not a traitor."

One year before his death, Yardley published _The Education of a Poker Player_, full of anecdotes about poker games in which he had played as well as practical advice about how to win. It is regarded as a classic, and is still in print and is admired by serious gamblers and penny ante basement players. It was a good way for Yardley to bow off the world's stage, but is not his lasting monument. When it came time to start busting codes again as World War II loomed, no one had to be convinced that cryptanalysts were good sources of power. Yardley, the first American governmental cryptographer, had done his part to make America stronger through signal intelligence. He was an important and flawed figure who deserves more recognition; he has, surprisingly, had no biography written before, and Kahn's detailed and readable book will always be the definitive one on the subject.

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A loud figure in a quiet business, August 8, 2004

By	F. R Anscombe (Indiana, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

A biography of Herbert Yardley is welcome. David Kahn has done a remarkable job unearthing many aspects of the life of an obscure figure in American history. Kahn is a fine, readable writer, in this book no less than in prior ones. I very much enjoyed his Seizing the Enigma (1991).

My lack of enthusiasm for this book centers on Yardley (not the author). During the 1920s, Yardley enjoyed a comfy salary heading a U.S. government cipher office in New York, where he might laze for an hour a day. In contrast, William F. Friedman, working for the Army, wrote about cryptanalysis, studied statistics, and evaluated the usefulness of tabulating machines, forerunners of computers. When the Hoover Administration reduced funding to his office, Yardley wrote a book, melodramatically called the American Black Chamber, which revealed the world of coded communications and U.S. efforts to read foreign communications. In so doing, he sold government secrets entrusted to him. Thereafter, he went Hollywood, contributing to screen plays. During 1938-39, he was employed by China to work on Japanese communications; his service was uninspired. Because Yardley had proven to be indiscreet, the U.S. of course did not make use of him during World War II, during which code-breaking was an important element in Anglo-American success. In 1957, Yardley published his second best-selling book, this one on poker. Not many authors write one popular book, let alone two, so Yardley seems to have been a talented person, in some respects.

Kahn seems to speculate that Friedman envied Yardley's success with women. No evidence that this would be a basis for Friedman's dislike of Yardley is provided. To a genuinely loyal patriot like Friedman, why would he be jealous of the likes of Yardley? In any event, Friedman and many others within the British and U.S. intelligence agencies rendered extraordinary, educated, hardworking service in the years leading up to and beyond the Second World War. Friedman would be the much more important figure for history, even if not a flashy author or self-centered cad.

Kahn refers to Yardley's "immortal legacy" of introducing codebreaking in the U.S. I am unpersuaded. Codebreaking would have come to the U.S. regardless of participation by Yardley. By his writings, Yardley may be appreciated, I suppose, for contributing to pop culture. This book persuades me that Yardley's service on behalf of his nation was trivial and self-serving. Yet I am glad to have read this book. It is well-written, well-researched, and pleasantly concise.