Home : America At War : WW I :

Herbert Osborne Yardley

Born in April 1889 in Worthington, Indiana, Yardley dreamed of becoming a criminal lawyer but, following his high school graduation in 1907, he hit the road, bumming about the U.S. In 1912 he obtained a job in Washington, working for the State Department as a telegraph operator. He found the work fascinating and played a little game by decoding messages to President Woodrow Wilson.

For four years, Yardley toyed with messages sent to President Wilson, arguing with his superiors that American codes were hoplessly outdated. He proved this by decoding a highly sensitive message to Wilson from the American ambassador in Berlin. He then pointed out to his superiors that the British, then controllers of the Atlantic Cable, could obviously do the same and were privy to all of America's most secret diplomatic messages. To more than prove his point, Yardley authored a 100-page report titled Exposition on the Solution of American Diplomatic Codes. He submitted this to his superior, who became incensed since it was he who had developed most of these top codes.

Yardley then told his superior that his codes were predictable, and, to painfully prove his point, he opened the man's locked office safe within a few minutes, rightly figuring out that the combination was based on the telephone number of President Wilson's fiancée. Such brazen tactics almost lost Yardley his job but when America entered World War I in 1917, he was sent to the War Department and then on to the U.S. Signal Corps, where he was given the rank of lieutenant and named the head of a special bureau dealing with cryptology called MI8 (Military Intelligence, Section 8).

Within months, Yardley's small bureau had broken almost all of the German diplomatic and Abwehr codes. One of his many cryptological coups was deciphering a letter found on Lothar Witzke, a German saboteur who was picked up by American agents after he entered the U.S. from Mexico. Witzke was one of those responsible for the Mare Island sabotage (and most probably the Black Tom explosion). The letter found on Witzke proved that he was a saboteur for Germany and caused him to be tried and convicted, then condemned, the only German agent in World War Ito receive a death sentence. Witzke was not executed, however, but received a reprieve at the last minute from President Wilson. For this exploit, Yardley was promoted to the rank of major. His achievement firmly entrenched cryptology inside the American intelligence community.

In August 1918, while battles still raged along the Western Front, Yardley went to Europe to learn more about cryptology from the British and French intelligence agencies. In England, he met Vernon Kell, head of MI5, and Admiral William Reginald Hall, head of British naval intelligence, whose celebrated Room 40 operation had broken the coded contents of the notorious Zimmermann Telegram, a deciding factor for the America's entry into the war against Germany. He also went to France, where he studied the operations of French cryptology.

After attending the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 as chief cryptologist of the American delegation, Yardley was told that his job was at an end. He disagreed, pointing out that America had enemies around the world and the codes of these nations would have to be deciphered so that the U.S. could realize any future threat to its security. He prepared a comprehensive plan to establish a peacetime cryptological bureau and submitted this to the State Department and the Chief of Staff, a report titled Code and Cipher Investigation and Attack.

General Marlborough Churchill, head of Army Intelligence, was so impressed with Yardley's report that he was determined not to let MI8 go out of existence. He persuaded officials in the State Department to fund an "unofficial" code-breaking operation. Because of legalities, the State Department insisted that this operation not be located in Washington. Instead, in 1919, Yardley opened up his cryptology bureau in a four-story New York City brownstone at 141 East 37th Street, just east of Lexington Avenue.

Yardley quickly organized a staff of twenty top cryptologists, mostly those who had worked under him at MI8, including Dr. Charles Mendelsohn and Victor Weiskopf. One of his most brilliant code- breakers was F. Livesey, who became his assistant. Yardley dubbed the operation the American Black Chamber (after the French Black Chamber, the cryptology division of French intelligence in World War I that he so admired), a name that soon became world famous.

Yardley's group proved to be successful in breaking the difficult codes of the newly formed Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police in Russia which had supplanted the czarist secret police, the Okhrana. Further, the American Black Chamber was then ordered to break the Japanese diplomatic codes so that the U.S. would better be able to negotiate with Japan at the 1921 Washington Naval Conference. This conference involved decisive negotiations involving the tonnage of warships of all major nations at that time.

The formula then being argued would limit warship tonnage to each nation. The U.S. was deeply concerned about Japan, an aggressive nation since its naval victories over Russia in 1904-1905 in the Russo-Japanese War. Knowing that Japan had set itself on a war footing and was eager to build up its war fleet, the U.S. wanted to curb that warship escalation and insisted that Japan's ratio to U.S. warships be 10:6 (one million tons of U.S. naval strength for each 600,000 tons of Japanese naval strength).

Japanese negotiators insisted upon a 10:7 ratio and stubbornly clung to that argument for months. Yardley's code-breaking operation, however, was able to break the then top Japanese diplomatic code and deciphered messages between its delegation to the U.S. and Tokyo that clearly showed that the Japanese, to "avoid a clash," were to compromise at 10:6. When U.S. negotiators learned of this, they stiffened their resolve and the Japanese finally accepted the compromise.

In 1924, Yardley's funds were considerably reduced by the State Department, which was then undergoing budget cuts under direct orders from President Calvin Coolidge. In 1929, Henry L. Stimson became Secretary of State. In reviewing the American Black Chamber operation, Stimson dismissed the organization as non-essential. Stimson, an old-school diplomat, was repelled by espionage and covert operations of any kind. He reportedly told Yardley in a reproachful, stuffy manner: "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail." He then ordered the State Department to cease funding Yardley's operation. It simply went out of business because the crusty, naive Stimson was unable to grasp the vital importance of intelligence information.

Yardley suffered greatly. He found himsel unemployable, having earned a reputation as a man who had alienated heads of state. After using up his savings, he wrote an enormously successful book titled The American Black Chamber, which was first serialized in the Saturday Evening Post. Though the book earned Yardley a great deal of money, it also earned him the enmity of Congress, where he and the book were denounced as having given away America's secrets.

Other cryptologists, including the greatest American cryptologist of them all, William F. Friedman, chief of the U.S. Army Signal Corps Code and Cipher Section, took exception to the book, saying that Yardley had cast a slur on American cryptographic work. Congress then passed a bill, "For the Protection of Government Records," which prohibited the public revelation of government secrets by federal employees or former employees. In 1933, the newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed this bill, creating Public Law 37, making it a crime for anyone to use material in official codes for personal reasons.

Yardley's book sales were stopped but by then he had already captured a huge audience and earned considerable profits. He next busied himself with developing invisible inks, which he attempted to sell to the government without success. To earn a living, Yardley continued writing, going after what he properly considered the most menacing nation at that time, Japan. He wrote a manuscript entitled Japanese Diplomatic Secrets, but this book was seized before publication and did not see print, the government upholding Public Law 37. He next churned out a spy-comedy called The Blonde Countess, which, combined with code-breaking elements from The American Black Chamber, made up the script for a 1935 MGM movie, Rendezvous, starring William Powell and Rosalind Russell.

Though he reapplied for cryptographic work with the government, Yardley, because of his exposé, found himself persona non grata, so he went to China in 1938, where he worked with Chiang Kai-shek's intelligence bureau, working under the spectacular Morris "Two-Gun" Cohen. By 1941, Yardley had moved to Canada to help establish a code-breaking bureau but he returned to the U.S. after World War II began and was finally given a government job, but not one in the area of cryptology.

Yardley was given a paper-shuffling job with the Office of Price Administration. By that time, William F. Friedman and others had preempted Yardley's place in American cryptology to the point where they were able to break the so-called "unbreakable" Japanese codes transmitted through what was called the Purple Machine, predicting Japanese military movements and battle plans throughout World War II.

Following the war, Yardley pursued his old hobby, poker, writing articles about the game and, in 1957, producing another book, The Education of a Poker Player. Sales were brisk but Yardley did not live to enjoy his newfound success; he died the following year, all but forgotten as America's founding father of modern cryptology. It should also be said that without Yardley's considerable contribution, including his unpublished manuscript concerning Japanese diplomatic codes (perused by cryptographers in the U.S. Signals Intelligence Service), the successes enjoyed by others coming after him may not have been possible.

Jay Robert Nash. Spies: A Narrative Encyclopedia of Dirty Tricks and Double Dealing from Biblical Times to Today. . M. Evans and Company, Inc., New York. 1997.

top of page

back a page