Posted on: Thursday, August 15, 2002

Cold War code-breaker Meredith Knox Gardner dead at 89

The Washington Post

WASHINGTON — Meredith Knox Gardner, an Army 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, has died at 89.

He died Aug. 9 at a care center in Chevy Chase, Md.

Gardner's work for the Army Signal Intelligence Service included the discovery of lists of code names in telegrams sent by the Soviet consulate in New York to Moscow from 1943 to 1945. This 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 officer Kim Philby, who after defecting to Moscow in 1963 said he had been a Soviet spy for two decades.

Within the intelligence community, Gardner was said to have been a living legend, and his work in penetrating Soviet codes is widely considered to have been one of the great U.S. counterintelligence coups of the last half-century.

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, code-named Venona.

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.

Before World War II, the native of Okolona, Miss. was a language teacher at the universities of Akron, Texas and Wisconsin.

As senior Venona linguist, it was Gardner's job to recreate a Russian code book and translate Russian messages into English. He said 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."

Gardner retired in 1972. The Venona operation was shut down in 1980.