[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 97 (Monday, July 12, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Page S8293]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            MEREDITH GARDNER

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President. I rise today to pay tribute to 
Meredith Gardner, long unsung contributor to the identification of 
spies. Described by the FBI's Robert Joseph Lamphere as ``the greatest 
counter-intelligence tool this country has ever known,'' Gardner was 
the National Security Agency's leading enabler of the reading of 
thousands of enciphered cables intercepted from Soviet foreign 
intelligence in the 1940's. The NSA, under its various names, spent 
four decades deciphering what Moscow intended to be an unbreakable 
Soviet cipher. Gardner and his team painstakingly worked on these 
messages in a project which came to be known eventually as ``VENONA.'' 
The resulting VENONA decrypts, which were finally revealed publicly in 
1995, detail the Soviet's espionage efforts in the United States during 
and after World War II.
  Gardner has a genius for learning languages, and is fluent in German, 
Spanish, French and Russian and has had courses in Old High and Middle 
High German, Old Norse, Gothic, Lithuanian, and Sanskrit. He taught 
languages at the Universities of Texas and Wisconsin before being 
recruited by the U.S. Army's Signals Intelligence Service (the 
precursor to the National Security Agency) shortly after the Japanese 
bombed Pearl Harbor. The Army wanted people fluent in many languages to 
work on breaking German and Japanese codes. Until 1955 Gardner worked 
at Arlington Hall, a former girl's school located 10 miles outside 
Washington, which served as the Army's headquarters for code-breaking 
operations. Gardner soon added Japanese to his repertoire of languages. 
By chance, he became the first American to read in an intercepted 
message the Japanese word for atom bomb, ``genshi-bakudan.''
  When the war with Japan ended, the NSA phased out its Japanese 
section. Gardner learned that there was a section working on Soviet 
Union messages (its existence was kept secret) and he transferred into 
it. Gardner insists that the most arduous efforts to make the messages 
readable had already been done before he came along. First, the 
messages had to be sorted into at least four varieties, each used by 
representatives of separate Soviet government departments. It had also 
been discovered that some messages could be paired as having been 
``randomized'' by the same pad and page carrying random additive digits 
(and hence were solvable).
  Such mixed pairs were worked on by a small group of women led by 
Katurah ``Katie'' McDonald. This group had already produced a 
remarkable amount of code text, and the code-groups that had appeared 
so far had even been indexed in context by a card machine. The material 
was just awaiting the appointment of a linguist, and Gardner 
``appointed himself'' to be it. It was the easy stage, but without it 
all the preparatory work would have been for nothing.
  Gardner's reconstruction of the foreign intelligence (VENONA) code 
book was slow at first, but gained momentum. Because some recruits were 
named in the messages and given cover names, it became obvious that the 
FBI ought to receive translations of the cables. Special agent Robert 
Joseph Lamphere was assigned to be the (very efficient) link between 
the NSA and FBI. The next is history.
  Gardner spent 27 years working on the ``Russian problem'' before 
retiring in 1972. He and his wife of 56 years, Blanche, who also worked 
for the Army Security Agency, now spend part of their time teaching 
Latin to a small group of students. I commend Mr. Gardner for the 
invaluable assistance he has given to our country, which we are only 
now beginning to realize and understand. I salute Mr. Gardner for his 
dedicated and important service.

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