Meredith Gardner

Gardner, on the far left, doing the decryption work.

Meredith Knox Gardner (born October 12 (or 20) October 1912 in Okolona , Mississippi , † August 9, 2002 in Chevy Chase , Maryland ) was an American linguist and code breaker , one of the greatest intelligence coups of the 20th century succeeded when he decoded Soviet messages about espionage in the USA as part of the VENONA project .

Life

Gardner grew up in Austin, Texas . After a first degree at the University of Texas there , he obtained a master’s degree in German from the University of Wisconsin – Madison ; there he was employed as a research assistant from 1938 to 1940 . As a linguistics professor at the University of Akron , he was hired by the US Army's Signals Intelligence Service to crack the codes of Nazi Germany . Soon after, he began to work on the codes of the Japanese Empire instead, learning the Japanese language in just a few months .

Gardner retired in 1972; his work remained secret until 1996, when the NSA , the CIA and the Center for Democracy honored him and his colleagues with a ceremony at the instigation of US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan .

As a pensioner taught he and his wife Latin , setting off on a regular basis the crossword of the London Times . Gardner died at the age of 89.

Web links

Commons : Meredith Gardner  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Daniel Patrick Moynihan : MEREDITH GARDNER . In: Congressional Record , US Senate and United States Government Printing Office , July 12, 1999, p. S8293. Retrieved April 30, 2009. "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. "