Meredith Gardner

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Meredith Knox Gardner (1912–August 20, 2002) was an American linguist and codebreaker, who pulled off one of the greatest U.S. counter-intelligence coups of the 20th century.

He was born in Okolona, Mississippi and grew up in Austin, Texas. After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin, he earned a master's degree in German from University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was a teaching assistant from 1938 to 1940. While working as a linguist and professor of German at the University of Akron, he was recruited by the U.S. Army's Signals Intelligence Service to work on breaking German codes. Soon after, he started working on the Japanese codes instead, mastering Japanese in only a few months.

Meredith Gardner (left man); most of the code breakers were young women.

In 1946, Gardner began work on a highly-secret project, codenamed VENONA, to break the Soviet cryptosystems. The Soviet encryption system involved the use of one-time pads, and thus was thought to be unbreakable. However, the Soviets made the mistake of reusing certain pages of their pads. Later that same year, Gardner made the first breakthrough on VENONA by identifying the ciphers used for spelling English words.

By May 1947 Gardner had read a decrypt that implied the Soviets ran an agent with access to sensitive information from the War Department General Staff, U.S. Army Air Corps Major William Ludwig Ullman. It became apparent to Gardner that he was reading KGB messages showing massive Soviet espionage in the United States.

Gardner retired in 1972, yet his work remained mostly secret until 1996, when the NSA, the CIA, and the Center for Democracy honored Gardner and his colleagues in a formal ceremony that was the result of campaigning by U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Gardner died on August 20, 2002 in Chevy Chase, Maryland, at the age of 89.