Meredith Gardner, 89, Dies; Broke Code in Rosenberg Case (original) (raw)
U.S.|Meredith Gardner, 89, Dies; Broke Code in Rosenberg Case
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/18/us/meredith-gardner-89-dies-broke-code-in-rosenberg-case.html
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- Aug. 18, 2002
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August 18, 2002
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Meredith Knox Gardner, a linguist and puzzle solver whose skill at deciphering codes played a pivotal role in the Rosenberg spy case, died on Aug. 9 at a hospice in Chevy Chase, Md. He was 89.
Fluent in French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Lithuanian, Spanish and Russian, Mr. Gardner arrived here early in World War II to work for the Army Signal Intelligence Service, a predecessor of the National Security Agency.
He spent the war poring over messages between Germany and Japan. After their defeat, his focus turned to the Soviet Union. He was assigned to help decode a backlog of communications between Moscow and its foreign missions. The project, named Venona, was based in northern Virginia. In recent years, the National Security Agency has made public some of the exploits of the code breakers.
Starting in 1939, the Signal Intelligence Service intercepted thousands of Soviet communications, but they were not studied while America and Russia were allied. By 1946, Mr. Gardner was among the hundreds of people trying to decode the accumulated messages.
On Dec. 20, 1946, Mr. Gardner discerned that a message from 1944 had contained a list of the leading scientists on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. More months of toil by Mr. Gardner and his colleagues turned up a reference to an agent code-named Liberal who had a wife named Ethel.
''Liberal'' and his wife were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage. They were executed in 1953.
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