10 Facts About Meredith Gardner

Meredith Knox Gardner was an American linguist and codebreaker.

Meredith Gardner was born in Okolona, Mississippi, and grew up in Austin, Texas.

Meredith Gardner was a linguist and professor of German at the University of Akron when the United States Army's Signals Intelligence Service recruited him to work on breaking German codes.

In 1946, Meredith Gardner began work on a highly secret project to break the Soviet cryptosystems.

Later that same year, Meredith Gardner made the first breakthrough on Venona by identifying the ciphers used for spelling English words.

Meredith Gardner was able to decipher enough of a Soviet message to identify it as the text of a 1945 telegram from Winston Churchill to Harry S Truman.

Meredith Gardner used to tell me how he worked on the matches in his office, and of how a young pipe-smoking Englishman named Philby used to regularly visit him and peer over his shoulder and admire the progress he was making.

Meredith Gardner felt very keenly that the cryptanalytical break he had made possible was a thing of mathematical beauty, and he was depressed at the use to which it had been put.

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

Meredith Gardner died on August 9,2002, in Chevy Chase, Maryland, at the age of 89.