[68289] in Cypherpunks
JUN_tas
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Young)
Sat Oct 19 14:09:40 1996
Date: Sat, 19 Oct 1996 09:45:50 -0400
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
From: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
10-19-96. WaPo:
"Story of How an Unknown American Linguist Broke Soviet
Wartime Spy Code Finally Emerges From Shadows"
NSA's legendary cryptlinguist Meredith Knox Gardner
emerged from a lifetime of anonymity to tell his story
at a conference devoted to the "Venona" code break.
NSA historians have been unable to come up with any
evidence that President Truman was ever informed of
Venona. Mystery also continues to surround the
government's failure to prosecute Theodore Alvin Hall,
a Harvard physicist working at Los Alamos and Bill
Weisband, a Soviet emigre working with Gardner at NSA,
even though Venona decrypts revealed the two as spies.
Gardner believes that the intelligence chiefs withheld
the information from Truman because they were afraid
that he would "give away the secret. You can't imagine
how the intelligence agencies guard secrecy."
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http://jya.com/juntas.txt (20 kb)
ftp://jya.com/pub/incoming/juntas.txt
JUN_tas
