Abstract
For Herbert Yardley, the 1930s saw him move from one career path to another, some successful, others not, all the while in search of money and fame. The success of his book The American Black Chamber led to a series of magazine articles, a lecture tour, a column of cryptogram puzzles in a pulp magazine, two stints writing screenplays in Hollywood, a short-lived secret ink business, a series of radio plays, two novels, several short stories, and another entry into the history books as the author of the first and only manuscript confiscated by the American government. By the end of the decade, however, his writing and lecturing careers were slowing down, and he jumped at the first opportunity to return to cryptanalysis.
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Notes
- 1.
Herbert O. Yardley, “Are We Giving Away Our State Secrets?,” Liberty Magazine, December 19, 1931; Herbert O. Yardley, “Cryptograms and Their Solution,” The Saturday Evening Post, November 21, 1931; Herbert O. Yardley, “Double Crossing America,” Liberty, October 10, 1931.
- 2.
The cipher cylinder had been invented by Thomas Jefferson in the early 1800s, reinvented by Bazeries in the 1890s and reinvented again by Parker Hitt in 1914, and improved by Joseph Mauborgne around 1917. By the time Yardley wrote his article, the cylinder was the official US Army tactical cipher device, known as the M-94.
- 3.
William F. Friedman, Alphabetical Chart, U.S. Patent Office 1,608,509 (Washington, DC, filed January 7, 1926, and issued November 30, 1926).
- 4.
Yardley, State Secrets, 13.
- 5.
David Kahn, The Reader of Gentlemen’s Mail: Herbert O. Yardley and the Birth of American Codebreaking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 144–145.
- 6.
Kahn, ROGM, 140; Herbert O. Yardley, Yardleygrams, (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company Publishers, 1932).
- 7.
Kahn, ROGM, 159.
- 8.
James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency, America’s Most Secret Intelligence Organization (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1982), 38.
- 9.
Kahn, ROGM, 159.
- 10.
Bamford, Puzzle Palace, 39.
- 11.
Bamford, Puzzle Palace, 40.
- 12.
Kahn, ROGM, 163.
- 13.
Kahn, ROGM, 165–168.
- 14.
“An Act for the Protection of Government Records,” 18 U.S. Code § 952, Diplomatic Codes and Correspondence (1933), https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/952. Updated in 1948 and 1994.
- 15.
Japanese Diplomatic Secrets was finally released as a CD created by Cmdr. Emil H. Levine in 2001. No one tried to get the more than 1000-page book published. Neither Yardley nor Bye ever tried to get the original manuscript back from the government.
- 16.
Kahn, ROGM, p. 146–147.
- 17.
Herbert O. Yardley, “The Beautiful Secret Agent,” Liberty, December 30, 1933.
- 18.
Herbert O. Yardley, “The Commissioner Turns Cryptographer,” Detective Fiction Weekly, February 17, 1934.
- 19.
Herbert O. Yardley, “Spies Inside Our Gates.” Sunday Washington Star Magazine, April 8, 1934; Herbert O. Yardley, “H-27, The Blonde Woman from Antwerp.” Liberty Magazine, April 21, 1934; Herbert O. Yardley, The Blonde Countess, (New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1934).
- 20.
Yardley, H-27.
- 21.
John F. Dooley and Yvonne I. Ramirez, “Who Wrote The Blonde Countess? A Stylometric Analysis of Herbert O. Yardley’s Fiction,” Cryptologia 33, no. 2 (2009): 108–17; Kahn, ROGM, 152–153.
- 22.
Kahn, ROGM, 153.
- 23.
Samboul Quest was released in July 1934, starring Myrna Loy and George Brett.
- 24.
Rendezvous was released in October 1935 and starred William Powell and Rosalind Russell.
- 25.
Andre Sennewald, “William Powell as the Star of ‘Rendezvous,’ a Spy Melodrama Now at the Capitol Theatre.,” New York Times, October 26, 1935, sec. Entertainment, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1935/10/26/97147825.html?pageNumber=12
- 26.
Kahn, ROGM, 176.
- 27.
Kahn, ROGM, 153–154.
- 28.
Herbert O. Yardley, Red Sun of Nippon, (New York: A. L. Burt Company, 1934), 157.
- 29.
“Stories of the Black Chamber,” Stories of the Black Chamber (New York, NY: NBC, January 21, 1935).
- 30.
Tom Curtin, Interview with Tom Curtin re: Herbert Yardley, 1959, RG 457, Entry 9032, National Security Agency, National Archives and Records Administration, Herbert Yardley Collection, College Park, MD.
- 31.
Herbert O. Yardley, Shadows in Washington. Unpublished manuscript. National Cryptologic Museum Library, Ft. Meade, MD, David Kahn Collection, DK 82-03, 1937.
- 32.
Kahn, ROGM, 185–186.
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Dooley, J.F. (2023). One Career After Another. In: The Gambler and the Scholars. History of Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28318-5_14
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