Black Ops

[Mike Salovesh]

JJJRLandau at aol.com wrote:

> In a message dated 10/10/01 8:17:44 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
> salovex at WPO.CSO.NIU.EDU writes without intention of deniability:

I've always said that if I were to do any cloak and dagger work, my cover
would be an entirely honest statement that I was seeking intelligence
information for the benefit of my goverment.  Total openness makes a
perfect cover.  Along the same lines, I keep telling people that I never
have to lie: nobody believes me when I tell the truth, so I might as well
do so.  That really infuriates some involuted folks: they tie themselves in
knots trying to figure out what my secret motives could be when I tell the
truth about not having any secret agendas.

> Yardley rather romantically picked up the term "Black Chamber" for his own
> cryptographic office, although it worked with telegrams rather than mail.
> The "American Black Chamber" was in operation from October 1, 1919, to
> October 31, 1929.

(Quoting me, Mike Salovesh:)

> >  [The Black Chamber] had a super-secret
> >  reopening in 1930, with a total staff of 4.  Yardley was NOT invited to
> >  participate, allegedly because his book let the Japanese know that their
> >  code was compromised -- so they changed their code.  The reopened Black
> >  Chamber jest growed into the NSA.

Jim Landau again:

> Not very accurate.  You are probably thinking of Friedman, who became
> director of the Army's Signal Intelligence Service on May 10, 1929 (he had
> three assistants, Rowlett, Kullback, and Sinkov).  However, Friedman had been
> working for the Army as a cryptanalyst since 1922.  The Navy also had a
> cryptographic activity that ran uninterrupted from World War I to the
> post-World War II years.

        <skip>

> Most of the above is from David Kahn _The Code Breakers_ first (1967)
> edition.  Kahn   Kahn, page 1039 (footnote to page 360, incorrectly listed as
> footnote to page 359) says that the statement  "Gentlemen do not read each
> other's mail" is not "supposedly" by Stimson but is in Henry L. Stimson and
> McGeorge Bundy _On Active Service in Peace and War_ New York: Harper &
> Brothers, 1947, page 188.

Yes, I am thinking of Friedman and his assistants.  I know that I read an
article in the last 10 or 12 days that includes a very dramatic description
of the scene when Friedman took his three new assistants into a room within
a vault, announcing to them that they were in Yaradley's Black Chamber and
they were about to put it back in business.  Most of the article was about
NSA and the vastness of its establishment. I'm very clear that the article
reports the "reopening" as having taken place in 1930 -- but I have the
impression  that the author or reporter isn't dependable on mere factual
trivia.

Two examples: I believe the writer reports, or implies, that Yardley's
operation was shut down in 1923, just after the signing of the
international  pact limiting naval shipbuilding. (Was that the
Kellogg-Briand Pact? My trick memory is dead at the moment; that's part of
why I call it a trick.) You and I know it was 1929. If Yardley blew the
cover on the breaking of the Japanese code in The Black Chamber (and I
think I remember him saying, in that book, that he was the guy who broke
it), that certainly couldn't have been the reason why he wasn't teamed up
with Friedman in 1929 or 1930.  The Black Chamber was published in 1931.

The article most likely was in a Sunday NYT Magazine, not necessarily the
issue of two Sundays ago.  I had set a stack of them aside after finishing
their puzzles, with the illusion that I was going to get around to reading
their articles some day.  I did read the contents of a few of them, then
gave up kidding myself that I'd ever get to the rest. I put them all out
for the recycle pickup a week ago.  That's why I can't check for citation
to the source I was depending on.

Note that  Yardley's report of Stimson's "gentlemen" statement antedates
the Stimson and Bundy book by quite a few years. I never got the
Stimson/Bundy citation linked in my head to Yardley's quote before reading
your message.  Lacking solid verification, I mentally filed the statement
as an uncomfirmed allegation by Yardley.  He did occasionally indulge in
embellishment for the sake of a good story, you know.  So do I, for that
matter -- but I usually conceal the fact that I'm going beyond the facts
from myself.  I honestly believe that the stories I tell about "my life and
hard times" are true, if only because I've told them so often and so
effectively.

Things  I found out while checking the date on Black Chamber: the catalog I
used lists three translations.  There's the French "Le cabinet noir
americain" and Swedish "Amerika's Svarta Kammare", but the gem is the title
of the Japanese translation:  "burakku chenba".  I love it!

Burakku chenba is just too gorgeous to lose. I'll surely trot it out the
next time I want to say something about the Japanese propensity to borrow
words in a way that covers up origins.  It belongs to the same class as
16th/17th century loans from Portugese ("pan": "bread"; "pama": "hair
lotion" (cognate with our "pomade") or 20th (?) century loans frmo English
(despite the existence of many hundreds, or is it thousands, of those, the
one I think of first is "biru": "beer", followed by "beisuboru" and its
associated vocabulary.  It gives me a thrill every time I hear the umpire
say "Purei boru!")

-- mike salovesh   <m-salovesh-9 at alumni.uchicago.edu>   PEACE !!!

        IN MEMORIAM:     Peggy Salovesh
        25 January 1932 -- 3 March 2001