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162nd out of 216 books
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The American Black Chamber
During the 1920s Herbert O. Yardley was chief of the first peacetime cryptanalytic organization in the United States, the ancestor of today's National Security Agency. Funded by the U.S. Army and the Department of State and working out of New York, his small and highly secret unit succeeded in breaking the diplomatic codes of several nations, including Japan. The decrypts ...more
Paperback, 384 pages
Published
September 15th 2004
by US Naval Institute Press
(first published 1981)
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The author headed the titular Black Chamber, a euphemism for MI-8, the branch of US Intelligence that dealt with ciphers, codes and “secret inks” through WWI and beyond, until the branch was summarily closed by a spectacularly naive and short-sighted Secretary of State. Hardley is a fine raconteur, detailing step-by-step the painstaking ways he and his staff decoded, for example, messages that were composed solely of long strings of five-digit numbers (which turned out to be references to a dic...more
This embellished non-fiction account of MI-8, the US military intelligence office of codes and cryptography, was a hoot. My favorite chapter dealt with secret inks - spies would wear ties infused with special dyes, which they would use to write messages by dipping in water! Herbert Yardley, who founded and ran MI-8, wrote this in the 1930's after the office was disbanded, and he spends a good deal of time patting himself on the back for all the codes he cracked. There are some interesting exposi...more
nf
Interesting 1931 History of Cryptology & the beginnings of MI-8, Military Intelligence, Cryptographic Bureau. Reads partly as an autobiography of Merbert O. Yardley, author and creator of this bureau.
Interesting 1931 History of Cryptology & the beginnings of MI-8, Military Intelligence, Cryptographic Bureau. Reads partly as an autobiography of Merbert O. Yardley, author and creator of this bureau.
Ever wonder what spies did in the 1930's? Now's your chance to find out from an insider. Written in a purposefully glamorized style, this book is what happens when the government abruptly fires the man responsible for a lot of their secret communication. haha.
Interesting because it was once a banned book and is non-fiction. Definitely some gratuitous self-promotion by the author, but worth reading if the topic appeals to you.
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