Meredith Knox Gardner (October 12 (or 20), 1912–August 9, 2002) was an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 linguist

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 and codebreaker

Codebreaker

Codebreaker may refer to:*A person who performs cryptanalysis*The Codebreakers, a 1967 book on history of cryptography by David Kahn*Codebreaker , a 1981 puzzle-based computer game, originally released for the Atari 2600...

. Gardner worked in counter-intelligence

Counter-intelligence

Counterintelligence or counter-intelligence refers to efforts made by intelligence organizations to prevent hostile or enemy intelligence organizations from successfully gathering and collecting intelligence against them. National intelligence programs, and, by extension, the overall defenses of...

, decoding Soviet intelligence traffic regarding espionage in the United States, in what came to be known as the Venona project.

Early life and career

Gardner was born in Okolona, Mississippi

Okolona, Mississippi

Okolona is a city in and one of the county seats of Chickasaw County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 3,056 at the 2000 census.-Geography:Okolona is located at ....

 and grew up in Austin, Texas

Austin, Texas

Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of :Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 14th most populous city in the United States. It was the third-fastest-growing large city in...

. After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin

University of Texas at Austin

The University of Texas at Austin is a state research university located in Austin, Texas, USA, and is the flagship institution of the The University of Texas System. Founded in 1883, its campus is located approximately from the Texas State Capitol in Austin...

, he earned a master's degree

Master's degree

A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...

 in German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 from University of Wisconsin–Madison

University of Wisconsin–Madison

The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1848, UW–Madison is the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin System. It became a land-grant institution in 1866...

, where he was a teaching assistant

Teaching assistant

A teaching assistant is an individual who assists a professor or teacher with instructional responsibilities. TAs include graduate teaching assistants , who are graduate students; undergraduate teaching assistants , who are undergraduate students; secondary school TAs, who are either high school...

 from 1938 to 1940. He was a linguist and professor of German at the University of Akron

University of Akron

The University of Akron is a coeducational public research university located in Akron, Ohio, United States. The university is part of the University System of Ohio. It was founded in 1870 as a small college affiliated with the Universalist Church. In 1913 ownership was transferred to the City of...

 when the United States Army

United States Army

The United States Army is the main branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for land-based military operations. It is the largest and oldest established branch of the U.S. military, and is one of seven U.S. uniformed services...

's Signals Intelligence Service

Signals Intelligence Service

The Signals Intelligence Service was the United States Army codebreaking division, headquartered at Arlington Hall. It was a part of the Signal Corps so secret that outside the office of the Chief Signal officer, it did not officially exist. William Friedman began the division with three "junior...

 recruited him to work on breaking German

Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...

 codes. Soon after, he started working on the Japanese

Empire of Japan

The Empire of Japan is the name of the state of Japan that existed from the Meiji Restoration on 3 January 1868 to the enactment of the post-World War II Constitution of...

 codes instead, mastering the Japanese language in only a few months.

Venona project

In 1946, Gardner began work on a highly-secret project (later codenamed VENONA) to break the Soviet

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 cryptosystem

Cryptosystem

There are two different meanings of the word cryptosystem. One is used by the cryptographic community, while the other is the meaning understood by the public.- General meaning :...

s. The Soviet encryption system involved the use of one-time pad

One-time pad

In cryptography, the one-time pad is a type of encryption, which has been proven to be impossible to crack if used correctly. Each bit or character from the plaintext is encrypted by a modular addition with a bit or character from a secret random key of the same length as the plaintext, resulting...

s, and thus was thought to be unbreakable. However, the Soviets made the mistake of reusing certain pages of their pads.

Later that same year, Gardner made the first breakthrough on VENONA by identifying the ciphers used for spelling English words. By May 1947 Gardner had read a decrypt that implied the Soviets ran an agent with access to sensitive information from the War Department

United States Department of War

The United States Department of War, also called the War Department , was the United States Cabinet department originally responsible for the operation and maintenance of the United States Army...

 General Staff

General Staff

A military staff, often referred to as General Staff, Army Staff, Navy Staff or Air Staff within the individual services, is a group of officers and enlisted personnel that provides a bi-directional flow of information between a commanding officer and subordinate military units...

, U.S. Army Air Corps Major William Ludwig Ullman

Lud Ullman

William Ludwig Ullmann was an American official accused of spying for the Soviet Union.-Biography:He was born in Springfield, Missouri in 1908, attended Drury College , and graduated from Harvard Business School with an MBA in 1935. Ulmann then took a job with the National Recovery Administration...

. It became apparent to Gardner that he was reading KGB

KGB

The KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...

 messages showing massive Soviet espionage in the United States.

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

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Daniel Patrick "Pat" Moynihan was an American politician and sociologist. A member of the Democratic Party, he was first elected to the United States Senate for New York in 1976, and was re-elected three times . He declined to run for re-election in 2000...

.

Gardner died on August 9, 2002 in Chevy Chase, Maryland

Chevy Chase, Maryland

Chevy Chase is the name of both a town and an unincorporated census-designated place in Montgomery County, Maryland. In addition, a number of villages in the same area of Montgomery County include "Chevy Chase" in their names...

, at the age of 89.