JUN_tas

[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