Meredith Gardner (1912 - 2002) was a linguist and codebreaker, who was born in Mississippi and grew up in Austin, Texas. While working as a linguist and professor of German at the University of Akron, he was recruited by the U.S. Army's Signals Intelligence Service to work on breaking German codes. Soon after, he started working on the Japanese codes instead, mastering Japanese in only a few months.
In 1946, Gardner began work on a highly-secret project, codenamed VENONA, to break the Soviet cryptosystems. The Soviet encryption system involved the use of one-time pads, and thus for a time was thought to be unbreakable; nevertheless, that same year, Gardner made the first breakthrough on VENONA by identifying the ciphers used for spelling English words.
Gardner's 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.
Gardner died on August 20, 2002 at the age of 89; he is survived by wife, Blanche; his two children, Arthur H. Gardner and Ann Martin; and eleven grandchildren.
References
