The American Black Chamber

by Herbert O. Yardley

Description

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 played a critical role in U.S. diplomacy. Despite its extraordinary successes, the Black Chamber, as it came to known, show more was disbanded in 1929. President Hoover's new Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson refused to continue show less

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3 reviews

kaki1 84 reviews

The American Black Chamber is a 1931 book by Herbert O. Yardley. The book describes the inner workings of the interwar American governmental cryptography organization called the Black Chamber.

Oct 8, 2021

kaki5231 145 reviews

The first ultimate :tell-all" book. The author was responsible for breaking thje Japanese code during the Naval Negotiations of 1922. He ended writing a book on the subject of codebreaking which led him to be "black-balled" in WWII.

Sep 11, 2012