A Secret Life: Reading Gentlemen’s Mail…And Worse

He was one of the most significant figures in the history of American intelligence – but was he also a traitor? Top Secret Umbra is on the case…

One hundred and thirty-five years ago this weekend, one of the legends of American intelligence was born in the country’s heartland. He found success, fame, and even fortune, writing the first best-seller that exposed America’s intelligence secrets. But he became a scoundrel and perhaps even a traitor. He’s been largely forgotten, unfairly.

This is his story.

Eighty-two years before Edward Snowden burst onto the global scene in 2013 by revealing the secrets of American codebreaking, Herbert Yardley became a worldwide sensation by doing the same thing. While Yardley demurred from overtly helping America’s enemies, much less defecting to one of them, his motives for revealing state secrets, like Snowden’s, were personal and pecuniary at root. If he ever leaves Russia and finds his way home, Snowden will face criminal charges for breaking laws on protecting state secrets that exist only because Yardley got there first.

However, Yardley has been largely forgotten by Americans, despite the best-selling book which made him internationally famous. The American Black Chamber on its publication in 1931 exposed many of the closest-held secrets of the U.S. government, yet over the years, as more leakers, whistleblowers and traitors have followed in his path, Yardley gradually slipped from public consciousness. Nevertheless, he remains “the most colorful and controversial figure in American intelligence” more than six decades after his death, in the words of his biographer.[1]

That claim withstands scrutiny. Yardley, a self-made man, created the first peacetime codebreaking organization in American history; indeed, it was the country’s first standing civilian agency devoted to foreign intelligence to exist outside wartime. That organization enjoyed several years of secret success in support of American diplomacy and security before its abrupt demise. After that shock, Yardley created his own celebrity and infamy by telling those secrets in a book, making himself a best-selling author and global celebrity yet a pariah inside American intelligence.

Through it all, Yardley remained resolutely himself: A perennial outsider on the make. A skilled self-promoter with a better eye for salesmanship than bureaucracy. A charmer who could talk his way out of most problems, but not all of them. A risk-taker and card-player who eventually took one risk too many. A social animal with a fondness for drink and women that rested uneasily with the rigorous demands of his secret work. In the end, Yardley lost out bureaucratically to his codebreaking rival, William Friedman, who led American intelligence into a new era of unprecedented success. Yet Yardley remained the more interesting man in perpetuity.

Herbert Osborn Yardley was born on April 13, 1889, in rural Indiana, the second of four children, to a father who worked as a railroad telegraph operator. After graduating from the local high school, Yardley was admitted to the University of Chicago, where he lasted but a year. He returned home to work at the same job his father had. There Yardley learned about telegraphy and communications. But he escaped his father’s dreary life by passing the civil service exam in 1912. The young man on the make headed to Washington, DC, to find his destiny.