A book review of a book review

One of my primary hobbies is the study of history. Contrary to what some may believe about me, a lot of my interests are of a technical and to some, rather tediously educational nature.

To be specific, I like researching historical archives of various events for amusing or revelatory information.

In this case, I discovered something hilarious when researching Herbert Yardley, an Army Major who did cryptography work for the United States government during the 1910's and 1920's, and who published a book on his experiences called The American Black Chamber.

This text is a nonfiction book written in novel-like prose about Yardley's own experiences in this profession, covering many highlights of his career in the cryptographical fields and challenges he was devoted to during this period. While the book is certainly revealing, his critics at the time claimed he endangered the cryptographic security of the United States by spilling the beans on a lot of the things he did in government service. Yardley defends his work on the grounds of whistleblowing on the poor practices of his day and to make his own government take his profession more seriously.

To be fair to his critics, the Japanese especially panicked after seeing him describe how their mail was read by Yardley and strove to improve the security of their communications, which directly affected the events of World War II. And to be fair to Yardley, the US cryptographic services were a bit laggard in their progress and security measures compared to their European contemporaries at the time of publication.

I became aware of the text after reading the annotated copy on Archive.org with notes by William Friedman, an especially vehement critic of Yardley who also has a notable reputation for the breaking and creation of codes and ciphers for the US government. The work of both men now is largely declassified and easily readable in various archives, but at the time, Friedman hit the ceiling when Yardley, upon dissolution of the American "Black Chamber" for which his book is named, decided to do a tell-all book without getting the green light from his superiors and vetting its contents for censorship of matters still requiring classified effort.

I gave Friedman's annotated copy a read, and honestly, it's quite funny watching the man include footnotes that range between bemused snark to outright calling Yardley a dirty liar and presenting counter-facts to throw shade at Yardley. If you really want to get a good laugh, do a drinking contest every time Friedman goes on a tear about Yardley flat out lying or loses his cool over Yardley using the word commission (in the military sense, Yardley was not able to grant these, he likely meant assigned or delegated), your liver will be shot in half an hour at best.


As for the quality of Yardley's prose versus Friedman's rebuttal footnotes, I found both were approaching things from different angles. Yardley was not so much about explaining as he was trying to entertain, reasonably figuring he was both making a nonfictional text that was more interesting to read and likely doing his former service some favor by obscuring and muddying some of the finer details of his work. Friedman tends to get verbose about these flaws as distortions, inaccuracies, or Yardley simply trying to make himself look good at the expense of others. He also tends to give Yardley a lot of contempt for claiming certain cryptographical matters were far more difficult than they actually were.

Now, both men were in fact recognized as skilled in their fields by third-party observers then and in contemporary day. In fact, both men are part of the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame of the United States Armed Forces, so one must take a lot of Friedman's snark and derision with a few grains of salt at times, he really tends to make Yardley look like a middling idiot when Yardley was quite likely competent yet fudging things for the sake of an entertaining read. At the same time, given Yardley did commit what would be considered an act of treason by contemporary standards (and even then was highly suggested to be regarded as such by many of his aghast peers), some of Friedman's contempt comes from understandable anger at secrets of the United States being treated with what he considered casual contempt.

Of course, the annotated copy has some readability issues. Due to the fact it's a photocopy of a book from Friedman's personal collection which was turned over to US government after his death and later released in a declassified state for public consumption, it's best to have a copy of Yardley's original text to do a side by side comparison.

Friedman wrote most of his annotations in the margins, sides, and on the blank portions of the pages, but his copy also blanks out certain information Friedman considered a grave security breach at the time and has some age and weather damage to certain pages on the photocopy.

Finally, it's worth noting that due to the fact the annotated copy was essentially a critique of the whole text, it's available for the public domain while the original text is still under copyright. It also was classified as Friedman's annotations contained information on US cryptographic secrets and Friedman's estate turned it over the US government because he took his security clearance seriously and the US later allowed the annotated copy to become public domain like the rest of Friedman's work. Today, the overwhelming majority of which can be found in declassified NSA collected archives, on archive.org, and various websites for archival of materials relevant to the fields of ciphers and codes.

Overall, I found both Yardley's original book and Friedman's analysis to be quite interesting and revelatory to the cryptology field both men were members of, and it's a fascinating historical record if nothing else.