The Education of a Poker Player - Part III

Been workin' on the mainline, workin' like the devil.

The game is the same, it's just up on another level.

– Bob Dylan, "Po' Boy"


In early 1930, with his esoteric skills no longer in demand and the unemployment rate spiraling toward 35 percent, Herb Yardley couldn't find a job. "I felt very small in my rags and could scarcely open my mouth," he said later. "Poverty had done strange things to me, though only a few months before I had stood at the top of my profession. Now I suddenly found myself with no voice, no matter, no confidence." He probably didn't even consider trying to support his wife and son at the poker table. The games were either too big or too small, and in the bigger ones he could hardly count on a fair shuffle. On top of that, gambling was illegal in nearly all jurisdictions. Playing square poker as a regular job would have been almost unthinkable.



He finally hit on the idea of writing a memoir about his years as a code-breaker. After failing to find a ghostwriter, he took a cheap room in Manhattan, rented a typewriter, bought 500 sheets of paper, and – nothing. "For days I pecked out a few lines and threw them into the fire," he admitted to his agent, George Bye. "You cannot know what it means to sit before a typewriter with a tremendous story with no training, no craftsmanship to tell it." Yet his growing desperation spurred him to write by the seat of his pants. He screwed his rear end to the sticking place and knocked out the book in five months.



The American Black Chamber was published in 1931. Recounting his years as head of MI-8, it dished up juicy details of code-breaking, spy-catching, wireless and cable interception, secret inks, midnight liaisons. An American bestseller, it was quickly translated into French, Swedish, Japanese, and Chinese. In Washington, however, the book was considered such a betrayal of intelligence methods that many accused Yardley of treason. While no formal charges were brought, he became persona non grata in military and diplomatic circles. Some officers loathed him so intensely that despite his potential value during a war with Germany or Japan, he was blacklisted from all intelligence jobs. Yardley did his best to defend himself, insisting his motives were patriotic and that he was responsible for turning "intelligence into a significant instrument of war, no longer mistrusted by but accepted and even welcomed by admirals, generals, and statesmen," if not by Henry Stimson.



Yet even his biographer extends him little sympathy on this issue. Kahn does point out that Yardley "never sold information to Japan or to anybody else, and he never worked against the United States," but adds that he "cheated by working for himself while being paid by the government. Later, he was indeed a hired gun, an opportunist, and he breached the trust his country had placed in him when he published his book. The action was despicable. It was rightly castigated by many people. But it cannot be characterized as treason. Yardley was a rotter, not a traitor." Kahn's more subtly damning conclusion is that Yardley "sold his soul for his book." Being ostracized by former colleagues bruised him to his core, and he never fully recovered his confidence and equilibrium. And the worst was yet to come.



Not surprisingly, the Japanese edition sold like Sapporo in hell. The downside was that it shamed the Imperial military into upgrading its codes and cipher systems; it soon developed an "enigma-type" machine code-named "Red," then an even more sophisticated device, called "Purple" by American spies, to encrypt its most sensitive messages.



To escape some of the scrutiny he was under, Yardley moved back to Worthington, where he tried to capitalize on his notoriety by founding Major Yardley's Secret Ink, Inc. While mixing an experimental batch of the stuff, he cut his right hand on a shard of glass, and the ensuing infection made it necessary for doctors to amputate the middle finger. Had the patron saint of intelligence agents mailed him a coded fuck-you? Whether or not it was karmic comeuppance, Yardley remained fairly cheerful about it, signing his letters "Three-Fingered HOY." Ever adaptive, he began smoking cigarettes with his left hand and learned to peel up holecards and type with what was left of the other.



Infected by the writing bug, too, Yardley churned out – with help from two ghostwriters – three pulpy spy novels, The Blonde Countess, Red Sun of Nippon, and Crows Are Black Everywhere, along with radio plays and books of puzzles. Yardleygrams collected five stories designed to teach the reader how to decipher cryptographic messages. But none of these sold very well, and the profits from his invisible ink business remained themselves undetectable.



As war between the U.S. and Japan loomed larger during the '30s, Yardley put together a 970-page manuscript titled "Japanese Diplomatic Secrets," hoping to fashion it into another bestseller. Though his publisher turned down the project, the State Department got wind of it and procured a carbon copy of the manuscript. Upon reading it, the senior Far East advisor warned: "In view of the state of excitement which apparently prevails in Japanese public opinion now, characterized by fear or enmity toward the United States, every possible effort should be made to prevent the appearance of this book." The Army dispatched two captains to Worthington to demand that Yardley turn over all government documents in his possession. When Yardley told them he would take the matter up with the attorney general, the Justice Department stepped in. Thomas E. Dewey, the chief assistant U.S. Attorney, acting in concert with Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur, informed Yardley's old nemesis Henry Stimson, who was now Secretary of War, that the manuscript "was as bad as it could be, just the kind of thing which might be more than the Japanese could stand." A U.S. marshal appeared at the offices of Macmillan, the firm then considering it, to demand that the publisher accompany him to the Federal Building, where the manuscript was seized under the Espionage Act of 1917.



A grand jury was quickly convened, but no indictment was issued because the Act's language didn't categorically rule out such publications. But with war with Japan thought to be at stake, both the State and Justice departments wanted the case to be open-and-shut, with no room for errors or leaks. In March 1933, days after Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated and his New Deal – a term inspired by the stud games he loved – was being launched, Secretary of State Cordell Hull began meeting with Senate and House members to orchestrate a bill to suppress Yardley's manuscript. The bill would have to be carefully drafted "to avoid the necessity of proving the documents had been taken from a government officer or agency, since admission that the documents were in the government's hands would be as bad as" seeing them published. The State Department didn't want Yardley's name mentioned, but lawmakers, most of whom had read The American Black Chamber, could see what was happening, and more than a few didn't like it. After several revisions, H.R. 4220, "For the Protection of Government Records," was given to the Judiciary Committee. In part it said, "Whoever shall willfully, without authorization or competent authority, publish or furnish to another any matter prepared in any official code; or whoever shall, for any purpose prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States [publish items] in process of transmission between any foreign government and its diplomatic mission in the United States … shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both."



Among the hundreds of bills designed to raise America from the depths of the Depression, none was given higher priority than quashing Yardley's project. The Judiciary Committee requested its enactment "at the earliest possible date." After a series of back-and-forth amendments making sure freedom of the press would not be compromised, the bill passed both chambers and was enthusiastically signed by Roosevelt on June 10, 1933, as Public Law 37, known today as Section 952 of Title 18. Yardley called it "the gag bill" and wrote a magazine article about it, but George Bye wisely advised against publishing even that. "I think everybody is pretty well convinced you are a devil-may-care human being. To that impression I should not like to have added that you are thumbing your nose at constituted authority." There it was. Yardley was finished not only as a cryptanalyst but as a writer about those experiences.



It was at this rock-bottom point that Louis B. Mayer suddenly decided he needed the author of The American Black Chamber to help develop a Myrna Loy espionage comedy for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Yardley's agent wired the details in the telegraphese with which his client had long been familiar: "MGM offered me ten thousand dollars American Black Chamber and Blonde Countess This is absolutely best I can do STOP Guarantee of ten weeks at two fifty a week Transportation both ways Please confirm acceptance."



He did. Moving with Hazel into an MGM bungalow, he began work on an in-progress script involving – what else? – the solution of a cryptogram about the whereabouts of German U-boats attacking American troop ships in 1918. His job was to evaluate the plausibility of certain scenes and sketch a few new ones explaining such technicalities as wavelength, transposition, and direction finders. Warming to the Hollywood ethos, he drafted a scene in which the hero visits "one of the numerous intimate expensive dancing joints that sprang up in all the capitals," where he dances with a "cutie." It was also his idea to call the film Rendezvous. Though a dozen other writers were involved, screenplay credit went to Sam and Bella Spewack. Mayer had planned to pair Loy with William Powell, but when Loy held out for more money, the female lead went to Rosalind Russell, whose spy lingo Yardley got to coach. Newspaper ads featured the tag line, "He could solve the most intricate puzzle – unless it was dressed in skirts." The publicity kit mentioned The Blonde Countess but not The Black Chamber, though the credits say the film was based on the nonfiction book.



No writer understood the studios' collaborative and crediting practices better than the legendary Chicago journalist and Hollywood script doctor Ben Hecht, who won an Oscar in 1929 for Underworld and another in '37 for The Scoundrel. "Movies were seldom written," Hecht said. "They were yelled into existence in conferences that kept going in saloons, brothels and all-night poker games." Such locations suited Yardley to a T – or a P. Because the last location drove home the point that poker was not only related to code-breaking, it was often the very occasion for filmmakers to dramatize static or cerebral activities into key working parts of their vehicles of mass entertainment.



Another way Yardley's experience was typical was that after returning from Hollywood in '37, he and Hazel separated. Within weeks he was living with his longtime lover Edna Ramsaier. He had hired Edna as a 16-year-old typist on his MI-8 staff back in 1920, but she'd since developed into an effective cryptologist in her own right. They were married in Reno on Aug. 29, 1944.



Paying alimony to Hazel and having saved almost no movie loot, Yardley wrote an unproducable play and a novel his publisher flatly rejected. So when an offer came from Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek to decipher Japanese messages during the second Sino-Japanese War, Yardley leapt at the chance to get back to code-breaking. For this ultrasecret mission of espionage, he'd be paid $10,000 per year. Besides the handsome salary, he was motivated by his desire to help avenge the Rape of Nanking, in which as many as 300,000 Chinese noncombatants were slaughtered, and by his rage over the Japanese sinking of the USS Panay and, worse, the strafing of its lifeboats in December 1937. Like many Americans, he was amazed that President Roosevelt had responded with no more than a letter of protest.



His cover was as "Herbert Osborn," a merchant of skins and hides. While his real job was to teach the Nationalists how to break the Imperial codes, he first had to break one himself. Here, Kahn provides a brilliantly incisive account of the sorts of things Yardley picked up on:



While studying a series of kana [syllabic script] messages transmitted every day at 6 a.m., noon, and 6 p.m., he noticed that of the forty-eight kana, only ten were used, perhaps representing numerals, and that the messages were extremely repetitious in format, perhaps therefore meteorological. He arbitrarily converted the kana into figures and studied them. His team's rough direction-finding indicated that the messages were being sent from near Chungking, and Yardley concluded that the first group of all the messages, 027, stood for Chungking. He further observed that all the messages sent at 6 a.m. had, as their second group, 231, those sent at noon, 248, and those at 6 p.m., 627. The third group in nearly all the messages was 459 – except for a message of noon that day, where it was 401. Yardley noted that the light rain of several days had cleared at noon and he concluded that 459 meant rain and 401 fair weather. It was 1 p.m. He called in his Chinese liaison officer and told him that he believed Chungking would be bombed that afternoon. While he was explaining his analysis, the sirens wailed. Yardley's reputation was made.



The passage allows us to watch Yardley think like a poker maestro studying both the cards and the player across from him. Exercising his keen deductive facility, he made strong leaps of insight between numbers and kana, weather and bombers. Like the English major he almost became, he translated script into numbers, numbers into words, and words into meteorological patterns and military game plans, much as he (or we) might interpret a raise based on a physical tic combined with a glitch in a betting pattern. His work in China was a mature blend of the reads he'd been making since he learned five-card draw from his grandfather, Morse Code from his father, and higher-stakes poker from Monty, together with what he had taught himself while managing MI-8.



"Osborn" meanwhile was pursuing dangerous liaisons with Chinese and German women and cleaning up in seven-card stud games with ex-pats, double agents, and journalists. When he outplayed a Brit in a $15,000 pot, the man – much like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney – resentfully exposed Yardley's identity to counterespionage agents, who used his missing finger to confirm it. In jeopardy now from Japanese and German assassins, he needed to get back to the States. Naturally anxious to retain his services, the Chinese stalled with the necessary paperwork. When they told him he couldn't board the plane to Hong Kong without approval from HQ, Yardley bluffed: If they didn't give him clearance, he said, he would arrive at the airport with a newspaperman and the attache – in other words, he'd reveal to the world what his job was and what he had learned. And it worked.



Next: Yardley finally writes about poker. ♠