A tribute to Cecil Phillips--and Arlington Hall's "Meritocracy"

Cryptologia, Apr 1999 by Budiansky, Stephen

ABSTRACT: Cryptanalyst Cecil Phillips, who made the crucial break into the "VENONA" problem near the end of the Second World War, exemplified the diverse talents that rose through Arlington Hall's unusual meritocracy.

KEYWORDS: Cecil Phillips, VENONA, Arlington Hall, KGB, Richard Hallock, One-Time Pad, William Lutwiniak.

The official agencies that employ cryptanalysts have, over the year, carried out countless studies in search of the secrets for spotting budding cryptanalytic talent. Many great cryptanalysts of course were great mathematicians, and certainly the British, in recruiting talent for Bletchley Park prior to the Second World War, demonstrated the wisdom of drawing on distinguished mathematicians from the leading universities. Many people have remarked upon the seeming link between cryptanalytic ability and a talent for crosswords or music (the American cryptanalyst Frank Lewis notably excelled at both), or chess or bridge (Bletchley Park had a remarkable concentration of talent in these arenas, including the top two members of the British chess team). William Friedman made a point of recruiting winners of cryptogram contests. But for every such "rule" there are glaring exceptions, and the systematic studies into what makes a cryptanalyst have all in the end been inconclusive. There are mathematicians who are hopeless at code breaking, and there are many distinguished cryptanalysts about whom nothing in their background foreshadowed their brilliance.

The experience of Arlington Hall, the codebreaking establishment of the United States Army during the Second World War, still offers the most striking demonstration of the unpredictability with which nature has distributed cryptanalytic talent. By V-J day there were 7,848 people working at Arlington Hall; counting rotations in and out of the establishment, more than 18,000 people were recruited for work there during the course of the war.1 The net was cast extremely widely; college graduates and high-school graduates, mathematicians and nonmathematicians, men and women; some worked out and some didn't. But the remarkable thing about the Army's massive wartime experiment in creating a codebreaking establishment almost from scratch was that talent was swiftly recognized and rewarded; it was, in the words of many, a true "meritocracy"-you sank or swam on your ability.

Cecil Phillips, who died on November 27, 1998,2 was the accidental cryptanalyst par excellence. Within a year of arriving at Arlington Hall in 1943, he achieved the crucial break in the "VENONA" problem-the thousands of Soviet diplomatic messages that would eventually reveal a massive Soviet espionage operation within the United States. He was 18 years old when he came to Arlington Hall-no mathematician, no chess grandmaster, no winner of crossword contests, no linguist; just a college drop-out who had been rejected for the draft ( "to my great pleasure and surprise," Phillips recalled) for his flat feet-and who, wandering one day into the U. S. Employment Office in his hometown of Ashville, North Carolina, happened to cross paths with a U. S. Army lieutenant who had been told to rustle up some bodies to work in Washington. (The lieutenant was there in the first place, apparently, only because Washington was at the time part of the civil service district that included the southeastern states and was required to draw low-level employees from within that region.)

"How would you like to go to Washington and be a cryptographer?" the lieutenant asked.

Phillips, whose interest and knowledge in the subject, though genuine, did not extend much beyond having once possessed a Little Orphan Annie decoder ring, promptly answered, "That sounds interesting." That was plainly not the answer the lieutenant had been hearing all day in the mountains of North Carolina.

"You mean you know what that means?" the lieutenant replied, with obvious surprise.

So Phillips was administered an IQ test, hired on the spot as a GS-2 at the munificent sum of $1,440 per year, and told to report to Washington a week later, on June 22, 1943.3

He began as a cryptographic clerk; his first job was stamping the date on incoming messages. Having demonstrated his competence at that task he graduated to stapling. But his first boss was a remarkable man-remarkable in the broadest sense though not remarkable at all by Arlington Hall standards-a Lieutenant Bill Fleischman, who had been through an extensive cryptanalysis course as a student at City College of New York and who, Phillips recalled, "wanted to teach in the worst way." He set aside an hour or two each day to train Phillips and a half dozen other new hires. "You could start at the bottom and if you did well at cryptanalysis you could move up to the top," Phillips recalled, and move up he did.

He was at first assigned to Japanese weather codes. In January 1944 the weather problem was moved to the front half of one of the wings in A Building, one of two huge temporary structures built on the grounds of Arlington Hall (which had been a girls' school taken over by the Army in June 1942). The back part of the wing housed what was called-to the relatively few people even within Arlington Hall who even knew of its existence-the "Russian problem."