Within the intelligence community, Mr. Gardner was said to have been a living legend, and his work in penetrating Soviet codes is widely considered one of the great U.S. counterintelligence coups of the last half-century. But he remained unknown to the public for more than 50 years until 1996, when he emerged from anonymity to tell his story at a conference on the decrypting operation, which had its own code name, "Venona." At that conference, which was sponsored by the National Security Agency, the CIA and the Center for Democracy -- a Washington think tank -- Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) introduced Mr. Gardner as an unsung hero of the Cold War.



From the Washington Post obituary of Meredith Knox Gardner, who died on 9 August at the age of 89.