Breaking David Kahn’s Code
The famed intelligence historian was a friend and quiet newspaper man
When my friend and colleague, David Kahn, the journalist and famed cryptologist, died last month at the age of 93, I thought back to our days at Newsday in the 1980s. Even some people who worked with us didn’t know that the quiet copy editor in the Viewpoints section was the same man as the acclaimed intelligence historian.
One David Kahn was the mild-mannered reporter and editor. The other was Dr. David Kahn, the world-class, pre-eminent specialist on codes and author of classic books on spycraft, including The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet and Kahn on Codes: Secrets of the New Cryptology. Both books remain foundational volumes in the field. Despite its then-arcane subject, The Codebreakers propelled Kahn to popular acclaim, even landing him an appearance on “The Tonight Show.”
Dave, as we called him, had first come to the newspaper in the 1950s, then left in the 1960s, taught himself German so he could read World War Two Nazi documents in the original, and earned a doctorate after studying under the renowned British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. The Codebreakers was published in 1967, and his doctoral dissertation, “Hitler’s Spies: German Military Intelligence in World War II,” was published in 1978.
Dave was back at Newsday by the time I became foreign editor, and then later foreign correspondent, in the 1980s and 1990s. He was a copy editor on the opinion pages, massaging the writing of such Pulitzer Prize winners as Jimmy Breslin, Murray Kempton and Les Payne. Newsday was at its peak then with one of the country’s top ten circulations.
For a time, Bill Moyers, the high profile former Lyndon Johnson White House aide, had been the publisher. But when I went out on an early foreign reporting trip, I won an interview with a government official only because of Kahn’s connection to the paper.
“Do you know Professor Kahn?” the official gushed as if he were a groupie, grilling me for any anecdote I could tell him about my friend Dave.
The self-effacing copy editor moved in interesting circles. My colleague back then at Newsday, Jim Mulvaney, now an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, remembers Kahn inviting him over one day to visit with a friend and neighbor, CIA Director William Casey. True to form, and just as Kahn had warned, Mulvaney recalls, Casey held forth that afternoon but mumbled so much as to be unintelligible most of the time. Partial translation by Kahn: Casey wanted him to write a comprehensive history of the spy agency. The implication was that Casey would have a hand in it.
"I told him I couldn't do it," Mulvaney recalled Kahn saying. "These days there's a lot of stuff I know that I haven't yet written about the CIA. If I took Casey's offer, that would give the agency veto power on everything.”
It was not his first go-round with a U.S. intelligence agency.
Foes and Friends
Kahn had sparred with the National Security Agency when he first started reporting and writing The Codebreakers, but eventually his authoritative and astute work won him an invitation into the fold. He became a scholar in residence and was named in 2000 to the NSA Cryptologic Hall of Honor.
All the while, the skilled journalist’s knowledge bank was a great resource for us at Newsday. Whenever I or other editors wanted to check out the particulars on some news story with an intelligence angle, it only took a walk over to Dave’s desk. His Rolodex contained a large swathe of people in the intel community who were either his students, admirers, or both.
Our questions were always casual, something in the realm of, “Hey Dave, can you take a look at this story—do we have it right?” We weren’t looking for approval, we just didn’t want to get the facts wrong. Dave would smile and raise an eyebrow, and then say that he would get back to us. Whomever he checked with, we knew the response would be authoritative. And word would come back quickly. “Yes, it is safe to say that,” he might say. Or, “no, the intel doesn’t go that far.”
Dave kept working until he became ill in the 2010s. The last time I saw him, we had a chance meeting while we were both doing research at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. We were both working on World War Two projects. Dave was scanning through Nazi-era files on microfilm, in German script mostly impenetrable to me. That night, he came over for dinner but said he couldn’t stay long—he was in the middle of writing another book, and he had another deadline to meet. ###
SpyTalk Contributing Editor Peter Eisner is the author of a nonfiction trilogy about World War II, The Freedom Line, The Pope’s Last Crusade, and MacArthur’s Spies.