Obit of WW2 codebreaker, Arthur Levenson

The information below was extracted from an obit in The Washington Post, 5 Sep 07.





Arthur J. Levenson, 93, a former official with the National Security Agency who assisted in the British-led effort to break German codes during World War II, died Aug. 12 of lung cancer at his home in Washington.

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As a member of the Army Signal Corps in 1943, he was assigned as a cryptanalyst to the British code-breaking team at Bletchley Park outside London. He worked on efforts that ultimately led to the solving of the mathematical code of Germany's Enigma machine, which created secret messages for Nazi military leaders. In a 1999 PBS documentary about the decoding project, Mr. Levenson said the team at Bletchley sometimes deciphered the German messages before German forces in the field could read them. "If it was something hot," he said, "it'd get out in the field before the German commander got his." In one case, Mr. Levenson said, the team decoded a message from German military leader Erwin Rommel and determined that German tanks were converging at a spot in Normandy where U.S. paratroopers were planning to jump. "They were going to drop one of the airborne divisions right on top of a German tank division," Mr. Levenson said in the documentary. "They would have been massacred." At the last moment, plans were changed, and the paratroopers averted disaster.



After the war, Mr. Levenson was part of a British and American unit sent to Germany to interrogate German cryptanalysts and to examine equipment used in developing codes. Beginning in 1946, he worked for an Army intelligence agency that later evolved into the National Security Agency, which was created in 1952. Mr. Levenson initiated a program that recruited promising mathematics graduates to work for the NSA. He was the first chief of the NSA's Office of Advanced Analysis and later headed the A Group, devoted to analyzing communications from the Soviet bloc.

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In his 70s, Mr. Levenson set records for his age group in master's distance-running races. He ran competitively into his 80s.

Survivors include his wife of 62 years, Marjorie West Levenson of Washington [[  cut  ]]




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