Herbert Yardley: king of the whistleblowers

Herbert O. Yardley is America's archetypical spook whistleblower. He had successfully modernized America's code-breaking power as an Army Signal Corps lieutenant during and shortly after World War I. But the powers that be decided to force him out of his well-paid post as a high-caliber code-cracker.

Herbert Yardley's NSA biography
http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/cryptologic_spectrum/many_lives.pdf

As an NSA history says, Yardley, "with no civil service status or retirement benefits, found himself unemployed just as the stock market was collapsing and the Great Depression beginning. He left Queens and returned to his hometown of Worthington, Indiana, where he began writing what was to become the most famous book in the history of cryptology. There had never been anything like it. In today's terms, it was as if an NSA employee had publicly revealed the complete communications intelligence operations of the Agency for the past twelve years-all its techniques and major successes, its organizational structure and budget-and had, for good measure, included actual intercepts, decrypts, and translations of the communications not only of our adversaries but of our allies as well.

"The American Black Chamber created a sensation when it appeared on 1 June 1931, preceded by excerpts in the Saturday Evening Post, the leading magazine of its time. The State Department, in the best tradition of 'Mission: Impossible,' promptly disavowed any knowledge of Yardley's activities."

Government officials, though angry, decided to do nothing. According to some accounts, Yardley then went to work for the Japanese. The Canadians hired him briefly at the onset of World War I but British intelligence insisted on his ouster.

Yardley went on to write a successful book on poker strategies.