Richard Treadwell Hallock (5 April 1906 in

Passaic Passaic ( or ) is a city in Passaic County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. As of the 2020 U.S. census, the city had a total population of 70,537, ranking as the 16th largest municipality in New Jersey and an increase of 656 from the 69,7 ...

New Jersey New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York; on the east, southeast, and south by the Atlantic Ocean; on the west by the Delaware ...

– 20 November 1980 in

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

) was an American

Assyriologist Assyriology (from Greek , ''Assyriā''; and , ''-logia'') is the archaeological, anthropological, and linguistic study of Assyria and the rest of ancient Mesopotamia (a region that encompassed what is now modern Iraq, northeastern Syria, southea ...

and Elamitologist. He reached his Ph.D. degree in Assyriology at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...

in 1935, and was editorial secretary of the

Chicago Assyrian Dictionary The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (CAD) or The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago is a nine-decade project at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute to compile a dictionary of the Akkadian language and ...

(1955–1957). His major work is
Persepolis Fortification Tablets
' (1969), the first edition and translation of the

Persepolis Fortification Archive The Persepolis Fortification Archive and Persepolis Treasury Archive are two groups of clay administrative archives — sets of records physically stored together – found in Persepolis dating to the Achaemenid Persian Empire. The discover ...

. In 1972, he was elected a corresponding fellow of the

British Academy The British Academy is the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences. It was established in 1902 and received its royal charter in the same year. It is now a fellowship of more than 1,000 leading scholars spa ...

. Hallock also played an instrumental role in the

Venona project The Venona project was a United States counterintelligence program initiated during World War II by the United States Army's Signal Intelligence Service (later absorbed by the National Security Agency), which ran from February 1, 1943, until Octob ...

.NSA Page on the history of the Venona project.
/ref> While working on Soviet "Trade" traffic (so named because these messages dealt with Soviet trade issues), Hallock discovered that the Soviets were reusing pages of some of the

one-time pad In cryptography, the one-time pad (OTP) is an encryption technique that cannot be cracked, but requires the use of a single-use pre-shared key that is not smaller than the message being sent. In this technique, a plaintext is paired with a ran ...

s they relied upon to encrypt their messages. Hallock and his colleagues (including Genevieve Feinstein, Cecil Phillips, Frank Lewis, Frank Wanat, and Lucille Campbell) went on to break into a significant amount of trade traffic, recovering many

additive key tables in the process.

References

* Charles E. Jones and Matthew W. Stolper:
Hallock, Richard Treadwel
, in ''Encyclopædia Iranica''. *
Hallock, Richard Treadwell
, in the
CDLI Wiki
'. {{DEFAULTSORT:Hallock, Richard 20th-century American historians American male non-fiction writers American Assyriologists 1906 births 1980 deaths Iranologists Venona project Corresponding Fellows of the British Academy 20th-century American male writers Assyriologists