text: In 1929, the State Department withdrew its share of the funding while the Army, undergoing unit reorganizations, transferred the Black Chamber to the Signal Corps, which opted to rebuild the organization for their own purposes and dismissed Yardley and all of his employees. New Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson made this decision, and years later in his memoirs made the oft-quoted comment: "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail." Stimson's ethical reservations about cryptanalysis focused on the targeting of diplomats from the U.S.'s close allies, not on spying in general. Once he became Secretary of War during World War II, he and the entire U.S. command structure relied heavily on decrypted enemy communications.
  Legacy
  In 1931, Yardley, out of a job and desperate for an income during the Great Depression, wrote a book about the Cipher Bureau, titled The American Black Chamber. The term "Black Chamber" predates Yardley's use of it in the title of his book.
  During World War II, the Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) was created to intercept and decipher the communications of the Axis powers. When the war ended, the SIS was reorganized as the Army Security Agency (ASA). On May 20, 1949, all cryptologic activities were centralized under a national organization called the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), a division of the Department of Defense that, after issues relating to poor interagency communication and coordination, was reformed on November 4, 1952 into the National Security Agency (NSA).