Word: ciphering
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Although he has been a National Party politician for 17 years and State President for the past five months, Frederik Willem de Klerk, 53, is still something of a cipher. His five-year plan for constitutional change, presented at the National Party congress last summer, is empty of specifics; his rhetoric is soothing but ambiguous and dotted with the charged code words of apartheid. Yet this mild, bland politician startled the nation upon taking office with a display of bold pronouncements and a previously undiscovered talent for doing the unexpected. Although the changes he has made are still largely cosmetic...
...accounts, Donald F. was a first-class spy. For nearly 30 years, the well-placed Soviet diplomat was said to have fed precious secrets about his nation's defense to the U.S., making him one of the intelligence community's most valued assets. He used all the tricks: cipher pads, invisible ink, dead- letter drops in Moscow's Gorky Park, coded advertisements in the New York Times. Never short on chutzpah, he even transmitted radio messages to the U.S. embassy in Moscow from a passing trolley bus. Though Soviet agents reportedly suspected his disloyalty for years, he repeatedly managed...
...while the black guide with the pole is not. But a title is not a picture, and in the painting itself Eakins has taken scrupulous care with the guide's face, posture, attentiveness -- all that describes a skilled man at work. If we think Eakins meant "Blackman" as a cipher, we are off the mark...