Stories from the Black Chamber are just that.
They are four adventures taking place which reveal the efforts of a small, highly select and gifted team of counter-espionage agents who also were trained in the new science of cryptology.
[Note: the Black Chamber is the unofficial name for the Cipher Bureau, a division of the State Department which specialized in breaking the codes used by foreign governments and also in letting American governmental agencies know how easily their own codes could be deciphered. According the NSA website's history of the organization, it grew out of the void left when the Army, at the end of WWI, faced with massive budget cuts, closed down its radio listening division and thus its code-breaking operations. To continue the needed work of monitoring what other nations, such as the defeated Germany as well as the growing concern with Japanese expansion plans, State worked with the Army to create the Cipher Bureau, sharing the costs. Once going, though, the Army saw that very little of what was being produced had anything of interest to it so it cut its portion of the funding to next to zero, leaving State to foot the bill.
Chosen to head this new organization was Herbert Yardley, 'formerly a code clerk for the Department of State, recently a major in command of MI-8, Military Intelligence's wartime cryptologic section'. 'Based on his leadership during and immediately after the war, Yardley was selected as chief of this unprecedented organization. He assembled a staff and began operations -- in New York City! There were a number of sound bureaucratic reasons for locating the Cipher Bureau outside Washington, not least of which was the location in New York of several cable companies with international connections. America's first civilian intelligence agency began work in the Big Apple disguised as a company that compiled commercial codes for banks and businesses. Yardley later claimed that the Cipher Bureau solved the systems of two dozen foreign countries. Many of the records of the organization no longer exist, so it is impossible to verify all his claims.
When in 1929 Herbert Hoover became President, he named as his Secretary of State Henry Stimson. It would be Stimson who 'spoke the single most famous sentence ever uttered about codes and ciphers: "Gentlemen do not read other gentlemen's mail."' He closed down the Cipher Bureau. Yardley would be quoted later as saying it was for moralistic reasons only and even Stimson did not argue that point. While Stimson would later, during WWII when he was Secretary of War, make considerable use of decrypted intelligence, he apparently still found it abhorrent for use in peacetime.]
There is very little information available about the 'version' of the Black Chamber depicted in the four episodes which comprised this radio program.
We know that it is run by a man named Bradley Drake. [Apparently thought, though unproven, Drake was fictionalized Yardley.] He had a right hand man known only as Steve. Drake also had a secretary named Betty Lee Andrew who played a large role in the activities of the Black Chamber. Finally, there was an older fellow working in the chemistry department of the organization named Gus Kramer, a fellow who occasionally provided the team with sound advice.
One of the best descriptions of this series comes from Radio Crime Fighters by Jim Cox. He writes: "Charged with revealing top-secret communications that might guarantee the extension of a free world, Bradley Drake presided over operations of the Black Chamber. Chemicals were employed in the highly advanced facility to decode covert messages issued by nations both friendly and unfriendly to the United States." He adds, "One of his most urgent challenges was to put global master spy Paradine out of business. Joyce Carraway, Paradine's assistant, helped the unscrupulous villain in his mission to thwart detection by the Black Chamber."