Tag Archives: enigma code

Did a Typo Help Defeat the Enigma Code and Win World War II?

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During World War II, the Enigma code was one of the most daunting weapons in the German arsenal. Cracking the code would be the key to intercepting crucial information and outmaneuvering the Nazi war machine. In fact, unraveling the secrets of Enigma was so important that both England and the United States poured massive resources into building their own codebreaking operations, Bletchley Park and Arlington Hall, respectively.

Loads of fascinating information about the day-to-day operations of Bletchley Park and Arlington Hall have emerged over the last decade or so, and one of the most peculiar anecdotes to make the rounds recently claims that a typo is partially responsible for cracking Enigma.

As the story goes, a man named Geoffrey Tandy was recruited by the UK Ministry of Defense to work at Bletchley Park as part of their growing team of cryptography experts. Scholars and professions from all over the country were being enlisted in the war effort, and cryptographers (or cryptogramists) were at the top of the list.

But Tandy wasn’t a cryptogramist. He was a cryptogamist, aka an expert on mosses, algae, and lichen.

Despite the error, Tandy remained at Bletchley Park, and a year or two after his mistaken hiring, his expertise proved invaluable when a German U-boat was sunk and cryptographic documents relating to Enigma were recovered. You see, his experience preserving water-damaged materials and specimens helped salvage the water-logged documents so they could be used to crack the German code.

And thus, a typo helped end World War II.

cryptogam

[Image courtesy of Did You Know Facts.]

It’s a great story. And like many great stories, there’s a hint of truth to it. There’s also a lot of exaggeration to make it a tale for the ages.

It was no fluke that Tandy was recruited for Bletchley Park. In addition to his cryptogamist credentials, he was assistant keeper of botany at the National History Museum of London. His work included managing the voluminous library, working with fragile documents and samples, and a facility with multiple languages.

Those linguistic skills and organizational talents made him a perfect choice for Bletchley Park, since they were recruiting all sorts of experts. Remember that the field of cryptography was in its early stages. You couldn’t just go looking for cryptographers. You had to build them from scratch, as well as the folks who would be support staff for those codebreakers-in-training.

That would be Tandy’s role. He was part of a division known as NS VI, responsible for archiving foreign documents and helping the cryptographers deal with any technical jargon they might encounter, particularly in foreign languages.

tandy

[Image courtesy of the National Museum of Australia.]

So where did the typo idea come from?

Well, it’s entirely possible it came from Tandy. The cryptogram/cryptogam mistake is just the sort of joke that would appeal to linguists and other professorial types, so either another member of the Bletchley Park team or Tandy himself could have downplayed his credentials in tongue-in-cheek fashion with the story of an erroneous typo.

As for the other part of the story — where he saved the documents — there is some debate as to whether that happened. As the story goes, he used his knowledge of preserving documents to save a waterlogged set of cryptographic codes from a sunken U-boat.

[Image courtesy of Military Factory.]

The anecdote as reported usually cites the year 1941, whereas many books about Bletchley Park’s codebreaking efforts reference a U-boat from 1942, U-559, where documents AND a working Enigma machine were recovered.

I believe he DID participate in rescuing/preserving documents from a U-boat because it’s not some great heroic deed, it’s literally part of why he was hired in the first place. The crux of the anecdote is on the wordplay and the faux-fortuitousness of his employment, not on the actual events.

So, in the end, no, a typo didn’t help end World War II. But Geoffrey Tandy certainly did.

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Unsung Tales of Women in American Code Breaking!

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[Image courtesy of Amazon.]

Dot Braden. Agnes Driscoll. Betty Hyatt. Elizebeth Friedman. Genevieve Grotjan. Ann Caracristi. Virginia Aderholdt. Ruth “Crow” Weston.

You don’t know these names, but you should. Everyone should. They’re bona fide American heroes who dedicated their time and energy to protecting not only our country, but also every soldier in the Allied forces during World War II. And they did so when they should have otherwise been continuing their collegiate studies.

That’s right, these women who came from majors as diverse as botany, math, psychology, and English, were recruited out of college in order to build a dedicated code-breaking unit for the US armed forces.

Thankfully, their stories are now being told in Liza Mundy’s new book, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II. And these are some amazing stories.

It all started in early 1942, as secret letters began showing up in college mailboxes. Schools like Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Barnard, Radcliffe, and more posed two questions to prospective female recruits:

1. Did she like crossword puzzles?
2. Was she engaged to be married?

All of these women replied yes, they like crossword puzzles, and no, they’re not engaged or soon-to-be engaged.

After answering these questions, the women began attending introductory meetings. They were issued manila envelopes containing “a brief introduction to the arcane history of codes and ciphers, along with numbered problems sets and strips of paper with the letters of the alphabet printed on them.”

Their orders? Complete the problem sets every week.

[Image courtesy of YouTube.]

Each packet contained one problem that could not be solved, to show that sometimes, a jumble of letters or numbers doesn’t stand for anything. Sometimes, gibberish remains just that, because sometimes a code-breaker fails.

They developed working knowledge of foreign languages they didn’t speak. They memorized the most common English letters — E, T, O, N, A, I, R, S — and took frequency counts.

And that’s how America built its answer to England’s Bletchley Park code-breaking operation. (The American effort, known as Arlington Hall, was considered by their Bletchley Park rivals as “just a lot of kids playing at ‘office’.”)

College presidents like Ada Comstock, the president of Radcliffe College (the women’s counterpart to Harvard), were recruited to identify candidates to learn cryptanalysis to help shorten the war.

And make no mistake, they did shorten the war. They helped crack Enigma, which was key to decimating the German U-boat fleet, and their code-breaking efforts were instrumental in defeating Japan as well, providing valuable intel on the island-to-island battles of the Pacific theater.

[Image courtesy of Military Factory.]

Of the US Army’s World War II code-breaking force, nearly 70 percent was female. We’re talking 7,000 female code-breakers. When you factor in US Navy recruits as well, that number jumps to 11,000 women out of 20,000 code-breakers.

From Code Girls: “Code breaking required literacy, numeracy, care, creativity, painstaking attention to detail, a good memory, and a willingness to hazard guesses. It required a tolerance for drudgery and a boundless reserve of energy and optimism.”

Genevieve Grotjan was key to cracking the Japanese cipher known as Purple, and William Friedman, the man who initially ran the Arlington Hall operation, described the Purple cipher as “by far the most difficult cryptanalytic problem successfully handled and solved by any signal intelligence organization in the world.” He specifically pointed to the contrbutions of Grotjan, Mary Louise Prather, and other women in the Arlington Hall group.

Codes used by twenty-five different nations were analyzed by Arlington Hall, including codes of friends and foes alike. “There was a French code called Jellyfish, a Chinese enciphered code they called Jabberwocky, another they called Gryphon.”

But even their staggering efforts in code-breaking weren’t all they contributed to the cause. They were also crucial to the success of the D-Day invasion, as many of the women were put to work reverse-engineering messages in order to create false information about imaginary troop movements and landing areas. And in order to create fake signal traffic, they had to know the real traffic backward and forward.

I could go into more detail, breaking down how they cracked some of the war’s most important code languages, or exploring their personal lives and how life changed for these college students-turned-military operatives, but I don’t want to reveal more than I have already.

Read Code Girls. You won’t regret it. It’s another terrific entry in a year of books full of revelations about wartime puzzle history. We’ve been taken behind the scenes of the NSA, Bletchley Park, and now Arlington Hall.

And once more, important and influential female voices are getting the limelight far later than they deserve. It’s about time.

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Puzzle History: Codebreaking and the NSA

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ohr577n

[Image courtesy of NSA.gov.]

The National Security Agency has been in the news a lot over the last few years.

It arguably all started with Edward Snowden and the revelations about government surveillance, both domestic and foreign, that emerged in his wake. Between President Trump’s intimations of Obama-era wiretapping (which also supposedly involved England’s GCHQ) and recent news stories about NSA contractor Reality Winner leaking information, the NSA continues to draw mainstream attention in the 24-hour news cycle.

When you factor in the declassification of codebreaking intel during and after World War II, we know more about the NSA’s inner workings than ever before.

You might be asking what the NSA has to do with puzzles. Well, everything. Because the NSA was born as a codecracking organization.

enigma

The NSA was founded in November of 1952, but its formative stages began during World War II, as codebreakers were recruited in the U.S. starting in 1943. Not only were they tasked with tackling the German ENIGMA code, but their secondary mission was to solve “the Russian problem.” This group was known as Signals Intelligence, or SIGINT.

William Friedman, one of the early figures in American codebreaking, described cryptanalysis as “a unique profession, demanding a peculiar kind of puzzle-solving mentality combined with patience. So staffing this new organization was a curious endeavor.”

Those who were recruited came from all walks of life:

Career officers and new draftees, young women math majors just out of Smith or Vassar, partners of white-shoe New York law firms, electrical engineers from MIT, the entire ship’s band from the battleship California after it was torpedoed by the Japanese in the attack on Pearl Harbor, winners of puzzle competitions, radio hobbyists, farm boys from Wisconsin, world-traveling ex-missionaries, and one of the World’s foremost experts on the cuneiform tablets of ancient Assyria.

04/11/14 imitation game - bletchley park, milton keynes

A large campus was built that echoed the style and efforts of Britain’s Bletchley Park, including Alan Turing’s calculating machines, the bombes. Efforts on both sides of the Atlantic centered on cracking ENIGMA, the German codes used in all sorts of high-level communications. The teams worked alongside the bombes to try to determine which of the 456, 976 possible codes was being used in a given piece of communication.

It was a truly Herculean effort.

But while nearly half the staff focused on the Germans, others focused on cracking Russian codebooks, where words were translated into four-digit codes. Often, decrypting these codes involved “brute force” efforts, poring through numerous messages to pair up messages that used similar numerical groups, meaning they used the same cipher.

This would only work if the Soviets were lazy in their production of so-called “one-time pads,” encryption devices that had a particular code, which would be used once and then thrown away. Brute force codebreaking revealed that some of the one-time pads had been used more than once, a lapse in Soviet security that could work to the advantage of U.S. intelligence.

That deduction led to another stunning discovery: cracking the system used in encrypted messages to tell agents which encryption was used in a given missive. You see, each encoded message contained within it a code that dictated the cipher necessary to decrypt the message.

The Russians would later complicate this work by employing multiplexers: devices that would transmit numerous messages at once, making it harder to separate one message from another in the same dispatch.

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[Image courtesy of Virtantiq.com.]

The Germans would unwittingly aid the US in their Russian codebreaking efforts when a POW camp in Bad Aibling, Germany, was captured by the US army, and they uncovered a German device designed to “de-multiplex” Russian messages. The device was called the HMFS, because Hartmehrfachfernschreiber, while a great deal of fun to type, is hard to say quickly.

After World War II ended, U.S. intelligence consolidated their efforts on “the Russian problem,” continuing their work unraveling the Russian codebooks. Slowly, the codemasters began determining which organizations in the Soviet government used which codes. Even if the codes weren’t broken yet, it helped the intelligence community organize and prioritize their efforts.

The problem? They had a very tight timeframe to work in. Those duplicated codebooks were produced during a very small window of time in 1942, and only issued to Soviet agents in the three years that followed. By 1947, SIGINT analysts knew the Soviets would soon run out of the duplicated pads. Once they did, those recurring patterns of encrypted numbers would stop, and the best chance for cracking the Soviet codes would be lost.

Still, there was reason to be encouraged. Some important code words had been identified. TYRE was New York City, SIDON was London, and CARTHAGE was Washington; ENORMOZ appeared often enough that they determined it referred to atomic bomb research in Los Alamos.

It would also be revealed, through careful analysis of decrypted intel, that Soviet agents were embedded in both the U.S. Justice Department and in England’s Bletchley Park campus. The Justice Department agent was identified and tried, but released after the court found insufficient evidence to place her under surveillance in the first place.

This was one consequence of the secrecy surrounding codebreaking: an unwillingness to reveal their codebreaking success by turning over evidence of it. (As for the Bletchley Park spies, one was identified in 1951 and confessed in 1964. The other was never identified.)

By this time, the Russians had gone over ENIGMA machines captured during the German retreat, and had unraveled not only how the devices worked, but how to improve upon them. This would lead to the next-generation Russian Fialka machine.

fialka

With ever-increasing complexity when it came to encryption, thanks to increased automation, codebreaking evolved into not just intelligence work, but intelligence analysis. After all, if you don’t know something is important, you don’t necessarily give it the attention it deserves. As researcher Stephen Budiansky put it, “The top translators at Bletchley were intelligence officers first, who sifted myriad pieces to assemble an insightful whole.”

It also led to bigger, faster machines, like Goldberg and Demon, two computation machines designed to more efficiently pore over the vast amount of encrypted information being intercepted by the various U.S. intelligence services.

In 1948, though, the game changed. It changed so dramatically that November 1, 1948, is still remembered in NSA circles as Black Friday.

I hope you’re enjoying this look at the early days of America’s codebreaking efforts. Part 2 will continue next week, with a look at the rise of the NSA, Cold War cryptography, and more!

[Quotes and certain photos were sourced from Code Warriors: NSA’s Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union by Stephen Budiansky.]

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The GCHQ Strikes Again!

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Last year, one of the toughest puzzles I encountered all year was the GCHQ Christmas Card.

The GCHQ — Government Communications Headquarters — provides security and intelligence services for the British government. Back when they were known as GC&CS — Government Code and Cypher School — they were responsible for funding Bletchley Park and its successes cracking the German “Enigma” code during World War II.

And last Christmas, they released a puzzly Christmas card that challenged the staunchest puzzlers, with over 600,000 submissions, but only 3 successful solutions!

This year, they’re doing things a little bit differently.

View post on imgur.com

[Click here for a larger version.]

This puzzle is the first step in a larger event that the GCHQ expects will take MONTHS to solve. (Their official due date for submissions is February 28, 2017!)

The big change here is that instead of a series of webpages available free to the public, they’re releasing this puzzly master challenge as a book containing over 140 codes and puzzles.

But it’s for a good cause, as “all GCHQ’s proceeds from sales of the book will be donated to the Heads Together campaign, supported by HRH The Duchess of Cambridge, who wrote the foreword for The GCHQ Puzzle Book.”

The Duchess writes:

I have always been immensely proud of my grandmother, Valerie Glassborow, who worked at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. She and her twin sister, Mary, served with thousands of other young women as part of the great Allied effort to break enemy codes. They hardly ever talked about their wartime service, but we now know just how important the men and women of Bletchley Park were, as they tackled some of the hardest problems facing the country.

In a new century, their successors at GCHQ continue this intellectual tradition. Like their Bletchley predecessors, they have become well known for valuing and understanding the importance of mental wellbeing. This is so important when dealing with such discretion and the pressure which comes with this.

William, Harry and I are very grateful that this book is supporting our Heads Together Campaign. I hope it will not only amuse and challenge readers, but help to promote an open discussion of mental health problems, which can affect anyone, regardless of age or background. Together, we are aiming to change the national conversation around mental health from stigma and fear to openness and understanding. Those who buy this book and support the Heads Together campaign will be playing a part in helping people get the important mental health care they deserve.

Puzzles and charitable works: a perfect holiday match, to be sure.

For US shoppers, the book is available as a Kindle ebook through Amazon.com, but if you want a paperback copy, you’re better off ordering it from Amazon.co.uk. With shipping and conversion, it still cost me less than $20.

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The Story Behind Bletchley Park

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It’s amazing when you consider the impact one of the most common forms of puzzle solving, cryptography, has had on world history. From the Revolutionary War to World War II, codebreaking was a battlefront as crucial and as exhausting as any contested piece of land on the map.

This was brought into stark clarity recently when I read The Secret Lives of Codebreakers by Sinclair McKay, which chronicles the work and lives of the team members at Bletchley Park who dedicated themselves to cracking the German Enigma code. It’s been said that Bletchley Park’s achievements shortened the war by two or three years. That’s no small feat.

(You know the decryption work done at Bletchley Park was good if it inspired parts of two of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. The film The Imitation Game barely scratched the surface.)

From The Secret Lives of Codebreakers:

Here, in these grounds fifty miles to the north of London, they would be introduced to the gravest secret of the war. Every intercepted enemy message — every signal from every captain, commander, military division, battleship, U-boat — all these encrypted communications, jumbled up into seemingly random letters in groups of four and five, and transmitted by radio, were gathered by the many listening posts around the British coastline.

…

From the Battle of Britain to the Blitz, from Cape Matapan to El-Alamein, from Kursk to the V-1 flying bombs, to D-Day and Japan, the work of Bletchley Park was completely invisible, yet right at the heart of the conflict. It was a key player whose presence, at all times, had to be kept utterly hidden from the enemy.

Imagine working these incredibly intensive sessions, obsessively looking over bits of code for hours at a time, knowing that the fate of the world rested on your shoulders, and a simple transcription mistake could cost lives. It’s a mind-boggling concept.

And the book shed a great deal of light on the decryption work itself. For instance, I had no idea how many variations of the Enigma code they were expected to crack.

The German rule was that no message should be more than 250 letters in length; if it was necessary to send a longer message, it should be split into multiple parts. This was designed to make life more difficult for codebreakers: the longer the message, the easier it might be for such a person to see patterns of letters forming among the apparent chaos.

Thanks to preambles in each Enigma message, codebreakers could at least be organized under different color keys: yellow, green, red, and blue. When they ran out of colors, they named keys after marine life, then birds, then elephants, then insects.

This was a war, and organization was key, no pun intended.

The first big break is known as the Herivel Tip, when one of the Bletchley Park crew deduced that some Enigma machine operators might choose the new day’s settings based on the letters used the previous day. This became a valuable jumping-off point for daily decryption attempts with their own coding device, the bombe machine.

In 1941, the first major Enigma-style code, the Abwehr code, was broken by Bletchley Park. In June of 1941, they broke the Vulture key, which revealed German activity on the Eastern front.

But the Germans were constantly adapting and refining their codes. German paranoia led to submarines using a different code than surface naval vessels. So “Dolphin,” the surface naval code, was not the only code troubling Bletchley Park. “Shark,” the submarine key, was a new concern. Thankfully, when U-559 sank in 1942 and its crew abandoned ship, its Enigma machine and a book of current “Shark” keys was salvaged by Allied forces without German knowledge.

In 1943, they broke “Porcupine,” giving them access to all German air force messages for a few weeks.

Around this time, the German High Command began using another method to transmit encrypted messages, and this became yet another focus of Bletchley Park. The “Fish” or “Tunny” communications were between generals and the Fuhrer himself.

This led to the development of the big brother of the bombe machine, Colossus, which combined the logic engines of a Turing machine with electronic valves that allowed it to read 5000 characters a second, five times faster than the previous top machine.

(While this was going on, Turing himself was developing a new speech encipherment system, Delilah, so named because she was a deceiver of men.)

In January 1945, efforts were still going strong, as Bletchley Park not only cracked the “Puffin” and “Falcon” keys of the German army, but effectively countered attempts by the Luftwaffe to implement new encryptions. By this point, dozens of variations of Enigma had been unraveled by the team.

Of course, decryption wasn’t the only thing accomplished at Bletchley Park.

The grand deception that led to the Normandy invasion was also managed there. They gradually fed false data to German Intelligence about military groups like the First United States Army Group preparing to enter France via the Pas de Calais and the Twelfth British Army into Scandinavia and Turkey. This allowed for D-Day to proceed, as German attention was diverted.

But The Secret Lives of Codebreakers goes beyond their wartime victories. McKay takes us behind the scenes of Bletchley Park to share not only the hard-won achievements of the cryptographers there, but also what daily life was like on the isolated estate. From living conditions and several romances to rivalries and petty feuds caused by high tensions, the book catalogues the realities of such stressful work in richly detailed fashion.

I think my favorite discoveries were related to the off-time of the recruits:

Oliver and Sheila Lawn have especially fond memories of the way that Bletchley-ites contrived to use their leisure time: “There was music,” says Mr. Lawn, “Play readings. And play actings. Quite a bit of amateur dramatics. And concerts of all kinds.”

Highland dancing, madrigals, creating palindromes…they were offered all sorts of activities to help keep spirits up after grueling decryption sessions. Certain musical artists were even invited up to perform there!

When you consider how important their work was and how many years they were sworn to silence about Bletchley Park, these revelations become all the more stunning. This isn’t just a fascinating work of puzzle history, this is history itself.

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It’s Follow-Up Friday: Crossword Contest edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

By this time, you know the drill. Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and bring the PuzzleNation audience up to speed on all things puzzly.

And today I’d like to revisit the subject of The Imitation Game. (And announce a contest!)

Constructor and science guru George Barany recently reached out to me, asking me to spread the word about a puzzle contest with some terrific prizes to offer. And it just so happens that the contest ties into the recent release of The Imitation Game.

The Imitation Game tells the story of Alan Turing’s efforts during World War II to break the German Enigma Code and deserve crucial intel to the British government. To do so, he recruited puzzle solvers and cryptography enthusiasts at Bletchley Park in England to crack the supposedly uncrackable code.

You can tackle the 1942 puzzle that was supposedly used to recruit aspiring cryptographers for Bletchley Park by clicking here!

But that’s not all! You can also wrestle with a Barany crossword original inspired by the movie (created with Ralph Bunker and Michael Hanko), with a chance to win crossword books or even a paid registration to the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament!

Click here to test your mettle against Mr. Barany’s creation! And good luck!

The contest ends this Sunday, January 11, at midnight, so the deadline is looming, but hey, that just adds a little drama to the proceedings, doesn’t it? Rather apropos, considering its inspiration. =)

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