David Kahn - The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication From Ancient Times to the Internet

Some of the things you will learn in THE CODEBREAKERS

How secret Japanese messages were decoded in Washington hours before Pearl Harbor.

How German codebreakers helped usher in the Russian Revolution.

How John F. Kennedy escaped capture in the Pacific because the Japanese failed to solve a simple cipher.

How codebreaking determined a presidential election, convicted an underworld syndicate head, won the battle of Midway, led to cruel Allied defeats in North Africa, and broke up a vast Nazi spy ring.

How one American became the world's most famous codebreaker, and another became the world's greatest.

How codes and codebreakers operate today within the secret agencies of the U.S. and Russia.

And incredibly much more.

"For many evenings of gripping reading, no better choice can be made than this book."

Christian Science Monitor

THE

Codebreakers

The Story of Secret Writing

By DAVID KAHN

(abridged by the author)

A SIGNET BOOK from

NEW AMERICAN LIBRARV

TIMES MIRROR

Copyright 1967, 1973 by David Kahn

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

including photocopying, recording or by any information

storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing

from the publisher. For information address

The Macmillan Company, 866 Third Avenue, New York,

New York 10022.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 63-16109

Crown copyright is acknowledged for the following illustrations

from Great Britain's Public Record Office:

S.P. 53/18, no. 55, the Phelippes forgery,

and P.R.O. 31/11/11, the Bergenroth reconstruction.

Published by arrangement with The Macmillan Company

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are published by The New American Library, Inc.,

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first printing, february, 1973

printed in the united states of america

To my Parents

and my Grandmother

many people have urged me to put out a paperback edition of The Codebreakers. Here it is.

It comprises about a third of the original. This was as big as the publishers and I could make it and still keep the price within reason.

In cutting the book, I retained mainly stories about how codebreaking has affected history, particularly in World War II, and major names and stages in the history of cryptology. I eliminated all source notes and most of the technical matter, as well as material peripheral to strict codebreaking such as biographies, the invention of secondary cipher systems, and miscellaneous uses of various systems.

I had no space for new material, but I did correct the errors reported to me and updated a few items. The chapters have been slightly rearranged.

Readers wanting to know more about a specific point should consult the text and notes of the original.

If any reader wishes to offer any corrections or to tell me of his own experiences in this field, I would be very grateful if he would send them to me.

D.K.

Windsor Gate

Great Neck, New York

codebreaking is the most important form of secret intelligence in the world today. It produces much more and much more trustworthy information than spies, and this intelligence exerts great influence upon the policies of governments. Yet it has never had a chronicler.

It badly needs one. It has been estimated that cryptanalysis saved a year of war in the Pacific, yet the histories give it but passing mention. Churchill's great history of World War II has been cleaned of every single reference to Allied communications intelligence except one (and that based on the American Pearl Harbor investigation), although Britain thought it vital enough to assign 30,000 people to the work. The intelligence history of World War II has never been written. All this gives a distorted view of why things happened. Furthermore, cryptology itself can benefit, like other spheres of human endeavor, from knowing its major trends, its great men, its errors made and lessons learned.

I have tried in this book to write a serious history of cryptology. It is primarily a report to the public on the important role that cryptology has played, but it may also orient cryptology with regard to its past and alert historians to the sub rosa influence of cryptanalysis. The book seeks to cover the entire history of cryptology. My goal has been twofold: to narrate the development of the various methods of making and breaking codes and ciphers, and to tell how these methods have affected men.

When I began this book, I, like other well-informed amateurs, knew about all that had been published on the history of cryptology in books on the subject. How little we really knew! Neither we nor any professionals realized that many valuable articles lurked in scholarly journals, or had induced any cryptanalysts to tell their stories for publication, or had tapped the vast treasuries of documentary material, or had tried to take a long view and ask some questions that now appear basic. I believe it to be true that, from the point of view of the material previously published in books on cryptology, what is new in this book is 85 to 90 per cent.

Yet it is not exhaustive. A foolish secrecy still clothes much of World War II cryptologythough I believe the outlines of the achievements are knownand to tell just that story in full would require a book the size of this. Even in, say, the 18th century, the unexplored manuscript material is very great.

Nor is this a textbook. I have sketched a few methods of solution. For some readers even this will be too much; them I advise skip this material. They will not have a full understanding of what is going on, but that will not cripple their comprehension of the stories. For readers who want more detail on these methods, I recommend, in the rear of this book, some other works and membership in the American Cryptogram Association.

In my writing, I have tried to adhere to two principles. One was to use primary sources as much as possible. Often it could not be done any other way, since nothing had been published on a particular matter. The other principle was to try to make certain that I did not give cryptology sole and total credit for winning a battle or making possible a diplomatic coup or whatever happened if, as was usual, other factors played a role. Narratives which make it appear as if every event in history turned upon the subject under discussion are not history but journalism. They are especially prevalent in spy stories, and cryptology is not immune. The only other book-length attempt to survey the history of cryptology, the late Fletcher Pratt's Secret and Urgent, published in 1939, suffers from a severe case of this special pleading. Pratt writes thrillinglyperhaps for that very reasonbut his failure to consider the other factors, together with his errors and omissions, his false generalizations based on no evidence, and his unfortunate predilection for inventing facts vitiate his work as any kind of a history. (Finding this out was disillusioning, for it was this book, borrowed from the Great Neck Library, that interested me in cryptology.) I think that although trying to balance the story with the other factors may detract a little from the immediate thrill, it charges it with authenticity and hence makes for long-lasting interest: for this is how things really happened.