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The piece of paper that fooled Hitler
- cperciva 16y agoDoes anyone know if all the intercepted German WW2 dispatches have been decrypted? If there's a pile of undecrypted dispatches sitting in a vault somewhere, it could be of great interest to historians if someone applied modern computers and code-breaking techniques to them.
- redthrowaway 16y agoWe wouldn't need any codebreaking techniques; we know their encryption method. I suspect feeding the papers through OCR would be the most time consuming part. I doubt decrypting would take any longer than SSL.
- philh 16y agoWe know the method, but we also need the key used for any particular message, unless Enigma has been thoroughly broken. IIRC (from The Code Book), at the end of the war Bletchley park couldn't break German naval messages. (They used the same machine as everyone else, but with less predictable messages.) Am I missing something?
- Retric 16y agoThe search space is small enough that the only "hard" part is telling if the message is properly decoded. They might not have used predictable messages but simply testing for the number of German words / phrases in a given output should work just as well. Assuming the actual messages are not overly cryptic.
- eftpotrm 16y agoWasn't the whole point of Collossus that it was brute-forcing the messages on the more complex Naval keys until it found a candidate match? That's certainly what I remember from visiting Bletchley Park. In any case, there are now (finally!) software implementations that are significantly faster than the reproduced hardware Collossus, so even if I'm not fully right brute-forcing messages should be viable.
- mckoss 16y agoFrom my understanding, Collossus was not used against Enigma, but rather, Tuny (an teletype based 5 bit XOR stream cipher).
- eftpotrm 16y agoTunny was the British codename for data from the Lorenz machine, which is what Collossus was working on. The original Enigma machines were attacked by Bombe machines developed by Polish codebreakers pre-war.
- redrobot5050 16y agoYes, you are. Fortunately, Wiki backed my understanding of the situation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_Machine#Military_Enigma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_Machine#Military_Enigma In short, the Navy, specifically U boats, used a non-standard, stronger crypto (in this, more rotors) Enigma machine, called M4. They formed their own Enigma network called "Triton" which the allies called "Shark". Due to their hardening, and less message sent for traffic analysis, these machines were "safer" against cryptanalysis.
- pmiller2 16y agoActually, there is one message left to be decrypted. See http://www.bytereef.org/m4_project.html http://www.bytereef.org/m4_project.html . Since the link points to a distributed project dedicated to decrypting the last 3 undecrypted Enigma messages, we can safely assume there's significant computational effort necessary.
- redthrowaway 16y agoThis reminds me, I'm still reading Cryptonomicon. I find Stephenson's work to be really hard to get into, then hard to put down once you do. Guess I'll keep at it.
- ErrantX 16y agoI like this story, because it draws the whole complex masquerade operation together around a nice focal point. Fortitude was a very complicated operation (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fortitude http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fortitude, it even involved faking two entire fictitious armies :D) but executed brilliantly - one of my favourite pieces of war history.
- oiuytghyujki 16y agoAmateurs! One modern leader of an impoverished 3rd world country managed to fake an entire nuclear, biological, chemical warfare capability and the ICBMs necessary to attack Britain within 45mins. And he did it so successfully we were forced to invade.
- endtime 16y ago>so successfully we were forced to invade. I'd argue that that constitutes a failure mode...
- sp332 16y agoAfter doing it once, he had a lot of credibility when he said "Hey, remember the centrifuges the Germans helped us build in the 80's? and the chemical weapons we bought from Germany, refined with French equipment, and used to genocide the Kurds? Yeah, we're doing that stuff again." https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Al-Anfal_Campaign https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Al-Anfal_Camp... https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Iraq_and_weap...
- paulgerhardt 16y agoPerhaps you'll like the Bodyguard of Lies (http://www.amazon.com/Bodyguard-Lies-Extraordinary-Story-Behind/dp/1585746924 http://www.amazon.com/Bodyguard-Lies-Extraordinary-Story-Beh...). It largely focuses on the utilitarian sacrifices that were forcibly made in order to maintain the intelligence advantage.
- anarchitect 16y agoFrom the headline I thought this was going to be about Operation Mincemeat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat) which is a pretty amazing story.
- sliverstorm 16y agoI thought the same thing, and was very skeptical about all this 'published for the first time!' as I could swear there was a fictional-historical movie made around the 60's based on the premise of Operation Mincemeat!
- tygorius 16y agoPerhaps you're thinking of "36 Hours", where German psychologist Rod Taylor tries to convince drugged and captured Army officer James Garner that the war is long over, the Nazis vanquished, but he's suffering from amnesia that occurred years later. As part of your therapy to recover your memory, if you could just confirm that you remember where and when the invasion occurred... Mincemeat is offstage, but I think it was part of the set up. Saw it in a theater when I was a lad -- too young to properly appreciate Eva Marie Saint, alas.
- dlokshin 16y agoEasily my favorite spy story from WWII. For those interested, fantastic book on Operation Mincemeat: http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Never-Was-Counter-Intelligence/dp/1557504482/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1296137984&sr=8-3 http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Never-Was-Counter-Intelligence...
- parenthesis 16y agoAlso on Operation Mincemeat: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11887115 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11887115
- highzeth 16y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat should also be noted. Not only an amazing story/execution, but its successful outcome did have; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat#Impact_on_later_operations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat#Impact_on_l... Well worth reading the book by the same name.
- michaelty 16y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Pujol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Pujol Somebody needs to make a movie about this man.
- barredo 16y agoThere's a documentary (2009, imdb link: http://www.imdb.es/title/tt1344315/ http://www.imdb.es/title/tt1344315/) called "Garbo, the Spy" (Garbo was one of his nicknames). It's in spanish but i'm pretty sure there are english subtitles on the DVD. This work won the Goya (Spanish National Cinema Award) last year for better documentary. I read the article and thought: "At least, some british recognition to Pujol" :-)
- BluePoints 16y agoI want to know how one actively becomes a 'double agent' - anyone know any books that tell the 'story' here or in similar cases?
- elwin 16y agoBecause of their code-breaking, British intelligence was able to catch most German agents as soon as they arrived. Some of them were given the opportunity to "turn double". One example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Chapman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Chapman
- InclinedPlane 16y agoNote that "given the opportunity" meant "given the choice between execution and turning double agent".
- InclinedPlane 16y agoNote that "given the opportunity" meant "given the choice between execution and turning double agent", though some chose to turn themselves in and offer themselves up as double agents of their own will.
- jacquesm 16y agoIn light of this I'd like to point out jgc's efforts to help preserve Bletchley Park: http://blog.jgc.org/2010/01/1000-for-bletchley-park-thanks-to-geek.html http://blog.jgc.org/2010/01/1000-for-bletchley-park-thanks-t...
- markkat 16y agoThis is very tangential, but I just happened to finish the "Guns of August" by Barbara Tuchman last night. If any HN military history buffs have not read it yet, do pick it up. Although about the opening of WWI, it provides some great insight into both World Wars.
- logjam 16y agoAmazing book, highly detailed. Watching the madness of supposedly rational men bowing to militarism and nationalism, whipped along by supposedly inviolate plans and timetables, creating the conditions for not one but two world wars...it's all the stuff of nightmares.
- markkat 16y agoAgreed. And yet, you walk away better understanding how those nightmares can become reality. By chance, I picked up Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror" from a sidewalk seller, and was struck by her ability to address so many parts of a whole. After finding that she won the Pulitzer for "The Guns of August", I had to read it. I've heard that JFK was a big fan of "The Guns of August", and made it required reading in his cabinet. As an aside, Tuchman is now recognized for the following reflection, which is often paraphrased as Tuchman's Law: "Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening, on a lucky day, without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena." Oh, BTW: On the topic of encryption, I can't believe the Russians were sending unencrypted orders in WWI over wireless!
- Mithrandir 16y agoAnother excellent book is "Inside the Third Reich" by Albert Speer (ex Minister of Armaments.) Definitely worth the time. http://www.archive.org/details/Inside_the_Third_Reich_Albert_Speer http://www.archive.org/details/Inside_the_Third_Reich_Albert... http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Third-Reich-Albert-Speer/dp/0684829495 http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Third-Reich-Albert-Speer/dp/068...
- stcredzero 16y agoI from a crypto history book I read in high school: in WWI, German intercepts of Russian transmissions have the Russians illusions of German tactical genius. Somehow, Germans would often be in position to confound the Russians. The reason for this: Russian code clerks were badly trained. Sometimes there would be a couple of attempts to send a message followed by a plain-text transmission by the frustrated code clerk. This was a tremendous boon to German cryptographers in the long term as well as a giveaway of tactical maneuvers in the short term. In WWII, the Germans had their turn at incompetence. Enigma machines were supposed to be "warmed up" by 3 random characters. The purpose of this is like an Initial Vector or a "nonce" in modern block cipher use -- a bit of entropy to help obscure often almost identical message headers. A lot of German code clerks were lazy and just typed in "AAA", which helped out the Bletchley Park cryptographers a lot. Modern crypto technology is often very good, but only if used correctly. Security fails most often because of human error. (This includes programmers!)
- oiuytghyujki 16y agoAll crypto systems fail when faced with human operators! There was one story of an Afrika corp operator who sent HIT - LER as the 2 'secret' triplets every day for the entire North Africa campaign. Then disastrously he was captured! It's an interesting question as to whether at least the best (4-wheel naval) system could be cracked without operator error or deliberate plain text seeding. The only flaw of the enigma is that a letter cannot be encrypted to itself - I have heard different accounts of if this was enough to always make it crackable.
- protomyth 16y agoAll crypto systems fail when faced with human operators! Also doesn't help if you don't destroy your crypto books / equipment when boarded: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-505 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-505
- oiuytghyujki 16y agoIt's an interesting bit of military psychology that while every side in WWII broke their enemy's codes - all of them believed all their own codes to be unbreakable!
- paolomaffei 16y agoSo thanks to this piece of paper West Germany and probably Itay and Austria too didn't become communist states because the Americans got there before the Russians? Phew.
- danshapiro 16y agoDid anyone else notice that the BBC tarted up their headline to the point that it's actually false? The piece of paper was written by the Germans. It didn't "fool" them. It was proof that the Germans had been fooled, but I guess that's not quite as good for linkbait.
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- oiuytghyujki 16y agoIf you have broken the enemies crypto AND he doesn't know you have - then you can also send fake messages which they are going to believe. So the Brits could have sent a message ordering a few panzer armies from Normandy to the Pas de Calais. It doesn't seem that this was ever done - presumably because it gave the game away. Even more interestingly - the Brits kept secret that they had cracked enigma into the 1980s because after the war they distributed the 'uncrackable' German code machine to lots of rather gullible allies
- ryanc 16y agoEye of the Needle by Ken Follett is a great fictionalized spy novel centered around Operation Fortitude and spy catching in the UK during the second world war.
- bitwize 16y agoFun fact: The RUSI official quoted in this article, Amyas Godfrey, was a child star on You Can't Do That on Television.
- hugh3 16y agoWell, now there's an interesting fact I don't know.
- contagion 16y agoPretty monumental read, going to take its place in the history books. Nice to see the wide range of HN articles out there.
- insight 16y agothe brits did quiet a few things right, apparently