Thursday, March 26, 2009
A reunion at Bletchley Park
Indeed, this is personal for me, as I have wondered whether my father would have been less likely to survive his five years of active duty in the U.S. Navy in the Atlantic (1940-45, the last part of which was on a Destroyer Escort, partly the reason for my screen name) hunting U-Boats, had Bletchley not been providing the intel.
Many of these code breakers would be Silicon Valley gazillionaires had they been born a generation or two later -- their minds have the kind of quantitative analytical brilliance and keen associative characteristics that are common among today's top software engineers. I think history will regard them more kindly for helping to eradicate Western Europe's most heinous regime.
Thank you for a job well done.
16 Comments:
By 
, at
Thu Mar 26, 02:18:00 PM:
While working in London back in the 1980s, I saw Derek Jacobi play Alan Turing in Breaking the Code. Turing was one of the most influential people of the 20th Century, but hardly anyone knows of him. I wouldn't, but for seeing the play.
Link
By , at
Thu Mar 26, 02:23:00 PM:
Escort81:
Glad to see you in prime time!
I attended a funeral yesterday of a family friend, a man who entered Penn in the early 40's as a pre-med major before joining the army. He landed at D-Day and fought at the Battle of the Bulge, where he was wounded. The U.S. Army sent a representative to present the flag to his family, thanked the family on behalf of the President of the United States, and then a bugler sounded taps. It was very moving.
Our friend returned from the war to finish his degree. He opted not to become a physician, went into business, and was a vibrant member of our community (so much so that one of his daughters and his brother-in-law eulogized him as, among other things "a piece of work"). He was a good man.
It's needless to say that the war changed him. Both he and his brother-in-law witnessed many awful things as young men fighting in Europe. They served without hesitation, without question, and we're better off for having them precede us and having known them.
Thanks for sharing this story.
The Centrist
By 
Larry Sheldon, at
Thu Mar 26, 02:58:00 PM:
If you are in England for any reason, Bletchley Park is a must.
Spend at least a day there.
By TOF, at
Thu Mar 26, 03:02:00 PM:
Good point Escort81. Now consider the tables turned, as they were from around 1968 through the time (1985) when John A. Walker, USN (ret.) was caught selling US crypto and crypto hardware to the Soviets.
For how many American deaths can Walker be credited? How many operations went awry because of Walker? It didn't alter the outcome of the Cold War, but it certainly made it more costly for the USA.
I have some personal experience along those lines, having planned and participated in the Linebacker series of strikes against North Vietnam in the last nine months of 1972. The general comments were that the North Vietnamese seemed to know we were coming. Now we know why.
By D.E. Cloutier, at
Thu Mar 26, 04:08:00 PM:
It's nice to see you on the front page, Escort81.
Re: "wondered whether my father would have been less likely to survive"
Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore (1750-1799): "I would rather live one day as a tiger than a lifetime as a sheep.”
- DEC
By Georg Felis, at
Thu Mar 26, 05:14:00 PM:
And if done today, it would be front page headlines in the NY Times. "Republican Secret Wiretap Program Decyphers Both Japanese and German Codes! Diplomats Outraged!
*sigh*
By sleeper, at
Thu Mar 26, 05:36:00 PM:
I would respectfully disagree with the assertion that hardly anyone knows of Alan Turing. As a fast proxy I searched his name on amazon.com: 4,151 results.
By Kinuachdrach, at
Thu Mar 26, 07:03:00 PM:
As a fast proxy benchmark, I googled "Britney Spears" -- 79,100,000 hits.
Lots of people know about our debt to Alan Turing, but even more don't.
By Roy Lofquist, at
Thu Mar 26, 07:55:00 PM:
I highly recommend Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.
Alan Turing is one of the characters in the book as are modern day silicon valley types involved in international finance and hunting the Japanese horde of gold stashed in the Phillipines.
I was in the computer field for 45 years and also had a clearance above Top Secret Crypto. I can assure that the technical and mathematical stuff and the stories are uncannily accurate.
It is also a great read.
By Dawnfire82, at
Thu Mar 26, 09:27:00 PM:
I've got to represent my people in this SIGINT love-fest... the code breakers succeeded because of spies!
Polish intelligence obtained data on an early model of the Enigma that was then smuggled to Britain before they were overrun. It was with this data that the Bletchley Park was able to break the codes and alter the course of the war.
The Code Book, by Simon Singh, describes the story with good detail.
Purple, (the Japanese codes) on the other hand, was done (as far as I know) entirely by American cryptologists and bean counters.
Venona, I think also. But that was later.
By Escort81, at
Thu Mar 26, 09:30:00 PM:
TOF - Glad you made it out of SE Asia. Moles definitely suck. Walker caused huge damage. There is a chapter in Warrior Soul, Chuck Pfarrer's excellent account of his career as an U.S. Navy Seal, describing a mission on the coast of Central America that was intercepted by a Nicaraguan patrol boat, which Pfarrer attributes to intel from Walker. Are you aware of any instance in U.S. history when a U.S. code was broken with brute intellectual force and not with the help of a spy? Don't know, just asking.
DEC - Thanks, I wouldn't be where I am today without you.
Kinuachdrach - I guess Turing never went out in public without any underwear on.
Roy Lofquist - Thanks for the recommendation, I'm headed over to Amazon now.
By Escort81, at
Thu Mar 26, 09:38:00 PM:
DF82 - We posted at the same time. I was going to acknowledge the thing about the acquired Enigma machine. Wasn't that just a good one-off op, and not because of a long time in-place mole? There is kind of a difference in terms of a sense of betrayal, if not effect.
But your point is well taken, and you should "represent": the intelligence community is a team -- dysfunctional, frustrating and stovepiped at times, but still a team.
By Roy Lofquist, at
Thu Mar 26, 10:53:00 PM:
Dear Sirs,
The full story is still unknown - it is classified on a need to know basis. I didn't have a need to know so I am unaware of the details but I have some knowledge about the system.
There was, and still is, a tremendous amount of disinformation shrouding these matters. For instance, the people at Bletchley Park knew that the German naval code was based on an Enigma machine from the very start. In fact, the basic machine was invented at the end of WWI and was used commercially.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine
From the article: "Though the Enigma cipher had cryptographic weaknesses, in practice it was only in combination with other factors (procedural flaws, operator mistakes, occasional captured machines and key tables) that those weaknesses allowed Allied cryptologists to decrypt messages"
The real game was quite macabre: Do you divert the convoy and save 100 lives or do you not tip your hand that you can read the code?
The US mounted a massive disinformation effort to the effect that they had far more surveillance aircraft than they actually had. A plane would serendipitously spot a U-Boat when actually it was a decode. The story of the capture of U505, as depicted in Volume 16 of Victory At Sea
http://www.archive.org/details/VAS_16_Killers_And_The_Kill
was suppressed until two years after the war ended. There was actually sentiment to prosecute the people involved with capture because it was feared that knowledge of it would give the Germans hints.
In the early 50's the US developed the KW-26 machine which operated on a 52 bit key.
http://jproc.ca/crypto/kw26.html
There is speculation that the keys, changed every 24 hours, were generated by a Riemann-Zeta function. In 1957 two NSA employees, Martin and Mitchell, defected to The Soviet Union with the design of the system. This did not compromise our communications but did give the Russians an unreadable code. What the Walker crew did was give the Russkies the daily code.
'Tis murky. And fascinating. There is much more to the tales but my glass is empty and repose beckons.
Regards,
Roy
By Dawnfire82, at
Thu Mar 26, 11:23:00 PM:
"Wasn't that just a good one-off op, and not because of a long time in-place mole?"
Yes. A disaffected German sold the information to a French operative in Belgium for 10,000 marks. (and reportedly blew through it in a single weekend!)
If any further contact was maintained with the agent, I don't know about it. Against expectations, there may not have been; he had already handed over the crown jewels.
Regarding the Walker spy case... the damage done by them was so severe that some sources have claimed that had WWIII broken out at the time, the US would have lost.
By , at
Fri Mar 27, 12:28:00 AM:
This being a Princeton oriented blog, in this context one must bring up the names of Moe Berg '23 and the recently deceased Bob Furman '37.
JLW III P'67
By , at
Fri Mar 27, 05:11:00 PM:
While it's true that the average person doesn't know who Alan Turing is, everybody in the computer industry knows who he is. I dare you to try getting any kind of computer-related degree without hearing the term "Turing Machine".
