CryptoCellar Tales is active again

My friend Frode Weierud has started adding material in his site CryptoCellar Tales. Frode is an expert on WWII crypto history and few people know more on the subject. Let’s hope that he continues to write about these cases.

Update on OSS communications from Bern, Switzerland

After going through my files I’ve discovered more documents that have information on the compromise of OSS communications in WWII. Thus the following paragraphs are added in Allen Dulles and the compromise of OSS codes in WWII:

Report of Sturmbannführer Huegel

SS-Sturmbannführer Dr. Klaus Huegel was an important SD official with knowledge of German intelligence operations in Switzerland and Italy. In CSDIC/CMF/SD 20, he says that when he was working at the SD HQ he saw US intelligence reports from Bern:

‘A daily bulletin from the German High Command Cryptographic Service, OKW CHI, was sent to SS Brigadefuehrer SCHELLENBERG, the Head of Amt VI of the RSHA. It was signed by Generalmajor THIELE. From Apr 43 till Mar 44, source was in Amt VI, and often saw the bulletins. He remembers that the following links were intercepted and their traffic read, translations of matters of interest to Amt VI appearing in the bulletins:

USA Minister HARRISON in BERNE - WASHINGTON: Three or four signals daily, on the average, were intercepted. All traffic was read. This enabled Amt VI to judge the Swiss attitude to GERMANY as seen through American eyes, and also gave a good picture of conditions in GERMANY. Source says that Mr. HARRISON seemed to be particularly well-informed on the situation in MUNICH, for instance on the morale of the people and on rifts between various High Party officials, between GOERING and HIMMLER, RIBBENTROP and HIMMLER, etc. A conclusion drawn on several occasions in the messages was that though the population was restive, no organised underground resistance on a large scale was possible because of the power of the SS and Gestapo and other security bodies. Source says that Amt VI found these messages of great interest, and if any points raised required investigation, it was often found that the information had been correct.’

Under The Finnish connection:

David Kahn interviewed some of the Finnish codebreakers in the 1990’s (Aalto, Loimaranta, Pale) and they clearly remembered US telegrams containing intelligence reports and information on the German Resistance:

‘Q:  Why did you think the Americans used such weak codes?

A: They had no idea about that, the question was why the ambassador's telegram, everything in ….. cipher or ambassador send a list, a long, long telegram about conspiracy against Hitler with all the names. It was a very, very terrible business,

Another voice:  gave them away.

Q: Is that how they caught the conspirators.’

Presentation on solution of historical ciphers

Here is a recent presentation on new methods of solution of historical cipher systems by mr George Lasry.

Well that was fast…

One of the most interesting aspects of Cold War intelligence history is whether the spies recruited by the Western intelligence agencies (mainly CIA and MI6) were supplying real information or whether they were double agents. In his recent article ‘Doubles Troubles: The CIA and Double Agents during the Cold War’, Benjamin B. Fischer (former Chief Historian of the Central Intelligence Agency) makes the case that in Cuba, East Germany and the USSR practically all the CIA agents were in reality under the control of the enemy security services.

The author says:

‘During the Cold War the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) bucked the law of averages by recruiting double agents on an industrial scale; it was hoodwinked not a few but many times. The result was a massive but largely ignored intelligence failure. The facts are available from official sources.’

I thought that the article was very interesting and that’s why I linked to it back in January. The article also mentioned Adolf Tolkachev, the so called Billion Dollar Spy. Fischer said:

‘The CIA touts Adolf Tolkachev as its ‘‘billion-dollar spy’’ during the 1980s, asserting that the Soviet electronics researcher saved the Pentagon several times that amount in research and development (R&D) and production costs with purloined information on Soviet military radar and avionics. I believe, however, that Tolkachev was a double agent, in fact the precursor to the dangles who came after his 1985 arrest………..Tolkachev was not the only double on the CIA’s payroll. SE Division was handling another agent encrypted EASTBOUND, who also was selling information on military radars. Soviet and East German sources have confirmed that the anonymous agent was a double. I believe that Tolkachev and EASTBOUND were fraternal twins.’

This article which appeared in a journal with a limited readership seems to have attracted a lot of attention. The 'great' researchers of the National Security Archive have immediately followed up with the transcripts of a Politburo discussion on Tolkachev.

I don’t know why this organization was so interested in this case or how they were able to follow up Fischer’s article so quickly. Since they have such 'superior' investigative skills they could also look into the compromise of Allied codes and ciphers in WWII. That’s research that I’d like to see!

German signals intelligence files in the Russian national archives

At the end of WWII parts of the German state archives were captured by the Soviet forces and taken to the Soviet Union. There they were placed in various Soviet state archives and kept out of reach of researchers. With the fall of the Soviet Union these archives were opened to researchers but not many people have taken advantage of that. Thankfully some of these German documents have recently become available online. The website of The Russian-German project to digitize German documents in the archives of the Russian Federation has uploaded a large number of German documents from WWI and WWII.

The site says:

‘As a result of the anti-Hitler coalition victory in the Second World War, documents of Nazi Germany turned up in many countries, including Russia. Largest collections of German documents are kept in the Federal archives of the Russian Federation (State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), the Russian State Military Archive (RGVA) and the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI)), and in the Central Archive of the Russian Ministry of Defense (TsAMO). The project to digitize German documents was initiated by the administration of the Russian President in 2011. It is executed by the Russian Historical Society, the Ministry of Defense and the Federal archival agency with support from the German Historical Institute in Moscow. Coordination committee, overseeing the digitization project, is headed by S.E. Naryshkin, the Chairman of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation.’

Regarding German sigint activities during WWII, the search terms ‘Nachrichten Aufklärung’ and ‘horchtruppen’ bring up many interesting documents. For example:

Baudot traffic

Reports of Kommandeur der Horchtruppen Ost

Reports of Nachrichten Aufklärung Auswertestelle 2

I will be adding some of this information in my essays.

Interesting articles from academic journals

There are several journals that deal with military and intelligence history and I try to follow some of them in case they publish articles that deal with signals intelligence. Here are some interesting articles from 2015 and early 2016:

Cryptologia

Soviet VIC Cipher: No Respector of Kerckoff's Principles

Automated Known-Plaintext Cryptanalysis of Short Hagelin M-209 Messages

History and Modern Cryptanalysis of Enigma's Pluggable Reflector

Some Diplomatic Ciphers of the First Mexican Federal Republic (1824–1830)

A Historical Survey of Romanian Intelligence

J. F. W. Nuboer and the Reintroduction of Machine Cryptography by the Royal Netherlands Navy, 1915–1940

Intelligence and National Security

The Institution of Modern Cryptology in the Netherlands and in the Netherlands East Indies, 1914–1935

Germany and Chongqing: Secret Communication during WWII

Soviet Bloc and Western Bugging of Opponents’ Diplomatic Premises During the Early Cold War

International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence

Doubles Troubles: The CIA and Double Agents during the Cold War

Ghosts of the Spy Wars: A Personal Reminder to Interested Parties

The “Star Wars” Murders: Revisiting a Cold Case from the Cold War

In the Shadow of the Gestapo: German Secret Police Intelligence in East Asia, 1939–1945

Li Kenong and the Practice of Chinese Intelligence

Journal of Slavic Military Studies

Once Again About the T-34

The Key to the Balkans: The Battle for Serbia 1944

Compromise of US cipher teleprinter in 1944

When the United States entered WWII several cryptosystems were in use by its armed forces and diplomatic service. The Army and Navy used a small number of SIGABA cipher machines for their high level traffic and had to rely on a large number of hand systems, such as the M-138-A and M-94 strip ciphers and the War Department Telegraph Code 1919, Military Intelligence Code, War Department Confidential Code codebooks, for the rest of the traffic. The State Department relied almost exclusively on hand systems, specifically the codebooks A1, B1, C1, D1, Gray, Brown and the M-138-A strip cipher.

In the course of the war modern cipher machines were designed and built to replace the old systems and securely cover all types of traffic. In 1942 the M-209 device was used in the field and in 1943 the cipher teleprinters Converter M-228 - SIGCUM and SIGTOT were introduced in communications networks. In the summer of ’43 a new speech privacy device called SIGSALY became operational and the first system was used on the link Pentagon-London.  In late 1943 the CCM - Combined Cipher Machine was used in the Atlantic and in 1944-45 the British relied on the CCM as much as they did on their own Typex. 

By the end of the war the Americans were using several types of cipher machines, all offering a high level of security. William Friedman, head of cipher research at the Army Security Agency, stated in his 1945 reports that the primary US cipher machines SIGABA and Converter M-228 had proven completely secure against enemy cryptanalysts.

In the report ‘Security of our high-grade cryptographic systems’, dated March 1945 he said:

‘We come now to what, in the circumstances, must be considered as the strongest and most reliable evidence—that which is inferential in and is based upon German cryptography itself. We know so much about their practices that we can deduce and assess their cryptographic theories and thus determine the stage of development they have reached not only in cryptography but also in cryptanalytics. The overwhelming evidence is that they are far behind us and have no appreciation of solution techniques which we now regard as commonplace’.

‘To summarize: At the risk of sounding boastful, it will be stated that the Japanese are not as good as the Germans, and the latter are not as good as we are in cryptography and especially in cryptanalysis…… the conclusion must therefore be clear: They cannot read and are not reading our high-grade cipher traffic’.

In the report ‘important contributions to communications security, 1939-1945; summary of contributions made by mr. Friedman’, he said about SIGABA and SIGCUM:

‘We know now from Ticom reports that neither the Japanese nor the Germans had the slightest success in their efforts to solve messages in the Sigaba, though the Germans certainly tried hard enough. The absolute security of Army and Navy high command and high echelon communications throughout the war was made possible by the Sigaba’.

‘Results of Ticom operations have established that neither the Germans nor the Japanese were successful in their efforts to solve our Sigcum traffic, despite its great volume, and it is my belief that had we used this machine for secret radio-teletype communications no serious harm to our security would have followed’.

Was Friedman correct? Were all high grade US cipher machines secure during the war?

Unanswered questions of WWII cryptology – progress report

In January 2015 I wrote a summary of the progress I had made in researching some very interesting cases of cryptologic history. What is the state of these cases now? Let’s see.

1). US State Department strip cipher

This case has been (by far) the most difficult of those I’ve had to research. Despite this I was able to make real progress in 2015. I located the report ‘JAT write up - selections from JMA traffic' and used it to write an essay on the material transmitted from Germany and Finland to Japan, I received the report  I-89 ‘Report by Prof Dr. H Rohrbach of Pers Z S on American strip cipher’ and wrote Compromise of the State Department’s M-138-A strip cipher and the traffic of other US agencies.

Also during the year I managed to find a lot of material on the Finnish codebreakers and their work on the M-138-A strip cipher. Regarding the Carlson-Goldsberry report the NSA’s FOIA office has managed to locate it but releasing it will take time.

2). NKVD 5^th Department codebreakers

No new information has been published on the work and achievements of the Soviet codebreakers except for some online articles in Russian websites. The article ‘О ВКЛАДЕ СОВЕТСКИХ КРИПТОГРАФОВ В ПОБЕДУ ПОД МОСКВОЙ’, referenced in the book ‘Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence’, says that in late 1942 the Soviet codebreakers analyzed the Enigma cipher machine and developed ways of solving it. However their efforts failed in January 1943 due to German security measures.

3). Referat Vauck success

After locating the reports of Referat 12 i was able to write the detailed essay Allied agents codes and Referat 12. I’ve also requested the postwar interrogation reports of Dr Wilhelm Vauck from the NSA. However locating and declassifying them will take some time.

4). Forschungsamt information

According to the NSA’s FOIA office the Forschungsamt files are coming up for review.

5). German Enigma investigations

The reports of the German Army’s codebreakers on the Enigma are available from government archives in the US and Germany. Unfortunately no one has read and commented on them.

6). Japanese Purple and Coral cipher machines

Regarding the possibility of the Germans solving the Japanese Purple cipher machine I haven’t found any new information but in 2013 I had a brief conversation with mr Otto Leiberich, who worked in the German cipher department during the Cold War period. He told me that he had spoken with mr Cort Rave about this case and he was able to give me some additional information. I’ll write about this soon.

7). Soviet diplomatic code

I’m satisfied with the material I’ve found but there is still the possibility that the Germans solved some OTP traffic during WWII. Even if they did it is possible that the files were destroyed during the war.

8). M-209 decoding device

In 2015 I said ‘I have to say I’m still surprised that this device has not received any attention from historians and/or the media!’ Since then nothing has changed.

9). Unknown unknowns

As Donald Rumsfeld said ‘….. there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know…’.

Clearly there are cases that researchers have completely missed. I’ve been able to identify one such case and will be presenting it soon.