As I’ve
mentioned before the internal Soviet radioteletype network was intercepted
during the 1930’s and 1940’s by
the Germans and postwar by
the Americans.
The
intercepted plaintext traffic concerned economic and military matters and was
of vital importance in finding out what was happening inside the Soviet Union.
However the
Russian Fish intelligence was definitely a case of quantity over quality. This
is clearly mentioned in several TICOM reports and matches the American
assessment during the early cold war period.
Alexis
Dettmann, head of cryptanalysis at the German Army’s cryptanalytic centre in
the East -Horchleitstelle Ost, says in TICOM DF-112:
‘The monitoring and deciphering of internal
radio traffic was not an assignment of army signal intelligence units but
necessarily messages of internal networks were solved and worked on. Special
offices in the former German army were occupied among other things with the
reception of messages of Baudot circuits, the value of the results however
belonged in a different sector. Even in the years 1938/39 a relatively simple
devise was constructed which made it possible to reproduce directly on
typewriters the Baudot messages which in part ware transmitted by high-speed
transmitters. The results from the point of view of content in no wise
corresponded to the expectations. Of the
entire traffic monitored at great expense at best 10% was useful for economic
leaders while military-political matters constituted hardly 1%.. The major
portion of these messages was like the content of the long distance telephone
messages and contained private or business affairs. It was learned that all
these circuits were not only monitored and controlled by the NKVD but in many
cases were directed by it, and that in all probability the GUP-NKVD was also responsible
in large measure for the issue of cryptographic material for internal radio
traffic.’
Otto
Buggisch, a member of the cipher machine department of the German army’s signal
intelligence agency, gives the same percentage in TICOM I-58:
‘Further on Russian Baudot – B. says
that one Dipl. Ing. Gramberg came to group IV with him from In 7/VI (Army
Signal Intelligence) and was used to translate the intercepted clear text in
Russian Baudot. ‘’ 90% of it was
unimportant’’.
The relative
lack of importance of each individual message was also recognized by the
Americans. According to NSA history ‘The
Invisible Cryptologists: African-Americans, WWII to 1956’:
‘The ASA. effort to exploit Russian
plaintext traffic began in 1946 with the part-time assignment of several
linguists to the target. At that time, however, the Agency's emphasis was on
the translation of encrypted messages, and the employment of scarce Russian
linguists on plain text was judged to be unwarranted. Later, in May 1947, the
effort was revised at the Pentagon. Individuals without security clearances or
with partial clearances would sift through volumes of messages and translate
all or parts of those determined to have intelligence value. Placed in charge
of this group was Jacob Gurin, an ASA Russian linguist who had immigrated to
the U.S. with his parents at the age of three.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
From the Agency's inception under
William Friedman, its business was the breaking of codes and ciphers. Once the
underlying text was revealed, individual messages were translated, and, after a
reporting mission was established, selected ones were published on 3" x 5"
cards. While individual decrypted
messages could be extremely valuable, plaintext messages were most often
preformatted status reports that were insignificant when considered singly.
Jack Gurin was convinced that if these messages were assembled and analyzed in the
aggregate, they could yield valuable information on Soviet defense
capabilities.’
For both the
Germans and Americans the limited value of single messages was leveraged by the
huge intercept volumes.
FMS P-038
‘German Radio intelligence’ says: ‘At the
experimental station the volume of recordings, which were made available to the
cryptanalysis and evaluation sections of the Armed Forces Cryptographic Branch
and the Evaluation Control Center of OKH, averaged ten million transmissions a
day.’
Information on the Anglo-American interception is available in NSA history ‘On
Watch: Profiles from the National Security Agency’s past 40 years’:
‘In addition to manual Morse, the Soviets were using a
good deal of [redacted] among others. The Soviet plaintext problem was a SIGINT
success story from the beginning, from the design of electro-mechanical
processing equipment that could handle each new Soviet development to the
painstaking analysis of the intercepted communications. A joint
American-British effort against these communications in the nineteen-forties
led to high intercept volume and new engineering challenges in the face of
proliferating Soviet [redacted] techniques.
At one time the United States and
Britain together were processing as many
as two million plaintext messages a month, messages containing everything from
money orders to birthday greetings. The production task was awesome, with
analysts manually leafing through mountains of page copy, meticulously
screening millions of messages. [redacted] The investment paid off,
leading, to an encyclopedic knowledge of what was going on in the Soviet Union.
Over 95 percent of what the United States knew about Soviet weaponry in the
nineteen-forties came from analysis of plaintext radioprinter traffic. Almost
everything American policy makers learned about the Soviet nuclear energy and
nuclear weapons programs came from [redacted] radioprinter traffic, the result
of fitting together thousands of tiny, selected pieces of the jig saw puzzle.’
