Overview of 2015

In 2014 I was able to copy a lot of material from government archives in the US, UK, Finland and Germany. At the end of the year I was thinking that i had covered all of the important cases so there wouldn’t be much left to write about in 2015. However it seems I was wrong since I continued to find interesting information on various cases and I wrote some very interesting essays on WWII cryptology.

In January I wrote a review of ‘The imitation game’, received OSS telegram Bern-Washington No 2.181 from NARA’s FOIA office and corrected a mistake I had made in ‘German special intelligence, the M-138 strip cipher and unrest in India’.

In February I rewrote Intercepted conversations - Bell Labs A-3 Speech scrambler and German codebreakers, adding information from several sources, including the Bell Labs report ‘History of speech privacy systems’ and also added information in Italian codebreakers of WWII, mainly from the US report ‘Italian Communications Intelligence Organization’.

In March I completely rewrote Japanese codebreakers of WWII and even added decoded US diplomatic messages from 1941, found in the archive of the Diplomatic records Office, Tokyo (via JACAR-Japan Center for Asian Historical Records). I also linked to the ‘The Journal of Slavic Military Studies’ article ‘Once Again About the T-34’ by Boris Kavalerchik since it contained information that I had used in my essay WWII Myths - T-34 Best Tank of the war.

In April I wrote The codes of the Polish Intelligence network in occupied France 1943-44 and The US Division Field Code plus I solved the mystery of The unscrupulous Italian official and the code of colonel Fellers.

In May I wrote The compromise of the communications of General Barnwell R. Legge, US military attache to Switzerland, The OSS Bern station and the compromise of State Department codes in WWII and I linked to several interesting files released by the NSA as part of the Friedman collection.

During this period my researchers in the US and UK copied several files and managed to locate interesting documents.

In June i wrote a detailed essay on the State Department cipher material transmitted to Japan from their military attaches in Germany and Finland. This pointed to a more serious compromise than has been acknowledged so far in US reports. I also added material from the Friedman collection in several of my essays.

In July I wrote The CIA’s assessment of the Yom Kippur War and continued to add material from the Friedman collection in my essays.

In August I wrote the very interesting essay Allied agents codes and Referat 12. This took a lot of work to get right!

In September I uploaded the TICOM report I-89 ‘Report by Prof Dr. H Rohrbach of Pers Z S on American strip cipher’ and a missing page from Special Research History SRH-366 'History of Army Strip Cipher devices'. This was material that I had requested from the NSA’s FOIA office in 2013. I also wrote a review of The triumph of Zygalski's sheets: the Polish Enigma in the early 1940 and a presentation of Encryptors and Radio Intelligence. Shield and Sword of Information World. After examining new sources I added material to WWII Myths - T-34 Best Tank of the war.

In October I continued adding information in WWII Myths - T-34 Best Tank of the war, this time from a Russian source and after a yearlong search I was able to find some of the telegrams mentioned in the book ‘Hitler, the Allies, and the Jews’.

In November I wrote Compromise of the State Department’s M-138-A strip cipher and the traffic of other US agencies, Report on the solution and processing of the Soviet Army’s 5-figure code, Intelligence operations in Switzerland - Hans von Pescatore, Captain Choynacki and General Barnwell R. Legge, I corrected a mistake in my essay on the Finnish codebreakers and presented C.G.McKay’s website ‘Intelligence Past’.

Looking back I’m impressed with the essays I’ve written and all the material that I was able to collect. Apart from the files I got from my researchers, I benefited from the NSA’s release of the Friedman collection and of course I have to thank the people who gave me valuable information and/or files. I said it last year and I’ll say it again ‘η ισχύς εν τη ενώσει’.

Hopefully in 2016 more information on these cases will become available, as my freedom of information act requests are processed by the NSA.