Unfortunately
their response was ‘a thorough search of our historical files was conducted
but no records responsive to your request were located’.
In September
and October I received two more letters from the NSA and State Department FOIA offices:
1). Professor
Novopaschenny was head of the Russian section of Germany’s OKW/Chi (deciphering
department of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces). Novopaschenny was a
former cryptanalyst of the Tsarist Navy and after the rise of the Communists he
fled Russia and found work as a codebreaker in Britain (possibly for the
Police/Scotland Yard). In the 1920’s he went to Germany where he met Wilhelm Fenner and
together they reorganized OKW/Chi along mathematical/analytical lines.
In 2014 I
requested any postwar reports/interrogations of dr Novopaschenny but it seems
none are to be found as the response from the NSA FOIA office was ‘a
thorough search of our files was conducted but no records responsive to your
request were located’.
Fortunately
there seems to be more information available online!
According to
the recent Wikipedia
page on Novopaschenny he was arrested by the Soviet authorities at the end
of the war and died in 1950 in a camp near the Belorussian city of Orsha.
An unhappy end
for a fascinating individual.
2). In 2015 I
wrote the essay The
compromise of the State Department’s strip cipher – Things that don’t add up…
about the US cipher material transmitted from Finland and Germany to Japan
during WWII.
These were
solved alphabet strips and key lists for the US M-138-A cipher system.
The M-138-A
cipher was used by the State Department for messages classified SECRET and (later
in the war) CONFIDENTIAL.
These
messages revealed that a large number of alphabets had been compromised,
specifically the circular strips 0-1, 0-2, 0-3, 0-4, 0-5 and the specials 10-3,
10-1, 18-1, 4-1, 7-1, 33-1, Vichy, 38-1, 22-1, 20-3 (or 20-4) and 25-4.
That’s why I
wrote:
‘These were just the strips mentioned in the
Japanese traffic and not necessarily the only strips solved by the Axis (15).
Yet the EASI volumes do not mention them. Nor do they mention which systems
were solved by the Finnish codebreakers even though they had a detailed report
on the subject.
There is also no mention of specific
embassies such as Moscow and Bern, whose messages were known to have been read
by the Germans through the material found in the OKW/Chi archives and the OSS
reports.
The EASI volumes are dated May 1946,
so it is understandable that they only had general information on Axis codebreaking
activities. Processing all the captured material would have taken years. Yet
most of the information on the strip cipher was available since early 1945
(16). With the cooperation of the State Department it should have been easy to
identify which embassies used these strips and for how long.’
After I wrote
the essay I decided to investigate further so I requested the relevant
information on the embassies that used these strips from the State Department’s
FOIA office.
The response
I received this month says:
‘Based on the subject matter of your request,
we searched the record systems most likely to maintain responsive records: the
central Foreign Policy Record Files and the Retired Inventory Management System
records. After a thorough search of these systems conducted by professional
employees familiar with their contents and organization, no records responsive
to your request were located.’
It’s a good
thing that I
did my own research on the strip cipher earlier in the year!
