In the past I simply said nothing because I wanted the file
but now I’m too old for this shit.
Military and intelligence history mostly dealing with World War II.
Monday, December 17, 2018
Cancellation of my NARA FOIA cases
After being treated poorly one time too many I’ve decided to
cancel my two FOIA cases with the US National archives (‘Interrogation of mr
Hayashi’ and the two missing reports of NAASt 5).
Overview of 2018
This year I
continued to research several cases of cryptologic history, I copied material
from the US and UK national archives and I received reports from the NSA’s FOIA
office. I also received some interesting files from friends of mine.
State Department’s strip cipher – reuse of alphabet strips and key lists (added info and made corrections)
1). Original
information was presented in the following essays:
2). I posted
a presentation of the book The
Tanks of Operation Barbarossa and a Q&A with the author.
3). I
uploaded the following files:
4). I updated
the following essays:
The
British Interdepartmental Cypher (added a pic of the ID codebook)
Rommel’s
microwave link (added a link and info on patent US2211132A)
The
Japanese FUJI diplomatic cipher 1941-43 (added info from TICOM DF-31B)
The
Soviet K-37 ‘Crystal’ cipher machine (added info from TICOM DF-217)
The
American M-209 cipher machine (added the paragraph ‘M-209 vs Enigma’)
Allen
Dulles and the compromise of OSS codes in WWII (added information from
the Higgs memorandum)
Compromise
of State Department communications in WWII (added info and made
corrections)
The
compromise of the State Department’s strip cipher – Things that don’t add up…
(made corrections)
State Department’s strip cipher – reuse of alphabet strips and key lists (added info and made corrections)
5). I added
links to several interesting sources:
Overall this
was a productive year and many important files were located. There remain a
handful of reports that I’m waiting for to be declassified. Hopefully that will
happen in 2019.
Saturday, December 8, 2018
Reports on enemy successes against US cryptosystems
I have uploaded the file ‘Reports
on enemy successes against US cryptosystems’.
The source was US National archives - collection RG457 -
Entry 9032 - box 1.367 - NR 4263.
There is an interesting report in that file concerning the
German exploitation of the US M-209 cipher machine in late 1944 and early 1945:
NA 7 Sigint HQ was the Signal Intelligence Evaluation Center
of KONA 7 (Kommandeur der Nachrichtenaufklärung - Signals Intelligence Regiment)
covering Italy.
According to TICOM report IF-272 only two reports of KONA 7 survived
WWII. These were E-Bericht IV/44 and E-Bericht I/45.
Unfortunately I don’t know where to find them.
Thursday, November 29, 2018
Update
In the The
American M-209 cipher machine I’ve added the following under ‘Additional
information’:
M-209 vs
Enigma:
Regarding the
cryptologic strength of the M-209 machine versus the plugboard Enigma, the
expert on classical cipher systems George
Lasry (15) has stated:
‘One comment about the security of the M-209.
The claim that the Enigma is more secure than the M- 209 is disputable.
1) The best modern ciphertext-only
algorithm for Enigma (Ostward and Weierud, 2017) requires no more than 30
letters. My new algorithm for M-209 requires at least 450 letters (Reeds,
Morris, and Ritchie needed 1500). So the M-209 is much better protected against
ciphertext-only attacks.
2) The Turing Bombe – the best known-plaintext
attack against the Enigma needed no more than 15-20 known plaintext letters.
The best known-plaintext attacks against the M-209 require at least 50 known
plaintext letters.
3) The Unicity Distance for Enigma is
about 28, it is 50 for the M-209.
4) The only aspect in which Enigma is
more secure than M-209 is about messages in depth (same key). To break Enigma,
you needed a few tens of messages in depth. For M-209, two messages in depth
are enough. But with good key management discipline, this weakness can be
addressed.
Bottom line – if no two messages are
sent in depth (full, or partial depth), then the M-209 is much more secure than
Enigma’.
I also added
Lasry’s M-209 articles in the notes:
Sunday, November 25, 2018
Friday, November 9, 2018
Interesting articles
1). From ‘Journal
of Intelligence History’: ‘From
improvisation to permanence: American perspectives on the U.S. signals
intelligence relationship with Britain, 1940–1950’.
However I have
to disagree with the following statement:
‘One of Friedman’s reasons for visiting TICOM
was to confirm that the Germans had been unable to break any Allied high-grade
encryption systems during the war. That spring, senior Army officers had asked
why he was so confident that these systems remained invulnerable. Friedman
responded that captured German documents contained no suggestion any major
Allied systems had been broken, only the less sophisticated M-209 device and
even then only when Allied code clerks made mistakes. ‘The overwhelming
evidence’ Friedman concluded, ‘is that they are far behind us and have no
appreciation of solution techniques we now regard as commonplace.’ For him, the
Germans’ inability to penetrate Allied cryptographic systems reflected their
‘supreme confidence’ in Enigma. What Friedman learned from the TICOM effort
confirmed his view that British and American successes in cryptanalysis and
cryptography far exceeded those of the Germans’.
cough Compromise
of US cipher teleprinter in 1944 cough United
States cryptologic security failures in WWII cough
2). From ‘Intelligence
and National Security’: ‘Protecting
secrets: British diplomatic cipher machines in the early Cold War, 1945–1970’.
Regarding Typex
it says that model 22 (with movement of all 5 rotors and two plugboards) was
introduced in 1950 and not during WWII as claimed by some sites:
‘In 1946, the British authorities decided to
further modify Typex to increase its cryptographic strength. The rotors and turnover
mechanism were redesigned so that all rotors would turn as a message was encrypted
and the machine was fitted with a pluggable ‘crossover’ at the entry and exit
to the wiring maze. This new version of Typex was ready for service in
September 1950 and it was predicted that it would provide adequate cipher security
for another 10 years.’
Wednesday, November 7, 2018
Resurrection of the Hayashi case
Recently
I stated that I had given up on trying to locate an NSA report called ‘Interrogation
of mr Hayashi’.
However
after looking at the finding
aid to NSA transfer group TR-0457-2016-0017 I saw that there is a file
titled ‘INTERROGATION HAYASHI, TOKURO, 26
APRIL 1950 (S-058,590)’.
It
is reasonable to assume that this is the file I was looking for so NARA’s FOIA office
has reopened the case.
Let’s
hope that it will be declassified soon.
Monday, November 5, 2018
Saturday, November 3, 2018
Saturday, October 13, 2018
Entry 9032 finding aid
I have
uploaded the finding aid to US National Archives - collection RG 457 (Records
of the National Security Agency) - entry 9032.
Note that
this is not the only entry in collection RG 457.
Tuesday, October 2, 2018
More interesting USSBS interrogation reports
USSBS Japan – ‘Japanese
Communication Intelligence’, Serial No. 208 – Commander Ozawa
I’ve added
the first three in the sources of Japanese
codebreakers of WWII.
Saturday, September 29, 2018
Greek civil war decrypts
In the site primarysources.brillonline.com
there are several decrypted Greek Communist military radio messages dated 1948.
These messages
were deciphered by the US Army Security Agency.
Unfortunately
no NARA reference is given but from the notes in some of them it seems they can
be found in collection RG 38
1). U.S.
Army, Report, Greece: Move of GHQ of the Greek Democratic Army, March 4, 1948,
Top Secret Glint
3). U.S.
Army, Report, Greece: Thessaly Hq of the Greek Democratic Army, April 3, 1948,
Top Secret Glint
4). U.S.
Army, Report, Greece: Agent Traffic on Greek Guerrilla Network, May 20, 1948,
Top Secret Glint
6). U.S.
Army, Report, Greece: Rebel Supply Depot Probably in Bulgaria, June 8, 1948,
Top Secret Glint
Wednesday, September 19, 2018
Monday, September 10, 2018
German solution of State Department A-1 Code in 1944
During WWII the US State Department used several codebooks
for enciphering radio telegrams. These were the low level Gray and Brown codes
and the high level A1, B1 and C1 codes.
The latter codebooks were used with substitution tables.
It is clear that the German codebreakers were able to solve
the substitution tables used with the A1 and C1 codes till late 1943 because
these were given to the Japanese and decoded by the Allies in late 1944 (1):
According to a message of the Japanese military attaché the
C1 code continued to be used by the US embassy in Bern, Switzerland so those
messages could be read in 1944 (2):
Were the Germans also able to read messages enciphered on
the A1 codebook in 1944?
The book ‘Hitler,
the Allies, and the Jews’ by Shlomo Aronson mentions a message solved by
the codebreakers of OKW/Chi (German High Command’s deciphering department) (3):
‘At the same time, the
OKW/Chi decrypts tell us in their way what the Allies were doing in various
ways, including the hectic activities of WRB's operatives upon its inception.
Thus, the following cable from Washington, dated February 9, 1944, from the
State Department and signed by Secretary of State Cordell Hull but in fact sent
by the WRB to the American Legation in Bern, dealt with funds made available to
the International Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva to help Jews in Rumania, Croatia,
Hungary, Slovakia, and Theresienstadt by the Joint Distribution Committee
(AJDC), as authorized by the Treasury Department’.
The original message can be found in the US National Archives (4)
and the classification is SECRET.
The note on the first page says A-1 so I assume that it was
sent using the A-1 codebook.
Thus it seems that the Germans continued to read
diplomatic traffic sent on the A-1 code even in 1944.
Sources:
(1). US National Archives - collection RG 457 - Entry 9032 -
box 1.018 - NR3225 ‘JAT write up - selections from JMA traffic'
(2). UK National archives HW 40/132 ‘Decrypts relating to
enemy exploitation of US State Department cyphers, with related correspondence’.
(3). ‘Hitler,
the Allies, and the Jews’, p200.
(4). US National Archives - Microfilm Publication M1284, roll 38,
indexed to file ‘840.48 Refugees/5195’.
Saturday, September 8, 2018
Remaining research projects
What files am I still trying to locate? Let’s see.
1). TICOM report I-40
I requested this file from the NSA FOIA office in 2015. It
was quickly located and placed in the review queue. However it has not been
declassified yet…
2). NAAS 5 reports:
There are two German Army signal intelligence reports
covering the work of the NAAS 5 unit for the second half of 1944:
E-Bericht 4/44 der NAAst 5 (Berichtszeit
1.7-30.9.44) dated 10.10.44
E-Bericht der NAAst 5 (Berichtszeit
1.10.44-30.12.44) dated 14.1.45
According to the NSA FOIA office they are probably in transfer
group TR-0457-2017-0010.
These files have been sent to the US National archives
so I have to wait for NARA to process these files and then I can ask them to
locate the NAAS 5 reports (assuming they are really there…).
3). Henriksson report:
According to my information on 18 October 1944 there was a
meeting in Sweden between the US officials Wilho Tikander and L. Randolph Higgs
and the Finnish officials Reino
Hallamaa and Karl-Erik
Henriksson.
Henriksson was
the Finnish expert on US codes and ciphers and in this meeting he gave the
Americans detailed information on the compromise of their diplomatic
communications.
My researcher and
the NARA research department have checked the files in collection RG 84
‘Records of the Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State’ - ‘US
Legation/Embassy Stockholm, Sweden’ - ‘Top Secret General Records File: 1944’
but they could not locate this file.
Thus I have filed FOIA requests with NARA and the State Department
regarding this file. Maybe I’ll get lucky.
Saturday, August 18, 2018
Tuesday, August 14, 2018
Cryptology files on Elizebeth Friedman and Coast Guard Unit 387
Uploaded to archive.org by mr Jason Fagone.
Friday, August 10, 2018
Sunday, July 29, 2018
TICOM DF-174A
The report has information on the Enigma cipher machine, the SG 39 cipher machine and the Enigma modification LĂĽckenfĂĽllerwalze.
Tuesday, July 17, 2018
‘Experiences 1920-1939’
Site governmentattic.com
has uploaded the NSA report ‘Experiences
1920-1939’ by Brigadier John H. Tiltman.
Friday, July 6, 2018
Update
In Allen
Dulles and the compromise of OSS codes in WWII I’ve added the information
from the Higgs
memorandum.
Thursday, July 5, 2018
The Higgs memorandum - Compromise of State Department communications by the Finnish codebreakers in WWII
During WWII
the US State Department used several cryptosystems in order to protect its
radio communications from the Axis powers. For low level messages the
unenciphered Gray and Brown codebooks were used. For important
messages four different codebooks (A1,
B1, C1, D1) enciphered with substitution tables were available.
Their most
modern and (in theory) secure system was the M-138-A
strip cipher. Unfortunately for the Americans this system
was compromised and diplomatic messages were read by the Germans, Finns,
Japanese, Italians and Hungarians. The strip
cipher carried the most important diplomatic traffic of the United States
(at least until mid/late 1944) and by reading these messages the Axis powers
gained insights into global US policy.
Germans,
Finns and Japanese cooperated on the solution of the strip cipher. In 1941
the Japanese gave to the Germans alphabet strips and numerical keys that they
had copied from a US consulate in 1939 and these were passed on by the Germans
to their Finnish allies in 1942. Then in 1943 the Finns started sharing their
results with Japan.
Finnish
solution of State Department cryptosystems
During WWII
the Finnish
signal intelligence service worked mostly on Soviet military and NKVD
cryptosystems however they did have a small diplomatic section located in Mikkeli. This department had
about 38 analysts, with the majority working on US codes.
Head of the
department was Mary Grashorn. Other important people were Pentti Aalto
(effective head of the US section) and the experts on the M-138 strip
cipher Karl
Erik Henriksson and Kalevi Loimaranta.
Their main
wartime success was the solution of the State Department’s M-138-A cipher. The
solution of this high level system gave them access to important diplomatic
messages from US embassies in Europe and around the world.
Apart from
purely diplomatic traffic they were also able to read messages of other US
agencies that used State department cryptosystems, such as the OSS
-Office of Strategic Services Bern station, Military
Attaché in Switzerland, Office
of War Information representative in Switzerland, the
Foreign Economic Administration, War Shipping Administration, Office of
Lend-Lease Administration and the War Refugee Board.
Operation
Stella Polaris
In September
1944 Finland signed an armistice with the Soviet Union. The people in charge of
the Finnish signal intelligence service anticipated this move and fearing a
Soviet takeover of the country had taken measures to relocate the radio service
to Sweden. This operation was called Stella Polaris (Polar Star).
In late
September roughly 700 people, comprising members of the intelligence services
and their families were transported by ship to Sweden. The Finns had come to an
agreement with the Swedish intelligence service that their people would be
allowed to stay and in return the Swedes would get the Finnish crypto archives
and their radio equipment. At the same time colonel Hallamaa, head of the
signals intelligence service, gathered funds for the Stella Polaris group by
selling the solved codes in the Finnish archives to the Americans, British and
Japanese.
The Stella
Polaris operation was dependent on secrecy. However the open market for Soviet
codes made the Swedish government uneasy. In the end most of the Finnish
personnel chose to return to Finland, since the feared Soviet takeover did not
materialize.
The Higgs
memorandum
In September
1944 colonel Hallamaa met
with L. Randolph Higgs, an official of the US embassy in Sweden and told him
about their successes with US diplomatic codes and ciphers.
This
information was summarized in a report prepared by Higgs, dated 30 September
1944.
The report
can be found in the US National Archives - collection RG 84 ‘Records of the
Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State’ - ‘US Legation/Embassy
Stockholm, Sweden’ - ‘Top Secret General Records File: 1944’.
Higgs met
with colonel Hallamaa on September 29 and the OSS officials Tikander and Cole
were also present during their discussion.
Hallamaa
stated that he was an administrator, not a cryptanalyst and about 10-12 of his men
worked on US diplomatic codes.
His unit had
solved the US codes Gray, Brown, M-138-A strip cipher and enciphered codebooks
(probably the A1, B1, C1).
The high
level M-138-A system had been solved mostly by taking advantage of operator
mistakes such as sending strip cipher information on other systems that had already
been broken or sending the same message in different strips one of which had
been broken.
The strip
cipher was considered a strong encryption system and had been adopted by the
Finns for some of their traffic.
Important
diplomatic messages from the US embassies in Switzerland, Sweden and Finland
were read by the Finnish codebreakers.
Regarding Bern, Switzerland most of the
messages dealt with intelligence matters:
‘Replying to my request for information
regarding the contents of the messages from our Legation in Bern to the
Department, Col. Hallamaa said the great bulk of them were intelligence
messages dealing with conditions in Germany, France, Italy and the Balkans. He
spoke in complimentary terms about ‘Harrison’s’ information service’.
Regarding
Helsinki, Finland Hallamaa stated that thanks to the decoded diplomatic traffic
they were always informed of current US policy initiatives:
‘Col. Hallamaa said that they always knew
before McClintock arrived at the Foreign Office what he was coming to talk about’.
Hallamaa
revealed a lot of confidential information to the Americans and volunteered to
have some of his experts interviewed.
The interview was conducted on friendly
terms with Higgs stating; ‘Col. Hallamaa
was most pleasant and seemed to be entirely frank and open regarding the
matters discussed’.
Additional
information: In
November 1944 the US cryptanalysts Paavo Carlson of the Army’s Signal
Security Agency and Paul E. Goldsberry of the State
Department’s cipher unit interviewed Finnish officials regarding their work
on US codes. Their report can be found here.
Wednesday, June 20, 2018
Monday, June 11, 2018
Friday, June 8, 2018
The Tanks of Operation Barbarossa
Boris
Kavalerchik, tank expert and author of the Journal of Slavic Military Studies
article ‘Once
Again About the T-34’ has published a book on ‘The
Tanks of Operation Barbarossa’.
Summary:
When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 the Red Army had four times as many tanks as the Wehrmacht and their tanks were seemingly superior, yet the Wehrmacht won the border battles with extraordinary ease the Red Armys tank force was pushed aside and for the most part annihilated. How was this victory achieved, and were the Soviet tanks really as well designed as is often believed? These are the basic questions Boris Kavalerchik answers in this absorbing study of the tanks and the tank tactics of the two armies that confronted each other at the start of the war on the Eastern Front. Drawing on technical and operational documents from Russian archives, many of which were classified until recently and are unknown to Western readers, he compares the strengths and weakness of the tanks and the different ways in which they were used by the opposing armies. His work will be essential reading for military historians who are interested in the development of armoured warfare and in this aspect of the struggle on the Eastern Front.
Q&A with Boris Kavalerchik
The author was kind enough to answer some of my questions.
1) How did
you become interested in WWII history and why did you decide to write a book on
Soviet vs. German tanks during the 1941 campaign?
I've been
reading and collecting books and magazines about all kinds of military hardware
since I was 12 years old. In college, I had to go through military training and
become a tank platoon's commander in reserve, so my knowledge of tanks became
much deeper and more practical than before. After a while I started to realize
that military hardware is nothing without the people who use it, and I began to
pay much more attention to military history.
The Great Patriotic War has always
had special importance for people of the USSR, where I used to live. Many of my
relatives, including my father, fought in that war, and some of them were KIA.
Naturally, I have heard and read a lot about these historic events and become
quite interested in them. Eventually, I co-authored a book about the Soviet
Union and Germany's preparations for WWII, as well as that war's beginning. Tank
warfare played a very important part in determining the outcome of these
battles, so I decided to dedicate a separate study to this subject. That is how
my book came to life.
2) What
new information have you uncovered that differentiates your book from other
similar studies?
In the
USSR, only officially approved historians had access to the state archives.
Moreover, their work had to go through government censorship and could only
support the official point of view on history, which very often was far from
reality. After the collapse of the Soviet Union all archives gradually became
open to regular people who were interested in events from the past.
More and more original archival materials began to be published and even became
available online. As a result, I managed to find a lot of information which was
classified until recently and had been generally unknown, especially to western
readers.
This information allowed me to reach quite different conclusions in
comparison to widely held beliefs about Red Army's tanks during WWII based on
old Soviet propaganda. As a mechanical engineer, I also analyzed and compared
Soviet and German tanks from a purely technical standpoint,
but from rarely used angles which as a rule got neglected. The results struck
me as very unusual and I hope they will be of interest to my book's readers.
3) Do you
think that WWII era armored vehicles truly played a decisive role in combat
operations or has their contribution been exaggerated due to the ‘coolness’
factor?
I think
that a very important role in WWII was played not by armored vehicles
themselves but by armored forces which included not only tanks but motorized
infantry, artillery, combat engineers, anti-tank and anti-aircraft units, and
so on. Moreover, as a rule, armored forces fought successfully only in
combination and cooperation with other services and
branches of the armed forces. Tanks do have the ‘coolness’ factor, so
many people mistakenly take
them for wonder-weapons, capable of independently deciding the outcome of any
battle. In reality, this is not the case. Nevertheless, tanks were a
very significant part of the armed forces of all participants of
WWII.
4) In your
opinion what are the worst mistakes that popular history books make regarding
German and Soviet armored vehicles and the Eastern Front in general?
In my opinion, some authors of popular history books mistakenly judge people of previous generations and their armored vehicles from today's point of view using modern criteria. Every tank, without exception, has both positive and negative aspects. In order to determine them it is necessary to know the purpose and objectives of these tanks, which were not the same in all countries or in all periods of time. So, before criticizing any tank from the past, one should determine why it was designed and built the way it was. After understanding all factors which influenced tank design in a particular time and country, we can judge these combat vehicles much more objectively.
Monday, June 4, 2018
Friday, June 1, 2018
Update
In The
Japanese FUJI diplomatic cipher 1941-43 I’ve added the following
information under the paragraph ‘Pers Z effort’:
More
information is available from the TICOM report DF-31B ‘How J.B. 57 Japanese
Letter System Was Solved’, written by the cryptanalysts Annalise Huenke
and Hans Rohrbach.
The first
break into system JB 57 came through two messages that had the same indicator
(meaning they used the same transposition key). Once these were solved the
system was identified as a transposed code, using a stencil.
Solution of this indicator led to the decipherment of more messages and dr Kunze (head of the ‘Mathematical Cryptanalytic Subsection’ of Pers Z) was able to use the information recovered in order to solve more message indicators. The inroads made by the solution of indicator groups led to the eventual recovery of the underlying code by the linguistic group and the current exploitation of this traffic.
Wednesday, May 30, 2018
TICOM report DF-217
Friday, May 25, 2018
TICOM DF-196
The NSA
FOIA/MDR office has declassified the TICOM report DF-196 ‘Report on Russian decryption in the former German Army’.
Sunday, May 13, 2018
Another correction
After the
release of TICOM
report D-83, in The
British Typex cipher machine I’ve changed the paragraph
‘In the period 1940-41 the cipher research
department of the German Army’s signal intelligence agency Inspectorate 7/VI
had several talented mathematicians (Pietsch,
Steinberg, Marquart, Schulz, Rinow)
tasked with examining difficult foreign cryptosystems. The war diary of Inspectorate
7/VI shows that these individuals investigated the Typex device and by May ’41
had ascertained that it was mainly used by the RAF and was issued with 10
rotors. Their research on its internal cipher operation however was slow and
had not led to any breakthrough. Things changed in May when they visited the
facilities of the Signal Intelligence Agency of the Supreme Command of the
Armed Forces - OKW/Chi and were able to examine a Typex machine captured
at Dunkirk.
The device worked according to the Enigma principle with the two rotors on the
left remaining stationary and the wiring of the entry and reflector wheels
could be recovered’
into
‘In the period 1940-41 the cipher research department of the German Army’s signal intelligence agency Inspectorate 7/VI had several talented mathematicians (Pietsch, Steinberg, Marquart, Schulz, Rinow) tasked with examining difficult foreign cryptosystems. The war diary of Inspectorate 7/VI shows that these individuals investigated the Typex device and by May ’41 had ascertained that it was an Enigma type device with 5 multistep rotors, the last two of which did not move during encipherment. Their research was confirmed in May, when they visited the facilities of the Signal Intelligence Agency of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces - OKW/Chi and were able to examine a Typex machine captured at Dunkirk. The device worked according to the Enigma principle with the two rotors on the left remaining stationary and the wiring of the entry and reflector wheels could be recovered’.
Saturday, May 12, 2018
Saturday, May 5, 2018
Analysis of the Czechoslovak STP cipher
Essay on the
WWII Czechoslovak STP cipher by Ĺ tefan
PorubskĂ˝.
Research Gate
link: Application
and Misapplication of the Czechoslovak STP Cipher During WWII
Note that I’ve dealt with the ciphers of the Czechoslovak resistance movement in Svetova Revoluce and the codes of the Czechoslovak resistance.
Monday, April 30, 2018
Article on Chinese codes and ciphers
Interesting
article from the journal Cryptologia: ‘Chinese
cryptography: The Chinese Nationalist Party and intelligence management,
1927–1949’ by Ulug Kuzuoglu.
ABSTRACT
This paper is the first scholarly
attempt to examine the history of Chinese cryptography and the role it played
in building the intelligence network of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)
from 1927 to 1949. Rather than investigating the institutional structure of
intelligence, I focus on Chinese characters, the primary medium that made
cryptology and intelligence possible. Given that the Chinese writing system is
by nature nonalphabetic and thus noncipherable, how did cryptography work in
Chinese? How did the state and its scientists reengineer Chinese characters for
the purposes of secret communication? This paper argues that due to the Chinese
writing system itself, Chinese cryptography was bound to the use of codebooks
rather than ciphers; thus, “codebook management” was central to building
intelligence networks in China.
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