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).

In the past I simply said nothing because I wanted the file but now I’m too old for this shit.

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.

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)



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.