Another German mystery machine

It seems that apart from the Russian FISH the Germans also had other secret equipment.Thanks to our old friend Karrenberg we can get some information on them .From TICOM /I-149 "Report by Uffz. Karrenberg and Colleagues on Allied Cipher Machines."

The ((following)) British and U.S. traffic was intercepted by Group VI of Receiving Station ((Empfangsstelle))  West :
1).U.S. FF5 traffic.

2) U. S. WT-FF5 traffic.

3) High speed MORSE (Press reports by war correspondents)

British FF5 links were presumably also monitored, but we do not have  any details as to which traffic it was. The U.S. (?) FF5 "Tapeworm"  (machine cypher) which came up was intercepted on a punched strip. As far as we know, the traffic always consisted of Short messages which were passed to Group IV  to be worked on.

The machine system referred to was worked on by Uffz. LACHNER  in Section 1b (Baurat PIETSCH). Section 1b also worked on British and U.S. systems. No details are known.

A  cryptanalytic party, numbering about 20 men, under Wm. ENGELHARDT also worked with Senior Signals Recce Commander Oberst KOPP. The ENGELHARDT party worked on British and U.S. systems, using, among other things, an electrically driven apparatus constructed by themselves. (This was a heavy, black-painted metal box, measuring approximately 50 x 50 X 40 cm, composed of two parts of about equal size. In front of the machine was a keyboard, like a teleprinter. The machine was fitted in the upper part with a set of indicating lamps; when a key was depressed, a letter was illuminated above, as on the German cypher machine). The construction and function of this apparatus, and the systems with which it dealt, are unknown to us. It is alleged that complete solutions (not breaks-in) were achieved by mean of this machine.

Consequent upon the transfer in February of General Commanding Signals Recce Forces ,
PIETSCH's section was seconded to Oberst KOPP, and worked there in collaboration with the ENGELHARDT party. The PIETSCH section worked on French, British and U.S. machine systems-using the ENIGMA.When the Senior  Signals Recce Commander had to retreat, PIETSCH’s section and the ENGELHARDT party were sent to BAD REICHENHALL. From there, owing to lack of space, "PIETSCH's and MARQUARDT's sections and the ENGELHARDT party  were moved to UNKEN near REICHENHALL.There, the ENGELHARDT party  was subordinated to MARQUARDT's section.It was here that I saw Wm ENGELHARDT for the last time ,in the middle of April.The cipher machine was also taken to UNKEN

Karrenberg is referring to group IV of the Army High Command Signal Intelligence Service.FF5 is non morse radio teletype traffic.

So what was this machine and what system did it attack? Things keep getting weirder and weirder….

Something interesting on Typex

The  cipher machine Typex was used by the Brits during   the war for their high level traffic without the Germans being able to ''break'' it .At least that's what was supposed to have happened.It might be possible that  Typex was compromised in N.Africa in '42 .


From a British report:

..............................................

But for the astonishing insecurity of NFAK 621 in confiding in officers outside the organisation, who would not appreciate the need for absolute secrecy, ourselves should probably never have  received any reliable information.Certain messages (e.g. those bearing an indicator which had already been recovered) could probably be dealt with by "WAGNER" on the spot; other problems were passed back to OKH  to be tested on the "analytical machine" and the results sent to  WAGNER.

 If this theory is correct, and on the evidence there seems very little reason to doubt it, it is clear that METTIG and probably HUETTENHAIN could tell us far more than they have chosen to say. Whether the knowledge was confined to a few people in OKH and OKW, or whether the results were passed to other departments, it is at present impossible to  judge.

It remains to consider the more serious question of whether the Germans ,were able to exploit Typex without  compromised drums. It appears that machines ware captured at DUNKIRK without ,drums and were kept in OKW. There is no evidence that they ever saw a plugboard, although they must have "known of its existence and of the ,other complications of procedure from captured orders. .Again, the Abwehr assignment at the beginning of 1944 suggests that they captured no machines subsequent to North Africa. Ignoring BODE' s unconfirmed statement that Typex was exploited prior to DUNKIRK, how much reliance can we place on HAUNHORST’s statement that NFAK 621 had had sporadic success in 1941 ? It should be noted that this statement was made in reply to a question on "high-grade'' traffic, and not specifically  on Typex. It probably relates to the now known breaking of Cypher "W’’.

There is insufficient evidence to answer this  question. It is clear, however, that if the North African story is true, OKH must have had extensive machinery ready to cope with such a situation, and had presumably used such machinery in an attempt to break earlier traffic. These are the researches at OKH and OKW referred to in the OKM documents. HUETTENHAIN's statement that OKW had not studied the indicator system, coming from the head of the research section, is too simple to be credible and is at variance with the OKM document quoted above.

It appears that  HUETTENHAIN has mislead us on the subject of Typex. Great emphasis is laid on the idea that they considered enigma, and therefore Typex insoluble. Why then, did they devote so much time to the study of enigma and attempts to produce a securer type of machine ? No German would credit the statement that we made no attempt to solve German enigma because we believed Typex to be insoluble. It is clear that they had little doubt in the theoretical solubility of Typex at least in the earlier part of the  war. Interrogations have so far failed to elicit whether they had any practical success, and what stage they reached in their researches. At present we can only say that Typex with five compromised solid drums and no plugboard was soluble and was quite probably solved.

G.C.C.S (S.A.C)

22^nd September 1945

I'll write more on this soon...

Bamford , the Russian ''FISH'' and Unteroffizier Karrenberg - Part 4

With part 3 i thought i was done with the Russian Fish but due to sheer luck i found even more information regarding Jack Gurin and the teletype network.
From the NSA publication  '' The Invisible Cryptologists:African-Americans,WWII to 1956''

http://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/center_crypt_history/publications/misc.shtml

p17

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. A graduate of New York University, “Jack” grew up in a Russian-speaking household and spoke the language fluently. During the war, he served as a Japanese linguist for the U.S. Army, and after discharge, applied to the Army Security Agency. In1946, native speaking Russian language ability was a valuable and rare commodity.Security concerns arising from his birthplace were resolved, and he joined the organization as a Russian linguist. Within months of his entry on duty, he engineered a revolutionary approach to the exploitation and reporting of Russian plaintext communications.
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. Initially, three linguists were assigned to him plus a writer/editor. Their task was to select messages that qualified for immediate translation and publication or which could be used in a research report on a subject of interest.

Much of the intercept data was passed to the linguists by a group of processing personnel who would provide page print-outs of material that had been sent to the agency on tape. The tape conversion process involved running a paper tape of radioprinter signals through a machine (the CXCO tape printer) which read coded perforations and printed the corresponding Cyrillic characters.

p19

The development and expansion of the traffic processing unit are inextricably linked to the
tremendous dependence on the exploitation of Russian communications for intelligence following Black Friday. That day, 25 August 1948, the chief of the Soviet General Staff declared that “the transmission of . . . messages is permitted only by landline.”Within weeks, Soviet communications systems that had been successfully exploited since 1945 went off the air. The series of communications changes that began in November 1947 and culminated on Black Friday were catastrophic. Out of this devastation, Russian plaintext communications emerged as the critical provider of intelligence on our primary Cold War adversary

…………….

By July 1950, over a million messages a month were being forwarded to AFSA for processing and exploitation. The plaintext exploitation unit stood at 170, and it was projected that by April 1952, the volume of messages requiring processing would nearly double, requiring an additional 350 people.During the 1950/1951 time frame, Russian plain text was nearing its zenith in terms of intelligence priorities, collection resources, and personnel; and AFSA-213, the all-black traffic processing branch (later a division) that came to be known as “the snakepit,” “the plantation,” and “the black hole of Calcutta,” was in full operation

 All Russian plaintext traffic forwarded to Arlington Hall Station from U.S. sources was received in AFSA-213. In mid-1950, a paper delivered to Captain Mason (AFSA-02, Chief of Operations), entitled the “Russian Plain Text Problem,” placed the AFSA-213 manning at 98 and projected the 1952 personnel requirement at 218. The paper also supplied a concise, descriptive account of the work performed in the traffic processing branch:

The incoming material is of two types,printed messages and perforated radio printer tapes. The printed messages result from the collection of either . . . radio printer communications that were intercepted using standard teletype equipment or . . . morse transmissions that were transcribed from undulator tape recordings.. . . radio printer communications are recorded and printed on perforated teletype tapes in the field, and the tapes are forwarded to AFSA for processing. Once the material arrives in the Traffic Division, the employees scan it for keywords, addresses, and signatures. Messages that meet the selection criteria are assigned a two-digit routing number that separates them into homogenous groupings. Messages that are on tape are sent to the tape printing section for conversion to hard-copy. The selected, printed messages are then stamped with a one-up serial number and microfilmed. In the final step, they are sent to the sections of the plain text branch, according to the two digit routing number assigned during the initial scanning process

So is the interception of this  teletype network connected with the German demodulator? Although we can't be sure  it seems likely .The NSA history mentions foreign COMINT specialists and from Bamford's book : "They intercepted printers at Vint Hill, Russian printers," said Colonel Russell H. Horton, who commanded the station shortly after the end of the war. "They had these ... circuits that had nine channels if I'm not mistaken. They had machines ... all hooked up so that they separated the channels and did all of the interception in Cyrillic characters."  .

In any case let's hope more information becomes available sometime soon.

Bamford , the Russian ''FISH'' and Unteroffizier Karrenberg - Part 3

In parts 1 and 2 we saw that in May 45 a TICOM team discovered a German unit that was equipped with specialized equipment for intercepting and demodulating soviet multichannel radio teletype traffic.According to Bamford : ‘’ Two TICOM members, including First Lieutenant Sehner Norland, who would also go on to a long career at NSA, accompanied the equipment and soldiers back to England. There it was set up near Bletchley Park and quickly put into operation. It, or a working model, was later shipped back to Washington. So what happened after that ? How did the US and Britain use it ?

Bamford also says : ‘’ The relative handful of American codebreakers who stayed on quickly shifted gears. The Soviet Union instantly became their number one target.

One key listening post not shut down was Vint Hill Farms Station. Known as Monitoring Station Number 1, it was located in the rural Virginia town of Warrenton. During the war, Vint Hill played a pivotal role in eavesdropping on enemy communications for thousands of miles in all directions. At war's end, 2,600 people stayed on, many of them intercept operators, to handle the transition from hot war to cold war. They were able to eavesdrop on key Russian diplomatic and military communications sent over the Fish machine. "They intercepted printers at Vint Hill, Russian printers," said Colonel Russell H. Horton, who commanded the station shortly after the end of the war. "They had these ... circuits that had nine channels if I'm not mistaken. They had machines ... all hooked up so that they separated the channels and did all of the interception in Cyrillic characters." Horton added, "As far as I know, there was no effort against the Russians until after the war’’.

Thanks to google books I found this snippet of information in  : Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History By Jerrold L. Schecter, Leona Schecter page 262 

By the end of the 1940s and into the early 1950s, American listening posts could monitor Soviet radio voice and data traffic in the air and produce real time signals intelligence. The National Security Agency found a way to tap into Soviet internal teletype communications. These teletyped messages were unaided, clear transmissions on a multichannel communications network similar to Western Union that carried operational data on Soviet industrial and military production. These intercepts were a major source of data for analyzing Soviet military strength and strategic intentions.

So  it’s  clear that the Russians used unenciphered teleprinters in this network.

Now let’s see what pieces of the puzzle we can fill from more official sources.Specifically the NSA history  ‘’American Cryptology during the Cold War:  1945-1989 ,Book I: The Struggle for Centralization 1945-1960’’  and  Oral History Interview of Oliver Kirby.

Here are the links: http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/declass/cryptologic_histories.shtml

http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/declass/oral_history_interviews.shtml

 From  ‘’American Cryptology…..’’ p169  .

This small paragraph mentions radioprinter, ?  interrogations ,foreign comint specialists ,NSAer Jacob Gurin and an OSS unit.Is it referring to TICOM/CSDIC interrogations and German specialists ?

From the Kirby interview :

p14

KIRBY  Not during the war. The end of the war, right at the end of the war.

BAKER That would be sort of a natural with the Russo-Finnish...(B°/0 staring) right across the border, if you just thought about it.

KIRBY  Yeah, but ??? i remember that. I remember it was very interesting. Oh believe me, young man, coverage? Hell, we didn't have a capability to cover what was the biggest traffic-carrying thing going which was the ?????? We had no capability whatsoever.

He is referring to Soviet traffic but of what kind  ? Maybe the  radioteletype network ?

p39

VANDERPOOL And this was just the Russian problem, sir?

KIRBY Just this part of the Russian problem. But I also had become aware in TICOM of the printer problem, and so I was the only one pushing at that time for, "Hey, we've got to tackle this printer," because I also had heard from the British, I think, that they had a scrambler in there. I had already done the German scrambler. I was just getting converted to that, and I thought, heck, that would be nice to work on the scrambler problem.

HATCH Because these 35 to 40 (people) were just working Morse decrypt and cablegrams.

KIRBY They were working mostly just getting the cable stuff in order and figuring out the 'A" net and the "B" net and taking the intercept that was coming in and seeing if they could sort it and make it Russian versus something else. They had been doing work on the cable traffic, but this was to begin work on the overall (B% front). That's what it was for, and so I was asked to do It; start getting this problem pulled together. That's when I came in. And Cecil Phillips knew a lot about the cable stuff so I proceeded not to pay a heck of a lot of attention to that. That was being taken care of. That's all that was being taken care of. So then we went to work on the other stuff.

p51

BAKER Plus you've got burgeoning plaintext.

KIRBY Yes, and we began to really exploit and find that there was a gold mine in the plaintext in terms of intelligence, and I mean highly-desired intelligence.

BAKER Was Jack (B% Goering) already working with you then?

KIRBY Yes, Jack was one of the people we brought in very early on that. Jack was really in charge of the linguistic effort on that, and we then found Olin Adams in '47 working in the remains of an OSS group down in the old State Department building, and we hired away that whole group. And I received some bad slaps on the back of the wrist because of proselyting (sic) of...since we really decimated the entire unit. But then the people themselves, to the investigators, told them that there was no future in what they were doing. They didn't know how long they would be employed, and so basically that just disappeared. But we were desperate for linguists.

BAKER But you solved that problem very quickly.

KIRBY Well, not very quickly. We had a lot of new linguists from that one unit, and then as time went on we kept adding more linguists as time went on. And we began to develop machine methods of scanning and pulling out traffic so that one person could effectively look through a lot more traffic in a great hurry.

BAKER Was this (XG)?

KIRBY Ah, yes. Right, yes.

BAKER Okay, but the linguists you're still hiring from the outside. You're not building them your-self.

KIRBY Oh yes, but we're training too.

BAKER Oh, you are building some yourself? Okay, good. Now you're still leaving it up to the services to train them, or did the school develop them here?

KIRBY No, we were training them ourselves. The school...it might not have been the school, but we had our own training programs going which later became the school, so we were already developing our own linguists. There were internal classes and sending people to school at universities and a whole variety of things which now are formalized under various terms, but...(cut off by Baker)

So the OSS group from the NSA history is mentioned .Also is  Jack Goering =Jacob Gurin  ?

Seems like Kirby was probably in charge/involved with the unit that intercepted the teletype traffic.The information intercepted was according to ''Sacred Secrets'' and the Kirby interview very  valuable despite the fact that the network was unenciphered.Obviously the volume of traffic was so great that important information constantly slipped in.Was this the same network that was intercepted by the Germans during the war? Praun also mentioned military and economic traffic in multiplex radio teletype circuits. Many questions remain but I’m reasonably confident that the information presented so far is accurate. I hope some researcher or author manages to uncover more of these secrets.

Bamford , the Russian ''FISH'' and Unteroffizier Karrenberg - Part 2

Ok so in part1 we had a look at the information presented by authors  Bamford ,Parrish and West regarding the finding by  TICOM team 1 in Rosenheim of a mysterious German unit that intercepted and reconstructed soviet multichannel  radio teletype traffic.Is this story a figment of their imagination ,are they simply parroting one another ? Nope this unit and the equipment it used definitely existed .Let’s have a look at the EASI reports and see if we can fill in some pieces of the puzzle.

Is the TICOM team mentioned  ?  Yes in EASI vol8 p53

Team #1, dispatched to the Berchtesgaden area to search for traces of the Signal Intelligence Agency of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces (OKW/Chi), turned up the former headquarters of Goering’s "Research" Bureau (FA and a handful  of its personnel, secured the radio teleprinter communications train which had been attached to Field Marshal Kesselring’s headquarters, and located a German unit designed to intercept Russian non-Morse (Baudot) traffic. 

Ok so that part seems to be true. What about the use of radio teletype  by the Soviets? Didn’t  they use  code books like everyone else ? What was the point of going to such a high tech system?

From EASI vol4 p65

a. Radio teleprinter (Baudot) traffic was characteristic of the communications of the Russian General Staff to the Front Staffs (Army Group Staffs), and of that of the Front Staffs to the "Assault Armies." Russian General Staff radio teleprinter transmissions were 2-channel, as opposed to the "modulated" (i.e. probably multichannel) transmitters used from Front Staffs to Assault Armies. Also, these latter links used lower frequencies. Automatic high-speed morse transmission was possible on all such higher links, but was seldom used. (Three radio teleprinter links passing Air Force traffic from Moscow to higher Air Force headquarters were also identified.) 

Also EASI vol 4 p111

Corporal Karrenberg(of GdNA) spoke of "Bandwurm," and defined it as Russian Baudot letter "strip," not to be confused with Russian 5-letter traffic also carried on Baudot lines. The Germans did not capture any of the apparatus used but felt that it consisted of 2 parts: 1) a Baudot teleprinter and 2) a cipher attachment consisting of 5 small wheels driven by one large wheel. Depths were frequent, but the Germans did not seem to have any attempt to reconstruct the wheel patterns. The system used by the Army and Air Force and to a lesser extent by NKVD. Dr. Otto Buggisch (of OKH/Chi) went into somewhat more historical detail and stated that:

1) In 1943 (He heard), Goering's Research Bureau Forschungsamt, abbreviated FA) had claimed some success on a Russian teletype machine and had recreated the action. 2) Late in 1943 and early in 1944, OKH itself began to Intercept non-morse, 5-impulse traffic (called "Hughes" by Buggisch). The Mathematics section of In 7/VI (see Vol. V, Chapter II, on organization) worked on it; at the end of 1943, there was a "Kompromiss," and a depth of 8 messages with the same setting was created. The section was able to recover 1400 letters of pure key, and to determine that the traffic was derived from a 5-figure code. The Germans postulated a machine like the German T 43, but was not able to prove any theories they had. 3) Hollerith machinery was devised to locate depths, but in actuality only three or four more depths were found and were of no long-termed value. 4) The traffic (Buggisch thought, since he left the section in June) slumped off in 1944, and LNA took steps to improve reception.

Buggisch stressed one fact which had surprised him, that they had never had information about either of these machines (he assumed that the one the FA broke was not the same because of the difference of cycles) from PW or agent sources.The number of links, according to Corporal Karrenberg, varied according to the number of armies, with a maximum of 8. One end of link was Moscow, the other mobile. After 1944, no work was done on the traffic except on the spot. No vital clues to the system were given away by the Russians, though their security precautions were not considered good.

So it seems the Russians had at least one model of enciphered teleprinter in use.A simple machine with 6 rotors.But notice what Karrenberg said : ''not to be confused with Russian 5-letter traffic also carried on Baudot lines''.Could this mean that standard teleprinters were also in use?

Let's leave that for now and go back to the German machine.Who actually built it ?  

From EASI vol 8 p33

Signal Branch tested Non-Morse intercept equipment.

Intercept equipment for Russian three-and nine-channel transmissions was designed. Success was achieved in intercepting the Baudot link between Paris and Moscow.

Hmm didn't Bamford say : ''The Russian system involved dividing the transmissions into nine separate parts and then transmitting them on nine different channels''.

So it seems it was Army Ordnance, Development and Testing Group, Signal Branch that built it:

(Chef der Heeresruestung und Befehlshaber des Ersatzheeres Amtsgruppe fuer  Entwicklung und Pruefung des Heereswaffenamts,Waffenpruetung Abteilung 7, abbreviated Wa Pruef 7)

Army Ordnance, Development and Testing Group, Signal Branch was itself broken down into seven groups:

Group I (Wa Pruef 7/I) procured raw materials and small equipment.

Group II (Wa Pruef 7/11) developed telephone and telegraph equipment and ciphony (ciphony vas transferred to /II in 1942).

Group III (Wa Pruef 7/111) developed radio communication equipment, teleprinter, facsimile and television equipment, ciphony and cipher devices.

Group IV (Wa Pruef 7/IV) developed radio Intercept, direction finding and ciphony deciphering equipment.

Group V (Wa Pruof 7/V) developed permanent communications equipment for permanent Installations.

Section VI (Wa Pruef 7, Referat VI) developed chemical and flare signal equipment.

Group VII (Wa Pruef 7(II) developed radio remote control devices for rockets

Do we have any hint about the location of the facilities ? It could be that this equipment was installed at several intercept stations however i found this information in :

EASI vol 3 p48

Huettenhain had seen some Baudot traffic, and this had come from the intercept station at Staats. This station was conducted by the Reserve Army and was subordinate to a section of the Army Ordnance Testing Department whose work was the development of Signal Equipment. Staats also picked up Multiplex, Duplex, and Verdun transmissions and passed them to OKW/Chi. It was in operation since before the war, but its subordination indicates that the chief mission of the station was the development of equipment rather than operational intercept.

The most important question is who used it and in what manner.The Army High Command Signal Intelligence Service had a sub-section Group VI for ''Special Intercept'' .It makes sense that this unit would be using it since they were responsible for intercepting and evaluating Soviet teletype traffic.

From EASI vol 4 p15  :

Group VI, located at Potsdam under Capt. Roeder, was responsible for intercepting and evaluating special high-grade machine systems, Russian systems were handled by Section 1, with three sub-sections: Ia: interception and evaluation of Inter-Soviet State traffic; lb: intercepting and evaluation of Russian Baudot; lc: intercepting and evaluation of Russian Army traffic. Western teleprinter and automatic morse, traffic was handled by Section 2. (Interception was done in sub-section 2b, evaluation in sub-section 2a).

p50

The interception and evaluation of special high grade machine ciphers of Russia, Britain, and the USA were assigned to Group VI of OKH/GdNA which was located at Potsdam. Section 1, dealing with Russian traffic, had three sub-sections . la Interception of Inter-Soviet State traffic, lb Interception of Russian Baudot traffic, lc Interception of Russian Army traffic. The interception of Russian Baudot traffic (called by the Russians Z-traffic) was carried on by the same personnel who had manned the Russian Baudot station at Minsk in 1942/43. In 1943, the Russian Baudot station was moved to HLS Ost at Loetzen, where it was absorbed by Section 4 of HLS Ost. When HLS Ost was absorbed by the OKH/GdNa the Baudot station became Section lb of the OKH/GdNA. Section 2 of Group VI was employed with the interception (2b)and the evaluation (2a) of British and American high grade machine Ciphers.The interception of this traffic has been carried on by Feste 3 at Euskirchen until the establishment of the OKH/GdNA, when the responsibility for interception was transferred to the central agency.The interception of wireless photography, called by the Germans Y-traffic, was carried on by a special unit of Section I of Group VI. This unit intercepted traffic from all over the world but the non-Russian channels are said not to have yielded any valuable information. Photos intercepted from internal Russian traffic, however, often contained technical diagrams and charts.

Notice that Karrenberg(quoted several times in the EASI reports) was part of the Russian Baudot research section.

Is there any reference anywhere else on the use of this kind of equipment ? Well in ''German Radio Intelligence '' i found the following :

http://allworldwars.com/German-Radio-Intelligence-by-Albert-Praun.html#1

Generalleutnant Albert Praun became Chief Signals Officer in 1944.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Praun

4. Recording Devices

When radio communication followed the example of wire communication in adopting mechanical transmission and recording procedures, the high-speed traffic of foreign fixed radio stations was at first recorded by means of wax matrix and steel wire recorders. In 1939 a further refinement was introduced in the form of the "Magnetofon," which employed an iron-oxide-coated cellophane tape. This device was used as a sound recorder by intercept units before and during the war. Short-range RI platoons were issued portable sound recorders after 1942.

For intercepting enemy messages sent over radioteletype and multiplex circuits the Germans established in I944 a special recording center which consisted of eleven special radiotelegraph intercept devices which were tied in with sixty teletypewriters. This installation was a synthesis of recent technical developments in the field of radio and of experience with high-speed telegraphy. The average daily performance varied between ten and fifteen million characters, which could be raised to fifty million by around-the-clock operation.

This special recording center furnished cryptanalysis with a large volume of reliable texts and provided complete coverage of the widely-differing types of foreign high-speed CW and multiplex traffic. These messages were solved without actually possessing enemy transmitting and receiving sets and in spite of the fact that the Russians, Americans, British, and French had highly-developed teletype systems.

Facsimile transmission by radio was in extensive use by such Russian agencies as the NKVD and the Commissariat for Transportation. A net of about forty to fifty facsimile stations, several of which were in Siberia —for instance, in Irkutsk, Tashkent, and Vladivostok - transmitted hand-written communications, typewritten texts, drawings, and weather maps. However, none of the Russian facsimile devices ever fell into the hands of the Germans. Nevertheless, the latter did succeed in intercepting Russian facsimile messages with corresponding equipment.

Up to 1941 the Russians transmitted messages via facsimile in clear text. Even after the Russians had begun to use cipher machines, the Germans still had no difficulty in finding solutions and recording almost the entire facsimile output until the end of the war

..................

Strategic radio intelligence directed against the Russian war production effort provided a wealth of information for the evaluation of Russia's military potential. Owing to the general dearth of long-distance telephone and teletype land circuits, radio communication assumed an especially important role in Russia not only as an instrument of military leadership but also as the medium of civilian communication in a widely decentralized economy. In keeping with its large volume, most of this Russian radio traffic was transmitted by automatic means, as explained in Appendix 7. The German Army intercepted this traffic with corresponding automatic equipment and evaluated it at the communication intelligence control center. Multiplex radioteletype links connected Moscow not only with the so-called fronts or army groups in the field, but also with the military district headquarters in Leningrad, Tiflis, Baku, Vladivostock, and in many other cities. In addition, the radio nets used for inland navigation provided an abundance of information. Although this mechanically transmitted traffic offered a higher degree of security against interception, the Russians used the same cryptosystems as in the field for sending important military messages over these circuits. The large volume of intercepted material offered better opportunities for German cryptanalysis. Strategic radio intelligence furnished information about the activation of new units in the zone of interior, industrial production reports, requests for materiel and replacements, complaints originating from and problems arising at the production centers and administrative agencies in control of the war economy. All this information was indexed at the communication intelligence control center where reports were drawn up at regular intervals on the following aspects of the Russian war production effort:

Planning and construction of new factories;
Relocation of armament plants;
Coal and iron ore production figures;
Raw material and fuel requirements for industrial plants;
Tank and gun production figures;
Transportation facilities and problems;
Railway, inland shipping, and air communications;
Agricultural production;
Food distribution and rationing measures;
Manpower, labor allocation, and other relevant matters.

Strategic radio intelligence thus made a slight dent in the Iron Curtain, which during the war was drawn even more tightly than at present, and offered some insight into the operation of the most distant Siberian production centers and the tremendous war potential of that seemingly endless expanse of land.

Combined with what Karrenberg said i take this to mean that the Russians also used unenciphered radio teleprinters and sent messages after first enciphering them with their standard 2-part codebooks(used by armed forces).Since the Germans had success with most of them it's reasonable to assume that they would be able to read a lot of that traffic.

Praun also mentions the Staats facility :

''An experimental station for observing radio signals and for developing new intercept equipment was established by the Army Ordnance Office at Hillersleben-Staats....During the year 1944, for instance, twenty-four new techniques in enemy radio communication were observed and the development of corresponding countermeasures was immediately undertaken. 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.''

The only thing that's left is to find  the identity of the unit in Rosenheim.Is it possible it was  a sub-section of Group VI ?

It seems so  : vol4 p54 

During the last months of the war, the internal intercept units of the GdNA were also disrupted. The units of Croups I and V moved with the other groups of the GdNA to Erfurt and then to Bad Reichenhall.The intercept unit of  Group VI which had been covering high grade machine traffic at Potsdam was moved to Stuttgart and from there to Rosenheim.The equipment was buried in the cellar in the surrounding neighborhood of a house, the Pioneer-Kaserne, in Rosenheim where it was later found by TICOM interrogators.

Parrish says : '"a little twenty-year-old German sergeant had the group well under control and working like beavers. They had one of the sets all set up and receiving traffic."

I think Karrenberg and his party were the ones in Rosenheim.Also from Parrish  ''On June 2 Whitaker was ordered to take six of the OKW-Chi prisoners to the Albrechtstrasse jail in Wiesbaden, where they were to be confined until official papers came through authorizing their being taken to England''

There was a CSDIC(Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre)  in Wiesbaden .Report IF-123 (CSDIC interrogation )mentions Karrenberg and Erdmann,Grubler,Hempel,Schmitz,Suschhowk .They are all listed as belonging to Group VI(apart from Erdmann,no info on him).So i assume that the German Sgt was Karrenberg.He is actually mentioned as a sergeant in vol 9 p 46.

Final piece of evidence is a report in vol 4 p225 :

IF-162  '’Report on Preliminary Evaluation of German Equipment for interception of Russian Multichannel teletype circuits’’ 

In part 3 i'll share my  info on the post war use of this equipment by the Army Security Agency.

Bamford , the Russian ''FISH'' and Unteroffizier Karrenberg - Part 1

James Bamford is a bestselling author who has written several books on the  National Security Agency.

The NSA is the United States eavesdropping and codebreaking organization. Back in the early 2000’s I bought his book    ‘’ Body of secrets: anatomy of the ultra-secret National Security Agency’’ and although I enjoyed all of it two things stuck with me.One that NSA was years or decades ahead of the rest of the world when it came to computer technology (CPU’s and storage).The other thing that I found fascinating is the story of the Russian Fish in pages 15-16:

Within a few days the team struck gold. They came upon an entire convoy of four German signal trucks, complete with four Fish machines, a signals technician, German drivers, and a lieutenant in charge. Arthur Levenson and Major Ralph Tester, a British expert on the Fish, escorted the whole lot, including the Germans, back to England. Once at Bletchley Park the machines were reverse-engineered to determine exactly how they were built and how they operated. (Levenson would later return to Washington and go on to become chief of the Russian codebreaking section at NSA.)

With enough Fish and other equipment to keep the engineers busy for a long time at Bletchley, the team began a manhunt for key German codebreakers. On May 21, 1945, Lieutenant Commander Howard Campaigne and several other TICOM officers interviewed a small group of Sigint personnel being held in Rosenheim. They had all worked for a unit of the Signals Intelligence Agency of the German Abwehr High Command, a major target of TICOM. What the prisoners told Campaigne would lead to one of the most important, and most secret, discoveries in the history of Cold War codebreaking. Their command, they said, had built a machine that broke the highest-level Russian cipher system. The machine, now buried beneath the cobblestones in front of a building nearby, had been designed to attack the advanced Russian teleprinter cipher-the Soviet equivalent of the Fish.

If this was true, it was breathtaking. For over six years US. and British codebreakers had placed Japan and Germany under a microscope, to the near exclusion of Russia and almost all other areas. Now with the war over and with Communist Russia as their new major adversary, the codebreakers would have to start all over from scratch. But if a working machine capable of breaking high-level Russian ciphers was indeed buried nearby, years of mind-numbing effort would be saved.

The Germans, eager to be released from prison, quickly agreed to lead TICOM to the machine. Campaigne wasted no time and the next day the twenty-eight prisoners, dressed in their German Army uniforms, began pulling up the cobblestones and opening the ground with picks and shovels. Slowly the heavy wooden boxes began to appear. One after another they were pulled from the earth, until the crates nearly filled the grounds. In all there were a dozen huge chests weighing more than 600 pounds each; 53 chests weighing nearly 100 pounds each; and about 53 more weighing 50 pounds each. It was a massive haul of some 7-1/2 tons.

Over the next several days the dark gray equipment was carefully lifted from its crates and set up in the basement of the building. Then, like magic, high-level encrypted Russian communications, pulled from the ether, began spewing forth in readable plaintext. Whitaker, who pulled into the camp a short time later, was amazed. "They were working like beavers before we ever arrived," he scribbled in his notebook. "They had one of the machines all set up and receiving traffic when we got there."

The Russian system involved dividing the transmissions into nine separate parts and then transmitting them on nine different channels. The German machines were able to take the intercepted signals and stitch them back together again in the proper order. For Campaigne and the rest of the TICOM team, it was a once-in-a-lifetime discovery. Back in Washington, Campaigne would eventually go on to become chief of research at NSA. Once the demonstration was over, Campaigne had the German soldiers repack the equipment and the next day it was loaded on a convoy, completely filling four heavy trucks. Two TICOM members, including I First Lieutenant Sehner Norland, who would also go on to a long career at NSA, accompanied the equipment and soldiers back to England. There it was set up near Bletchley Park and quickly put into operation. It, or a working model, was later shipped back to Washington. The discovery of the Russian codebreaking machine was a principal reason why both the US. and British governments still have an absolute ban on all details surrounding the TICOM operations.

The Fish is mentioned again in page 20.

The relative handful of American codebreakers who stayed on quickly shifted gears. The Soviet Union instantly became their number one target.

One key listening post not shut down was Vint Hill Farms Station. Known as Monitoring Station Number 1, it was located in the rural Virginia town of Warrenton. During the war, Vint Hill played a pivotal role in eavesdropping on enemy communications for thousands of miles in all directions. At war's end, 2,600 people stayed on, many of them intercept operators, to handle the transition from hot war to cold war. They were able to eavesdrop on key Russian diplomatic and military communications sent over the Fish machine. "They intercepted printers at Vint Hill, Russian printers," said Colonel Russell H. Horton, who commanded the station shortly after the end of the war. "They had these ... circuits that had nine channels if I'm not mistaken. They had machines ... all hooked up so that they separated the channels and did all of the interception in Cyrillic characters." Horton added, "As far as I know, there was no effort against the Russians until after the war

.........

Since the discovery of the Russian Fish machine by TICOM at the end of the war, and the ability to read a variety of diplomatic, KGB, and trade messages as a result of the Venona breakthrough on Soviet onetime pads, American codebreakers had been astonishingly lucky. Virtually overnight they were placed in what NSA has called "a situation that compared favorably to the successes of World War II."

 So this Russian Fish must have been very important to the Western Allies.But why haven’t we heard more about it ?

In fact another author has mentioned this information back in 1986. Thomas D. Parrish,'' The ultra Americans:the U.S. role in breaking the Nazi codes'' .He has an entire chapter called the Russian Fish plus he has pics.

From chapter 14 pages 282-4:

Then came May 21, a day that, most regrettably, Ralph Tester had to
miss. To those devoted to cryptanalysis it possesses something of the quality
of the moment in 1922 when Howard Carter, chiseling through the door of
Tutankhamen's tomb, reported to the breathless Lord Caernarvon that through
the aperture he had made he could see "wonderful things." On the morning of
the 21st a party of seven left Berchtesgaden for Rosenheim, where Campaigne,
Capt. Edward Rushworth of British intelligence, and Tom Carter, a U.S.
officer who had joined the group, were to question an OKW-Chi (intelligence
department of the High Command of the Armed Forces) cryptographer. Whitaker,
Norland, and two British officers who were likewise newcomers to the team,
Pickering and Cockrell, were to continue on in search of various wanted
persons. (Pickering quickly proved a notable addition to the group, because
of his marvelous Hitler act. One evening, with a lock of hair pulled over his
face, he harangued the staff of a hotel with a Ftihrer-style monologue - to
such effect, Levenson said, that "they were ready to follow him anywhere.")

In the evening, after a fruitless search, Whitaker's group returned
to Berchtesgaden. Here they found the rest of the TICOM team seething with
excitement. A soldier had come to Campaigne, Rushworth, and Carter while they
were at Rosenheim, with a message that some prisoners in the cage nearby
wished to speak with the "proper people."

These prisoners had served at OKW-Chi headquarters. What they were
burning to tell the "proper people" was that, fearing the advance of the
Russians, they had buried a great mass of cipher equipment under the
cobblestones in front of their headquarters. They were sure that this
equipment would be of the greatest interest to the Western Allies and to the
Russians, because by means of it the Germans could read Red Army signals -
and not just any signals, but the most secret ones. It seemed that the
Russians would split the message being sent into nine elements, transmitting
it on nine different channels, and this German equipment could reintegrate
it; having developed this capacity, the Germans had then succeeded in
decrypting Russian traffic. The prisoners who were pouring out this news to
Campaigne, Rushworth, and Carter had no way of knowing two facts: a) the
western Allies very much wished to obtain information about the nature and
significance of various Soviet troop movements in Germany, information which
even then the Soviets were bluntly refusing to provide; and b), the Allies

had no capacity to decrypt this Soviet radio traffic. It was a momentous
discovery, more of one, perhaps, than the TICOM team realized at the moment;
"iron curtain" and "cold war" had not yet entered the language. Certainly the
Germans' viewpoint was clear. Already, just two weeks after the surrender had
been signed at Reims, the prisoners in their cage were hailing their American
and British captors as comrades, men who must see the need to make common
cause with them against the Russian hordes. They were eager to dig up the
buried equipment and demonstrate its wonders to the TICOM team.

It was an offer the team could not refuse. The next day Campaigne's
group returned to Rosenheim to supervise the recovery and sorting out of the
equipment, and on May 23 Whitaker joined Campaigne and Carter on the sortie
to Rosenheim. By the time the team arrived, "a little twenty-year-old German
sergeant had the group well under control and working like beavers. They had
one of the sets all set up and receiving traffic." On studying and analyzing
their find, the TICOM team realized that what they had been presented with
was nothing less than a system that received and decrypted the Soviet
equivalent of the German Fish traffic. And the Soviets, it was obvious, had
no inkling that the Germans had developed this capacity. Nor could they know
that the Western Allies had now inherited it. TICOM had made itseff into a
truly Top Secret operation. The Germans "had put the equipment together down in the basement of
part of this barracks complex. They were intercepting Russian traffic right
while we were there. And pretty soon they had shown us all we needed to see."
The Allied team ordered the prisoners to dismantle the setup and return it to
its crates along with the rest of the equipment. In sheer bulk the treasure
was phenomenal. It filled twelve huge chests weighing more than 600 pounds
each, fifty-three chests weighing about 100 pounds each, and about fifty more
weighing 50 pounds each - some seven and a half tons altogether. It filled
four large German trucks to capacity.

Rushworth and Norland were assigned to accompany the equipment and
some of the technicians to England, where a highly select audience would see
a demonstration. One wonders what General Marshall thought when he received
word of this remarkable convoy. He never put his thoughts about it on paper,
and he died fifteen years before the existence of Ultra would even have been
confided to his official biographer. TICOM and its amazing secret have
remained unknown till this day.
On June 2 Whitaker was ordered to take six of the OKW-Chi prisoners
to the Albrechtstrasse jail in Wiesbaden, where they were to be confined
until official papers came through authorizing their being taken to England.
"Those boys," Whitaker said, "were very downhearted at being left in a prison
after what they had done." He assured them that their stay at Albrechtstrasse
would only be temporary, and a week later they were flown to England, where
the equipment was set up at an installation about twenty miles from
Bletchley. It appears to have been put to work by the Allies immediately

Here are the pics : 

Also Nigel West in ‘’Venona: the greatest secret of the Cold War’’ says in p32 :

On 21 May, another TICOM team, led by Howard Campaigne, was taken by some German PoWs to a hiding place in a basement under an OKW (Wehrmacht High Command) communications centre at Rosenheim, near the Austrian frontier, where German technicians had intercepted Soviet military wireless traffic. The TICOM men were shown a still operational, fully-equipped intercept facility, complete with a machine for demodulating teletype signals, which they promptly dismantled and shipped to Bletchley. Altogether seven and a half tons of hardware were carried to England in a convoy of captured German trucks escorted by Selmer Norland and his British counterpart, Edward Rushworth.

Hmmm so the Fish was capable of  reconstructing the Soviet teletype transmissions.However that does not mean that the messages would be plaintext .If the Soviets used automatically enciphered teleprinters like the Lorenz SZ42 and the Siemens T-52 then the text would be encoded .I said IF in the previous phrase keep this in mind it’s important later on….

Ok so the plot thickens….Here is my breakthrough:

Recently the NSA released the EASI reports:

European Axis Signal Intelligence in World War II  As Revealed by "TICOM" Investigations and by Other Prisoner of War Interrogations and Captured Material, Principally German. In Nine Volumes

By going through these reports i found information on some aspects of this machine plus the unit and identities of the people in Rosenheim.Look forward to post 2 it’s coming soon.

PS : I have to thank Frode Weierud ( http://cryptocellar.org/  ) and Noel Chiappa  for sending me the info from Parrish’s book,although now I have my own copy.Mr Weierud also gave me info on the enciphered soviet teleprinter Bandwurm.