Overview of 2014

As the year comes to a close it’s time to look back at some of the top essays that I wrote in 2014, plus the ones that I extensively rewrote using new information.

Cryptology

United States cryptologic security failures in WWII

Compromise of Soviet codes in WWII

Soviet pre-arranged form reports

British cryptologic security failures in WWII

The British Typex cipher machine

Decoded US diplomatic messages from 1944

Compromise of OWI - Office of War Information communications

Compromise of US M-209 cipher machine prior to the invasion of Normandy

State Department’s strip cipher – reuse of alphabet strips and key lists

Naval Enigma compromise and the spy in the United States Department of the Navy

Case ‘Wicher’ – Information from the war diary of Inspectorate 7/VI

The US AN/GSQ-1 (SIGJIP) speech scrambler

The French War Ministry’s FLD code

Professor Wolfgang Franz and OKW/Chi’s mathematical research department

Reich security service and OKW/Chi reports

German special intelligence, the M-138 strip cipher and unrest in India

Decoded messages in the Finnish national archives

Typex cipher machines for the Polish Foreign Ministry

The epic quest for the Carlson-Goldsberry report

The German intercept stations in Spain

The Japanese J-19 FUJI code

The codebreakers of the Japanese Foreign Ministry and the compromise of US codes prior to Pearl Harbor

Svetova Revoluce and the codes of the Czech resistance

Allen Dulles and the compromise of OSS codes in WWII (added new information)

The US TELWA code (added new information)

The British War Office Cypher (added new information)

The Soviet K-37 ‘Crystal’ cipher machine (added new information)

Soviet partisan codes and KONA 6 (added new information)

French Hagelin cipher machines (added new information)

The RAF Cypher (added new information)

The British Interdepartmental Cypher (added new information)

The American M-209 cipher machine (added new information)

US Military Strip Ciphers (added new information)

US diplomatic codes A1, C1, Gray and Brown (added new information)

The British railways code (added new information)

Soviet Diplomatic Code 26 and the elusive Dr Roeder (added new information)

Swedish Army codes and Aussenstelle Halden (added new information)

Wartime exploitation of Turkish codes by Axis and Allied powers (added new information)

The secret messages of Marshall Tito and General Mihailović (added new information)

German intelligence on operation Overlord (added new information)

T-34 tank

WWII Myths - T-34 Best Tank of the war (added new information)

Spies

General Onodera’s intelligence bazaar

Abwehr agent Marina Lee and the Norway campaign

Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle and the radio network of the French Communist Party

Book reviews

Recommended reading on the Eastern Front

New books on Soviet cryptology in WWII

New book on the Italian codebreakers of WWII 

Australian codebreakers of WWII

I was able to find lots of new information in the government archives of the USA, UK, Germany and Finland and I got lucky with some of my freedom of information act requests to the NSA. Again I have to thank the people who helped me by giving me files and information and/or collaborating with me in locating interesting reports. I wouldn’t have been able to find so much without your help! As we say in Greece ‘η ισχύς εν τη ενώσει’.

Is there anything left to cover in 2015? Actually there is. I’m waiting for several TICOM reports to be declassified by the NSA and there also some files from NARA and the UK national archives that I need to locate/copy. Regarding historical cases I need to cover:

1). Τhe compromise of the codes of the Resistance movements in occupied Europe by the Agents section of Inspectorate 7/VI (German Army signals intelligence).

2). The compromise of the DFC - Division Field Code of the US 29th Infantry Division, prior to the Normandy invasion in summer ’44.

3). Find more information on the Polish diplomatic and military attaché codes of WWII (indicator MILITPOLΟGNE)

4). Continue to investigate the compromise of the State Departments strip cipher.

5). The compromise of the communications of General Barnwell R. Legge, US military attaché in Switzerland during WWII.

6). Add new information regarding the compromise of the Bell Labs A-3 speech privacy system.

7). Find more information on Goering’s Forschungsamt.

With a bit of luck I should be able to uncover a great deal of interesting information.

Update

Added the following pics in French Hagelin cipher machines.

Update

I added SRH-349 ‘The Achievements of the Signal Security Agency (SSA) in World War II’ in the notes of French Hagelin cipher machines and information from SRH-361 ‘History of the Signal Security Agency volume two - The general cryptanalytic problems’ in The French War Ministry’s FLD code.

The British Typex cipher machine

In 1926, the British Government set up an Inter-Departmental Cypher Committee to investigate the possibility of replacing the book systems then used by the armed forces, the Foreign Office, the Colonial Office and the India Office with a cipher machine. It was understood that a cipher machine would be inherently more secure than the codebook system and much faster to use in encoding and decoding messages. Despite spending a considerable amount of money and evaluating various models by 1933 the committee had failed to find a suitable machine. Yet the need for such a device continued to exist and the Royal Air Force decided to independently fund such a project. The person in charge of their programme was Wing Commander Lywood, a member of their Signals Division. Lywood decided to focus on modifying an existing cipher machine and the one chosen was the commercially successful Enigma. Two more rotor positions were added in the scrambler unit and the machine was modified so that it could automatically print the enciphered text. This was done so these machines could be used in the DTN-Defence Teleprinter Network.

The new machine was called Typex (originally RAF Enigma with TypeX attachments). The first experimental model was delivered to the Air Ministry in 1934 and after a period of testing 30 more Mark I Typex machines were produced in 1937. The new model Typex Mark II, demonstrated in 1938, was equipped with two printers for printing the plaintext and ciphertext version of each message. It was this model that was built in large numbers and the first contract for 350 machines was signed in 1938. Typex production was slow during the war with 500 machines built by June 1940, 2,300 by the end of 1942, 4,078 by December 1943 and 5,016 by May 1944. By the summer of 1945 about 11.000 (8.200 Mk II and 3.000 Mk VI) had been built (1).

Update

I have added the National Institute for Defense Studies articles ‘Japanese intelligence and the Soviet-Japanese border conflicts in the 1930s’ and ‘Japanese Intelligence and Counterinsurgency during the Sino-Japanese War: North China in the 1940s’ in the sources of Japanese codebreakers of WWII.

Update

I added information from ‘Report on interrogation of Walter Schellenberg 27 June- 12 July 1945’ (which can be found in British national archives folder KV 2/95) in Intercepted conversations - Bell Labs A-3 Speech scrambler and German codebreakers, Reich security service and OKW/Chi reports and Allen Dulles and the compromise of OSS codes in WWII.

Also added information from the report E-Bericht Nr. 3/44 der NAASt 5 (Berichtszeit 1.4-30.6.44) in German intelligence on operation Overlord and The American M-209 cipher machine.

Compromise of US M-209 cipher machine prior to the invasion of Normandy

Sometimes the answer to an interesting question is right in front of us but we can’t see it because we’re not paying attention…

In my essay German intelligence on operation Overlord I said about the M-209 cipher machine:

The M-209 cipher machine was used extensively by the US armed forces in the period 1943-45. Army units in England sent training messages on the M-209 which the Germans decoded.

The USAAF used it in operational and administrative networks.

M-209 traffic together with D/F may have allowed the Germans to discover the concentration of US forces in the South.

After having a look at the report E-Bericht Nr. 3/44 der NAASt 5 (Berichtszeit 1.4-30.6.44) it is clear that the Germans were in fact able to get order of battle intelligence on the US forces in the UK. In pages 2-3 it says:

 

 

Activity report before the invasion

…………………………………………

1). AM1:

Focused on decoding the AM1. Ten absolute settings were recovered, which brought the deciphering of 1,119 messages. This cipher-material, mostly composed by the U.S American Expeditionary Corps, gave valuable insights into the location of enemy groups.

AM1 (Amerikanische Maschine 1) was the German designation for the M-209.

German special intelligence, the M-138 strip cipher and unrest in India

Signals intelligence and codebreaking played an important role in WWII. British and American codebreakers solved many important Axis crypto systems, such as the German Enigma machine and the Japanese Navy’s code JN25. Similarly the codebreakers of the Axis nations also had their own victories versus Allied codes.

One of the most important Allied cryptosystems compromised by the codebreakers of Germany, Finland and Japan was the State Department’s M-138-A strip cipher.  This cipher system was used for important messages by US embassies around the world and also by the Office of Strategic Services and the Office of War Information.

Unfortunately accurate information on the compromise of this system is limited and the statements made in some of the available TICOM reports are often contradictory. Still it is clear that from 1940 till late 1944 the Axis codebreakers were able to read a lot of the traffic sent on the ‘circular’ and ‘special’ strips.

In complicated cases like this one the only way to find more information is by checking all the available sources. During WWII there was an exchange of information between Germany, Finland and Japan on the State Department’s strip cipher. Some of these messages were intercepted and decoded by the Western Allies, so it is possible to track the progress of the Axis codebreakers through their decoded messages.