TOP SECRETJ/SI 

Gentlemen, this talk this afternoon is going to be devoted to the history 

of the invention and development of cipher devices and cipher machines. Three 

or four years ago I was asked to give a talk before the Communications-Electronics 

Division of the Air University, USAF on the subject of communications security, 

COMSEC About that tune there was being hammered into our ears over the radio 

in Washington a slogan concerned with automobile traffic safety rules The 

slogan was: "Don't learn your traffic laws by accident". I thought the slogan 

useful as a title for my talk but I modified it a little--Don•t learn your 

COMSEx:: laws by accident I begin my talk by reading from Webster's Dictionary 

on the word "accident" I know, of course, that this group here today is not 

concerned particularly with COMSEx:: duties of any sort except of course when you 

go on active duty some of you but the definition of the word accident will 

nevertheless be of interest in connection with what will be said in a moment 

or two, so I will read Webster's definition if you will bear with me 

Accident. Literally a befalling, an event which takes place without one's 

sudden and often 

foresight or expectation, an undesigned/llllX unexpected event, hence,/an undesigned 

or unforeseen occurrence of an afflicted or unfortunate character, a mishap 

resulting in injury to a person or damage to a thing, a casualty as to die 

by accident. 

Having defined the word, I will now proceed by relating an interesting, 

.. minor but nevertheless quite important episode of_ the war of the Pacific during 

World War II and I will introduce the account of that episode by saying that 

Declassified and approved for release bv NSA on 07-28-2014 pursuant to E.O. 13526 

TOP SEGRl!!:14/SI 
REF ID_: A3837e 

during the war the President of the United States, Commander-in-Chief of the 

Army and Navy, the Chief of Staff of tbe United States Army, the Commander-in 

Chief ot' the United States Fleets a.nd certain other high officers of the 

Government Journeyed several times half-way around the world to attend special. 

meetings and conferences. They apparently could go with safety almost anywhere 

except directly over or across enemy or enemy occupied territory They met 

with no accident. On the other hand, the Japanese Command.er-in-Chief of the 

Combined Fleet, Admiral Yamamoto went on an inspection trip in April 

Navy Department 

19 43, tbe sequel to which may be s~ized by an official Japanese/communique 

reading in pa.rt as follows 

"The Commander in Chief of the Combined Fleet, Admiral Yamamoto, 

died an heroic death in April ot' this year in air combat with the enemy 

while directing operations from a forward position " 

As is often the case, the communique did not tell the whole truth Yamamoto 

didn't die in air combat with the enemy while directing operations--be met 

with an accident. I don't know wbo first used the following terse statement 

but it is decidedly applicable in this case: Accidents don't happen,, they are 

brought about. OUr Navy communications intelligence people were reading the 

Japanese Navy high c()!DIDand messages They had Yamamoto scheduled to the day, 

? 

hour and minute They knew when he would leave Truk, the tirne he would arrive 

7 7 / 

at Bukka and leave Bukka for Tr~hele or Balalle They also knew what his escort 

would be and so on It was relatively easy to bring about the accident Our 

top Commander-in-Chief JO~with safety because the communications connected 

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REF ID:A38378 

with his various trips were secure The Japanese Commander-in-Chief Journeyed 

in peril because his communications were insecure. His death was no accident 

in the dictionary sense of that word--it was brought about. The Yamamoto 

incident later gave rise to a somewhat amusing exchange of TOP SECRET telegrams 

between Tokyo and Washington and after the war was all over these telegrams 

turned up in the Forrestal Diaries (Page 86). 

The formal surrender took place ~on ,:the deck of "t!he U .s .s. Missouri off .. it' .. .. 

- . - . Tokyo Bay on September 2nd The mood of sudden relief from long and breaking 

tension is exemplified by an amusing exchange a few days later of urgent 

TOP SECRET telegrams which Forrestal put into his diary. In the enthusiasm 

of victory someone let out the story of how in 1943 Admiral Yamamoto, the 

Japanese Naval Commander-in-Chief and architect to the Pearl Harbor attack had 

been intercepted and shot down in flames as a result of the American ability to 

read the japanese codes It was the first public revelation of the work of the 

cryptanalytic division and it brought an anguished cable from the intelligence 

unit already engaged at Yokohama in the interrogation of Japanese Naval officers. 

11Yama.moto 1 s story in this morning's paper has placed our activities in very 

difficult position. Have meticulously concealed our special knowledge, we now 

become ridiculous 11 They were even then questioning the Japanese officer who 

had been responsible for these codes and he was hinting that in the face of this 

disclosure he would have to commit suicide The cable continues: "This officer 

is giving us valuable information on Japanese cryptosystems and channels and we 

-3-
REF ID:A38378 - do not want him or any of our other promising prospects to cODIDll.t hari ka.ri until 

after next week when we expect to ba.ve :mJ..lked them dry." Washington answered 

with an operational priority TOP SECRET dispatch. "Your lineal position on the 

list of those who are embarrassed by the Yamamoto story is 5,692. All the 

people over whose dead bodies the story was going to be published have been 

buried. All possible schemes to localize the damage have been considered but 

none appears workable Suggest tba.t only course for you is to deny knowledge of 

the story and say you do not understand how such a fantastic tale could have .., 

been invented This might keep your friend happy until suicide time next week 

which is about all that can be expected 11 

But not many years passed before the Japanese began to realize what had 

happened to them in the cryptologic battles o:f' World War II. For example, 

Rear Admiral Nomura, the last Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese Navy said 

(this was on an interrogation), "Not only have we been beaten in the decisive 

- battles of this war, but also we lost the communications war We felt foolishly 

secure and failed to take adequate meas~es to protect our own communications on 

' -= 

one band, while on the other band, we failed to succeeP, in breaking into the - - '-; ' -

enemy• s traffic This is undoubtedly one of the ma.Jor reasons for our losing 

battles and in turn one of the major contr~buting factors to our losing the war. 

We failed in communications." Here is another one from a Japanese Naval Officer. 

"Our Navy was being defeated in the battle of the radio waves. Our cards were bad 

and the enemy could read our band. No wonder we could not win in this poker 

ga.me o II 

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REF ID:A38378 

Books recently published in Japan by former Japanese military naval officers 

come out quite openly with statements attributing their defeat to poor CCMSEC on 

their pa.rt and excellent COMINT on our pa.rt. For example, there is a book on 

Midway, Chapter VIII: 

"American Situation and Preparations If' Admiral Yamamoto and his 

.. staff were vaguely disturbed by persistent bad weather and by lack of 

information concerning the doings of the enemy, they would have been 

truJ.y dismayed bad they known the actual enemy situation. Post-war 

American accounts make it clear that the United States Pacific Fleet 

knew of the Japanese plan to invade M:ibe,y even before our forces had 

started from home waters As a result of some a.ma.zing achievements of 

American intelligence, the enemy had succeeded in breaking the principal 

code then in use by the Japanese Navy. In this way the enemy was able to 

learn of' our intentions almost as quickly as we had determined them ourselves." 

And then in the last chapter, General Summary. 

11The distinguished American Naval historian, Professor Samuel E. Morrison, 

characterizes the victory or the United States forces at Midway as 'a 

victory of intelligence'. fully concurs for 

In this Judgment, this author/l!fJ!!•pnnarx)!lrgavge 

it is beyond the slightest possibility or doubt that the advance discovery 

of the Japanese plan to attack was the foremost single and JJDDJ.ediate cause 

of' Japanese defeat. Viewed from the Japanese side, this success of the 

enemy's 1ntell1gence translates itself' into a failure on our part--a failure 

-5-
REF ID:A38378 

to take adequate precautions regarding the secrecy of our plan. Had the 

secret of our intent to invade Midway been concealed with the same thoroughness 

as the plan to attack Pearl Barbor, the outcome of this battle Illl.ght well 

have been different." 

~ Less you infer that our side didn't meet with any COMSEC accidents, let me 

say tba.t we had plenty but these were not attributable to serious weaknesses in 

our COMSEC divices, machines and rules, but principally to human failure to follow 

the rules implicitly or, and this hurts me to say, to weaknesses in the COMSEC 

devices, machines and rules of some of our Allies. Take for instance the heavy 

losses that the United States Army Air Corps sustained in their air strikes on 

floesi; the oil fields in southeastern Europe. We lost several. hundred big bombers 

because of weaknesses we didn't realize existed in Russian communications. Those 

big raids constituted field days for the German fighter commands because merely ,., 

- by traffic a.naJ.ysis, and simple traffic analysis at that, they knew exactly when 

and where our bombers were headed When""~e-foung out, it ;,as too late. This : ... 

.. -~=~· - ...... ' .. .... , =_.11 :... ·..... ,,, ... -...... ~ 

incident leads me to say that the CO~EC weaknesses of our Allies and friends 

even today lead to a rather serious illness which afflicts our high level 

authorities from time to time. I've given the disease a name--cryptologic 

spbizophrenia It develops when one is torn between an overwhelming desire to 

continue to read friendly traff'ic by crypta.Dalytic operations when one knows 

that that traffic should be ma.de secure against one's enemies. What to do'l 

Thus far, no real. psychiatric or psychoanalytic cure bas been found for the 

-6-
REF ID:A38378 

illness. The powers that be have decreed that the illness will be avoided by 

the very simple ruling that COMSEC interests will always over-ride suppressed 

- - i 

COMINT wishes. You will understand that this problem is a rather serious one 

in connec'tion with our relations with certain of our allies in NATO. I might ...... ~ ~ ... ,,. . 

add that u.s and U.K. physiCJans collaborate very closely in treating their own 

for the cryptologic schizophrenia and in applying remedies where possible in 

bolstering the COMSEC weaknesses they find in their NATO allies 

Today we a.re going to see some slides which will mark and illustrate 

important milestones in the history of' invention and development of cipher 

devices, cipher ma.chines, cipher apparatus and, if there is time, rules for 

establishing and maintaining communications security. 

The need for these things arose as a consequence of the constantly increasing 

necessity for more security in military and diploma.tic communications, more 

especially after the advent of telegraph, cable and radio communications subJect 

to the discoveries of the pioneers in the field of electrical invention and 

development. It soon became obvious that the so-called pencil and paper cipher 

systems and a little later the so-called hand-operated cipher devices had to give 

way to ma.chines and to mechanical, mechanical-electrical, and now to electronic 

machines. As automation and mechanization progress in our civilization, similar 

progress has to follow in communications especially in military, naval and air 

and diploma.tic communications. Now we will proceed with the sl.ides. 

First, I show you the ea.rl.iest cypher device known to history This one is 

-7-
REF ID:A38378 

the cipher disk taken from Alberti, who wrote a treatise on ciphers in Rome about 

It is the oJ.dest on cryptography tba.t the worJ.d possesses. 

The next slide shows, many many years later, Porta., whose book I showed you 

the other day, bad a similar device, if you cal.l it a device. 

November 

The Myer disk is next, patented in/1e65 by the first Chief Signal Officer 

of the United States Army 

It took a long time but the Signal Corps caught up with Alberti in due 

course 

This is the U S. Array Cipher Disk, 1914-18, exactly the same principle. 

Now I know it takes a long time to get a pa.tent through the United States 

Patent Office but AJ.berti•s device was finally patented in 1924. 

This is a picture of the cipher disk~used by the Nazis in 1936 

'I 

. . . ~ 

This is the picture of the Wheatstone device. I have the only copy in the 

I ~·3••,.-

c~~,,."" ~ _ ... ,. 1 1 • 1 ~.q,!.~ __ "' ..... \, ,, ·~ .. .. ... , .......... world, I think, now. Churchill Wheatstone interested himself' in cryptography 

and he invented a cipher device Here it is. It is not a simple disk It 

consists of an alphabet on the outside and an alphabet on the um.er which is a 

mixed sequence but one additional important feature -- the alphabet on the outside 

contains 27 places, the one on the inside is 26. There is a diffential gear ratio 

therefore in this device so that as you encipher a message and you turn the big 

hand to the letters to the plain text, the small hand advances one step for each 

complete revolution of the big hand After the talk is over, those of you who 

wouJ.d like can come up and examine that. 

-8-
REF ID:A38378 

Now in 1917, in casting about f'or a field cipher device f'or use on the ~ .. -

Western front, our British allies rssusc_ita.ted Charle~ Wl:J,ee.tstone•s principle 

and embodied it in a little di:f'ferent mechanical form. Here it is and here is 

a copy of' it -- 27 unit alphabet on the outside and the 26 on the inside but one 

additional feature You will notice tbat both alphabets are now disarranged 

f'or mJ.Jted sequences Now I suppose you would be interested in a story about 

this thing It was decided to adopt the device for use on the Western front 

and was approved by the British cryptologic agency and by the French and American 

GHQ (by that time it had been set up and they approved of it) and the device was 

sent to Washington and Washington approved of' it At that time I was teaching 

at school--remember that photograph I showed you of' the school for instruction 

in cryptogmplrf and crypta.na.J..ysis. Somebody said why not send it out to Riverbank 

and see what they have to say. So they sent out a test and one day Colonel 

Fabyan came walking into my office and he handed me a piece of pa.per and he said, 

"these are in Wheatstone, I think. Solve them". And I took a look and saw 

there were five messages, Just five and they were very short--they had 35 letters 

each, and I said, "oh, I have other fish to fry--it•s silly to try this". And 

he said, looking dowA on me, "young man, on the la.st day of' each month, you get 

a little green piece of pa.per with my name in the lower right-band corner of it, 

if you would like to continue receiving the piece of pa.per, you will start . 

working on these messages right away " I said,'' yes sir." Well, I started in _. 

-

and by means too involved at the moment tQ tell you, I felt that the outer 

-9-

-~ -
REF ID:A38378 

alpha.bet, in this case the Illl.xed sequence, had been derived from a rectang1e 

with a keyword at the top of' it or at least the recta.Ilfie was based on a keyword 

and it appeared to me from the distribution of' the ba.lf dozen letters that I had 

reconstructed in that sequence of' 27 tba.t ~ the word might ba.ve been 

now 

cipher and so I set back and thought/if a chap is idiotic enough to use as a 

keyword a word connected with the subJect for the one a1phabet, he wou1d probably 

use one associated in his line as the key for disarranging the inner a1phabet, so 

I tried every word that was associated in ray Illl.nd with the word cipher-- cipher 

alphabet, cipher device,cipher polya.J.phabet and a1l tba.t sort of thing One 

after the other, this took a little t~. Finally I came to the end of ray rope 

and I said to the then and new Mrs. Friediiia.ti., -El_izebeth, I Wa.nt you to stop what 

you are doing and do something for me. And, I said, make yourself comfortable--

whereupon she took out her lipstick and ma.de a few passes and I said, now I am 

going to say a word to you and I want you to come back to me with the very first 

word that comes to your mind. "Are you ready'l" She said, "Yes". And I said 

cipher--she said, ma.chine. Ma.chine was the word. You see the male mind didn't 

regard this thing as a ma.chine at all Well, the messages were deciphered in a 

hurry The first message, by the way, read. "This cipher is believed to be 

absolutely indecipherable " We sent the solution to Washington and there was 

a to-do there and also in Europe and when I got to GHQ three or four months 

later, I wasn't very popu1ar with our British friends. They had to withdraw the 

device. Thousands of them had been manufactured 

-1'6-
REF ID:A38378 

'. ----..-T 

• I • 

Now I show you a very poor picture of a similar device, bearing on its face 

the engraved date J.8J.7 It was invented by Decius Wadsworth, at that time the 

Chief Ordnance Officer of the United States Army The device itself is still in 

operative condition and is housed in the museum of a iittl.e hamlet in Connecticut. 

I borrowed it for a short time from the curator and unt'ortunatel.y didn't have a 

good picture made but you see Decius Wadsworth anticipated Sir Charles by a good 

many yea.rs 

Next comes the cypher cylinder A Frencbma.n. by the name of Bazeries, 

Commandant Bazeries, a French Army officer, Ret., tried to interest the French 

Army in a device which he called the "Cryptographe Cylindrique", cylindrical 

cryptograph. Well, it consists of a series of disks or rings rather which we 

mount upon the shaft --each of the rings bears an alphabet in disarranged sequence 

and you put your message up by rotating the rings to bring the letters of your 

plain text -- the first twenty in that case -- on a horizontal line whereupon 

for cipher text you can choose any other of the, in this case 23 rows of cipher 

text This principle seemed to be a very good one and messages in it appeared to 

be quite safe Here is a picture of the gentl.ema.n--be was quite a battler. He 

was always having letters exchanged with the French War Department but he never 

got anywhere and later on, after a good many years after I studied the cipher 

cylinder, the Bazeries cipher cylinder, I~came upon a description of the cipher 

cyl.inder in the papers of Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson was the first to 

invent the cipher cylinder principle There is the f"irst page of his description 

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REF ID:A38378 

of the thing,, there is the second page,, you see the calculations,, giving you at 

the bottom the number of permutations that his particuJ.a.r device a:ff ords 

In 1915,, an Army officer, Parker Hitt about whom I have told you,, thought 

of the principle independently. Be knew nothing about Bazeries His form of 

the device,, however,, was in strips, you see. This is the very,, very crude first 

shot at it. This he gave me and it is among my treasured collection There is 

a better model that he ma.de lll 1915 with the paper strips mounted on wood --

wooden sliders That device was brought to the a.tt.e~tion of the then Major 

.... 

Ma.rbourgne in Washington and Ma.Jor Ma.rbow:gne got up a cylindrical. form of the 

... \ .. E•'lf•'r i. .. thing Here is the first model ~ of it--it is ma.de of brass and is 

very heavy. And this is the final It became what we call Cypher Device,, M-94. 

Now,, when MaJor Ma.rbourgne decided to go ahead with this device,, Mrs. Friedman 

this was 

and I were still at Riverbank and/after I had returne;d from the AAF. I didn't 

think the device was very secure and said so whereupon he issued a challenge. 

I accepted the challenge He sent 25 messages. I started in with my crew to 

try to solve the messages by lining them all up and trying to guess the first 

word This was no-go. We spent a lot of time that way Ten years later I 

found the plain text of the messages,, the test messages,, amongst some old papers 

in the Sig:na.J. Office and then I knew why I couldn't read them-- ~~~~~~~-

All of the rest of' them were worse than that. Well,, when we 

couldn't come up with a solution and,, by the way, I must say that it wasn't 

Major Ma.rbourgne hJ.IDSeJ.f who cooked the messages up He said to an aide, ".Put 

up iaome meseagee in thie thing" so the aide thought the best thing to do was 

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REF ID:A38378 

to make them like that He went ahead then and got the thing out and this was 

the M-94. We had thousands of them ma.de They were used by the Army, the Navy, 

the Coast Guard, the Treasury and that's the picture of the thing I think we 

can stop with that. 

Very soon after I came to Washington, I decided that fixed 

alphabet--these are engraved, of course, it would be best to have 

this with variable alphabets so I had a gadget built on which we could mount 

slips of' paper and fasten them and then have the alphabet changed as often as 

you felt it wa.s necessary And that wa.s the beginning of our variant forms 

of S.r:ip cipher devices used by both the Army and the Navy and the Coast Guard--

an original. version of the strip cipher device -- this one here seems to be 

it was a difficult 

thing but it was finally accomplished and our devices in the Army and the Navy 

were ma.de of alUID.J.nium to begin with and then we got actually into the war, 

they made them out of scrap. Here is one of our Army type devices with 25 

channels and the alpha.bets which were printed up and cut apart and you could 

, 

of course these strips according to the daily key with which you were 

• v 

provided with There is another t~-although it is not made 

,. 

we used it and this was then pulled down and we carried 

This then is the same sort of thing. This is the European form of the strip 

cipher device except it is very much poorer. There, not only are the alphabets 

fixed but all you can do with them is to pick out the whole strip and they are 

detachable in the middle. See the number of' permutations--they are not very 

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REF ID:A38378 

great there, a very insecure machine 

Next we come to a ma.chine called the Kryha, invented by a German, in about 

the year 1925 The Kryha was the last word at the time and Mr Kryha tried to 

interest various governments in his machine and I think I should explain it for 

those who have never seen it Here is an alphabet and an inner 

alphabet The alphabet is mounted on a disk which is rotated angularly accordin 

to the reel which is in here The alphabets can be rearranged 

starting 

if you wish by slididng them into a slot From a given stXJiDg point, you start 

with the first letter and then you and then you push this button 

and then this will slip or skip a certain number of spaces, one to seven, something 

like that and then you insert the next letter and give the button a push. Now 

there is a dissertation on the number of permutations and combinations that the 

Kryha ma.chine affords. This is written by the German mathematician and all I 

have to say a.bout it is that, lll this case, as in many others, the number of 

permutations and combinations which a given machine affords, like the birds that 

sing in the Spring, have little to do wit:p. ;the Cfl.Se. It much depends upon just 

exactly how the alphabets are composed, not only their numbers For example, 

to give you a simple illustration, you take a. simple monoalphabetic substitution 

cipher. The number of alphabets that can be produced is factorial 26--that's a 

large, large number -- 4S3 quadrillions, 291,451 trillions, 126,605 billions, 

635,584 millions and a few more but you know as well as I that you don•t solve 

the monoalphabetic substitution cipher by KH exh austion methods ~ 

There a.re very much simpler ways of doing it 

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REF ID:A38378 

Now there was of course a pressing need in the :uu.litary and naval services 

for two types of ma.chines. First the sma.J.l ma.chine for low echelon or field use 

and second a large machine for rear echelon high-command use. Let us take up 

the first of these two types and see what happened. 

I show you next a device which was development model of a so-called 

device or ma.chine constructed by the Signal Corps Laboratories. This machine 

was developed sans guidance from Washington The Director of the Laboratories 

at that time was a great believer in economy and he wasn't going to have 

Washington tell him anything about how things were to be done and when it came 

to deve1oping a cipher machine, he knowing at least the aJ.pbabet or pa.rt of it 

decided that he was capable of inventing a cipher machine so he proceeded and the 

result was that we in Washington were unable even to know what was being buiJ.t 

until fxwctt7 the finaJ. model was completed It was delivered to us and I asked 

the Chief of the Division to put up some messages himself so that there wouJ.d be 

no question as to whether myself or some at my assistants had gotten any help 

Well, he put up some messages and I_ brought him back the answer to the first 

message in 2111 minutes and the answer to the rest of them in 35 minutes The whol.e 

devel.opment was wasted ene~gy and wasted what little money we had for such 

business I amost forgot to tell you. This was very amusing When we finally 

went to get the ma.chine, pick it up, I talked to Colonel So and So and he told 

me that his ma.chine was al1 mechanical and that there was nothing in the way of 

an electrical machine or electrical. operation that you couldn't do mechanically. 

-15-
REF ID:A38378 

-

- And I said, Colonel, can you light a room and be said, you've said enough--

get out That's the ma.chine You see the power scarce It's laughable. He 

said, of course, that be was planning to put some sort of motor on it -----

but the cryptoprinciple was very faulty--it didn't take Ivery much time as I 

indicated to read the messages 

" 

·-

-16-
REF ID:A38378 

Now I'm coming to a line of development which is of deep interest to us 

This is a picture of Boris C W Hagelin, a Swedish engineer responsible for the 

invention and development of one of the machines that we used in World War II in 

great quantities Mr ile;gelin and I (Mr Bagelin is a Swede) became very good 

friends I was opposed to taking o~ the Hagelin device for reasons that will 

become clear presently but the decision to have them ma.de for and used by the 

United States Army was a decis~on ma.de on a level somewhat higher than my own, 

and I accepted it 

Now just a bit about Mr Bagelin 

fl'"O't~ .. YO~ 

AysTe1-"~ - 1, 

He did what I best describe as historone 

corodorone--now that's a four-bit word, not four bit in the sense that you use it 

- for digital computers but in the everyday sense It's a four-bit word from the 

Greek meaning to do a thing "ass-backwards" Now usually you go into cryptographic 

work and then you have a nervous breakdown He did it the other way He had a 

nervous breakdown and while he was recovering he invented this machine That's ,, 4 

h'l1ter.,...... -rr•-ltro"'r" OGA 

why I say he did a bistorone corodorone 

Now here is a picture of bis very first ma.chine and this by the way is a copy 

of that, in fact, 

I Very interesting device ..._ ____________________________________________________ __ 

From that device we built in America for World War II (that's another picture 

of that old one) but this six-wheel Hagelin machine with American specifications 

and with American rather than converted 

We bad one hundred and ten thousand of these ma.chines ma.de--ma.de by Smith Corona 

Company up in Groton, New York They had a weakness, you know, among other things 

-17-
REF ID:A38378 

they had no printing machine--no printing mechanism This thing we got in 

Italy after the war was over and you know how resourceful. some of our G l's 

are and here is one which they had manufactured into a printing model--see here 

is the keyboard This is a 

EO 3.3(h)(2) 

cartoon of' a couple of G I 's PL 86-36/50 USC 3605 

and it says here "Yes, and the God Damn thing works'!" 

Now, Mr Hagelin proceeded to improve his machine and this is a side view 

of one of the late models--the CX-52 It prints not only the plain text but 

also the cipher text. It has a very great change Now the 

wheels instead of being permanently fixed upon the shaft are demountable The 

stepping motion for these wheels is complicated and they say as of this.moment 

we do not know how to solve this machine but ld:kxk it has weaknesses. It has, .. .. 

\\\ 

on my pa.rt--! will go through the steps First of all I will show you how a 

message which has been enciphered by an intelligible key sequence can be 

deciphered--here is the message Now we take the cipher message and we are 

going to assume that the word "possible" is used in the message and we assume 

are what we call 

further that the alphabets are, in this case,/reversed standard alphabets 

So them, here is 

we build up plain text because this key has been taken from a book and 

-18-
REF ID:A38378 

so you see, here is plain text and what you have to do from here on 

is to guess what can follows such as the constitution, the constellation, the 

construction, anything that comes to nn.nd until you get something clear that will 

follow logically the word hostile. Now the next step where you have two messages 

identically keyed in the M-2~9 device or any similar device Here is the two 

messages Here is a cipher mesaage A 

I 

and here is another message with the same indicator key 

I 

Now then this brings us to a good stopp]..ngplaceandwewiil have a break 

EO 3.3(h)(2) 

of ten minutes PL 86-36/50 USC 3605 

-19-
REF ID:A38378 

- - - - - - used in World War II, it was Of course, we had many many of 

them out for training and that's all we did have until the M-2f/J9 became available 

but for actual communications this was used inJ ... ____ ..... Fd I 1 m going to tell you 

al.so of another place where it was used You will remember that we had a lot of' 

our forces /a.eked to t1~ gill\ in the I land they were of'f'icers 1 pretty 

clever young men and we received a message one day in Washington and in this cipher 

device which was preceded by a few wo:rds in the device itself for that message 

There was no other way of' doing it at that time When the message was unbuttoned, 

it said, "Would like to get into communications. Please suggest key". Well, we 

scratched our heads and somebody came up with a good idea to wit. We would J.ook 

in the roster of the names of /the enlisted men in t;ba.t unit and we would pick out 

one who was married and whose wife's full name was given and also this man should 

be a non-com, so we sent 'back word "Key to be used will be first and middle name 

of wJ.f'e of' so and so " Now this non-c9DJ, •s name was not in '!-llY directory so that 

the Japanese could easily find out who the officer was and that was the beginning 

of communications with these isolated units 

Now we a.re going to proceed with the development of what we cal.l rotor 

ma.chines, eJ.ectrical rotor machines This is the first one that I show--a product 

of the company which was headed by Mr Hagel.in when his father bought out a 

Swedish cryptograph company in Stockholm This device was not a real. rotor 

device in the sense of rotors as we know them today b'Ut I don•t want to go into 

details. I merely want to show the device. The device is now connected with an 

EO 3.3(h)(2) 

PL 86-36/50 USC 3605 

-21/J- E{) 3.3(h)(2) 

PL 86-36/50 USC 3605 
REF ID:A38378 

typewriter, an electrical typewriter, so that you have a permanent record Up 

to that time the device was only an indicator type of ma.chine You press a 

key and the light would light and wheels would step and that way the type of 

message was stepped 

The next slide shows a better picture of this with the Remington typewriter 

and the next step, of course, Mr. Hagelin took and he made the printing 

mechanism an integral part of the ma.chine itself Here is the keyboard, the 

printing mechanism is in here and now very much smaller 

Now I show the German Enigma ma.chine, commercial model, which was invented 

and put on the market in about l923-24 or thereabouts A keyboard, a light 

band, a set of wheels--these are the rotors In this case the circuitry 

through a key of the keyboard, then through these rotors, 

I think beginning here, through these rotors and through this reversing wheel 

and ba.ck again through a. 1.ight and everytl.me you press ~ a key one of 

these rotors would step forward and it was in its stepping so that 

it had a very short cycle as such things go about 263 and a little less than 

that on account of necessary to set the wheels. Now, I'm not 

going to take the developments of that machine through World War II until 

later. At the moment, I want to go directly to the American development in 

rotor machines For this I show the picture of Edward H Hebern, a Californian 

who independently, I think, thought of rotor ma.chines I asked Mr. Hebern one 

day how he happened to get started on such work and he said, "well, you see I 

-21-
REF ID:A38378 

I~ a.. 

was in jail" and I said, "~n jail, what for" and he said, "horse thievery" 

I said, "were you guilty", and he said, "~be Jury thought so" and it was while 

he was in Jail that he conceived the idea of a ma.chine and here is the very first 

model, built presumably after he got out of Jail, a keyboard, a left hand 

or a place where you have 26 contacts arranged in a circular fashion, a rotor, 

a 26-point on this side. You press a key and a lamp would light. Just 

one --he built this ma.chine for the Klu Klux Klan Here is the first 

printing model made by Mr. Hebern--still a one wheel or one rotor ma.chine--

keyboard electric typewriter connected thereto. I have among my 

treasures in the library a brochure which went with this thing and its a very 

curious document Now, one curious thing about Mr Hebern•s rotors is worth 

noting He didn't have absolutely fixed wiring--these are detachable and this 

next slide shows 13 leads on one side and 13 on the other--this is a kin~ of 

arrangment in order to save space but at any rate he did have the 

idea of variable connections f'or rotors. This is an extremely important feature 

of any kind of a rotor ma.chine This shows his next step Now we have three 

rotors in cascade. This was a very important step--the cascading effect was 

a great advance in connection with rotors. Here I show his next development 

which was a 5-rotor ma.chine Here are the rotors taken out JUSt to show you 

what they look like They were still variable--you colil take wires and rearrange 

them, keyboard and light band There is an interesting story connected with 

that one The Navy Department was very much interested in cipher machines which 

-22-
REF ID:A38378 

was something they absolutely had to have for communications from Washington 

to the Fleet Commanders and, of course, intra-fleet and they were scurrying 

... here a.nd there and the Hebern~ma.c~i~~ seemed like a ~ood ~et This was the 

I 

t 

ma.chine they thought they would like to buy They got an appropriation for 

the purpose of a large sum of money for those days, $75,000 and they proceeded 

then to negotiate with Mr Hebern Now, at that time, in the code and cipher 

section, the Registered Publication Division they called it, there was a 

cryptanalyst of parts, it happened to be a lady, and she was quite able She 

was the one who got Mr Hebern ready to jump from a three-wheel to a five-wheel 

ma.chine and when he finished the development of that and he seemed to be on the 

point of getting a good sized order from the Navy Department, Ebe accepted an 

attractive offer from Mr Hebern to come and Join him out in California which 

she did I apoligize for introducing the first person singular so much but 

the fact that I became interested in this ma.chine as a result of an inquiry 

from the President of the Naval Board that had been assigned to study the thing 

and I got the War Department to purchase one of these machines from Mr Hebern 

I sat and studied that thing for some weeks--three or four weeks The whole 

of my outfit consisted of myself and a veteran, an ex-prize fighter with 

cauliflower ears and the only thing he could do was to type, he could copy from 

draft letters or cipher text with absolute accuracy but that's all he could do 

The rest of it was up to me As I say, I studied the thing for sometime until 

an idea came and then I went over to the Navy Section, it was in charge then of 

.. a Lt Struble, who now is Vice Admiral ~truble, he may be_ retired I said to 

. - - -23-
REF ID:A38378 - - - - --------------

Strubl.e,"Lieutenant, I don't think that machine is quite as safe as you think it 

is," He said, "oh, you're crazy 11 I said, "does this mean that you challenge me'l" 

and he said, "yes" and I said, "I accept" and he said "wel.l., what do you want" and 

I said "Oh, I'l.l take ten messages i:f you wil.l put them up on your machine". He 

gave me the ten messages and I worked on those messages and I got to a place one 

day at the close o:f business when I had reduced the text o:f one o:f those messages 

to monoalphabetic terms--by this I mean I knew in the :first line of the text of 

one of the messages, let us say, the first, the seventh, ~he ninth letters were • t 

the same letters, whatever they were~.the seco'1d, the seventeenth and the twenty- • ,. ,,. ,. .. 

third were the same and so on. That's all. I had when I left for home that 

evening We were going out to some sort of a party and I had these letters in 

my mind, at least the identities and their positions, and as I was tieing a black 

tie, it suddenly came to me and I can't tell you to this day just how or from 

where but the whole line of text fell into place with all the identities in the 

proper place. "President of the United States." I could hardly wait to get to 

the office in the morning--it was correct. I reconstructed the ten messages, 

turned them over to Lt Struble, and there was considerable amount of excitement. 

The Navy Department cancelled the order that they had placed, the Bebern Company, 

which had been selling stock on the basis of great prospects, went to pieces, 

the l.ady who joined from the Navy lost her JOb and came back Mr Hebern, trying 

6~~v the part of 

to recesitate what he could from his fortunes, bought stock in/Southe:m,California 

at 4e¢ and sold it in the northern part of California at about $2.ee and the 

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REF ID:A38378 

California blue sky laws didn't like that so Mr. Hebern was tried and he spent 

a year in prison 

I hope you won't think I am vain by showing this--I saved the :r.aper which 

had the text of the first message which I was able to solve in that thing. And 

by the way, you will forgive me if I say, the methods that were devised at that 

time for the solution of rotor ma.chines and rotors in cascade are practically 

the same today as they were over twenty-five years ago Now then the Navy 

decided that the Hebern principle was still a good one and they went ahead 

with Mr. Hebern after he got out of' prison and Mr. Hebern built some machines 

for them I think this is the last machine -- this :tkx is the last machine he 

built for them They weren't satisfied with the power drive and the hand drive 

and this machine--again the Navy challenged the Army and the Army accepted and 

we solved messages in it It had a different kind of stepping motion on which 

the Navy had put a great deal of faith It was a good motion but nevertheless 

it had weaknesses that we could exploit. Now, that last machine that Bebern 

built, didn't work--I think that's it but there may be one more-- that's the 

.... - last one he built and he wanted to get paid :f'or it and when it was pointed out 

.. to hJJn that the machine didn't work, he said, "show me ~n the contract where it ... • 

says it has to work" and they couldn't-s~ ·h~ was paid o:f'f. and the Navy decided 

that they had had enough of Hebern and they went in on its own. They had a 

laboratory established in the Navy Yard and with a very able young man, named 

-

Seiler, now a Captain in the Navy, did some excellent developmental work Now 

fifteen years later, the Hebern heirs and the Hebern widow brought suit in the 

-25-
REF ID:A38378 

United States Court of Claims against the United States for $5S,SSS,SSS, believe 

it or not. The case has bean pending for a number of years and the last I knew 

which was about a month or two ago, a settlement was in prospect for about 

$3S,SSS--that's quite a discount I might say that, except for these challenges, 

and acceptances of challenges, there was very little collaboration between the 

Army and the Navy cryptologic organizations~ Each Service had its own secrets--

r 1!r 1 .,.. w ..,,. """ this was really too bad but it was mended later as we will bave occasion to I t. .; 

learn 

Now, I'm going to show you a f'ew slides of the Army developments This was 

the first shot that we had at developing a machine under the guidance of the 

cryptanalytic people in_the Chief Signal Office, Signal Intelligence Service. 

A keyboard, 5-rotors, and now an interesting feature--an external keying 

mechanism I had come to the conclusion that internal drives for rotors had a 

fundamental weakness that you must not make the rotors depend upon themselves 

for the stepping so I conceived the idea of having a teletype tape which would 

step along and step these rotors in random fashion because these tapes were composed 

of random characters and that was our first shot at it I think the principle 

is still quite safe This is another view of the thing--here is the transmitter, 

tape transmitter, all the connections, etc It was a slow machine because of 

- - -- -- - - -. Now we bad a printing model, there it is connected with a 

electroma.tic typewriter, I think. this was, one of the early models Still a 

five-rotor tape transmitter For the tapes we had boxes of I think. 

-26-
REF ID:A38378 

there were about l~~ to ---- tapes from which you could make the selection for 

the day according to the keying document and you had various starting pl.aces on 

those tapes The fatal weakness, of' course, was the production and the distribution of' the tapes This was quite a headache and the tapes would break after 

they had gone through say thirty or forty times tyow, the Army development 

keying mechanism with tbr 

contined and here is the next one -- side-by-side arrangement with the/typewriter and this was the Converter M-134, which was finally put out. We had 

about 75 of these manufactured by a concern in New Jersey that was not particularly 

gifted in the typewriter art and the machines functioned all right but before 

even ten of them had been produced, we had come across a new principle for the 

control of the rotor stepping I tried my very best to get the Signal. Corps to 

change the development right there and then and shift to the new type of control. 

I was practically thrown out of the office of the Chief of the Division with the 

remark, "you go back to your den--youinventers are all alike If we listen to 

you, we would never get anything out -Everyday you've got a new idea Get out" 

So, we put the idea on ice Now, this, I will switch to the Navy MARK I ECM--

.., 

electric cipher ma.chine, developed and patented by the Navy without any help from 

Mr Hebern This now had a control meahanism for the rotors -----------

the control. mechanism consisted of wires Now this is tricky and gave 

rise to a lot of difficulty but over and beyond that the machine had a fatal 

weakness It ha.d a key length of tremendous length but with only 15 different 

starting points. How this came, I do not know, but this was done of course without 

any coordination or collaboration from the Navy--we didn't xexa even know there 

-27-
REF ID:A38378 

was such a thing This was very very secret and finally I think the next is 

in command 

the first production model of the MARK I ECM When there came a c'Dange/in the 

Navy code and signal section the new head decided that that development had gone 

fa.r enough and he wanted some help He wanted some help from the Army if he 

could get it Re came to see me one day and told me that they were in difficulty 

and needed ideas if we had any I sa.id, "well, we ha.ve a good idea. but it's 

secret" And he said, "well, what do you have to do to tell me I said, "I '11 

have to get permission from the Chief Signal Officer," which I proceeded to do 

Now I mention this specifically and I ask that you believe that this was the 

situation--there were secrets from the Navy and secrets from the Army of course 

on the other side But the Chief Signal Officer said "of course, let them ha.ve 

it" And then we went ahead together and I told the Navy, showed them the 

cir,cuitry and the thing was adopted--the machines were developed by the Teletype 

Corporation, a very competent organization and this is a picture of the MARK II 

ECM--Na.vy terminology, SIGABA, Army terminology If it hadn't been for the fact 

that we got tegether before World War II broke out, I mean when we began to 

participate in it, it would have been extremely dif~icult for the Army and the 

Navy to have a.ny inter-communications at all The only thing that we had was 

a disreputable hand-operated cipher scheme, pencil and paper which had been 

adopted way back in 193~ by direction of the Chief of the Staff of the Army and 

the Chief of Naval Operations and that •s all there was. Fortunately, the ECM 

SIGABA went to a war with great satisfaction to both sides and I am very happy 

that we were able to get together I might add in closing that incident by saying 

-28-
REF ID:A38378 

that to the best of my knowledge, this is the only gadget that was withheld from 

our British Allies and although they knew that we had a ma.chine of this character - . . ... - .. -... - ~ 

and although we knew their type of machiqe with which we were not at all happy, IL ! - r 

. it was the policy of-the, on the highest level of the Army and Navy to withhold 

this from the British and there was a terrible terrible struggle for several years 

until the recalcitrant people in both services high up began to see the light 

The trouble was that when the technicians assurred them that we didn't know 

they didn't know how to read messages in this ma.chine without having the rotors 

and key list, they JUSt wouldn't believe it One reason is, of course, they were 

decrypts 

getting daily the BRKx•tK that were being produced by the British and ourselves 

:from German messages and they JUst didn't feel like taking any chances They 

wouldn't believe the technicians so I don't know how ma.ny millions of dollars 

means 

were spent needlessly in establishing me!!d;x•g:r for inter-communication with the 

British By this I mean that we had to make an adaptor for this machine so that 

interi t could/communicate with the British TYPEX and the British had to make an 

adaptor for their ma.chine to inter-communicate with this one A wholly 

unnecessary expense and extravagance, I think, but in the end in 1953, we were 

able to convince the authorities and powers that be that it would be all right 

and finally the British were allowed to use the ECM until they could get al2ng 

with their own developments and be on their own. I think even at the present 

time, they still have some of these ma.chines As long as this slide is on here, 

I can explain the principle of the_t:q,ipg perhaps This is the essential element 

.. .. for keying in the machine, it consists of a set of rotors here, five of them 

"S !' 'r 

~ . - .,. 'I .. - -29-
REF ID:A38378 

and another set, five here, ma.king a set of ten altogether These are all interchangeable so you see to begin with you have a great number of selections from a 

primary set of ten rotors. Now a circuit, rather there are four inputs 

this row of rotors and the output of these rotors then goes to control the stepping 

of the cryptographic rotors so that the stepping of these rotors is very erratic 

according to the output, the sequence of characters that come out Of here. Here 

is another set of rotors, five small ones, which are used to permute the output 

of the control rotors, 

Question from the audience. Will you comment on the relative security of' 

this system and also whether it was ever compromised? 

Well, we know of no solution of this system at all throughout the war. 

There was one possible comwOIIU.se and it raised quite a storm at the time. The 

28th Division bivouacked for the night in a ~mall city in France and the van 

containing the cryptoma.terial and the SIGABJ6was stationed in front of' the place 

where the SignalOf'f'icer and his entourage were quartered f'or the night In the 

morning, that van was missing It was a trailer, the whole thing was gone and 

there were messages sent instantly to Washington and there was a great to-do--

we bbcked all the roads, the idea was to make sure that it wasn't being carried 

off' by some German outfit but nothing turned up We even diverted a river and we 

found the ma.chine in the river. The vehicle had been stolen by Frenchmen purely 

for the vehicle. The contents were of' no interest to them The episode was one 

which caused court martial for the Signal Of'f'icer and several others. We had 

very strict rules about the safeguarding of' this gad.get. One of' the funny things 

about not giving the ma.chine to the British, I think I can hardly refrain from 

-3f{j-
REF ID:A38378 

telling you. I mentioned the strict rules about who could see the thing and 

--.. 

who could service it and the mainte~~e.SJJ.d so on a.q.d ~here came a time in 

lt t "# • .J ,~a• - •_" #. 

North Africa when we had a unit there and maintenance men were knocked off and 

~ 

there was nobody to service the thing but there was a very very skillful British 

engineer He serviced and maintained our SIGABA's. 

Question: 

No, we didn't learn of' that until after the war 

Question. 

No, the strip cipher was but the ECM was never shown to the any of the 

A1lies until 1953, not even to the British. 

Now, I want to show you next the German Military Enigma This was a 

modification of their commercial enigma but an important modification I think 

you can see it better on the next slide Here are the rotors--they are 

exactly the same as they are on the commercial model now let's 

see what the modification was There was a plug board, by means of which one 

could change the connections between the keys of the keyboard and the 

There were 13 and this was not by accident, they had 

mathematicians who figured out absolutely the best arrangement for this particular 

ma.chine and now the fatal weakness in the German Enigma communications was that 

they couldn't change their rotor wirings at all throughout the war. Without the 

rotor wirings we couldn't b8.ve done anything With them we were able to read 

.. T 

a very great amount of traffic. Th~ Germap. Conuyand tried to make a printing .. ... • ¥ - , '3! - _It. ... .... 

y - .... -- - ... 

model with wheels and.4 _this is J. t We captured this in 1945 at 

, Germany. It was not a success Now about the enigma, I'll come to 

-31-
REF ID:A38378 

that in the next ta.J..k The Naval enigma was much like the military except it had 

one more wheel and there were other things to it. 

Now we come to the development of teletype cipher ma.chine With the ever 

increasing speed of communications, it was necessary to speed up this business of 

cipher communications This was recognized a.long time ago In 1919, for example, 

the A.T & T. Company engineers, in collaboration with the Signal Corps, devised 

this modification of the then standard printing telegraph to make it a 

cipher printing telegraph This is the way it was done Here is the ordinary 

tape transmitter which was used to take the and shoot it out .. " .. 

through the line but here there were two additional transmitters - .) ' '; ~.. ) - ~ 

and they were differential diameters ~o ~egin with they started out with l,S~~ . . 

characters in length and the other 999 so you can see if you start at a initial 

point, they would not reach that initial point until the 

long key and the plain text tape here 

a cipher tape here. This was a and of course know 

where to put them Now the A T &T Co. had great faith in this ma.chine and they 

wanted to get the thing in use by the Army. It was put into use in 19.}.9 By 

that time I had come back from France and we were challenged to solve this kind 

of system at Riverbank. I accepted the challenge and I think it is too long a 

story to go into right now but as a result or the solution, the Army dropped the 

project I think it was in a way too bad because we had a need of it later on 

in the early pa.rt of ~ 1942 when we wanted frypto-communicati.ons and we actually 

went back to this thing. The big trouble of course was the production of key tapes. 

-32-
REF ID:A38378 

The problem of manufacturing key tape is one which is still with us and this 

is an old model of a machine for ma.king key tapes You see t~is is an electronic 

type of key generator, random noise, noise is used to produce the impulses 

-' 

in random manner to make tape for tel~t~ encipherment purposes 

Next I show a development called SIGCUM This is an I.T T venture. They 

were interested in trying to get up a cipher machine teletype encipherment 

This, by the way was designed by 

(tape ran out) 

after he had retired from the Army and presumably was to incorporate a very 

secure principle but, I am sorry to tell you that it wasn't a secure principle 

and again :tkK I had the unpleasant duty of having to tell Colonel Hitt, after 

some test messages were solved by the Secretary of State by the Army group, 

that I wasn't at liberty of telling him what the trouble was This was a fixed 

an 

policy in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer and I think J1DKXBEK understandable 

one If we undertook to tell inventors what the trouble is with their inventions 

we would never get anything else done but try to bring them up-to-date in 

cryptanalysis and this XK was not a politic thing to do. 

This is the device which the Army developed to encipher teletype communications 

We call this the SIGCUM. It used not perforated tapes but rotors again, rotors 

which step in an erratic fashion but not as erratic as in the SIGABA and ECM--

it's not a bad ma.chine. It had weaknesses, every once in a while when we discovered new ways of doing things, we found that SIGCUM had weaknesses and then 

we would proceed to tighten up the thing and change the method of usage or their 

method of stepping and so on That was used, well that's a picture of the entire 

-33-
REF ID:A38378 

workings of the thing-- that was used in connection with the big set here--most 

of that was unnecessary,, there is the SIGCUM there teletype 

and aJ.l this is the Dllxing apparatus for taking signals from here and mixing them 

with the SIGCUM and then putting them out on the line--a very very dangerous thing 

from the point of view of electro-magnetic radiation 

I 

This is a war-time development of a se~-contained or integrated unit,, 

particularly 

teletype and cipher ma.chine Not successful. il!Q'l'l't•t•XJ',, a little too complex 

for use by even the large commands in the rear 

-

Now we have to say a few words ~ 

~ l: 1. .I 

about other types of ciphering apparatus For example,, it is necessary to send 

meteorological data and maps in time of war,, weather maps and other types of 

maps so it was desirable to have a ~chine which would encipher facsillll.le and 

here is one such ma.chine that was developed by Army for the purpose,, called 

SIGMEW We call a ma.chine for enciphering :f'acsillll.le,, ci:f'ax We also had need 

for ma.chines that would encipher telephone conversations and this was the first 

shot at it--a development by the Bell Telephone Laboratories,, called SIGJIP. It 

was a gip in a way--it gave you much more feeling of security than was warranted 

means of 

by the circumstances Conversations enciphered by/that thing could be read 

very readily but the Telephone Company proceeded with its work in collaboration 

with engineers from the Signal Intelligence Service and Signal Corps and we 

developed a very high grade ciphony system which became known as SIGSALY. EAch 

terminal cost over a million dollars and there were a total of 7 of tbhm This 

is Just one piece of apparatus--the two ends of the circuit were kept in synchrony 

by means of a very very high grade record playing mechanism that controlled the 

-34-
REF ID:A38378 

------ and so on. It was very very useful, the whole thing was very useful 

you 

~ilDxxlmxlt This is a vocoder type, those of/who have gone in for ciphony realize 

that what I mean, or recognize what I me13.n, by vocoder. You take the speech and 

signals and you chop them up into discreet units 8.nd you encipher those and 

that is what you transmit. At the other end you take off the cipher and then you : . . ...... 

have the units and you put them together in the proper way 

- ,,. . . Now in addition to ma.chines for facsi:nule, ma.chines for telephony, we have 

been working along the lines of ma.chines for other purposes, such as, recognition, 

identification, IFF, callsign machines--this is a war-time callsign ma.chine 

developed by the U S. Navy and based upon an algebraic principle which was 

described in a paper in one of the mathematical Journals and it appealed to me. 

in 'for 

I could never get the Army to go :tDm callsign changes in a big way, the Navy 

was 

did and this %Jl a principle that appealed to me and I suggested its possibilities 

to the Navy and they liked it and I think my friend here, Dr. Tompkins, had a 

lot to say about the actual form of this thing This isn't what he really bad 

wanted and perhaps be would like to say a word or two after I finish in a moment 

or two 

We will have to have enciphering apparatus for telemetering signals and for 

television, anything in the way of a signal, sooner or later we are going to 

have to have means and mechanisms for their protection 

Now a professional cryptologist is always amused by the almost invariable 

reference by the layman to "the German code¥, ''the Japanese code", the U.S. code 

To give an idea as to how fallacious such a notion is, I will say as I said once 

-35-
REF ID:A38378 

before, there are hundreds of systems in simuJ.taneous use in the large govermuents, 

at least, of the world and the next slide will tell you--oh, that's a picture 

of the SIGSALY--Just one part of the terminal We have, by the way, reduced 

that. It used to take as much space as this whole building here but we have 

reduced it now so that a machine the size of one of these little chambers or 

cells is quite adequate and we have got even smaller ones • 

.. - - - This slides shows the number of cryptographic systems in effect on 7 December .It 

1941 until October 1945 in the Army alone Thousands of them and the next slide 

shows the number of holders of cryptographic materials from the same dates, 

December 1941-0ctober 1945 and this is U S Army and U.S Air Forces alone. It 

does not consider U.S Navy which bad as great or perhaps greater distribution 

Now keeping1rack of the crypto-ma.terial and accounting for it is a big headache 

There is no way of getting around this that I know of and it is :unportant that 

the rules for the protection of the material be followed absolutely to the letter. 

I'm going to show you as my wind-up two slides. The Japanese had very very 

definite rules too about the accounting for crypto-ma.terial and they were 

supposed to burn the codebooks and the keys and the ciphers tables and so on and 

to scatter the ashes and then make a certificate witnessed by a fellow officer 

Now we very often got these certificates by radio and then we would find a case 

like this where a chap has ma.de a certificate, certifying to the destruction by 

burning, the scattering of the ashes but he was observed. Be took a spade and 

he dug a hole and be dumped the codebooks and the tables in that hole and he 

poured some water in and he went away and that was it. Well, in due time some 

of our people sneaked out, dug up the hole, got out the material and brought it 

-36-
REF ID:A38378 

in and there it is being dried out This helped a great deal because it saved 

us an enormous amount of time to reconstruct that particular code There were 

instances of this sort every now and then By the way, the Japanese were worried 

about this business of their security Theyi'elt that something was wrong and 

the only thing that they could ima.gine was that there were spies so there were 

messages all the time requiring the commands to go through their quarters and 

look under the beds and seek spies Of course, that wasn't the case at all, we 

\ . " were solving their codes and ciphers because they were not secure 

I am going to bring this talk now to a close by repeating the importance 

of the slogan which we try to inculcate Don't learn your COMSEC laws by 

accident Gentlemen, thank you 

-37-