REF ID:A38500 

LJ (5-"\.Ll-. w 0-\) t ~-d_.t..-o.. c.f-- ~tu_ ~I 

La.dies and Gentlemen. r") v...J....~ a.A- S c..a-~ph-i -d~~~d~L /"'-" ... , .... ,,,,, now ...,.-~~-V, I am/about to begin the story of World War I and the cryptologic aspects 

of it It broke out in August 1914 By that time Britain had become so 

dependent upon seaborne imports that its people couldn't live, let alone wage 

. ;. 

a war for more than four or five weeks 8.f'ter those sea lines of communication 

.. to the outer world were severed ; Pr_otec~i9n· of these sea lines was Britain's 

""I - - :I. 

I .. Ai& ! .. •• ;: 

Navy's principal task The Central Powers were not de~ndent upon seaborne 

:unports and Navy's historic function of arresting enemy seaborne trade lapsed 

after German shipping found refuge in neutral ports British trade route 

protection was the responsibility of the Grand Fleet. A battle with the almost 

equally strong German Fleet would nullify this protection but the Germans were 

not inclined to risk their fleet. German hopes of quick victory were shattered 

when their armies were brought to a standstill in France and with each month 

it became more and more evident to Kaiser Wilhelm and his advisors that there 

could be no victory unless British seaborne trade was destroyed Now the 

success of the German small submarine flotilla of 1914 pointed out a way of 

doing so without risking their fleet and therefore the highest priority was 

given to the construction and launching of submarines Now the rules of 

maritime warfare required that no merchant ship be sunk without warning and 

before the crew could take to the life boats But observance of these rules 

severely reduced the destructive power of the submarines and their commanders 

were ordered to ignore them The British were unprepared for such an 

offensive and there came a time when the daily toll of ship losses was so 

heavy that unless something new was discovered or devised, there could be one 

@'pp roved for Release by NSA on 09-19-2013 pursuantto E .0. 1352a 

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and only one end to the war and tbat would be soon The scientists and shipbuilders and the sailors had their part to play and by tremendous exertion they 

enabled the British to turn the corner but it was not until early 1918 that a 

mastery over the submarine fleet was gained During the first year of submarine 

warfare, the German Govern,ment respected the rights of neutrals but faced with 

the JCR prospect of losing the war unless all imports to Britain were stopped, 

they ma.de the ~Id: fateful decision--they ordered the submarines to sink at 

sight all ships encountered on the high seas In February 1917, they proclaimed that unrestricted submarine warfare would commence. Now the British 

expected the U.S , already exasperated by activities of German agents in 

America and by specious arguments by the German Government and excuses for 

sinking American ships, the British felt that the United States would soon 

join the Allies but President Wilson was determined to keep out of war and he 

. ... tried most earnestly to keep neutrality, like Holla:O.d, like Denmark, like 

- Republics 

Norway and the other countries L '{h~.S9uth ~ric~ ~were not T ~ 

unsympathetic to Germany Spain was neutral but there was no lack of German 

sympathizers in Spain British and German agents conducted their own private 

warfare on Spanish soil The United States sympathies on the whole were with 

the Allies but there was alarge German-American population, powerful too and 

these had to be taken into account Even when British high-handed action every 

once in a while hurt their case, so the United States Government official 

position was very difficult President Wilsom came to the time when he was 

hesitating on the brink of war, reluctant to plunge into it, clinging painfully 

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to the idea of strict neutrality which seemed to be almost a part of his 

religion You remember the slogan for the Democrats for the svcond term for 

the President-- he kept us out of war. His statement, you will remember, "there 

........ is such a thing as being too proud to fig:q,t"~ This didn't set too well with 

the American people. For a large part of the United States, for the DU.ddle 

West and the far West, Southwest, the war in Europe was 3,f/Jf/Jf/J llll.les across 

the Atlantic It might JUst as well bave been on another planet Then came 

... 

a cryptanalytic episode which entirely changed the picture and it did it almost 

overnight 

The episode goes under the name "The Zimmermann Telegram" The interception 

and solution of this message by the British and the brilliant manner of its 

employment brought the United States into the war on the side of the Allies. 

Now I had decided to give a fairly detailed account of the Zimmermann Telegram 

episode and had ordered to be shipped out to SCAMP, the motion picture which 

you are about to hear It is Walter Cronkhite 1 s "You are There" and we are 

about to see a very well-done picture but Just yesterday I received a letter 

from which I would like to read a few lines I don't bave time to request 

permission of its writer but I am sure my friend wouldn't obJect to my reading 

parts of his letter before this group The letter is from Cmdr A G 

Denniston who for a number of years before World War II was the head of the 

British cryptanalytic group and a short time after World War II began concentrated 

his attention upon the diploma.tic, econOllll.c, political cyphers wh~ch were 

.... 

encountered A few weeks ago I was in London and I took the time to go down 

- - to the country and visit my old friend who bas been retired for about a dozen - . -3-
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years I was very happy to do this I hope that when I get older and have to 

withdraw from active participation in this very interesting activity somebody 

will remember me and come around and talk over some interesting episodes. I 

wrote him a letter and note of thanks when I got home and my letter was dated 

the 26th of May and this letter in reply thereto is dated 19th of June. 

"My dear Friedman· I found your letter of May 26th and its very interesting 

thru 

enclosure, sent a Captain Currier, on my return from a visit to the North " 

which 

(What I sent him was a paper/I had written a number of years ago, before we 

became Allies with the British in this activity The paper dealt with the 

Zimmermann Telegram and certain questions were raised, the answers to which 

I needed some help in procuring I thought that Denniston could It turned 

I 

out that the information in tl;lat paper/was told by the official custodians of 

the records and my friends at GCHQ, the contents of that paper, which by the 

way was written in collaboration with :mm my late friend, Dr. Charles J. 

Mendelsohn, who was Professor of Greek and German at the City College in 

New York, the contents of that paper according to them gave a more complete 

account of the Znmnerma.nn Telegram from the cryptographic aspects than their 

own records But at any rate, I wanted Denniston's help I won't read anything 

more except I want to come to this place ) 

110n the same day that you wrote your letter, the l_mC on sound radio 

broadcast a version of the Znmnerma.nn Telegram giving very full and accurate 

details of 4S OB and the methods employed and even the names of the actual 

performers I a.m trying to f'ind out who is responsible but I suspect Admiral 

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- -v 

.. . 

J"ames 11 So you see the ZJ.IDmermann Telegram, an episode which took place forty 

years ago is still a live subject~ 

-----=- . ... . - .. 

Now I think we will start the film, we'll turn out the lights a.nd we will 

l.isten to Walter Cronkhite•s "You are There". 

When the United States became one of the belligerents in World War I 

it entered into the war very illy equipped as far a.s cryptology is concerned 

It had no organization whatever either for cryptography or for cryptanalysis. 

The Navy had a. very small unit, called the Registered Publications Section 

and their JOb was to make the Naval. codes which they did occa.siona.l.ly and 

revised them from time to time The Army had that wonderful piece of work, 

Telegraph 

the War Department/Code of 1915. There was in the United States a citizen 

whose name was Fabya.n He had a. title--Colonel, Kentucky variety He was a 

very wealthy ma.n and he had a lovely estate a.bout 35 miles west of Chicago and 

he conducted a number of curious activities on this estate I ca.me there in 

June 1915, in the middle of my work in the graduate school at Cornell University 

I was trained as a geneticist. When I ca.me I found on the place a division or 

department devoted to the study of acoustics, nothing much was known about 

acoustics in those days but Colonel Filbya.n had gotten in touch with Professor 

Wallace Sabin of Harvard University who was the leading expert in the a.coustica 

field in this country and Dr Sabin began to suggest certain things that Colonel 

" .. Fabya.n might do in the way of studl of .ac°a~tic~ .and he i::,.tually designed a 

Sii l311J 

building which was started and about one-fourth completed when Dr F Jt t ' 

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died There was another division or department on the place besides my own, 

if' you wish to ca:L.}. it that, devoted to the attempt to prove by means of' 

cryptography that the works the world generally attributes to William Shakespeare 

are written by Francis Bacon and the attempt was underway with a number of' 

young students under the leadership of' a woman whose name was Elizabeth Wells 

Gallup. Riverbank Laboratories, or Riverbank, was a good distance from 

Chicago and in those days there weren't many young fellows who had sporty 

cars and I stuck pretty close to home and having an inquiring mind I wanted 

to know what was going on in the cipher department and besides a rather 

attractive young woman had come to JOin that organization about a year after 

.. I had started my genetics work. From !J. "'cj.sual interest in cryptography I 

- - w 

- ... - - -. • 

ca.me to have a deeper :fill interest as Colonel Fabya.n was a shrewd and f'arsighted man came to believe that the United States would be drawn into the 

war sooner or later and that it would be a good thing if there were some 

people skilled in military cryptography. He suggested that I do some studyi.ng. 

I looked for texts, there was very little available certainly none in this 

small town of Geneva and the city of Chicago had little to offer I didn't 

realize at the time that there wasn't very much but at any rate I began 

studying with a manual that had been produced by the .Army Signal School which 

was then at Fort Leavenworth and from the very small beginning grew an 

organization which was able to fill in the gap until the government could 

establish a real organization to deal with cryptology Now the first slide 

I want to show is one of, I think of, George Fabyan. 

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- - - • i :!' 

Colonel George Fabyan sitting in ~~t we called the "hell chau". It is 

• 

oJl,.o-..J.r 4o' ~ 

suspended you see on chains A.. !_ _ - -- .i and _ • -=-------------.111li.l""h!.:!-1 ch the 

chains were attached and when 1ou wer~ called upon the carpet you had to stand 

in front of him and he slowly swli.ng back and forth and you caught hellJ' 

There is that War Department Telegraph Code of 1915 and soon after our 

entry into the war, our British Ally gentlyinf'ormed the Military Intelligence 

Division of the War Department General Staff that its code was not safe I 

think you can see the implications of that statement and I certainly wouldn't 

deny myself the benefit of reading the code of an Ally to be and I believe that 

they probably were reading a certain amount of .Army traffic There was somebody else who had very little confidence in the codes of the United States 

Government--President Wilson There is a message which he was getting off in 

# 

bis own handwriting Mrs Wilson was bis cryptographic expert--she put the 

message up in a special code. Where there was no word in the code or phrase 

and a name had to be given 

those words were left as they are That is the way the message was finally 

sent out from the White House to the Department of State for transllll.ssion and 

whether the message was super-encoded by State Department code, I don't remember 

at this ti.me 

Some shorthand written by President_W~lson--a memorandum for himself which 

• • 

typed ' 

he then surlnRli out and you will see that it•e in a code ma.de up not of 

groups of numbers or letters but a word code--tbe old-fashioned type. Someday 

I am going to try to find that code I think it woULd be a good souvenir to 

have And the plain text of that shorthand note is down here. Now I said that 

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we began studying, I say "we" because it was not only myself but by that time 

Elizebeth Smith had become Mrs Friedman and we studied together a.nd the 

manual that we had was the manual for the solution of military ciphers--this 

is it and this is the very copy that she used--her own copy That had been 

wr~tten by Parker Hitt, then a Captain of the Infantry, but stationed at 

Leavenworth, the Signal School for a brief' period and it was a good manual, 

very succinct and I learnt the basic principles Colonel Hitt became the 

Chief Signal Officer of the ADF and did a fine job and after, shortly a.f'ter, 

the end of World War I retired I believe he is still living. 

We also studied a manual, a little brochure 

Question 

Yes, an advanced problem The problem was the PLAYFAIR cypher--the 

cypher which I think anyone o:f' .You could solve now with one hand tied behind 

you in twenty minutes but in those nays it was considered quite a feat As a 

matter of fact the PLAYFAIR cipher was the field cipher used by the British 

.. in World War I and to a certain degree by our own field forces This is the 

picture of Ma.uborgne, the author of that treatise He later became Chief 

Signal ~fficer He took a deep interest in cryptography I suppose that 

my continua.nee in the cryptologic :f'ield I owe to him We studied ciphers and 

since there was no department in the government that was devoted to that sort 

of business, Colonel Fabyan got in touch with the authorities in Washington 

and pretty soon we were being given messages to solve The messages were 

mostly those that were surreptiously obtained by the Department of Justice 

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passing between points in the United States including Washington and Mexico 

If you will remember in those days, 1915, 1916 we were in continual difficulty 

with our Southern neighbor so it was necessary to know as much as possible what 

was going on and we got these messages and had good fortune--we were able to 

read everything that the Mexican G~vernme~t sent--the ciphers were not very 

complex We also taught classes in cryptography to the classes of officers 

sent out by the Ad.Jutant General, few from Navy, when the government began to 

see that it was necessary to do some training in this field. It was while 

we were studying ciphers there that I had rrry first contact with Francis 

Bacon's bi-literary alphabet, bi-literal cipher, so called and there is the 

alphabet and this I believe, gentlemen, is one of the very earliest examples 

of binary code By means of that alphabet you could indicate thoughts, 

sentences, so on, very simply This is an example, a fantastic picture of 

a castle Some of the bricks a.re shaded, some a.re plain and if' you start in 

at the upper most tier of bricks, assign them to a or b according to that 

binary system, your mesaage that is spelled out is the following It was 

prepared by a physician friend of Colonel Fabyans "My business is to write 

prescriptions and then to see my liHK doses taken but now I find I s:pend my 

time endeavoring to out-Bacon Bacon " Many years later, desirous of giving a 

picturesque example of Bacon's bi-literal cipher in one of rrry Army texts, but 

thinking that a ~llldm.x picture of a holy castle of this sort might not set 

:. 

well with the authorities, I had to put in a different type of cipher and 

tlf /{1(' II 

I 

You will note the footnot7'calls attention to the fact that there it is 

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there is a cipher in that paragraph Even so, the number of students who have 

found the secret message is very low. If there had been no footnote, I don't 

think it would ever have been found Anybody want to try to find it now'l 

Well, we built up a cryptanalytic organization and we did a Job that had 

to be done until the government did organize its facilities, ma.inly, under 

the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department General Staff The 

Navy did not go in for cryptanalysis at that time. We were called in 

occasionally to help out and this slide will give an example of the type of 

letter which occasionally was sent to us by the Department of Justice. This 

~ - - was one page of a seven-page letter sent by a Hindu in New York City who was 

reporting to his superior in Qe~ffV~" !3w;i.tzerland The Hindus, financed by 

the Germans, were trying to stir up a rebellion in India The purpose being 

to cause enough of a disturbance so that the British would have to withdraw 

troops from the Western Front and send them to India. The Hindus in this 

country were buying arms and ammunition and trying to ship them to India ~ 

Since the United States was neutral, this could not be allowed and when the 

British turned over these messages, how they got them I do not know--I suppose 

they had their own secret agents, we were asked to take a look and this 

particular letter was solved in its entirety You will notice that it's a 

page line and letter in the line system The reason that we were able to 

solve it was that this Hindu was a lazy fellow and instead of jumping all over 

the book, he took sequent letters in many cases and he used the same page and 

sometimes the same line for a good many different spellings so that with the 

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REF ID:A38500 

plain language interspersed you would get a clue, some idea, as to what :; 

might be in here This might be a name, you see 

Well my assuming names and words between the places where there was plain 

language, we could begin to reconstruct the book from which the key letters 

came • For example, there was a place in the text where it said 

fitted in right by it 

you will see if you replace these letters you can 

build up words in that text This gave some idea as to the nature of the book 

It dealt with id* political economfy or history of Germany and I found the book 

It was Price Colliers ' Germany in the Germans The Hindu,ad two other systems 

This is one of them, one of the two other ones It was a monoalphabet sort 

of thing key numbers of the key word lamp. 

They had a trial in Chicago of these Hindus and they were found guilty and then 

they had a bigger trial in San Francisco and there were about 1~2 or 1~3 Hindus 

on trial simultaneously I went out as government expert to testify on some 

of these mesaages and the trial wound up in a very drama.tic fashion These 

Hindus were quartered in a hotel and everyday before they were led into the 

courtroom they were searched for weapons One day one Hindu managed to secret 

a gun and in the midst of the proceedings, he drew the gun and shot the Hindu 

who had turned State's evidence dead on the spot The idea being that :Zkk 

" 

this dead Hindu I suppose was the one.that gave away the key to the ciphers, 

you see Whereupon the United States M.8.rshal; whoAwas a man about six feet three, 

standing in the rear of the court room drew his gun and shot over the heads of 

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REF ID:A38500 

the spectators a.nd the second Hindu wa.s dea.d a.nd the whole business within one 

minute I was gla.d I wa.s not in the line of fire Now, in due course, the 

Military Intelligence Division builf t an organization around a young man whose 

picture is shown, Yardley, Herbert 0 Yardley, a first Lieutenant at the time 

He had been a telegraph operator in the State Department a.nd had taken an 

interest in cryptography and he knew more about ciphers, I suppose, from what 

little he had done with the State Department codes than most other people in 

Washington so when they needed somebody, they commissioned Yardley and he 

began building the organization I will have something to say about Yardley 

a little later on. 

This picture shows, save for Yardley who was abroad at the time, the 

':!.. 

- entire officer staff of the cryptologic division Cff the War Department General 

Staff in World War I Some of them attained positions of distinction This 

gentleman w • • 

Dm was already a distinguished man at the time--that 's John Manly who was 

Head of the Department of English at the University of Chicago and this is David 

Stevens who became Head of the Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Institution 

And everyone of them was a scholar of some sort so one must see that at least 

and 

Yardley .ill his associates above him understood from the beginning that cryptologic 

work required a little bit more than the ordinary run of mine brains Now 

some of the things that Military Intelligence worked on I think should be 

mentioned Of course they bad postal censorship and there is a picture post 

card and there is the back of the postcard with a message which is unintelligible--

it is German but it is unintelligible It was prepared by means of a grille 

which would be applied to the card on which you were going to do the writing 

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-

.. • : ' !.. 

. -

That's the front side of the grille ~~at•s the back side so you had 

• 

two positions--in all you had four positions But from the first position you 

get the words: Lever, Charles and so forth, you can read that in 

plain language So for the rest of the thing, you just put the words in as you 

apply the grille to the basic card on which you are writing There is one 

more position and then we a.re finished with that--a rather easy thing to 

reconstruct Music--real music, the writing which you see in between here 

is in secret ink That was one of the methods the spies and secret agents 

used The gentlemean who used this one was a German spy He was caught in 

England and was sentenced to life imprisonment Here is an example of phoney 

music, usually detected by any llllU[)l musician I should modify that to say 

perhaps 

except/for those who are addicted to modern music A very simple expedient, 

what we call a concealment eystem--every fourth word in this message is 

significant, the rest is padding Another example, well, there is the text 

of that one Another example In this case every sixth word in lines containing an even number of words--in this case we have a JD,essage indicated by 

heavy shading of letters This message in fact got by thef German censors, you 

see the censors mark at the top MI-8 worked on sabotage messages, this 

doesn't happen to be one that they worked on themselves but I show it for its 

interest This was solved by the British organization and if you read the text, 

you will see that they were, t'he fiermans were bent _on rals ing as much hell as 

they could by means of sabotage and some of you are old enough 1D remember a 

great disaster on the Eastern Seabcfod, the Black Tom explosion and the Kingsland 

fires where millions of dollars worth of property damage was done to munitions 

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going to England The trial of certain suspects went on for years and the 

German-American Mixed ClaJ.IDS Division dealt with it for years and finally the 

German Govermnent gave in and admitted that the things had been done by some 

of their agents 

That is the original German plaintext message of the previous one in 

cipher I got that from German records after World War II There is the 

second page with all the authenticating signatures This was no fly-by-night 

action on the part of anybody, this was the German Government setting out the 

sabotage arrangements 

Next we have, that is a page from Blue Book magazine with secret ink 

writing that was a part of the testimony or exhibits in the Mixed Claims 

COlDlD.l.ssion study of the case 

I have here now a message whiq,h was found on the person of a man who was 

caught crossing the border from Mexico into Texas. That was a chap named, 

Paablo Viversky The message was solved a.nO. there you see at the bottom how 

dangerous it is to be a spy and carry anything on you. 

I - ~ 

the bearer of this is the subject of the Empire as a Russian 

under the name of Paablo Viversky etc He was tried by court 

martial, sentenced to death--the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by 

President Wilson and the gentlemen was out of the hoosegow XH within a year 

Question 

No it is not really a double transposition It's a queer kind of transposition which I think I will take up later 

-J.4-
-- :-RE-F~B--:--A-3-8 5-(}0 . :. 

Well, we continued to work at Riverbank. on various messages that were sent 

to us but as the organization in Washington ~ew we were gradually being 

contracted and devoted our attention then more to running some of these 

instructional courses and this is a picture of one of those classes This is 

the largest class we had Colonel Fabyan paid for all the instructional work, 

the rooms and facilities at a hotel in Aurora adJacent to Geneva This 

picture contains ciphers It's binary alphabetic You will see some of the 

officers are standing looking straightforward, some are looking one way or 

another so you have a binary system This chap took me too literally by the 

way and is smack in the middle There's myself, you see But the message as 

you start off abaab a.bbaa., etc-- knowledge is power 

Question 

I don't know whether Jll9IXKl8IHili: I would consider hm a garble but that 

picture was reproduced in an issue of ~ magazine a.bout 1956, summer of 

1956, when the government was rather nice to me and some letters came into the 

editor obJecting to the fact that there was one character llll.ssing--one of the 

five units, the last one was missing Well if you had any sense at all, you 

would know that you could fill that in If you got knowledge is powe, you 

should know what the la.st letter is 

After this class was over, I was commissioned and went directly to France 

where I became a member of the German Code and Cipher Solving Section of the 

Military Intelligence Sta.ff That is Colonel Ma.uborgne, who was my chief'. 

J.tinds of 

Now at that time I learnt something about the/codes and ciphers in use by the 

various bel.l.igerents That is the cipher system used by the Russians This is 

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REF ID:A38500 

A simple modification of the system It happens to have a key of 

2 - 4 - 6 - 8 positions and there is the decipherment They were very inept 

at it, by the way, and I could talk for a whole hour on the causes for the 

£ 

terrible defeat of the Russians forces at Tannenberg and the collapse of the 

Russian military effort because of thei~ ineptitude in cryptography They 

couldn't even use that simple system and many times they had to resort to 

plain language. It was easy for Ludendorf and Hiddenburg to make up their 

operations based upon their knowledge of where the Russian forces were 

Army 

This is a cipher system used by the French/ It is a traDposition with 

keying for the columns but with a little querk in it by diagonals--! won't 

take the t11ne to go into that 

This is a cipher used by the Italians, a variation of the Viginere 

Square and this is the great German General Staff high-level cipher, called 

the ADFGVX, because the cipher text was composed of those five letters, six 

letters at the latter part of the war, a matrix with the letters ADFGVX, 

coordinates, these in mixed arrangements, generally a keyword arrangement in 

here The plain text of your message requests etc , the substituted equivalents 

diagraphic, the substituted equivalents used now is again a diagram, transposition 

diagram with a key to determine the order which you take your letters out of 

the cciunns so here is the first message You begin abaff and so on The 

ADFGVX cipher for that period was a very secure system but we read 95~ of all 

the messages that were transmitted This cipher is susceptible of solution 

in three ways f First, if you have two messages which begin with the same 

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REF ID:A38500 

words Second, if you have two messages which end with the same words 

Third, if you have a number of messages, which are of identical. lengths In 

those days we had not worked out a general solution but after the war when 

.. we had a little more time to devote to theoretical studies, a couple of my 

associates worked out a general solution and this cipher now would not be at 

all secure under heavy use Incidentally, I J111.ght say that by following the 

"' ...... . ,,.._ 

ebb and flow of traffic in the ADFGVX :ipher we gained a great deal of inf'ormati.on because it was the high command cipher 

Next I show you the PLAYFAIR cipl1ezf1bich is composed of a matrix, 25 

characters, 5 X 5, the letters I and J are considered the same and you take 

l.f 

them by pairs For example/you want to encipher EH, well they happen to be 

on the same line, you take the letters to the right HW EX would be enciphered 

by the letters standing at the other diagonal, AU and so on Incidentally 

that cipher goes by the name of PLAYFAIR, Lord Playfair, Leon Playfair is his 

name but it was actually invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone who tried to get 

it introduced into the Foreign Office but had no luck and he thought that 

maybe his friend Playfair would be able to impress the officials in the Foreign 

Office but he didn 1t have too much luck either but during World War I, the 

PLAYFAIR cipher was used 

Another system that was used was the double transposition. Perhaps 

later on I will give you an illustration of that 

We come now to code systems of World War I I hardly have to tell you 

what a ccxie is. You see there an example a page from a, a couple pages 

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REF ID:A38500 

from a commercial code Those code words, five letter groups, all differ 

from each other by a llllnimum of two letters, the purpose being that if a 

single error is ma.de in transmission or reception and generally an operator 

will not make more than one error, you can detect that there is something 

wrong by the fact that the group will not be in the book This two letter 

differential was a very important piece of business for commercial codes 

Oh, this one was a code and somewhat specialized You know there are people 

who believe that illness is all in the mind and so can be treated by mental 

processes and this was a code gotten up by a practitioner of that art who 

wanted to have a holiday now and then and he also wanted to be able to treat 

bis patients at a distance but he realized that he had to be a bit careful 

because of errors, the likelihood of errors, so that he had not a two letter 

differential but a three letter d~fferential. You will see that if a patient 

were complaining of constipation, he might get1reated for diarrhea unless 

there was a three letter differential of some sort 

Chinese telegrB.llh codes I have here a couple of these They are 

' interesting to look at This is the official code of the Chinese Telegraph 

Ministry There is nothing secret about it They can't send characters so 

they send numbers to represent the characters and the characters a.re all 

disposed on pages 10 X 10 so that it is a very simple ma:tler, if you can read 

Chinese, to pick out the numbers and send it Now prior to World War I, it 

was considered impractical to use codes in the field but the Germans initiated 

the use of codes in the field and I show you a picture of one of their so-called 

KRUSA codes, because the code words began with those letters You will see 

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REF ID:A38500 

... 

variants, it's not a bad code at all 

The French had a code In this case it was not only a--I think this one 

is a two-pa.rt code, yes, two-pa.rt code and then on top of that they superenciphered 

~ -- This one is an extract I am sorry I-can't give you an actual facsimile 

of a British field code Our British allies were particularly cagey about 

letting us ba.ve any of their codes so we did the best we could We photographed, 

we copied a page from one they had lent us for an hour The A.EF went into 

the war very vary poorly prepared This, believe it or not, is authentic I 

ba.ve the thing in my own collection I don't know, maybe there are one or two 

who remember these gentlemen Johnson, 

But we caught up pretty quickly and tba.t is a fascimile of a couple of pages 

from the American field code called the Champlain We had for the First Army 

a river series, the Allegheny, the Potomac, etc and for the Second A:rmy, a 

lake series After we really got started we were the wonder boys of France 

because who but the Americans would have an AdJutant General with a van and 

a printing plant so that we could get up a new edition of a code of this sort 

every five or six days so we were pretty secure with those codes. 

Now American successes in cryptanalytic work in the ADF xx: World War I 

were not remarkable especially as regards the solution of codes because we 

were assigned to a quiet sector and there was very little traffic We had fair 

success with the cipher traffic and in this we collaborated very closely with 

our French and British allies The best results that we had in regard to codes 

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REF ID:A38500 

were with the low echelon three-digit codes and often we got tactical useful 

information by working on those By the way, I remember how we used to get 

information when a code changed, when a German code changed, by a very simple 

subterfuge The Germans a.re very very methodical and if they didn't have 

anything to report, they reported "nothing to report" and this happened 

thousands of times in World War I and several hundred thousands in World War 

II If you have good reason to suspect that on the hour from a certain 

station, where there has been quiet, there will be a report, it will be 

"nothing to report" so you have a very excellent crib We al.so had another 

crib They had an inspector who used to go around to see to it that the 

men were following the code instructions to the letter and so we could follow 

this chap a.round on bis rounds because he did the unpardonable thing of 

signing his messages and he had a long German name and this had to be spelled 

out so every time the code cha,nged we looked for this 

Here is an example of the worksheet that confronted us every morning 

.. • 

We had scads of them facing us when we came in and all you had to do was to 

fill in the meanings, very simple 

This is an example of the sort of information that was put out from the 

ADFGVX cipher This is a particularly good one It was, I don't know, a 

12 or 15 pa.rt message after the armistice when McKenson's army was withdrawing and we followed them and were able to tell everything that was going 

on Every message of McKenson's was solved 

Now I mentioned that we got a certain amount of information by watching 

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REF- ID:A38500 

the ebb and flow of' traffic in the ADFGVX cipher This, I believe, is the 

first example of what later became the art or science of' traffic analysis 

When there was a peak, we could expect in four or five days action in the 

vicinity of where that traffic was going or comng from After the war, I 

was demobilized and I went back to Riverbank and stayed for a. year. The 

government wanted me back I was asked, urgently asked, to come into the 

Regular Army I was urged by Colonel Fabyan to do this--he had a special 

motive o£ his own So I went and took the examination I flunked miserably 

They said I had heart disease--that was 38 years ago and I'm still alive 

Now, I think this is a good place to stop I will resume on Monday with 

what happened in Washington--I think I can finish this, it will only take 

a moment or two 

I went back to Washington, not as an officer but as a civilian and I 

had charge of the code compilation division in the Office of the Chief Signal 

Officer At that time, the cryptologic work in the Army was in somewhat 

chaotic state The Signal Corps had responsibility for the compilation and 

the revision of the codes and ciphers The Ad.Jutant General had responsibility 

for storage and issue of the codes and ciphers a,μd their printing. The ..... - .. -. 

~ ,. 

Director of Intelligence, G-2, had charge of cry:i;lan.a.lytic work and there 

was no contact between the code compilers !IUlli in the Chief Signal Office and ... -.... ... . '" .! 'f ;:... 't" -

the code solvers in G-2 Yardley had gone to New York and had established 

what was later termed the American Black Chamber and I will have something 

to say about that later on 

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REF ID:A38500 

There ca.me a. time when a. Colonel Albright came to duty in the General 

Sta.ff and he didn't like this arrangement of division of responsibility and 

he ma.de a. study of the situation and came up with the report that recommeneed 

that the work be integrated under the Chief Signal Officer so that the work 

that was conducted under Yardley in New York, in great secrecy, came ba.ck 

to Washington, or what there was left of it and Yardley proceeded to publish 

a book This book was called "The American Black Chamber 11 and I have a copy 

of it here, it's a first edition It raised quite a. commotion, 30,0~0 copies 

of it were sold in Tokyo within three weeks of a Japanese edition It almost 

got us into a war right there and then because you see Yardley tells in his 

book BJllXX about how we were reading their messages between Tokyo and Washington 

at the time of the disarmament conference and how Mr. Hughes, who was the . . Secretary of State at the time, and was~Chairma.n of the US delegation and 

at the tJJne this book was written was Chief Justice of the United States 

Supreme Court--this didn't look very nice Well, there was nothing that 

could be done to Yardley for his indiscretions All I can say is that the 

publication of this book cost the government of the United States hundreds 

of I!ll.llions of dollars and thousands and thousands of lives because until 

this book was published, the Japanese were children cryptologically speaking, 

children After the book was published, they began to study They improved 

their ciphers There was only a small amount of' money that could be devoted 

to cryptologic work in the Army and what little we had had to be concentrated 

on one thing or another The concentration wa.s on Japanese diploma.tic ciphers 

We bad no money, no people to study military ciphers As a consequence, the 

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REF ID:A38500 

- very simple types of ciphers that the ArrrIY and military attaches were using 

up until the time this book was published, became replaced by much more 

difficult systems and we did not read a-single Army message from December 7, 

1941 until about the 1st of April 19~3 This was a very unfortunate thing 

Had we been able to read the military messages, we might have done some good 

with what little forces we had and prevented the Japanese from their onward 

rush\nto Southeast Asia 

During the time that I was working in the Office of the Chief Signal 

Officer and studying ciphers and revising and compiling, I also did a number 

of brochures These were published and I show you one of them, I think the 

title page of one 1923--this was the first document that the government of 

the United States printed officially on cryptology I show it because I have 

here a photostatic copy of it This photostatic copy we captured from the 

Germans and the Germans captured it from the French It is now liberated and 

belongs in the Friedman Collection I would like any of you who want to see 

it to come up and see it 

Now I think this is-- one last slide This is a picture of the entire 

cryptanalytic group under me in the year 1935 We had two rooms This outer 

room, where people are standing, I think everyone of these people in the 

picture are still in the business except this one lady who has several children--

she may be a grandma by this time The secret work was conducted inside a 

-. ~ 

. vault--we actually got locked in The funny part of it is, you won't believe 

this, but whatever results we put o~t in the way of decodes and decrypts, 

nobody ever saw Our instructions were to put them on a hook--this was hot 

~$ 
REF ID:A38500 

stuff, it was too dangerous to band.le, it was illegal I think with that 

we will bring this period to a close and will resume on Monday Thank you 

very much 

• 

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