The main secret of the British special services became known only in 1974!
The hunt for the German Enigma encryption machine is full of dramatic twists and turns, brilliant insights and painstaking work. And although the main merit in decoding the German codes belongs to the British, it was still the fruit of the collective efforts of the Dutch, French, Poles, Americans, including Russians …
The military always had the ability to hide the essence of their reports behind a veil of cipher. Even the great Caesar resorted to a cunning code that received his name. It was a kind of substitution cipher in which each character in the plaintext was replaced by a character located at some constant number of positions to the left or to the right of it in the alphabet.
We can say that it was this principle, but many times more complicated, and was used by the Germans in the construction of the most successful model of the "Enigma".
The fatal mistake of the Lord of the Admiralty
By the beginning of World War I, the need for encryption devices was obvious to everyone, and Russian sailors played a significant role in this. On August 26, 1914, they captured the German cruiser Magdeburg, which had run aground. In the confusion, the Germans threw overboard the signal books - that on which all their cipher work was based. Our intelligence classified the fact that these books were found, thereby calming the German cipher clerks, who did not change anything in their work. After that, one of the three captured signal books was handed over to the British Admiralty. The disclosure of the cipher had a significant impact both on military operations at sea and on the course of the war in general.
However, a few years later - in 1923 - Winston Churchill, who was the First Lord of the Admiralty during the war, published a memoir in which he told how the British broke the notorious cipher. This recognition had far-reaching consequences and in fact forced the Germans to throw themselves into the arms of the creator of "Enigma".
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And such a machine already existed by this time thanks to American and Dutch inventors. But in 1918 it was “registered” in Germany: the German inventor Arthur Scherbius bought it from the Dutch and significantly improved it. Scherbius christened his invention "Enigma", which translated from ancient Greek means "mystery". After the death of an enterprising inventor, the Reichswehr officers drew attention to the Enigma, which was promoted by the company that had bought it.
Three years later, the machine, brought to mind by German cryptologists, started working at full capacity: German ransomware turned the Enigma into a real Pandora's box.
The Turing case is afraid
Poland was the first to be concerned about the situation. By 1926, the Poles could no longer read a single encryption from the German Navy.
Panicked, they urgently created the "Cipher Bureau", which recruited the best mathematicians with knowledge of the German language. For four years they stood still until help came in the person of the French. A certain Hans Thilo-Schmidt, an officer of the Reichswehr who did not receive a proper assessment of his merits and was hungry for money, sold the obsolete Enigma codes to French intelligence. They handed them over to the Poles. Thanks to this, in 1932, the talented Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski and his team hacked the miracle machine.
France supplied the Poles with this information until the war, and thus managed to create a machine-simulator of "Enigma", calling it "Bomb" (a popular variety of ice cream in Poland). Her strength was enough to open the keys of the Reichswehr and the Air Force, but she could not split the keys of the Navy. 37 days before the start of World War II, the Poles handed over their developments to the Allies, adding one "Bomb" each. But the French, defeated by the Wehrmacht, lost the car, and the British made a cyclometer machine out of their copy, which became the main instrument of the Ultra program.
This anti-Enigma program was Britain's top secret. After the outbreak of the war, the decryption service, struggling with the mystery of the code, moved from MI6 headquarters to the town of Bletchley Park, which is 80 km from London.
The secrecy of the operation was such that the code words "Enigma" and "Ultra" became known only in 1974 - the British could not forget Lord Churchill's boasting!
About 10 thousand people were involved in the Ultra program: mathematicians, engineers, linguists, translators, experts, as well as technicians who simply know how to keep their mouths shut. One of the leaders of the program - its intellectual headquarters - was the young British mathematician Alan Turing.
This extraordinary scientist, who was not yet thirty years old, treated the project as a personal challenge. He invited to the program his colleagues, the same obsessed mathematicians, together with whom in 1940 he created a machine, also called the "Bomb". With its help, by the middle of 1940, the British could read all the Luftwaffe ciphers.
Sorry Coventry …
But, as you know, in many respects there is a lot of knowledge and sorrow: in order to prevent the Germans from understanding that the code had been cracked, the British had to make great sacrifices. So, knowing that the Germans were going to bomb Coventry, they, wishing to keep the secret, allowed the Nazis to carry out a massive raid in November 1940 on the city. 554 people were killed, 865 were injured, 4330 houses and three quarters of all factories in the city were completely destroyed. The losses of the Germans amounted to only one plane. This is the price of a secret.
And soon it was possible to decipher the codes of the German Navy. On May 9, 1941, three British destroyers attacked and forced the German U-110 to surrender. At the same time, the "Enigma" and the code books were captured by the boarding team. This allowed Turing's team to split the naval ciphers, which until that moment had not been decrypted in any way. At about the same time, they decoded and transmitted to Moscow information about the timing of the attack on the USSR. Alas, Stalin considered this information to be a fake.
Throughout the year, the British rested on their laurels, easily learning about all the plans of the Nazis. However, the peculiarity of the German encryption system with the help of "Enigma" was that the main unit of the wonder machine was a set of reels, forming a huge number of different combinations. This gave German specialists the opportunity for a long time to consider such a coding method fundamentally indecipherable even when the device itself was captured.
Therefore, when, on February 1, 1942, the Germans complicated the task and installed a fourth drum on the Enigma, which increased the number of possible combinations by orders of magnitude, the British panicked. For ten months they could not decipher anything, and only on October 30, 1942, five British destroyers in the Mediterranean captured the German submarine U-559, on which they found a new codebook that gave the missing keys.
At the same time, the British worked so carefully that the Germans never learned that the Enigma ciphers were known to London. Only in November 1944 did the German command have doubts about the reliability of the encryption technology, but over time everything calmed down. Happy Churchill informed Stalin about the plans of the Germans, about the offensive in the region of Orel, Kursk and Belgorod, but he did it literally on the eve of the events, when there was too little time left for taking the necessary measures. Such is the help in the British way: whatever one may say, the allied duty was regularly fulfilled, and even if they did it in time - did not have time - it is not our business!
At the end of the war, Turing was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his "vital contribution to the war effort". But in 1954 he was forced to poison himself - the scientist was a homosexual, which at that time was considered a criminal offense.
As for the Soviet intelligence, it also did not stand aside in the fight against Enigma. Karel's agent, John Kern Cross, informed our people about everything that happened in Bletchley Park. And since 1943, the legendary Soviet intelligence officer Kim Philby worked there, who, according to one version, knew Turing well: they studied together.
So Churchill might not have told Stalin anything - he knew everything without him.