Show ciphered messages foil enemy but sometimes they backfire ay 57 glistening operators in recording room of the british broadcasting corporation london listening to stations throughout the world when they strike an interesting or mysterious broadcast its switched to the recorder two british secret ENDON 1 12 service agents were arrested in germany recently after the nazis had intercepted their coded radio communications thus was completed a thrilling if unsuccessful chapter in wartime use of ciphered messages a procedure developed during the world war and being used by all participants in the present war in london berlin paris and other key cities code specialists are constantly scanning the ether for secret messages which they can record on discs and decipher at their leisure once the key to these communications Is discovered a hostile nation can usually decipher all its opponents messages until the code is changed phonograph ran down clever tricks are often used to foil the enemy during the world war the allies puzzled for months over fast gibberish signals broadcast from the great german radio station at nauen records were made and studied in the allied decoding rooms but the mystery remained unsolved until one hot day on the mediterranean when british naval officers were mixing cool drinks and listening to musical selections on their portable phonograph finally one officer said well all the records except 0 tor for some of the nauen lightning gibberish put it on said another officer JAny anything thing Is better than nothing the record was started but the first officer forgot to wind the phonograph and none of his companions bothered to stir in the heat suddenly an officer jumped to his feet the gibberish on the slowly turning record took form in recognizable code groups being a message ge from the german high command to an outpost in east africa all the germans had done was put their code on records speed it up several times for transmission and thus foil the enemy blunder cost a war A code blunder was responsible for dussias Rus sias defeat in the world war discarding its old cipher in favor of a previously planned new one the russians invaded east prussia with two armies through error only one of the commanding generals had been given the new code so the field radio proved a boomerang neither army could read the others code consequently they resorted to clear or plain code which the germans had no trouble intercepting with this unexpected information general von hindenburg surprised the russians at dannenburg Tann Tarin enburg on august 26 1914 and massacred the enemy A few weeks later the russian navy made up for the ardys loss having sunk a german battleship in the baltic a russian commander ordered that the german dead be picked out of the water wate r and taken to land for a decent burial one of the first things they found on the person of a dead officer was the lead binding of a code book dredging frant frantically icalla they soon discovered the book itself and thus acquired not only the code then in use but the key to the whole system on which german naval codes were built it took the germans two years to devise another system but in the ensuing months they paid heavily at least two major naval disasters in which british ships intercepted surprise german moves were blamed on the russian coup aided prison escape codes have been used for centuries according to secret and urgent a new bobbs merriu merrill book written by fletcher pratt from ancient greece until today codes and ciphers have helped win and lose wars have caused heads to roll and crowns to topple one ot of the best such stories comes from the civil war between charles I 1 ol of england and his commons sir john trevanion locked in jail awaiting execution for participation in the quarrel received a long letter of condolence from a friend a few hours before his scheduled death that evening he asked to be taken to the chapel tor for solitary devotions when the guards returned sir john was gone had cryptographers cryptograph ers examined the letter carefully they would have discovered that by reading every third letter after each comma the following message was found panel at east end of chapel slides |