THE CODEBREAKERS

by DAVID KAHN

  It was used in 1937 with keyword M DEL VAYO, the M the initial of the agent, the DEL VAYO the name of a Spanish Communist. The two extra spaces were used for a period and a letter-number shift sign:

  With this, e @ 8, a @ 5, b @ 10, t @ 27, and so on. There will be no single 2 or 1. The decipherer takes all 1’s and 2’s as the first digits of a two-digit group, and joins to it whatever digit follows. He takes any digits from 3 to 0 as individuals if they are not already part of a pair. Thus the ciphertext 828115125 can be unambiguously divided as 8 28 11 5 12 5 and deciphered to Espana.

  Other configurations are possible. Seven single digits will permit three side coordinates, for a total of 37 cells in the checkerboard. Six singletons will produce 46 cells; five, 55, and so on down to one singleton, 91 cells. The arrangement with 28 equivalents has been widely used for Latin-alphabet texts, that with 37 for Cyrillic texts.

  Although the M DEL VAYO checkerboard was used by the Swedish fellow traveler Dr. Per Meurling only to teach his fiancée secret writing, his knowledge of it testifies to its use at that time by the Communists. He subjected the numerical text resulting from the checkerboard to a multiplication, and then reconverted the product to letters in another checkerboard. The system resembled but was much weaker than Pliny Earle Chase’s of 1859, and it is unlikely that the Russians would have used it in that form.

  The Spanish Civil War, a prelude to World War II, furnished the Fascist-Nazi and the Communist dictatorships with a testing ground for the weapons they would use in the later conflict. Perhaps this extended—for the Communists, at least—to the cryptologic arena as well. Red ciphers of World War II had purged themselves of whatever weaknesses were discovered in Spain and had erected upon their strengths an impregnable structure.

  The Soviet Union was not so totally immersed in the task of improving its own ciphers that it could not heed what other nations were doing to theirs. On the contrary, it engaged in the constant tug-of-war of “practical cryptanalysis.” This is more prosaically known as stealing codes. It is speedier and easier on the cryptanalysts’ brains than pure analytical cryptanalysis, or solving, but it costs more and risks loss of the information if the theft is discovered.

  Victories in this tug-of-war went now to one side, now to the other. In 1926, a French Communist was arrested in Marseilles with the French Army code AFNO in her possession. Both it and an Interior Ministry code had been smuggled out of the prison at Melun, where French codes were printed, by a convict named Bultez, who concealed them in the pages of an English grammar on his release. The following year, Russia recruited the “cipher expert” of the Persian Council of Ministers, who promptly became Agent No. 33. Also serving the Communist cause was the cipher clerk of a Persian Army brigade near the Russian border. Somehow the Soviet espionage organization, the O.G.P.U., had obtained the cipher key of the Dachnaks, an anti-Communist party in Soviet Armenia. Dachnak activity was directed from Tabriz, across the border in Persia. The O.G.P.U. resident in Tabriz made certain arrangements with a Persian postal official, and soon the O.G.P.U. knew enough to block any Dachnak move, if necessary, with a swift series of arrests and raids. In 1930, a Rumanian police official expressed his displeasure over a demotion by presenting his country’s secret code to the Soviets.

  The shoe was on the other foot in 1925, when code documents disappeared from the Soviet embassy in Shanghai. The White Russian suspected of the theft disappeared overboard on his way to Vladivostok. Ten years later, a Soviet employee stole codes from his embassy in Prague; their subsequent recovery and courteous return by Czech police could hardly have convinced the Russians that they had not been compromised.

  In the summer of 1936, Russian military intelligence gained access to the coded correspondence of the Japanese military attaché in Berlin with his home office in Tokyo. Photostats of the telegrams were rushed to Haarlem, where a Japanese-language expert from Moscow decoded them—with a Japanese codebook that the Russians had obtained—and then translated them. They proved to be messages relating to the Anti-Comintern Pact, which was of the greatest interest to the homeland of the Third Communist International. In 1937, the Russians were on the losing end again, when the code employed between Moscow and the Spanish Loyalist Ministry of National Defense, which was receiving help from Russia in the struggle against Franco, was reported stolen. The Russians again lost in 1938, when General G. S. Lyushkov, a secret police official in the Soviet Far East Army, defected to Japan and revealed details of his army’s secret communications—though Soviet agents mitigated the damage by telling Moscow what he was telling the Japanese. A victory ended the following year, when another defector disclosed the presence of a Soviet spy, Captain John Herbert King, in the code room of the British Foreign Office. England sentenced him to ten years.

  All this thievery back and forth reached a ludicrous climax of sorts in a 1939 lawsuit. Two Russian emigrés, Vladimir and Maria Azarov, had bootlegged out of the Soviet Union in 1939 a “certain Code Book containing the code for the transmission of messages, then in use by the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, which Code Book was of a secret nature.” The Cunard steamship line had shipped their goods, the codebook included, aboard the freighter Baltabor, which had grounded in the harbor of Riga, resulting in the loss of all the Azarovs’ property. Whereupon they sued the steamship company for $511,900—$11,900 for clothes and house furnishings and half a million for the code, a figure which Azarov said represented the “value of the Code Book in the open market at the time of its loss.” The matter was settled out of court, and how much cash the Azarovs finally accepted for this almost-impossible-to-price article has never been revealed.

  Soviet cryptologic espionage extended beyond the simple theft of codes. It included, apparently, lifting plaintexts that might help Soviet cryptanalysts solve codes or ciphers. In this category fall the famous “pumpkin papers,” which ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers accused Alger Hiss of giving to him for transmission to Soviet agents. Though Chambers never gave the particular rolls of film that constituted the actual “pumpkin papers” to the Russian Colonel Boris Bykov, they were representative of many other, similar photographed documents, allegedly from Hiss, that he did pass on. They included, for example, a cablegram from the American embassy in Paris of January 13, 1938, marked “Strictly Confidential, for the Secretary.” Though parts of some of these messages were sent in the nonconfidential GRAY code, others, stated Sumner Welles, who was Under Secretary of State in 1938, “would presumably be sent in one of the most secret codes then in our possession.” When he was asked, “Would the possession of the document as translated, along with the original document as it appeared in code, furnish an individual with the necessary information to break the code?” he replied: “In my opinion, decidedly yes.” And at least one Russian expert (Isaac Don Levine, the Russian-born journalist who specialized in Soviet affairs) became convinced by mid-1939 from numerous conversations he had with General Walter Krivitsky, the defected head of Soviet military intelligence for Western Europe, that the Communist cryptanalysts were reading American codes.

  Questions of the security of Soviet communications naturally interested their secret agents. One day during World War II, Lauchlin Currie, an assistant to President Roosevelt and allegedly an informer for Russia, reportedly burst into the house of George Silverman, a member of a Soviet spy ring, and told him that the United States was about to break a Soviet code. When Communist courier Elizabeth T. Bentley passed this news on, her Russian superior asked, “Which code?” Miss Bentley was unable to find out. (Currie has denied ever making such a statement to anyone, saying that he knew nothing about any American cryptanalytic attempts or successes, and that he was not a Soviet agent.)

  Soviet espionage, finally, did not disdain the least tidbit of information that might be of help to its cryptanalysts. In the winter of 1945, when agents of the O.S.S. broke into the New York office of a Communist-linked magazine called Amerasia, they found therein, among approximately 1,800 confiden
tial U.S. official documents, a top-secret report revealing the American breakdown and mastery of Japanese codes.

  The Soviet Union expressed its intense interest in the codes and ciphers of other countries primarily through the clandestine activities of two agencies—the secret police and military intelligence.

  The secret police, through which the Communist government enthralls the people of Russia, is more than just a Gestapo. It gathers external intelligence as well as guarding internal security. It thus encompasses the functions of a C.I.A. as well as an F.B.I. This seemingly unusual situation began under the czars, when revolutionary agents were very numerous outside Russia. The Okhrana infiltrated their conspiracies outside Russia, and its successor under Communism did the same to the exiles who sought to undermine Soviet power. Soon it extended these activities to capitalistic Western countries as a means of defending the Marxist regime, and in this way it developed into a political intelligence service. Created by Lenin only a month after he founded his government, the secret police has had an extremely tangled history. Its various reorganizations, mergers, and separations are reflected in its various names—Cheka, G.P.U., O.G.P.U., N.K.V.D., M.G.B., M.V.D., and K.G.B. After Stalin, it was divided into two agencies, the K.G.B. or Komitet Gosurdarstvennoi Bezopasnosti (“Committee for State Security”), responsible for external espionage and high-level internal counterespionage, and the M.V.D., or Ministerstvo Vnutrennykh Del (“Ministry of Internal Affairs”), for the more routine domestic policing functions.

  The other Soviet intelligence agency is an arm of the Red armed forces, rather corresponding to the American Defense Intelligence Agency. Founded by Leon Trotsky, the first Soviet Minister of War, it, like the secret police, has changed its name and organization during Russia’s administrative upheavals. In theory, it attends to military matters whereas the K.G.B. handles political espionage, but this line has often been blurred—perhaps intentionally. The two were even merged briefly. Military attaches belong to it, and contacts with foreign governments on intelligence matters are made through it. Its present title is G.R.U., for Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie (“Chief Intelligence Directorate”).

  One of the tasks of the secret police is to protect the dictatorship of the proletariat from the proletarians who are unhappy with the dictators. Soon after Lenin founded it, the Cheka resumed the czarist black-cabinet practices of opening mail and reading telegrams. The practice has gone forward uninterruptedly, altered only by improvements in techniques. By the 1950s, the M.V.D. was confiding this activity to an entire section—the 3rd, or Individual, Division of the M.V.D.’s 2nd Special Directorate, the Directorate for Positive State Security. This division ensures the reliability of the Soviet citizenry by the most modern methods of communications surveillance, such as electronic room-bugging, as well as by the most pedestrian methods of shadowing, using informers, and reading letters. Representatives of the secret police’s Information Administration, stationed in postal-telegraph stations, have long opened foreign mail, letters to suspected persons, and a percentage of the rest of the mail at random.

  They turned over any suspicious letters to the chief cryptologic agency of the Soviet Union, the quasi-independent Spets-Otdel (“Special Department”), whose primary task was reading the coded messages of other nations. Though attached to the foreign directorate of the secret police, it was actually responsible to the Central Committee of the Russian Communist party, the Soviet Union’s real ruling body, whose chairman was first Lenin and then Stalin. In 1938, it appears to have been renamed and reorganized into the 5th Directorate of what was then the N.K.V.D.

  Up until that time, and beginning, apparently, around 1927, its chief was Gleb I. Boki, an old Bolshevik and friend of Lenin, who, at the same time, sat on the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union! Born in 1879, he had taken part in prerevolutionary activities and had gained the Communist badge of honor by being arrested many times and winning a three-year sentence in Siberia. At the time of the Revolution, he was secretary of the Bolshevik cell in the capital, St. Petersburg. In the early 1920s, he headed the Cheka in Turkestan, where he so terrorized the country that legends about him remained alive long after he had gone: that he ate dog meat (especially execrable to the Moslem population), even that he drank human blood. It seems true, however, that as head of the Spets-Otdel Boki held wild parties, if not actual orgies, with a group of carefully selected guests at his rented dacha near Batumi during his vacations. He kept his office door always closed and used a peephole with one-way glass to examine visitors. Tall and stooped, with a sinister expression and cold blue eyes that gave one the impression that he hated the very sight of you, he gave at least one girl worker the shivers whenever he emerged from his sanctum and spoke to her when she was alone in the office on night duty. Never with a hat and always with his raincoat, which he wore in all seasons, Boki seems to have been an administrator rather than a cryptologist. He was executed in 1938 in the great Stalinist purges. Afterwards, it was discovered that he had, most unsocialistically, hoarded gold and silver coins.

  The Spets-Otdel handled both cryptography and cryptanalysis. In 1933, the cryptographers worked in a big room on the fourth floor of a former insurance building that the O.G.P.U. occupied at 6 Lubyanka Street. The cryptanalysts were then on the top floor of a former Ministry of Foreign Affairs building at the corner of Lubyanka Street and Kuznetsky Bridge Street. The comings and goings of ordinary tenants on the lower floors and of the members of a diplomats’ club disguised the presence of the office. In 1935, both cryptographers and cryptanalysts moved into the new building of what was now the N.K.V.D. at 2 Dzerzhinsky Street (named for the first head of the secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky).

  The cryptographic division was subdivided into several sections. There were separate sections, for example, for the N.K.V.D. network inside Russia, for the border patrols (under N.K.V.D. jurisdiction) and uniformed N.K.V.D. troops, for Gulag, the prison administration, for clandestine agents abroad, and for the “legal” N.K.V.D. residents abroad. This last section was No. 6. Its chief, Koslov, was dismissed during the purges, and after his successor was sent to the United States as a cipher clerk, the section was headed by a man not unknown to later fame—Vladimir M. Petrov, who defected in 1954 and was granted asylum in Australia.*

  The growth of Section 6 may measure that of Soviet espionage. When Petrov joined in 1933, there were only 12 workers; in 1951, there were 45 or 50. As cipher clerks in the N.K.V.D., entrusted with the deepest secrets of the most secret agency in Russia, these people were among the elite of the Soviet Union, yet their jobs in this workers’ paradise were anything but heavenly. Ciphering was done by hand, and early in his career Petrov often worked until midnight to clear up the day’s backlog of telegrams. Later, as deputy section chief, Petrov did no actual enciphering or deciphering, but read the telegrams, corrected them, and signed them. Sometimes the clerks were given noncryptographic assignments, as in the case of Bokov, a tall, taciturn, unusually strong staff member. He was selected to kill the Soviet ambassador in a Middle Eastern country, which he did with a single blow of a short iron bar that split the ambassador’s skull in his office one day. Bokov stayed on for a year as a cipher clerk in the embassy to throw off suspicion, and then returned—with the order of the Red Star.

  The cryptanalysts were divided into geographical and linguistic subsections—Chinese, Anglo-American, and so on.† The future Mrs. Ekdovia Petrov, who had studied Japanese for two years at a language school in Moscow, was assigned to the Japanese section. Among her co-workers were Vera Plotnikova, daughter of a professor of Japanese and a long-time resident of Japan; Galina Podpalova, who liked things Japanese so much that she wore kimonos at home; Ivan Kalinin, who came in occasionally as a consultant; and Professor Shungsky, old, distinguished, vigorous, the section’s supreme authority on Japanese. He gave Doosia (the future Mrs. Petrov’s nickname) an affectionate kiss on the cheek when, after four years of his tutoring, she translated a difficult sentence to his
liking at her final examination.

  Shungsky had served in the czarist Army, and many others in the crypt-analytic section were elderly former Russian aristocrats, including counts and barons. This shocking breach of Bolshevik polity resulted from a serious shortage of linguists, who were needed in codebreaking. Cryptanalysts themselves were so excessively scarce that even when they were jailed they continued to work. Vladimir Krivosh, the father of Doosia’s first love and de facto husband, Roman Krivosh, had held a high post in the Okhrana; he was alternately arrested and released, but worked for the Spets-Otdel even while he was in the Butirskaya Prison in Moscow. Eventually the police took Roman away to the same prison, but the head of his section in what was then the 5th Directorate brought him his work.

  There was, of course, no security problem with inmate-cryptanalysts. But security was impressed on the others. They were not allowed to tell anyone the department in which they worked nor even where the office was. Doosia never even told her parents. They also had to keep out of restaurants, presumably because their conversations might be overheard.

  Did their work prosper? It did, and very well indeed. In 1929 or 1930, the Spets-Otdel compiled a weekly precis of foreign telegrams that it had solved and sent it to O.G.P.U. department heads and to the Central Committee. By 1938, the pace seems to have accelerated, for by then Doosia had the job with a Madame Moritz of checking the typed fair copies that represented each day’s output against their handwritten originals. One former O.G.P.U. official stated that the Spets-Otdel “carries on the work of reading codes splendidly” and praised Boki’s staffers as “a first-class lot, often cited for emulation.”