THE CODEBREAKERS

by DAVID KAHN

  The great advantage of the pictorial approach lies in its grasp of the real. A picture can indeed be worth a thousand words. But pictures without captions, objects without concepts to relate them to one another and to the higher realms of generalization, would afford the creatures of outer space but a grotesque parody of life on Earth, and would in fact exclude the more important things of that life. Needed are both the abstract and the concrete, and needed in interstellar communication, therefore, are both the logico-mathematical and the pictorial approaches. It seems most probable that the messages to outer space would combine some form of Lincos-like instruction with Drake’s pictures. Morrison envisaged such a combination in his television picture of a circle; he preceded it with a brief lesson in arithmetic followed by a numerical series that converged on π. It would only be after the television raster was taught and enough test patterns sent to make the principle sink in that man would flash pictures of his world—still or moving—upon the screen of the extraterrestrial TV set.

  Man’s next step might well be to use pictures to create a dictionary for a second-level, verbal language. He would send a picture of a triangle and whatever radio signal will be used for it, a picture of the carbon atom and then its radio signal, a picture of a man and its radio signal. What might be the composition of these radio signals? Morse code might be used, and sending dadah didah dadit (@ man) would be faster than sending the picture of a man. But the great redundancy of English and all natural languages makes this inefficient. Much more economical would be the commercial code principle: as the radio signal for “man” or “carbon” or “triangle,” use a group of numbers or a combination of radio frequencies. The redundancy would be minimal—only that required to detect and correct errors. The numbers need not be limited to base 10 any more than only ten different radio frequencies need be used.

  Still more economy would be obtained by varying the lengths of the radio signals, giving those with the fewest elements to the more frequent concepts. For example, the idea “hydrogen line emission” would probably be used much more frequently than the term “blue,” and so it would get a much shorter signal. This is, of course, the principle of economy used by Morse in devising his telegraph code. Algorithms are known to communications engineers that optimally assign digital groups of varying lengths to messages of varying frequencies; these could be used to construct the most efficient language. At first the communication engineers would have to guess at the probable frequency of the words in this language. Later, a corrected version, based on experience, might be constructed. The arrangement of words and ideas in this verbal interstellar language would then depend solely upon their frequency. This represents a new kind of artificial language. It is based on efficiency and differs from both the “rational” categorization of the a priori type and the natural-language imitations of the a posteriori type.

  Sometimes it may be necessary to send words as pictures, as in the case of captions labeling objects shown in a picture being sent on the interstellar television. The letters and numbers of existing Earth alphabets are wasteful in design, of course, and special symbols would probably be invented. The combination of symbols for a given word should naturally correspond exactly to the combination of radio frequencies in that word’s radio signal, thereby saving both men and outer-spacelings innumerable headaches in spelling.

  All this, of course, is to think and act like humans in communicating with nonhumans. Some scientists are trying to gain some knowledge about this very problem of interspecies communication by working with the bottlenose dolphin, or porpoise. This mammal may have an intelligence approaching or equaling man’s, and its marine environment may make it a more alien race than any man may encounter in space. In comparison with man’s brain, its brain is slightly larger, appears as dense in nerve fibers as man’s (which is not true of elephant and whale brains, which are much larger than man’s), and is even richer in cortical folds, usually taken as a rough index of intelligence. Moreover, it has a complex and efficient vocal language for talking to other dolphins. This consists mostly of sharp, high-pitched whistles, but it has imitated human voices that it has heard in the laboratory. Dolphins have helped other dolphins, and even humans, in distress. They have learned in a single try to push a switch giving them a pleasurable electrical sensation, whereas monkeys usually need 300 or more attempts.

  Dr. John C. Lilly, who is working on man-dolphin communication at his Communications Research Institute, stated with conviction:

  If we are ever to communicate with a non-human species of this planet, the dolphin is probably our best present gamble. In a sense, it is a joke when I fantasy that it may be best to hurry and finish our work on their brains before one of them learns to speak our language—else he will demand equal rights with men for their brains and lives under our ethical and legal codes!

  Before our man-in-space program becomes too successful, it may be wise to spend some time, talent, and money on research with the dolphins; not only are they a large-brained species living their lives in a situation with attenuated effects of gravity, but they may be a group with whom we can learn basic techniques of communication with really alien intelligent life forms.

  So far, however, Lilly has made little fundamental progress—and this in itself may be significant.

  Man’s situation in regard to the creatures of outer space and their messages may resemble that of the human beings in Plato’s parable of the cave. Trapped in an underground den, they thought that their shadows, thrown on the wall before them by a fire, were their substances. A whole school of linguists thinks that men are trapped, intellectually, by their languages. Following Benjamin Lee Whorf, they point out that the way each language dissects reality imposes a world-view upon its speakers. Whorf thought, for example, that Western civilization emphasizes history, clocks, calendars, exactness in sequences of events, wages on the basis of time, and business records because Indo-European languages analyze time and all aspects of the world in spatial terms. Thus even nonspatial entities are envisioned by Western minds as “‘something like a ribbon or scroll marked off into equal blank spaces, suggesting that each be filled with an entry.” The Hopi language does not emphasize chronology so much, Whorf said, because it structures life differently. Many of its verbs are conjugated on the basis of whether the speaker saw the action directly or had it reported to him. On this view, men cannot project their minds further than their linguistic preconceptions will allow. It is like trying to see a rainbow in all its colors while wearing red glasses. The implication is that interstellar communication may be fraught with obstacles and misconceptions of which man will be wholly unaware.

  Moreover, men cannot even read the primitive Mayan hieroglyphs or the Voynich manuscript, and the simple process of translation from one common language to another still plagues the cause of peace. If this be so between individuals of the same species inhabiting the same planet, how difficult would it be to communicate with an utterly different species having nothing in common with man and living on a planet invisible to him!

  Nothing seems more certain than that integers, the basic system of counting, will be known to both sides. Yet perhaps the outer-spacelings think in terms of continua, of curves, of Fourier analyses; perhaps their thinking begins with aleph-null, the first number past infinity, and works down to integers, which would then be the last thing they would introduce. Perhaps, as cosmologist Fred Hoyle has suggested, the values man observes for such dimensionless numbers as the fine-structure constant might “be connected with the particular oscillating and finite region [of the universe] in which we happen to live.” Perhaps the outer-spacelings amplify the minute electrical fluctuations that constitute their brain waves and transmit them directly from mind to mind. Perhaps they communicate through some kind of music, having refined it into a much more intimate and emotional communication than men now dream of.

  So much is unknown! Who knows what the beings of outer space are like, or how they think or sense? The s
imple idea of communication by picture presupposes that they see. Yet nothing about them can be assured in advance —the wildest imaginings are probably but feeble simulacrums of the truth. Fact has always been stranger than fiction. Of course they will try to make their messages as clear as possible, but what is clear to them may not be clear to humans. How, then, does man dare hope that he can read any messages from outer space?

  Nothing can guarantee that he will. Perhaps he will not, if the communicators differ too radically. It may be, as Ulysses found, that the horizon of “that untravell’d world” “fades/ For ever and for ever when I move,” that man in trying to read such messages will never arrive at an answer. Yet to succeed he must begin somewhere. And he has no choice but to start from within his own mental cage: “That which we are, we are.” He must seek in order to find, he must start in order to end, he must strive in order to succeed.

  Man’s hope lies in his intelligence. With it, he has riddled out the secrets of stars and atoms. He has traced the thin thread of causality back from a tremor in an adult’s hand to a long-forgotten trauma in childhood. He has mastered the complexities of transfinite algebra and deciphered the histories of unknown men from speechless stones. He has freed himself from the grip of Earth and swims at the shores of the universe. These achievements of the human intellect father the hope that man will solve whatever message may come from the stars. Perhaps some day Earth will be enriched by the profound knowledge of glittering civilizations, and Man, in turn, will endow them with the magnificent creations of his Shakespeares and the noble philosophies of his Christs.

  The New Cryptology

  27

  CRYPTOLOGY GOES PUBLIC

  The great struggle in cryptology during the final quarter century of the millennium came over openness. A field that had for centuries been a secret government monopoly exploded into public consciousness under the impact of technology, economics, politics, and history. This development engendered conflict between the people engaged in open cryptologic activities in these new fields and the governmental agencies charged with making and breaking codes for their countries, which require secrecy for success. The individuals and the businesses sought not only the advancement of individual and corporate freedom but also personal and professional profit. The agencies fought not only for national security but also for jobs and bureaucratic power. The expansion of communications, a constant in history now exponential in its growth, has vastly increased the stakes in this fight.

  This expansion meant that, by the last half of the twentieth century, communication security and communication intelligence operated in many more places than ever and, more than ever, risked exposure by events. And indeed, a number of episodes brought electronic intelligence to the attention of many.

  Several embarrassing airborne episodes, such as when Francis Gary Powers was shot down in his U-2, led the United States to supplement its Cold War intelligence collection with ships. These were seen as platforms that could carry bigger intelligence teams and larger, more sensitive instruments than planes, work an area longer, and navigate more precisely to stay out of dangerous areas. So, in 1963, the Navy began putting such vessels—converted from surplus World War II freighters—into service. The larger of them were called AGTRs, for auxiliary general technical research vessels; the smaller, AGERs, for auxiliary general environmental research vessels.

  The Navy’s official description of one such vessel probably typified them all: she supported “U.S. Navy electronic research projects which include electromagnetic propagation studies and advanced communications systems.” While not, strictly speaking, inaccurate, the statement obfuscated her mission. Communications technicians aboard her intercepted, recorded, took bearings on, and analyzed radar emissions and radio transmissions. This activity probably obtained locations and operating characteristics of radars, order-of-battle information on armed forces, and noted foreign military and civilian activities. The intelligence was forwarded to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, for further refinement and transmission to higher military and civilian authorities. The information was certainly useful, for the intelligence community kept putting more AGTRs and AGERs into service. But the theory that ships would be safer than planes did not always prove to be true.

  In the spring of 1967, the smoldering hostility between the Arab nations and Israel intensified. The situation was fraught with global danger, because the Soviet Union supported the Arab countries and the United States, Israel. The possibility of renewed hostilities grew. Now, it is well known to cryptologists that the start of fighting, with its corrections to misdirected messages and improperly used cryptosystems, yields a bumper crop of radio intelligence. To harvest this, in case war did break out, and to gather any information on possible Soviet forces in the Arab countries, the United States dispatched into the eastern Mediterranean an AGTR outfitted to collect such intelligence.

  She was the U.S.S. Liberty, AGTR-5, a 22-year-old, 7,600-ton, former cargo ship commissioned on December 30, 1964. The three huts of her SOD, or special operations detachment, housed dozens of communications technicians. She arrived at her station off Port Saïd just about the time the soon-to-be-called Six-Day War erupted on June 4, 1967, between Israeli and Arab forces. Among Liberty’s primary targets were the Tupelov TU-95s currently in Egypt: policymakers in Washington wanted to know whether these airplanes were controlled by the Egyptians or their Soviet “advisors.” In the fast-moving fighting, the Israelis drove the Egyptians back and the Jordanians out of the Old City of Jerusalem. Four days later, as Israeli forces reached the Suez Canal and the tip of Sinai to control the whole peninsula, Israeli airplanes reconnoitered the Liberty, which was flying a large American flag, more than half a dozen times. At 2:00 p.m., Israeli jets swooped down and fired machine guns and rockets at the Liberty. Within half an hour, the air attack was supplemented by machine-gun fire and torpedoes from three Israeli torpedo boats. One torpedo passed only 75 feet astern of the Liberty. In the SOD hut, the eavesdroppers continued their work. Marine Staff Sergeant Bryce F. Lockwood ran up to Lieutenant James M. Ennes, Jr., and cried exultantly that “We’ve got the Bears”—the TU-95s—“They’re Russian!” A moment later, a torpedo slammed into the Liberty, killing 25 and putting the ship all but out of commission. After an hour and a quarter, the Israeli forces retired, and the Liberty staggered into Malta.

  The United States protested, and Israel immediately apologized for what it called a “tragic accident.” At least two suggestions have been offered as to the possible reason for the attack on the ship of a friendly nation. The Israelis, who the day after the Liberty incident launched a surprise attack on Syria, driving her forces out of the Golan Heights, and who did not know what the Liberty was listening for, may have wanted to prevent the spy ship from overhearing their plans for the assault. Or perhaps Israel feared that the intercepts would show that she had started the war against the Arab states. But no proposed motive has been satisfactory.

  Though the incident showed that spy ships were almost as vulnerable as spy planes, it did not stop the N.S.A. from dispatching them. One was the U.S.S. Banner, covernamed the AGER-1. She fished the airwaves above the frigid waters of the Siberian Sea, netting a good enough catch for the United States to send the AGER-2 to cruise off North Korea. A cockleshell of a ship, a converted cargo carrier like the Liberty though, at 900 tons, only an eighth her size and with a third the intelligence crew, she was named the Pueblo. Her operational orders called for her primarily to “(1) determine nature and extent of naval activity vicinity of North Korean (Korcom) ports …, (2) sample electronic environment of east coast North Korea, with emphasis on intercept/fixing of coastal radars, (3) intercept and conduct surveillance of Soviet naval units operating Tsushima Straits in effort to determine purpose of Soviet presence in that area since Feb 1966.” She was to do this 15 to 20 nautical miles off the coast of North Korea from about January 10 to January 27, 1968; then she was to work off the Tsushima Straits unt
il she had to leave to arrive at her base at Sasebo, Japan, on February 4.

  With Commander Lloyd M. Bucher as her skipper, the Pueblo rolled and pitched through heavy storms to reach her station. Though her latitude, about 39 degrees north, was that of Kansas City or Washington, ice soon coated her decks and superstructure and had to be chipped off. Meanwhile, the technicians developed information about the number, type, and position of coastal radars, and Bucher and the head of the intelligence unit, Lieutenant Stephen R. Harris, prepared reports. But then, on January 23, 1968, while Bucher was lunching, a North Korean SO-1 submarine chaser raced out from port and began circling the ship. Soon, three torpedo boats joined her. They too surrounded the Pueblo at a distance of 50 yards, aiming their machine guns at the Pueblo’s bridge. The SO-1 signaled, “Heave to or I will fire.” When Bucher signaled back, “Am in international waters,” the SO-1, which by now had been joined by two other North Korean vessels, fired a long burst from her 57-millimeter cannon. The shells struck the radar mast and other parts of the ship. Splinters wounded several, including Bucher. He ordered destruction of classified material, but it was not so easy to do. Some of the gear had heavy metal covers, and 8-pound sledgehammers bounced off them. Though some documents were burned and some torn up and thrown overboard, the volume was too great: all of it could not be destroyed. The North Korean boats drew closer, but Bucher, under instructions not to act provocatively, did not fire his own machine guns. Suddenly, eight or ten North Koreans armed with automatic weapons climbed over the Pueblo’s fantail, and she became the first American warship captured without a fight since 1807, when the U.S.S. Chesapeake surrendered to Britain’s H.M.S. Leopard off the Virginia capes. She was taken into Wonsan; the crew went into captivity.