Transcripts For CSPAN3 Breaking The German Enigma Code 20240713

Cryptoanalyst alan turing. Prior to his writing career, he worked for the International Law firm clifford chance. He is currently a trustee of Bletchley Park and the turing trust. He serves as the Bletchley Park fellow of college in oxford. Last but certainly not least, he is a member of the honorary board here at the International Spy museum and he is a tremendous supporter of our educational efforts here at spy. So we are excited to have dermot here today to discuss how enigma was really broken with the cooperative efforts of poland, britain, and france. After the formal presentation, what we would like you to invite you to walk up to the mics on each side of the theater and go ahead and ask your questions. There will be plenty of time to ask your questions and get them answered. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to dermot turing. Thank you. [ applause ] many thanks, chris. And to all of you for coming and for the welcome. Just before i start, id just like to say to chris and to the team here at the spy museum, i think its amazing to see how this place has transformed since the move last year from your previous premises. I think youve got an amazing array of things going on here. Its very, very exciting museum to be associated with. So its a privilege for me to be here today and to be associated with you more generally. Now, youre wondering what the real story is behind the enigma code breaking. Otherwise, you wouldnt have shown up to this talk. Youve seen the movie and you know that Benedict Cumberbatch is the gentleman on the right. He played my uncle who is the gentleman on the left. Have i got that right . Yeah, i got that right. Anyway, these two characters are sort of confused or maybe holmes is the guy on left. Anyway, never mind. So we all know the truth. At least we think we know the truth about enigma. But its actually a little bit more involved. Im not going to give you a movie synopsis. You can go buy the dvd if you havent already seen it. Here is a memo which from where im standing, the print is big enough to read. I guess if youre at the back you may not be able to see this. This memo is in the British National archives. It dates from 1938 and the year before war broke out in europe, its written by the one of the cryptoanalysts which shortly became Bletchley Park and john tillman. Old spies dont retire. He subsequently worked for the nsa. When you retire from the uk government it wasnt called the government code anymore. It was called gchq. When you retire from there, then he is hired by the nsa. Thats how things work. John tillman worked here for a while. For about 20 years, in fact. This is what he wrote in 1938. He is writing about the enigma machine. I dont need to introduce that. That is Benedict Cumberbatch over there on the right. He said in 1931, we were provided by the french, ill come back to that in a minute, with photographs and directions for use of the German Army Enigma machine. There is an attachment on the front of the machine which does not appear on the model available to the public. It was commercially available, but not in the form the german army was using. This is the thing that tiltman is asking about. This plug board arrangement on the front. Which was not available on the commercial machine. In the directions given, tillman goes on, do not fully explain the function of this attachment which is still not understood here. So this is 1938. The british do not understand basically how this german army model of the enigma machine works. He says, can the french be asking to tell us everything on the following points. A, b, c, d, so on. This is interesting. This is right before the outbreak of war. And that state of ignorance if you like goes on right up until pretty much the outbreak of war. It goes on right through until july of 1939. The brits still dont know the answer to these questions. So if they dont know how the enigma machine works, this raises a question for me. And the question is this. Contrary to when you come away from the imitation game understanding is that they were going to find the daily settings of the enigma machine, that design was ready and in the hands of the engineers by no later than november of 1939. So between july, when they have no understanding of how the machine works, and november, when they were ready to start the codebreaking machine, something almost miraculous has happened. Knowledge has been just transformed in that time. And thats a puzzle. So what im going to talk to you about for the next few minutes is, what is the answer to that particular mystery . Im going to introduce you to some of my friends. First of all, these particular friends, which are documents. Im a geek, i like finding old documents in archives. So weve got photographs taken in 1931. And ill talk about how those photographs came to be taken in a moment. There is a photograph of an enigme machine. Its not a very good picture of an enigma machine. But thats clearly what it is. We have a document on the left. Berlin, 1913. You can see the number of the document has been redacted by the photographer. Top righthand corner. Hmm, interesting. The reason for that being that we dont want anybody to know who it is, whose copy it is that we got hold of. That is interesting. The plot thickens. And this is the operating instructions for the enigma machine. And then the document in the middle is what you see on the inside front cover of this which tells you that under the law of june 3rd, 1914, if you give this away to the enemy, then you will go straight to jail and you will not be able to pass go and you will not be able to collect your 200. Okay. So these are the famous documents handed over by the french in the early 1930s. And the ones that do not explain the operation of this fiendish plug board device on the front of the machine. How did the brits get hold of these documents . This is how i will introduce you to some real friends of mine, every one of whom is a spy. This is my friend, his brother was the head of the german armys Cipher Office. And wasnt doing very well. And he begged his brother to give him a job. And his brother gave him a job in the Cipher Office and good old hans tilo had access to the safe where certain documents were kept. Unfortunately the salary of a german Civil Servant in the between the wars period wasnt particularly great. And we know what happened to the German Economy in the between the wars period and so hans was thinking of ways to supplement his income. I will explain in a moment why he needed to supplement his income. It looks smart in this one. This is about the time he joined the something called the nationalistic socialistic german workers party. In other words, the nazis. And thats the photo of him on his nazi membership card. That was later, mid1930s after hitler had come to power. Were still stuck in the 1930, 31 period. Hitler is still trying to get his machine going to get himself elected. Hans schmitt needs the money. Hes got the documents. And so whats he do. He goes to the obvious person who is likely to be able to buy them from him, which is the French Embassy. He walks up to the street in berlin to the French Embassy and he asks to speak to the military attache and says i have some documents that might be of interest to you. I think is quite interesting. Berlin believes unlike certain other cities that or maybe even like other cities that it is the capital city of spying. And so its not surprising to discover that the french in the between the wars period had a process for walkin spies. What they would do is refer the walkin to the gentleman in the middle. Hes very charming looking, isnt he . I tell you, hes very charming indeed. Because his career was as a professional card sharp. He started his career in the 1870s and he had been banned from most casinos across europe. He had been to jail a few times. And hed managed to get quite a tidy fortune by fleecing, charming a young man and pour lots of champagne down their throats and then win lots and lots of money off them at cards. So this hes got very many names. Most of the time when he was gambling he was going by the name of the baron from kerney which is a false name. But when he was born he was called rudolph stallman. Then he acquired french citizenship. He spoke about 11 languages, but german and french, both completely fluently. He became rudolph. By the time he is meeting hans schmitt, he is rudolph some of the time. When hes not baron from kerney. He was baron from kerney for some of the time. Okay. So, rex, that was his spy cover name and its a lot easier than baron kerney or any of the other things. So we call him rex from now on. Rex, having retired from gambling, was hired by the german sorry, by the French Intelligence Service. This is kind of a natural career progression, isnt it . So the French Intelligence Service hire rex. And his job is to fix the walkin spy with the same kind of steely gaze that he would fix on his victims in the casino. He would suss out these guys. He is the ideal person to check schmitt because he is a native german speaker. So he invites hans schmitt to a meeting. This has to be set up in the proper le carre approved fashion. So there is a first of all there is a letter that goes to hans schmitt inviting him to come to a particular address where there will be a letter waiting for him that will tell him where to go to go to the meeting and so forth. And then all the other meetings after that are set up with unsigned anonymous postcards which have sort of coded information about where he can go and find out information about where documents are to be dropped. And all this kind of stuff. Its fantastic. Le carre didnt make it up. He just looked at the handbook. So eventually, we get to the stage where rex met schmitt and has checked him out and, yes, hes got some documents. But schmitt is not the sorry, rex is not the expert on whether documents are the real thing or not. So he calls in help from the cipher experts in france and that would be captain bertrand, who is the man on the right. Captain bertrand is the head of section d of French Military intelligence. Section d consists of captain bertrand. But thats fine. Because captain bertrands job is to buy and sell foreign code books because the french Cipher Bureau, the decoding guys, have all retired. They were really good in world world i but they reached retirement age. Unfortunately, when you retire, you cant go into gambling. The street works the other way. So the cryptoanalysts were no longer around. Bertrand wasnt a cryptoanalyst. So the only way for them to read foreign codes is to buy the code books from people like hans schmitt. Okay. Now we have to set up a meeting so bertrand can look at the stuff that schmitt has lifted out of the safe and see whether its the real deal. So they meet in a hotel in a small town in belgium and this is where it all gets fun. Because rex and schmitt go into the bar and they listen to the music and drink champagne and then brandy and they smoke cigars and bertrand has to look at the documents. So hes the one that cant drink the champagne and brandy or smoke the cigars and he has photographs so he realizes he actually has got the real deal. Hes got the enigma machine operating instructions. So he takes his photographer and camera up to the bathroom on the first floor, sorry, im an american, on the second floor in the hotel and they do the photography there. So, why are they using the bathroom . I think the reason they were using the bathroom is because the photographic apparatus is large and clumsy and probably quite noisy. And therefore they need to go somewhere where they werent going to attract a lot of attention. They took the photographs in the bathroom. It is these photographs that i showed you before that found in the french archives two or three years ago. The original photographs taken by bertrand and his team in 1930 of the enigma operating instructions and the photos of the machine itself. So, says bertrand, enigma is no longer a problem. So he goes around to the colleagues in the cryptoanalytical unit and shows them these things and says, German Army Enigma. Problem solved. They say, au contraire, monsieur le captain. You gave us operating instructions. What we need is wiring diagrams. And in particular, we need to know what that funny thing on the front is. What it does, and how to do it. Bertrand is not dismayed. He gives the documents to the brits. People like captain tiltman, who say, look, bertrand, old chap, its very kind of you to give us this stuff. But you gave us operating instructions and operating instructions are hopeless if we dont know what the wiring is. If you gave us wiring diagrams, thing was be a lot better. So bertrand still is not dismayed by this. Because the year before, hes been instructed to reach out to polish military intelligence. Poland and france have a common problem. Germany is aggressive, and its wedged firmly between those two countries. And so polish and french objectives are probably aligned. He made friends with the head of the polish Cipher Bureau. And so he offers the documents to colonel langer. Colonel langer says, hey, these are fantastic. This is what weve been waiting for all along. I know theyre only operating instructions but it gives us something to get our teeth into. Lets give it a go. If we get anywhere, well let you know. Now langer puts his own team onto it. Im now going to introduce you to another one of my friends. An unlikely spy. He looks like a mathematician. He is a mathematician and really, hes the most unlikely spy. This is the thing, spying transformed itself in the middle of the 20th century into something that geeks and nerds can do. So there is hope for all of us, even people like me. I might make a spy one day. This is a mathematics graduate. And he is sent in to a small dark room because thats appropriate if youre a mathematician, a spy, and a nerd, and he is given a commercial enigma machine, one without a plug board on the front. He is given the documents that bertrand photographed in the bathroom. And he is given a bunch of enigma intercepts, radio messages that have been intercepted and in morse code and written down. This is one of the things i regard as being one of the top three codebreaking achievements of the 20th century. And hes the first of the top three to do this. He manages to turn the problem of the wiring of the enigma machine and its coding rotors into a set of mathematical equations. In permutation theory permutation theory is a horror. Some of us loved algebra in high school, some of us didnt. You remember if you multiply both sides by two, then five minutes later you can divide both sides by two and end up in the same place. Now, i want you to imagine trying to do that with unboiled eggs. Okay. So you take some eggs out of the fridge. You divide them by two. And now multiply them by two. Do you get back to where you started . No, you dont. No, you dont. You have to call the cleaners urgently. Okay . This is what permutation theory is like. Permutation theory works like eggs. They dont work like algebra. But he had been taught permutation theory in the mathematics course and was able to solve the permutation equations. And deduce the wiring. And the coding row rotors. Okay. This means that by 1933, this is the year that hitler comes to power, by 1933, the poles have managed to reverse engineer the German Army Enigma machine, and theyre building their own fake enigma machines. Okay, that machine on the right, it looks a bit like an enigma machine. But there is a jumble of wires at the back. Thats the plug board. Those of you who are sitting in the front row, can you see that keyboard is all wrong. Its in alphabetical order. Its not in q, w, e, r, t, z, whatever, i spoke american correctly. I said z, not zed. There may be some canadians in the audience who would understand. Okay. So that is an enigma machine. Its a polish fake enigma machine. Its not a fake. Its a reverse engineered analog if you like of an enigma machine. That one was built in france. During the war, and it is now in london and it has been on show at the Science Museum in london. But it belongs to the studeinst in london, its one of two, maybe three surviving polish fakes. Yeah, thats great. So theyre able to so they solved the problem. But the brits were still agonizing over in 1938 and 1939, they know what the wiring is. And that means they can start on the real problem, which is the codebreaking problem. Its all very well to know what the wiring is in in the machine. You got to know how the machine is set up every day in order to be able to decipher enigma messages. There is only 150 million, million, million different ways of setting up the machine. Youre not going to do it by brute force, are you. It would take all the time in the universe to get there. You have to do something clever. So they brought in the rest of the mathematical team. This is a gentleman on the left and another in the middle and these guys come up with a host of codebreaking techniques which will enable them to figure out how this enigma machine has been set up by the germans every day. And these guys are the pioneers of an electromechanical approach to codebreaking. In the old days, world war i, codebreaking was more about guessing what the enemys codes were. If you came across a code group that was 6, 9, 4, 2, it could mean the battleship queen elizabeth. And code group 8, 4, 2, 2, could mean tomorrow morning. And so youd have to guess. And linguists are great at this. They can interpolate between the known code groups to work out what the missing one they dont know is. This is a pencil and paper exercise and requires linguistic skills. These guys are mathematicians. And together with their engineer colleagues, theyre coming up with ways of creating a logic test to figure out how the cipher might be working and theyre doing it, particularly theyve invented this machine and the righthand side of the slide which is called a bumba which combines a mechanism brute force approach which goes through all the different rotor settings. It clanks through those, testing each of them for a likely rotor setting which is halfway to the solution of how the machine is set up. Thats amazing. They developed this machine and theyre able to read german army, air force, and even navy enigma messages in real time in 1938. Okay, i told you this is going to be about spying. So we have kind of done the math now. So we can go on and talk about something else. So im going to take you to switzerland. Schmitt did not drop out of the picture after he handed over those documents to be photographed. And then had to put them back in the safe in time for monday morning. Otherwise, he would have been caught. He developed a thirst for cash, really. Well come to that. I keep promising to tell you about the cash. Ill come to that. But hes having regular meetings with rex and the other officers of French Military intelligence. And hes not just handing over codes and ciphers material. Because one day in the mid1930s, after hitler had come to power, he set up a meeting in this rather quaint Swiss Village which is called mirren. The reason its very dark blue on the lefthand side of the photograph is that really is a 1,000meter drop. It is perched on the top of a cliff and it is a 1,000meter drop. Dont get too close to the edge. But its a ski resort in the winter and hiking resort in the summer. Its great. Perfect tourist industry spot. He sets up a meeting there. And rex and the French Military intelligence guy sit in the hotel there and its a usual sort of business with brandy and cigars and what have you. And apparently they have a nice band as well. That is all very civilized, this spying business. Schmitt turns up. He has this attache case that is made out of very finely soft polished leather. Its absolutely sort of very fashionable and very chic and quite visibly very expensive. He says, i have good news and bad news. They say, go on. He says, im no longer quite so closely associated with the Cipher Bureau, at which point the french guys looked very dejected. He says, but i have been appointed as the Liaison Officer for the they said, the what . Okay. You have to imagine that youre in nazi germany. This is going to be tough. But okay. Goerring, hitlers favorite guy for a long time and the head of the German Air Force and so forth, goerrings role in the nazi party was very significant. And because it was a nazi state, there were many spying organizations, many of which were spying on everybody else within germany. And so goerrings Research Office, it is kind of like a cover name that means nothing, goerrings Research Office was specifically set up to keep an eye on everybody else that needed an eye keeping on them in case they were going to conspire against hitler and the nazi party and so forth. So this is kind of you could imagine this in the totalitarian states. So schmitts role is to keep tabs on or find out what is going on and hes offering this to the french who havent heard of this organization yet. It was a codebreaking operation as well as an internal spying operation and it is so closely intertwined in all of the thinking, all of the military decisions that schmitt has got now perfect, almost perfect knowledge of german strategic operations and hes able over the course of the years to share this with french intelligence. So let me give you some examples. Tank warfare development. So this is, tank warfare is a new science in the 1930s. Hes closely associated with all of the documents, all of the strategic meetings and decisions being taken about how to do tank battles, how to use tanks in a modern warfare scenario. Hes giving this information to the french. No, hes not. Hes selling it to the french. Hes getting an annual salary every time he delivers some of this priceless information. As war gets closer, hes able to explain precisely when the attack on poland is going to come, hes able to explain exactly when the attack on france is going to come. And he also explains how the maneuvers of the german army which was something called the sickle schnit, a sickle cut designed to cut off the British Expeditionary force in dunkirk and destroy them in detail before moving on to take over the rest of france. Does that sound like something that might or might not have happened. He divulges all of this detail. So we have details of weaponry and details of tactics and details of strategy. And weve got a reasonably constant flow of codes and ciphers material amounting over a sixyear period to over 300 documents counted by bertrand in his memoir. Schmitt is the spy to end all spies. So david, who you will all have heard of, the master of cryptoanalytic history, said he was world war iis greatest spy and i think that is probably right. But what was schmidt doing with all of the money and how was he concealing it . So if youre a badly paid Civil Servant how come you could explain this swish nice suit and the posh briefcase and all of that kind of thing. Not to mention the expensive holidays, here he is with his wife on one of these expensive holidays wearing an expensive dressing gown and it wasnt just the wife, unfortunately, schmitt had a lot of other expensive habits. There was champagne and brandy and cigars, we heard about those. And there were girlfriends and more brandy and then the girlfriends needed brandy and maybe not cigars. And then the nannies and the nannies were hired by him on the basis they might become girlfriends and fired by mrs. Schmitt on the basis they might become a girlfriend and then she would hire a nanny uglier than the previous nanny and the kids noticed that the nannies got progressively uglier and it was very embarrassing. So we hit on the scheme. The french said were worried about you and this cash because youre visibly living a lifestyle that does not, is not commensurate with what your earnings are supposed to be. So they hit on something called a Money Laundering scheme. Now, hans schmitt had run a failed soap factory business in the early 1930s and so they invited schmitt to revive the soap factory idea and he could present the earnings from spying as being the profits of his soap factory. So the soap factory became solvent because he literally laundered the fruits of his labors through the soap factory business. He truly is a star of a spy. I mean, he is fantastic. I like rex a lot. I mean, rex is great. But i have these two criminals competing for my affections as to which of them is the most splendid spy. Oh, dear, were going to have to go back to britain and deal with some more sort of normal guys. So ill introduce you to some british spies. This is the chap with the cigarette is alister denniston the head of the Government Cipher School until 1942 when he was fired. And his man the man in the middle is his number one cryptoanalyst, a guy called dilly knox. And dilly knox is a professor of ancient greek. But when i say that, what he did as a professor of ancient greek is quite astonishing. He was trying to reconstruct a set of dodgy poems, this is like fourth century b. C. Porn, dodgy poems by a guy called herodas. But herodas has written his poems on crumbling papyrus and the greek was in fragments so knoxs job was to try to reassemble the fragments into meaningful porn. Which was sort of great. But you could see that this is like a codebreaking exercise really because youre piecing together things. It is partly a jigsaw puzzle, partly a linguistic puzzle and its all going on in ancient greek and in slightly odd ancient greek because herodas had a slightly unconventional approach to writing verse. Why am i introducing these two guys to you . Because by 1938 britain had woken up to the idea that adolf hitler was not really going be a good thing. And they had realized that the immediate threat to peace in europe was not the bolsheviks who they had thought it was but actually the nazis. And they started communicating with the french about the possibility of something that might look like an alliance. A bit late, but okay. They got there in the end. 1938. Which is why tiltman is starting to write letters saying, cant we ask the french about the enigma machine and see what they know . Now, the french invite the british to a conference in paris in january of 1939 to discuss codebreaking problems and in particular the problem of the enigma. Bertrand, who is the mover and shaker behind this, thinks it is a bit suspicious that he handed this all over to langer in poland in 1931, and he hasnt heard a whisper since then about whether the poles have made any progress. So he invited the poles to this conference as well. So they turn up to the conference in paris and they earnestly discuss the problem of the enigma machine and they agree it is a very difficult problem and very important to solve it and they should solve it as soon as possible. Which is kind of a little bit deceptive on the part of the poles, really, but who are you going to tell, which allies do you think are real allies, which ones do you think are fickle, to what extent are you really willing to trust people with the secrets of your own intelligence gathering . This is a problem not specific to 1939. This is a problem specific to all eras. So i dont think it is surprising at all the poles said nothing at this meeting in january 1939. And you might think therefore the conference was a complete failure but i dont think it was because two things come out of it. One in particular is this this is the memorandum of agreement, it is in french but it is by bertrand and its the intelligence Cooperation Agreement of 1939. And it says, for greater convenience and discretion, from now on were going to call ourselves by the following abbreviations, x is paris, y is london, and z is warsaw. And then he said, can you please number the documents so we could keep track of them . So, very good. And that is important too. Because what they are doing is theyre sharing everything except this piece of information that the poles know that nobody else knows that they know. So to give you some examples, picking up radio traffic, poland has radio masks to intercept signals that are not actually able to be picked up by the british or the french. So theyre actually providing information that is valuable. Theyre also agreeing to cooperate on codes and ciphers problems. Enigma is not the only fruit. There is a load of other codes and ciphers and this is easier to cooperate and there is a whole bunch of correspondence and it is in german because it is the common language but they are cooperating. So from january, 1939, marks the beginning of this special info sharing relationship. The other thing that comes out of the conference is that it is agreed that if any of the three countries makes a breakthrough on the enigma problem, they are to send a telegram that says, something has come up. In july, the poles are confronted with two problems. One, they cannot break enigma messages anymore. And the reason for that is the germans have there are lots of reasons but the principal reason is the germans have added two extra rotors to the library of available rotors to put in an enigma machine. Instead of having three rotors there are now five to choose from. And that means that there are now 60 different ways of putting three rotors into an enigma machine, whereas previously there had only been six. The poles had got six of their famous bomba machines, but they did not have 60. And without 60 of them, they were not able to rapidly enough break the enigma messages and they needed some help with their technology. The other thing that happened by july, 1939, is blindingly obvious, that hitler was ratting the saber very, very loud and they were feeling that they really needed to transform their intelligence sharing relationship into something that felt a bit more like a tough military alliance. So polish intelligence was given authority from on high to share the enigma secret. So they send out a telegram. And knox and denniston go this time to warsaw. Bertrand goes to warsaw with his number two, and they are told the secret of enigma. Now, told the secret in this building, i like this building because this is still a center of spying. This is a 1938 building that was built for the polish Cipher Bureau and it still exists just outside of warsaw and it is now the headquarters of nato air Traffic Control for eastern europe. So youre not allowed in. And you werent ever allowed in. So you can see it has soldiers guarding it. And that thing is a memorial plot to the polish codebreakers. These grills on the windows, it is much bigger underground. It is like the doctor whos tardis. But it is much bigger underground but the grills on the windows have got pock marks from german machine gun bullets when poland was invaded in 1939. It is a quite interesting building but you cant go in. What they came away with from this meeting, a twoday meeting, is this list and again you could see it is in german because that was the common language, of each one is like an entire chapter in the enigma story. But weve got things like how to reconstruct the cipher wheels in the enigma machine. How you find the crosspluggings on the plug board, what else have we got. That is the bomb machines and various other things and the last one is, other possibilities is number 17. So there is a lot of information being changed hands. Just pausing there, i think ive now answered the question i started off this talk with, which is how come the british went from zero knowledge about its not quite zero knowledge but close to zero knowledge about the enigma machine in july, 1939, to the point why they could design the machine and be discussing how it might work with engineers as soon as november, 1939. Its because of this. This transfer of knowhow just transformed the ability of the british team to be able to get on with the problem. So what happened next . I probably dont need to introduce this gentleman. Hes not one of my friends and some of you would probably say hes not a gentleman. He is taking the salute in the saxon square in warsaw after the conquest of poland. This photograph would have been taken probably about october, 1939. The reason it is my favorite world war ii photograph is because hitler has no idea that in this building behind him is where they uncovered the secrets of the enigma machine. So what is going on . The polish codebreakers didnt get trapped in poland. They were ordered to escape with their precious knowledge and they eventually wound up in france working for bertrand, who has now been promoted to major just outside of paris where this is interesting because the x, y, and z triangle is reconstituted with the poles and french working in this building, and the teleprinter link to the Bletchley Park, the three codebreaking teams are all working harmoniously together and breaking enigma. Meanwhile, alan turing is working on his design for a bomb. This commemorative stamp always amuses me because the british like to do these commemorative stamp collector stamps. So this was done in the early 1990s. They did a series on famous scientists. Most of the famous scientists had their faces on the stamps. But apparently that is what alan turings face looked like. They didnt have benedict in those days. They wouldnt have a problem there. Okay, so, this is quite interesting. The only problem is that germany has his eye on invading france and sooner or later this arrangement is not going to survive. The french and the polish team have to escape once again. And then eventually they set up in the south of france, in the unoccupied part of france. But we have a problem. In fact, we have several problems. When germany occupied warsaw in 1939, they took back to berlin as many documents, as many secret documents as they could find. This is normal practice. The reason i am here researching on codebreaking things in america is because the americans took all of the german intelligence documents they could find and photographed them and stuck them in the National Archives here, which is quite helpful to come and do research in the u. S. On german world war ii history. Dont ask me. It is confusing. But all right. So what the germans did was they analyzed the documents they found in warsaw and they came across some really quite alarming material which suggested that the poles had been reading enigma messages before the outbreak of the war. E been reading enigma messages before the outbreak of the war. They concocted wanted lists, heres an example of one of them on the left here. They have the names of the polish code breakers, and they had mugshots of the polish code breakers, and they were looking for these guys in france. So their intelligence was not bad, they had tracked these guys to france. They did not know where they were but they thought they were in france somewhere. They had obviously come across this guy, who looking slightly older and a bit more seedy, but the cigar gives it away. That is my friend rex. That is rex probably in the 1940s, i should think. They had got the baron von kern eurnig on the wanted list as well. This is a problem because everybody in german intelligence wants to track down rex because they know that rex holds all the secrets. You may be asking yourselves who the gentleman on the right is. He is one of my friends. He is not. He is a panzer general, Rudolph Schmidt. He is the guy in the Cipher Office in the 1920s and 1930s, and gave the big break. By 1943, 1944, general Rudolph Schmidt is a highly regarded german tank officer and he has a problem. Hes got a problem because rex is found. The wanted list has done its work. Rex was arrested in early 1943. And because he is rex, he doesnt get taken to a dank cell and get his toes stomped on to tell the truth. He gets fed cigars and branding, and that makes him talk. He is installed in a very nice hotel in paris and his interrogation takes about two months. It is heavily loaded with highquality food and plety of drink and lots of cigars. And he tells everything. In particular, he tells the story of schmidt and the safe. General Rudolph Schmidt is relieved of his command. It is kind of unfair, isnt it . What did he do wrong . He gave his brother a job. But anyway. This is a map of the south of france with some red dots on it. This is the fate of these guys. Once the wanted lists are out and the french the germans have decided they are invading the unoccupied part of france and the americans have landed in north africa, the world has suddenly turned upside down. The polish code breakers are on the run for the third time. These docks are significant places in their story. This one is where rex was holed up in the mountains just near spanish boarders. I think it is probably just a coincidence that these other places are also close. These places are within 10, 15 minutes drive, and this is maybe an hours drive through the mountains. This is the base of operations for trying to get the polish out of what is now fully occupied france. There are pickups in the mediterranean organized with british submarines. These operations dont work and the polish are realizing that the only way they will get out is to cross the mountains into spain and hope they dont get picked up by the not very neutral spanish. The base of operations, some of the polish, and equations men and code breaker in particular, they make it to this place, and they have to bribe their guide because this is people trafficking. You know how it works. You pay the fee to be traffic. Half of these are supposed to be paid for Safe Delivery of people on the other side of the border. But then they would lift all of their money off of them and the fee is doubled, a complete disaster. They are abandoned at the top of the mountain and it is the second week of january, 1943. There is a foot and a half of snow on the ground. It is minus heaven knows what. They are told spain is that way, off you go. They make it across the border, and they get arrested. They get arrested and spent the next six months in a spanish jail. From which the red cross managed to get them out and back to the u. K. , which was great, so they could carry on doing code breaking in britain. There is another town that some of the other polish code breakers, but in particular langer, the head of the team, there was some sort of bonkers story about them being able to walk from there into spain. Its about 15 kilometers, and through the snow in the middle of the night over the mountains. It was not going to happen. They took a taxi. [laughter] that was what you did. They got most of the way and there was a roadblock, and it turned out once again, their guide it was people trafficking, so their guide was in cahoots with the gestapo. They got arrested and ended up in a german prison camp. What happened to the rest of them in the end . I told you about rigidski, he died in a shipwreck in 1942. It is amazing we have a photograph of the ship going down. Some people survived but he was not one of them. This is the schloss eisenberg, now in the czech republic, this is the place where langer and his number two were sent after they had been arrested. After the rex saga, they were interrogated about what it is they had been able to achieve with the enigma in the prewar period. It was only by langer and his colleagues subtle preparation, the fact the allies had broken the enigma was kept secret. They did it in the most astonishing way. They said of course we broke the enigma, but you changed the system and changed your procedures and locked us out. All of which was completely true. It played straight into the hands of the germans because the guys and interrogating them where the experts who had recommended the changes in the first place. They felt vindicated so the interrogation ended where it ought to have begun. So well done langer for keeping the secret secret. And zukowski eventually got released from the spanish jail. Reascone of them did not return to poland after the war because it was to dangerous. It was a satellite of the soviet union, and these guys, particular after they got back to britain, were put onto decoding russian material. Russia was supposed to be an ally, so this was very dangerous. The idea that they could go back to poland knowing what they knew and having blank Service Records and being able to escape investigation by the secret police, it beggars belief. So the most unlikely character to be a spy, he actually did that brave thing and got investigated by the polish secret police. It was only once stalin was dead and the socalled reforms of communism took place in the mid1950s that he was effectively free. And able to pursue a normal life. He looks a little like a 1950s film star in this. It is a shame that is Barclays Bank behind him. He has kind of a cool guy. He stayed in the u. K. For the rest of his life and had a very nice family life and became a mathematics professor. You wouldnt have minded being taught math by this guy, he is great. A proficient musician and stuff. For him, it was happily ever after. The real star is look at this french general at the top right. Look at all of those medals. That is fortrond, he is taken on by general de gaulle that is bertrand, he is taken on by general de gaulle for the French Military intelligence, particularly signals intelligence. He finishes his career in the 1950s. He is only a brigadier general, but that is pretty good for the guy who started off as a captain who was photographing stuff in the bathroom. That is a pretty cool combination of a career. When he stopped spying, he became the mayor of his village and there is a nice commemorative plaque to him in the village in the south coast of france. Bertrand probably gets all of the owners here. So there we are, i am done. We promised you the opportunity for questions and i would be happy to invite them. Perhaps we can have the house lights up and we can start that process off. [applause] we have microphones at either side of the room and if you are trapped, i can also try to get to you with a microphone if you have a question. Just stunned by you, durmot. If you want to make a line behind the microphone, i will go left, right. Can you explain what the commercial use for the machine was before it was converted to militar . It was available to the public, what were they doing with that . Industrial secrets mainly, i imagine. Codes and ciphers have been used for all kinds of industrial purposes for centuries. In the old days when you had to pay by the number of words and telegrams, people used to use codes to cut down on the number of words they could use. You could find that most companies would have a code book and they would send stuff in code. This doesnt do that, it doesnt cut down the number of characters you are going to send, but there was stuff you probably did not want people to know. Imagine you are a bank and you are trying to arrange a letter of credit for international trade. Your customers dont want everybody to be able to read how much they are paying for whatever it is, a shipment of something or another. It would be wise to encode that kind of stuff and cipher it. Before military uses. The military started getting excited about this machine as it came onto the market, looking for ways to adapt it and make it for military purposes but it was originally conceived as an office thing. I have two questions. That is all right, you have the floor. Who got the first working german enigma machine and did it play a role in the development of the bomb . Or was it purely theoretical from the instruction booklets . In the early months of the war it was purely theoretical from the instruction booklet. The brits were very excited to have one of the polish fakes given to them in 1939, which happened after the warsaw meeting. It was the first time they had gotten their hands on the functional equivalent of an enigma machine. Sooner or later it was bound to happen that one got captured in combat. The germans were winning the war for the first few years, so the likelihood of a capture was actually quite low during that period. There were some ships that were sunk and boarded, which enabled the british to get a hold of some naval enigma machines. I think it wasnt until 1941 that they got a complete set of rotors to go with the machine. Really the breakthroughs were mostly dependent on the theoretical analysis, and later in the war when the germans adapted the enigma machines, we were relying on information given about the adaptations rather than actual captures of pieces of kit. My other question is, do you think that alan turing read the math paper, or a translation of it . No, that wasnt written until 1967. What i showed you is raevski memoirs, these are the equations that i constructed. He explains them. But certainly, what was explained in that meeting in warsaw, turing was not present in that meeting, but the explanations given to knox and denniston, were related back to turing in the u. K. Knox in particular was quite skeptical whether the polish breakthrough could have been done by pure mathematical analysis. He felt that the polish had cheated in some way, stolen some information or done something through spying or whatever. Turing said no, i can see exactly how raevski did it, this theory. Of course, once you know what the answer is, youve looked at the back of the book and you can see what the answer is, it is a little easier. But he did meet, they did meet in paris in january 1940. How good the conversation was, i dont know, because in those days raevsk didnt speak any english. He wouldve b been beginning to speak some french. Alan turing was good enough to order things in a restaurant, but not good enough to talk about code breaking. Of course, all mathematics graduates in the 1930s, the lingua franca for mathematics was german. All the really good mathematicians were germans. Some of them were in french but most in german. If you want to keep up with what was going on, you had to be good enough at german to be able to be technical papers. I think probably the german language is what would have been spoken around that table. Its intriguing. Ok, please. You have been very patient. What do you think the german militarys reaction was when they found out that the allies had control of a real enigma machine . This is almost like a sort of history in its own right. You have a great question there, how many hours we have . You dont want dinner. [laughter] the initial reaction, as i explained earlier, when they found out about the polish successes, their own developments have been vindicated. In fact, quite a few historians have been quite snippy about the way the germans reacted to security scares. There were a number of them. There were at least a dozen scares during the course of world war ii, which, in the opinion of historians, also told the germans that the enigma machine was not secure. Or at least not securing the way they were using it. And they ought to have therefore changed things. We angloamericans were so much more clever and did not make those silly mistakes. I think that story is slightly biased and slightly unfair. The germans were constantly investigating the security of enigma. What they did not foresee was that the quality of the code breaking devices that were available to the allies would be so superior to what they had. s they were, as were the allies, using punchcard Type Technology to do code breaking on their side. So were we on our side. We got things like bombs and the colossus machine, and so forth which were immeasurably more sophisticated than what they had. So then did they actually know that the enigma had been broken other than the success of the polish . I think they didnt. They probably should have done but they didnt. Many of the senior polish code breakers were in denial about it until many decades after the war. So when the enigma code breaking story broke and the public in the mid1970s, some of those german code breakers were still alive. They said, this is nonsense, this is fiction, this is spy stuff. The first books that were written about it were full of rubbish anyway, not very accurate. It was easy for them to say the enigma was perfectly secure and this is rubbish, dont believe these popular books you can find in station bookstores. Now we have more detail and we know where the truth is. I think its quite interesting that they were still in denial about it in the 1970s. Ok. One of the slides you showed was a replica enigma machine that the polish built with the keyboard. What are the outcomes of the july 1939 one of the outcomes of the july 1939 conference was the polish gave the english and the french copies of that machine. Another chronicle claims that when the french and polish, in france before it was totally occupied, were cooperating with the british at Bletchley Park. That the only secure means of communication they had was using those replica enigmas. They further embellished that claim with the fact that the french operator always started his messages with heil hitler. That means no messages were started with the letter h. I find that somewhat improbable. Im wondering if anything you found could substantiate a claim like that. I believe this to be true. This story comes from bertrands number two. To explain about the machines, Gustav Bertrand had this one polish fake machine given to him in warsaw in 1939. It was crucially important to build more of these fake enigma machines. When the polish team reached him later in 1939, bertrand requisitioned, or put in an order at his Favorite Manufacturing Company in paris for additional enigma machines. He had just got the quote it was very expensive for what he was ordering, in april of 1940. That was like three weeks before the germans arrived. Somehow, miraculously, bert rand managed to convince the Manufacturing Company to keep on with its work and they managed and he managed to pay them even though they were working in the occupied part of france. By the early part of 1942, he had begun to take delivery of parts of fake enigma machines made by this factory. He was smuggling them back into the unoccupied zone, bits at a time, where they were reassembled by the polish in his chateau in the south of france, this meant by the summer of 1942, the polish had created a fully operating ending the machine and could communicate with Bletchley Park using it and Bletchley Park was very concerned about the security of it, not just the heil hitler thing. There was a communication, does your machine have a plugboard and how do we know what the key way using it . They were figuring this out. By september 1942, the polish and french in the south of france were communicating using an enigma machine. Now, your question about the heil hitler thing, is they thought it was so hilarious they were using a german machine to communicate in a way that was shielded from the germans. He said, to rub it in, we signed off our messages heil hitler. Not every single one, occasionally. I dont think there is any evidence that the germans were aware that the brits and franco pol es were trading messages using an enigma. I think its quite likely they never knew, because it was such a shortlived thing. They managed to get the Communications Protocols agreed by the end of september 1942. The cooperations in the south of france came to an end in november 1942 when the germans invaded the south of france. There was only a month where they were doing this. It was probably just long enough for anything significant to happen. I will come back to you in a minute. Was turings design based on the other . Good question, this one will take about four hours and i will need a blackboard. [laughter] all right. While they are getting the blackboard, let me give you the quick answer. At the heart of both machines is the idea that you get the machine to do the brute force, cranked through the 17,000 settings of the three rotors, and then stop when it comes up with a plausible setting of the combination of the three rotors. The polish were doing a logic test based on the indicator, the first part, the methodator park, and the germans had change that. Turings design did not depend on the preamble process that the germans had been using before that date. It was testing for a probable word in the body of the message. If you think the message contains the word weather forecast, and they all did, a nice, long german word, you can test that against your intercepted morse code. Qkqwab, and find a place where it turns into that gobbledygook. If there is a rotor setting which consistently transformed those letters and the observed fashion, it would stop. His machine was little more sophisticated in that it was doing what is called a probable word test. But its also testing for the plugboard settings as well, which the polish machine wasnt able to do. That was the really imaginative bit. That would seriously take me four hours, so im not going to do it. When you look at the bomb replica, you get the full on story. My question was, how does alan turings contribution to this compare with the spies in poland . I would not trust alan turing with a dead letter drop. He never wore hats, and to be a proper spy, you have to wear a hat. [laughter] its really hard to compare the contributions. There is lots of without this then its difficult to imagine the next stage. Without the oldfashioned spying being done by rex and schmidt, and the bathroom photography of bertrand, would the polish have made their breakthrough in the 1930s . It is possible. But one of them says he was significantly helped by having the operating instructions given to him. He said later in his life he thought he probably could have figured it out without the instructions. So maybe it was not as crucial, but we know it was in the chain of causation. Would the british have gotten there without the polish contribution . I think they would have done. Again, they were capable of doing a mathematical analysis once they hired the mathematicians, which was in 1938. The polish hired them in 1928, 10 years ahead of the game. The british would have gotten there, but later. What would the consequences of that have been, particularly when you think about the operational use that was being made of enigma intelligence early in the war . Whose contribution was more significant . Would the brits have been able to invent a machine of the quality of the british bomb without alan turing . I think the answer to that again is probably yes. If you look at the other machinery that alan turing was not involved in, he did not design the colossus, and if you look at another bomb machine and the u. S. Army bomb machine were doing, completely different designs. They were relying on some of the ideas that have been shown to them by alan turing, but these are very sophisticated pieces of engineering. I am fairly sure that somebody would have come up with a similar thing, and might have been later in the war. All of these things are, if this hadnt happened, it wouldve been different. That is clear. Whose contribution was more significant . I dont know. But whose contribution was more fun, come on, we are going to the casino right now and smoke some cigars, and we are going to go to the soap factory to pay homage. That stuff is just so good. Carre could not have written that. You mentioned early on that the polish code breakers had enough information to know when the invasion of poland was going to take place. Were they able to use this information in any way . Its not the polish that got the information, the french got that information from schmidt. The interesting thing about all of that priceless information that schmidt gave, the highest quality human intelligence you could get, it was all obstinately ignored. You have to ask yourself why that was. Why, when the french were given the stuff and it was proved time and again to be 100 accurate, why were they not paying more attention . There is this problem with human intelligence. You say that your spy is really good, and 100 accurate, and i say my spy is really good and 100 accurate all the time, and somebody else says there spy is 100 accurate, and you have all this conflicting noise. The job of a good Intelligence Department is to sift through that and work out the consensus stories. All of these spies are doing it for dodgy reasons that dont stack up morley. Frankly, human intelligence is very difficult to rely on. I think the french can be forgiven for ignoring schmidt. He was just one of a number of people, and it is only hindsight that has proven he was right. I think a more difficult and possibly more interesting question, which is why the french did not make more serious operational use of the enigma intelligence that bertrand was giving them during the battle of france. Bertrand is almost crying through his pages of his memoirs, and langer working with him at the same time, expressing exactly the same emotions. The luftwaffe attack on paris during the battle of france was foreseen in immense detail through enigma decrypts given to French Military planners. They knew how many german aircraft, exactly what direction they will be coming from, what time the attack was coming. It was perfectly possible for the French Air Force to intervene, and they did not. They just let the luftwaffe come. It wasnt because they did not have aircraft to retaliate with. Why didnt they do it . I dont know the answer. Bertrand said it was like feeding sweeties to the swine. We gave them this priceless information. The generals did not know how to use signals intelligence and we have the same problem in britain with the British Royal navy. The admiralty did not know how to use signals intelligence. They were being told things and it was just another piece of intelligence and we will treat it the same way like all of the other stuff. They did not realize you could treat it as being on a higher plane than human intelligence. I think that is what went wrong. But those generals are not here to answer for their conduct. Most of them disappeared into obscurity after the fall of france and i dont think they were regarded as National Heroes and nobody wanted to speak to them. So we dont know. Could you possibly explain in more detail how and when the polish contributions became known to the general public, and the polish role and his interactions . Its easy to answer your question in a negative sense. There was a polish historian who was writing about polish military intelligence between the wars period. He was researching, this was in the 1960s. He was researching in the polish military archives in warsaw and came across a paper written by a mathematician. This was quite interesting because he claimed that the germans had been using a machine called enigma for insight enciphering their secret stuff, and this guy was saying i was part of the team that broke them. So he tracked the guy down and calls on him to write up his story and more detail, which is why we have this account, the memoirs written in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But i told you that poland was still a communist country than and country then, and there was something called iron curtain, and not many people could understand polish. So the fact that there was this book published in poland and polish meant that it was still a wellkept secret as far as we were concerned. But gradually the story leaked out. Bertrand wrote his memoirs in the early 1970s because he was very keen that some misinformation that had gotten out there, probably by somebody who had gotten hold of the other book. He was trying to set the record straight. But he wrote in an obscure language called one or two alarmed brits got a hold of it. There was an official, semisanctioned book written by a guy who probably knew some of what was going on, frederick, who had a significant role in exploiting intelligence during the war. He wrote a book called the ultrasecret and it sold more books than the enigma code breaking ever. Gradually, the story i am sorry, i think i probably have not answered your question. I am talking about all i know that pertains to what you asked. [laughter] the books were translated to several languages. The more recent books. He wrote a book that was much more detailed. It is called enigma in english. I do not know what it is called in polish. The german and english versions are very different. Polish is probably different again. [laughter] but these kind of accounts, [indiscernible] that is part of the mismanagement of the story. For those of you, let me explain. The poles had been angry for many years because the first stories that came out of the enigma code breaking in the west, there was no credit to the polls for their for the polish for their achievement. There is a reason they are not giving given credit. It was not a conspiracy against poland. It is simply that the people who were involved personally in the early stages of the egg, story the enigma story were not around when the intelligence was written in the 1970s and 1980s. Lets go through the list of people we know about. Williston was sacked in 1942 and died in the early 1950s. Knox died in 1943. Alan turing moved out of ashley park into 1943 and moved on to other products other projects and we all know what happened to him after the war. Those were the three guys who had personal contact with the polish code breakers. John jeffries died in 1942 as well. They were the ones who personally knew what the public had done. What the polish had died. Had done. The others around interviewed by the official historian only had a hearsay knowledge about what the polish had done. The british gave british names to the polish. For example the clock method was rechristened because the paper sheets they were used were made in a town called banbury. This sheets were renamed. This meant everything the polish had done was lost the memory. This is a struggle for them to understand because they assume we are lovely in the west, but we keep our secrets. Ive been in the national art today and i wanted to look at files on enigma that were put in the archives in 2010. I was not permitted to look at them. They are still classified in 2020. That is how excessive we are about the enigma secret, 75 years after the war ended. This was a secret. People were not allowed to know. While he was free to write books in communist poland, he was not allowed to write books on the subject in the west. So these halftruths and mistaken accounts were all that was available and it took until midway through the 1980s when they put a counter blast to the official history about what had happened to [indiscernible] that the record was able to be corrected. So the perception is the brits were trying to whitewash the polish out of history, and it is not true but we understand why you think that way. Can we let someone else have ago . Whatever happened to herr schmidt who delivered the goods, and his brother . I told you about his brother because that was slightly less dramatic. There was a reason why Rudolph Schmidt was relieved of his command when his brother was arrested. We do not know exactly what happened but we know he never made it out of jail and his body was found in his cell in september, 1943. There is enough circumstantial evidence to indicate he probably took his own life. A rather sad ending for someone who, ok, he betrayed his country so some people say just desserts but i am disappointed because he never got to write his memoirs. I think rudolph, i feel very sorry, why did he get relieved of his command just because his brother betrayed his country . Thank you. You will be signing your book out in the hallway. It would be a pleasure. Thank you. [applause] next, the fleet that came to stay. This u. S. Navy film opens with huge dramatized scenes on board a ship, but was assembled from aerial in combat footage by ensign budd boetticher, who directed many lowbudget westerns. music music 75 years ago, april 1 to june 2 1945, the battle of okinawa raged. Over 82 days, the japanese launched 2000 attacks on american ships. Next, the fleet that came to stay. This u. S. Navy film opens with huge dramatized scenes on board a ship, but was assembled from aerial and combat footage by ensign budd boetticher, who directed many lowbudget westerns