the time that six of our code books were missing and that a seventh neatly wrapped firmly tied and accompanied by a courteous note had been returned to one or another of our embassies. by the japanese. either because they had finished with it or because they already had one. i had been instructed to report to colonel house at the hotel when i got to paris, but i never saw him. i saw instead ran outraged gentleman who plainly regarded me as an unsuccessfully comic pup net a crude and inexcusable practical joke. he said bitterly that code clerks had been showing up for days. the colonel house did not want even one code clerk, let alone 12 or 15, and that i was to go on over to the embassy where i belonged. the explanation was i think as simple as it was monumental. several weeks before the state department in washington had
were quaint transparencies dating back to the time when hampton fish was secretary of state under president grant, and they were intended to save words and cut telegraph costs, not to fool anybody. the new code book had been put together so hastily that the word america was left out and code groups so closely paralleled true readings that love, l-o-v-e-e, for example, of the symbol for love. whatever slight illusion of secrecy we code clerks may have had was disspelled one day by a gentleman who announced that the germans had all our codes. it was said that the germans now and then got messages through to washington taunting us about our childish sifers and suggesting on one occasion that our clumsy device of combining two codes in a desperate effort at deception would have been a little harder if we had used two other codes which they named. this may have been rumor or legend like the story current at