Serving as the Bletchley Park visiting fellow at oxford. Ember of themumbe honorary board here at the International Spy museum and he is a tremendous supporter of our efforts. Were excited to have dermot here today to tell us how enigma was really broken with the cooperative efforts of britain, poland, and france. We would presentation, like you to walk up to the microphones on each side of the theater and ask your questions. There will be plenty of time to ask your questions and get them answered. Join me in giving a warm welcome to dermot turing. [applause] chris, andy thanks, to all of you for the welcome home. Before i start, i would like to say to chris and to the team here, i think it is amazing to see how this place has transformed since the move last year. You have an amazing array of things going on here. All wondering with the real story of enigma code breaking is because otherwise you would not have showed up to this talk. I think you probably know it already. Laid my cumberbatch uncle, the gentleman on the left. Did i get that right . Are here remedy irredeemably confused. Maybe it is Sherlock Holmes on the right . Of enigmaw the truth code breaking but it is more involved than what you may have come away from the movie with. Not going to give you a movie synopsis. You can buy the dvd. Here is a memo. From where im standing the print is big enough to read. The british in National Archives and it dates from 1938. The year before war broke out in europe. Its written by one of the tanalysts, a guylyst called tiltmon. Dont retire. When he retired from the u. K. The time he was required retired it was called gchq. He worked here in the United States for a while. This is what he wrote. Writing about the enigma machine. The enigma machine. 1941, we were provided by the french instructions for the german enigma machine. The photograph shows an attachment on the front which does not appear on the model available to the public. Wasenigma machine commercially available but not in the form that the german army was using. Tiltmanthe thing that is asking about, this plugboard arrangement on the front. The directions do not fully explain the function of this attachment. This is 1938 and the british do not understand how this german already german army model works. Describe the parts. Right before the outbreak of war, and this state of ignorance goes on until the outbreak of war. 1939. S on through july the brits dont know the answers to these questions. If they dont know how the enigma machine works, this raises a question for me. Contrary to is, what you may have come away from the intake imitation game finding the daily settings of the machine, that design was ready and in the hands of the engineers by no 1939. Than november between july when they have no understanding of how it works and november when they are able to start the engineers designing a code breaking machine, something miraculous has happened. Knowledge has been transformed in that time. Thats a puzzle. What im going to talk 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. Ill introduce you to these particular friends. Im a geek. I like finding old documents in archives. Weve got some photographs taken in 1931. I will talk about how those came to be taken. You can see that there is a photograph of an enigma machine. We have a document on the left, berline 1930. You can see that the number of documents has been redacted by the photographer. Top righthand corner. The reason for that being that we dont want anybody to know whose copy it is we got hold of. The plot thickens. This is the operating instructions for the and nick my machine. Enigma machine. Middle says,the if you the law of 1914, give this to the enemy, you will go straight to jail and you will not pass go. Famousse are the documents that tiltman was talking about that were handed over by the french in the 1930s and the ones that do not explain the operation of this fiendish plug device. Brits get hold of these documents . This is where i get to introduce you to some real friends of ise, every one of whome a spy. On the left, this is my friend hanz schmidt. His brother was the head of the german armys Cipher Office. Demobbed at the end of wwi, he wasnt doing well and he begged his brother to give him a job. His brother gave him a job in the Cipher Office. Hanz had access to the say for the certain documents were kept. Unfortunately, the period was not particularly great. We know what happened to the british economy German Economy during the between the britains economy during the between the war period. The, he joined nationalistic german workers party. The nazis. That was a bit later after hitlers had come to powerj. We are still stuck in the 1931 period. Kittler is trying to get his machine going to get himself is trying to get himself elected. The person likely to buy them from him, the french embassy. He walks straight up and offers andpeak to the at cacheattachee he says, i have documents that might be of interest to you. The capital city of spying. Tits not surprising to discover that the french had a process for walkin spys. What they would do is refer the thein to the gentleman in middle. Hes very charming looking, his intake . Isnt he . His career was as a professional card shark. He started in the 1970s and he had been banned across most casinos. Few timesto jail a but had managed to amass a tidy typically, charming some young man, pouring lots of champagne down their throats, and winning lots of money off of them at cards. Hes got many names. Most of the time when he was gambling, he was going by the kerney which was a false name. He acquired french citizenship, spoke 11 languages, but german and french completely fluently. Moin. Came rudolph le some of the time. His spy coveras name. Its easier than any of the other things. Rex, having retired from gambling, was hired by the the frenchry, by intelligence service. This is a natural career progression. Job is to fit the walkin spy with the same steely gaze that he would fix on his victims in the casino. Hed suss out these guys. Hes the ideal person to check him out because he is a native german speaker. A meeting schmidt to and this happens to be set up in the proper le carre fashion. ,heres a liston to schmidt tter tohere is a lesso schmidt, telling him where to go. All of the other meetings are set up with unsigned, anonymous postcards with coded information about where he can find information about where documents have been dropped. Le carre didnt make it up. He just looked at the handbook. Ually, we get to the stage where rex has met schmidt and checked him out. He has documents. Whetherot the expert on documents are the real thing or not. He calls in help from the cipher experts in france. That would be captain bertand, the man on the right. Oftain bertrand is the head section d. Section d consists of captain bertrand. Thats fine because his job is to buy and sell foreign code books because the french Cipher Bureau have all retired. They were good in world war i but they reached retirement age. When you retire from being a cryptanalyst, you can go to to gambling. To get them for him was to buy the codebooks from people like hans schmidt. Now we need to set up a meeting bertrand,rke trend rex, and schmidt so he can look at the book and see if it is the real deal. Rex and schmidt go to the bar and drink champagne. Has a photograph of stuff and he is realizing that he has got the real deal, the and make a machine operating instructions. Photographer to the bathroom on the second floor of the hotel. They do the photography. There was always the question of why were they using the bathroom . I think the reason is because the photographic apparatus was large and clumsy and probably noisy. They needed to go somewhere where they were not going to attract a lot of attention. We know they took the photographs in the bathroom and it was these photographs which i showed you before which i found in the french archives. The original photographs taken of the enigma operating instructions and the machine itself. Gma is nobertrand, eni longer a problem. He goes to his colleagues in the ptanalytical unit, they y probleman arma solved. they say, au contraire. You have given us operating instructions but would we need our diagrams and we need to know what that funny looking thing on the front is and how it does what it does. Bertrand is not dismayed. He gives a documents of the brits, people like captain tiltman, who says, look, old chap, its very kind of you to give us this but you have given us operating instructions and they are not helpful without the wiring. If you give us the wiring instructions, it would be better. Bertrand is not dismayed. The year before, bertrand has been instructed to reach out. A commond france have problem which is that germany is aggressive and wedged between those countries. Polish intelligence objectives are probably aligned. Bertrand has made friends with the head of the polish Cipher Bureau. He offers the documents to colonel langer. He says, these are fantastic. This is what we have been waiting for all along. I know they are only operating instructions but it gives us something to dig our teeth into. If we get anywhere, we will let you know. Langer puts his own team onto it. I will introduce you to another friend who is an unlikely spy. He looks like a mathematician. He is a mathematician. Spying transformed itself in the middle of the 20th century into something that geeks and nerds can do. There is hope for all of us. This is a mathematics graduate erom the university of and h a sent to a he is given commercial enigma machine. Hes given the document that bertrand photographed in the bathroom and a bunch of enigma intercepts, radio messages that have been intercepted in morse code and written down. This is one of the things that i being one of the top three code breaking achievements. Hes the first of the top three. The problemo turn of the wiring of the and nick my machine and its coding roters ofrotors into a set mathematical equations and permutation theory. All of us remember algebra and high school. Some of us loved it and some of us didnt. You remember if you multiply both sides by two, five minutes letter you can divide both sides by two and you end up in the same place. I want you to try to imagine to do that with on boiled eggs. Take eggs out of the fridge and divide them by two. Now multiply them by two. Do you get back to where you started . No, you dont. You have to call the cleaners urgently. This is how permutation theory is. It works like eggs not algebra. Taught permutation theory in his Mathematics Co urse and was able to deduce the wiring and its coding rotors. For those of you who are mathematically inclined and speak polish, we have these equations here and perhaps one of you would be kind enough to explain them to me later. 1933, thes that by year hitler comes the power, the have managed to reverse engineer the german army and nick my machine German Army Enigma machine. On the right, it looks a bit machine. Nigma if you look closely, there is a jumble of wires in the back. Your of you who brought Long Distance glasses can see that the keyboard is all wrong. It is in alphabetical order. Order. T in qwertz i spoke american correctly. And not zed. That is a polish fake and nick ma machine. Its a polish analog of a german enigma machine. It is now in london and has been on show at the Science Museum in londo, bun. Its one of two or three surviving polish fakes. Theyre able to they solved britsoblem that the were still agonizing over in 19 39. They know where the wiring is in the machine. That means they can start on the real problem, the code breaking problem. You have to know how the machine is set up everyday in order to decipher enigma messages. 115 millionly million million ways of setting up the machine every day. Not going to do it by brute force. It would take all the time left in the universe to get there. Therought in the rest of mathematical cryptanalytical team. These guys come up with a host of code breaking techniques which will enable them to figure machinethis enigma has been set up by the germans every day. Ofse guys are the pioneers an electromechanical approach to code breaking. In the old days, wwi, code breaking was more about getting what the enemeys codes were. If you came because across a code group that was 6942, it could mean the battleship queen elizabeth. Could meanoup 8422 tomorrow morning. Linguists are great at this because they can interpolate between the known code groups to work out the one they dont know. This is a pencil on paper exercise and requires legalistic skills. Se guys are mathematicians requires linguistic skills. These guys are mathematicians. They are trying to figure out how the cipher might be working. They have invented this machine side. Righthand mechanistics a brute force approach which goes through all of the different rotor settings. Possible 17,556 positions. It clanks through each of them for a likely rotor setting which is halfway to the solution of how is the machine set up problem. They developed this machine and they are able to read german army, air force, and even navy enigma messages in real time in 1938. I told you this would be about spying. We have done the math now. I will take you to switzerland. Nsthilo schmidt did not drop out of the picture after he handed over those documents and had to put them back in the safe by monday morning. He developed a thirst for cash. Well come onto that. Having regular meetings other officerse of French Military intelligence. Hes not just handing over codes and cipher material. Mid1930s, after hitlers had come to power, he set up this meeting in this quaint swiss village. You can just kind of make out. The reason that it is dark blue on the lefthand side is that really is a 1000meter drop. It is perched on the edge of a cliff. It is picturesque but dont get too close. It is a ski resort in the winter and a hiking resort in the summer. A perfect tourist industry spot. He set up a meeting there. French military intelligence guy sit in the hotel there. Usualusual bid business of brandy and cigars. Apparently they have a nice band as well. Very civilized, this spying business. Schmidt turns up with these illgotten proceeds of his activities, hes got this nice case made of soft, polished leather. It is very impressionable and very chic and visibly very expensive. He says, ive got good news and bad news. They say, go on. Not longer so closely associated with the Cipher Bureau, at which point the french guys look dejected, but he says, i have been appointed as the Liaison Officer for the and they say, the what . You have to imagine you are in nazi ok, so. Hermann goering, who was hitlers favorite guy for a long time, the head of the German Air Force and so forth, his role in the nazi party was very significant. Because it was the nazi spate, there were many spying organizations, many of which were spying on everybody else in germany. The Research Office, that is a cover name that means nothing, the Research Office was specifically set up to keep an eye on everybody else that need ed an eye on them in case they were going to conspire against hitler and the nazi party and so forth. You can imagine this in these totalitarian states. Schmidts role is to find out whats going on, and he is offering this to the french, who havent even heard of this organization yet. There was a code breaking operation as well as internal spying, and it is so closely intertwined in the thinking and military decisions that schmidt has got almost perfect knowledge of germanys strategic intentions, and hes able over the years to share this with french intelligence. Let me give you some examples. Tank warfare development. This is a new science in the 1930s. He is closely associated with all of the documents and strategic meetings and decisions that have been taken about how to do tank battles, how to use tanks in a modern warfare scenario. He is selling this information to the french. No hes not. He is getting an annual salary every time he delivers this priceless information. As war gets closer, hes able to explain precisely when the attack on poland is going to come. He is 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 was a sickle cut designed to cut off the British Expeditionary force in the dunkirk area, 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 these details. We have details of tactics and strategy. Details of weaponry. And we have a reasonably constant flow of codes and ciphers material, over 600 documents counted in his 300 memoir. Schmidt is the spy to end all spies. David, who you will all have heard of, the master of crude to analyst at history, said he was world war iis greatest spy. History, saidytic he was world war iis greatest spy. What was schmidt doing with this money and how was he concealing it . If you are a badly paid civil service, how can you explain having this swiss nice suit and the posh briefcase and all of that . Not to mention the expensive holidays with his wife, wearing an expensive dressing down. It was not just the wife, schmidt had other expensive habits. Champagne, brandy and cigars. There were girlfriends, and more brandy, and then the girlfriends needed brandy and maybe not cigars. There were nannies, and they were hired by him on the basis that they might become girlfriends, and then fired by mrs. Schmidt. The nannies got progressively uglier. The kids noticed. [laughter] very embarrassing. Ok. So we hit on this. The french said we are worried about you and this cash because you are visibly living a lifestyle that is not commensurate with what your earnings are supposed to be. So they hit on something called a Money Laundering scheme. Schmidt had run a failed soap factory business in the early 1930s, and so they invited schmidt to revive the soap factory idea, and he could present the earnings from spying as being the prophets of his soap factory. The soap factory became solvent because they literally laundered the fruits of his labors through the soap factory business. He truly is a star of a spy. He is fantastic. I like rex a lot, but i have these two criminals competing for my affections as to which is the most splendid spy. We ar