
The piece of paper that fooled Hitler - epo
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12266109
======
stcredzero
I from a crypto history book I read in high school: in WWI, German intercepts
of Russian transmissions have the Russians illusions of German tactical
genius. Somehow, Germans would often be in position to confound the Russians.
The reason for this: Russian code clerks were badly trained. Sometimes there
would be a couple of attempts to send a message followed by a plain-text
transmission by the frustrated code clerk. This was a tremendous boon to
German cryptographers in the long term as well as a giveaway of tactical
maneuvers in the short term.

In WWII, the Germans had their turn at incompetence. Enigma machines were
supposed to be "warmed up" by 3 random characters. The purpose of this is like
an Initial Vector or a "nonce" in modern block cipher use -- a bit of entropy
to help obscure often almost identical message headers. A lot of German code
clerks were lazy and just typed in "AAA", which helped out the Bletchley Park
cryptographers a lot.

Modern crypto technology is often very good, but only if used correctly.
Security fails most often because of _human error_. (This includes
programmers!)

~~~
jordanb
While we're telling war stories. ;) Nonces played a role in a major American
blunder too.

During the Battle of Leyte Gulf, Admiral Halsey moved his massive Third fleet
out of position to chase a Japanese ruse. The Japanese then moved their
Central Force through the gap and attacked the much smaller and ill-prepared
Seventh Fleet.

The commander of the Seventh Fleet sent several desperate messages asking for
Halsey's help, causing Admiral Nimitz at Pearl Harbor to send a message to
Halsey asking, simply "WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR?" (Task Force 34 was
the Third Fleet's detachment of battleships).

His clerk changed the message to WHERE IS RPT WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR?
And then, while forming the message, added the beginning nonce "TURKEY TROTS
TO WATER GG" and the trailing nonce "RR THE WORLD WONDERS". The "GG" and "RR"
were indicators of the end and beginning of the nonces.

Halsey's clerk removed the first nonce, but left the last one "THE WORLD
WONDERS" as part of the message, apparently missing the "RR". So when Halsey
got the message, it read "WHERE IS RPT WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR THE
WORLD WONDERS".

Halsey interpreted the message as sarcastic criticism of his decisions by a
commanding officer over official channels, and flew into a rage. He then
decided to delay the Third Fleet's assistance of the Seventh Fleet, ostensibly
to refuel his destroyers.

Had he sent the battleships immediately, they likely would have crossed the
Central Force's T and crushed them. It would have been one of the greatest
(and last) battleship duels in history.

Of course the blunder didn't affect the outcome of the war, or even the battle
in a strategic since. The Seventh Fleet was able to turn the Central Force
back, mostly through self-sacrificial courage on the part of the destroyer
crews.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_world_wonders>

~~~
stcredzero
_the Third Fleet was able to turn the Central Fleet back on their own mostly
through self-sacrificial courage on the part of the destroyers._

I know of that action from documentaries. Basically, the destroyers engaged
heavier ship classes which they theoretically had no hope against. In some
cases, "charged" is actually more apt than "engaged."

------
ErrantX
I like this story, because it draws the whole complex masquerade operation
together around a nice focal point.

Fortitude was a very complicated operation (see:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fortitude>, it even involved faking
two entire fictitious armies :D) but executed brilliantly - one of my
favourite pieces of war history.

~~~
oiuytghyujki
Amateurs! One modern leader of an impoverished 3rd world country managed to
fake an entire nuclear, biological, chemical warfare capability and the ICBMs
necessary to attack Britain within 45mins.

And he did it so successfully we were forced to invade.

~~~
sp332
After doing it once, he had a lot of credibility when he said "Hey, remember
the centrifuges the Germans helped us build in the 80's? and the chemical
weapons we bought from Germany, refined with French equipment, and used to
genocide the Kurds? Yeah, we're doing that stuff again."

[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Al-
Anfal_Camp...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Al-
Anfal_Campaign)

[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Iraq_and_weap...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction)

------
danshapiro
Did anyone else notice that the BBC tarted up their headline to the point that
it's actually false? The piece of paper was written by the Germans. It didn't
"fool" them. It was proof that the Germans _had_ been fooled, but I guess
that's not quite as good for linkbait.

~~~
oiuytghyujki
If you have broken the enemies crypto AND he doesn't know you have - then you
can also send fake messages which they are going to believe.

So the Brits could have sent a message ordering a few panzer armies from
Normandy to the Pas de Calais. It doesn't seem that this was ever done -
presumably because it gave the game away.

Even more interestingly - the Brits kept secret that they had cracked enigma
into the 1980s because after the war they distributed the 'uncrackable' German
code machine to lots of rather gullible allies

------
anarchitect
From the headline I thought this was going to be about Operation Mincemeat
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat>) which is a pretty amazing
story.

~~~
sliverstorm
I thought the same thing, and was very skeptical about all this 'published for
the first time!' as I could swear there was a fictional-historical movie made
around the 60's based on the premise of Operation Mincemeat!

~~~
tygorius
Perhaps you're thinking of "36 Hours", where German psychologist Rod Taylor
tries to convince drugged and captured Army officer James Garner that the war
is long over, the Nazis vanquished, but he's suffering from amnesia that
occurred years later. As part of your therapy to recover your memory, if you
could just confirm that you remember where and when the invasion occurred...
Mincemeat is offstage, but I think it was part of the set up.

Saw it in a theater when I was a lad -- too young to properly appreciate Eva
Marie Saint, alas.

------
jacquesm
In light of this I'd like to point out jgc's efforts to help preserve
Bletchley Park: [http://blog.jgc.org/2010/01/1000-for-bletchley-park-
thanks-t...](http://blog.jgc.org/2010/01/1000-for-bletchley-park-thanks-to-
geek.html)

------
markkat
This is very tangential, but I just happened to finish the "Guns of August" by
Barbara Tuchman last night. If any HN military history buffs have not read it
yet, do pick it up. Although about the opening of WWI, it provides some great
insight into both World Wars.

~~~
logjam
Amazing book, highly detailed. Watching the madness of supposedly rational men
bowing to militarism and nationalism, whipped along by supposedly inviolate
plans and timetables, creating the conditions for not one but two world
wars...it's all the stuff of nightmares.

~~~
markkat
Agreed. And yet, you walk away better understanding how those nightmares can
become reality. By chance, I picked up Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror" from a
sidewalk seller, and was struck by her ability to address so many parts of a
whole. After finding that she won the Pulitzer for "The Guns of August", I had
to read it.

I've heard that JFK was a big fan of "The Guns of August", and made it
required reading in his cabinet.

As an aside, Tuchman is now recognized for the following reflection, which is
often paraphrased as Tuchman's Law: "Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it
seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear
continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both
in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than
the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing
the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes,
crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns,
muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come
home in the evening, on a lucky day, without having encountered more than one
or two of these phenomena."

Oh, BTW: On the topic of encryption, I can't believe the Russians were sending
unencrypted orders in WWI over wireless!

------
redthrowaway
This reminds me, I'm still reading _Cryptonomicon_. I find Stephenson's work
to be really hard to get into, then hard to put down once you do. Guess I'll
keep at it.

------
highzeth
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat> should also be noted. Not
only an amazing story/execution, but its successful outcome did have;
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat#Impact_on_l...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat#Impact_on_later_operations)

Well worth reading the book by the same name.

------
michaelty
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Pujol>

Somebody needs to make a movie about this man.

~~~
barredo
There's a documentary (2009, imdb link: <http://www.imdb.es/title/tt1344315/>)
called "Garbo, the Spy" (Garbo was one of his nicknames). It's in spanish but
i'm pretty sure there are english subtitles on the DVD.

This work won the Goya (Spanish National Cinema Award) last year for better
documentary.

I read the article and thought: "At least, some british recognition to Pujol"
:-)

------
cperciva
Does anyone know if all the intercepted German WW2 dispatches have been
decrypted? If there's a pile of undecrypted dispatches sitting in a vault
somewhere, it could be of great interest to historians if someone applied
modern computers and code-breaking techniques to them.

~~~
redthrowaway
We wouldn't need any codebreaking techniques; we know their encryption method.
I suspect feeding the papers through OCR would be the most time consuming
part. I doubt decrypting would take any longer than SSL.

~~~
philh
We know the method, but we also need the key used for any particular message,
unless Enigma has been thoroughly broken. IIRC (from _The Code Book_ ), at the
end of the war Bletchley park couldn't break German naval messages. (They used
the same machine as everyone else, but with less predictable messages.)

Am I missing something?

~~~
eftpotrm
Wasn't the whole point of Collossus that it was brute-forcing the messages on
the more complex Naval keys until it found a candidate match? That's certainly
what I remember from visiting Bletchley Park.

In any case, there are now (finally!) software implementations that are
significantly faster than the reproduced hardware Collossus, so even if I'm
not fully right brute-forcing messages should be viable.

~~~
mckoss
From my understanding, Collossus was not used against Enigma, but rather, Tuny
(an teletype based 5 bit XOR stream cipher).

~~~
eftpotrm
Tunny was the British codename for data from the Lorenz machine, which is what
Collossus was working on. The original Enigma machines were attacked by Bombe
machines developed by Polish codebreakers pre-war.

------
ryanc
Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett is a great fictionalized spy novel centered
around Operation Fortitude and spy catching in the UK during the second world
war.

------
bitwize
Fun fact: The RUSI official quoted in this article, Amyas Godfrey, was a child
star on _You Can't Do That on Television_.

~~~
hugh3
Well, now there's an interesting fact I don't know.

------
contagion
Pretty monumental read, going to take its place in the history books. Nice to
see the wide range of HN articles out there.

------
insight
the brits did quiet a few things right, apparently

------
BluePoints
I want to know how one actively becomes a 'double agent' - anyone know any
books that tell the 'story' here or in similar cases?

~~~
elwin
Because of their code-breaking, British intelligence was able to catch most
German agents as soon as they arrived. Some of them were given the opportunity
to "turn double". One example: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Chapman>

~~~
InclinedPlane
Note that "given the opportunity" meant "given the choice between execution
and turning double agent", though some chose to turn themselves in and offer
themselves up as double agents of their own will.

------
paolomaffei
So thanks to this piece of paper West Germany and probably Itay and Austria
too didn't become communist states because the Americans got there before the
Russians?

Phew.

