Notes - Burdens of Proof - page 195

a cryptanalyst with even a modicum of experience would find the key in less than
an hour.” Ibid., 10 (my translation).
23. Ibid., 9 (my translation).
24. Kahn, The Codebreakers , 299.
25. Ibid., 300. This kind of basic traffic analysis was still entirely relevant in the
Vietnam war: “On January 25 [1968], NSA issued another alert, 'Coordinated Viet-
namese Communist Offensive Evidenced.' The SIGINT report gave clear evidence
that a major attack was about to take place, citing an “almost unprecedented volume
of urgent messages . . . passing among major [enemy] commands.” James Bamford,
Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency: From the Cold War
through the Dawn of a New Century (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 333. And later,
“That night, David Parks noticed something very unusual. 'At twelve midnight, the
enemy went on total radio silence,' he said. 'It was just as if someone had switched
off a light—'Nil More Heard' on any frequency. . . . Military units go on radio silence
for only one reason: they're up to something.'” Ibid., 334.
26. Kahn, The Codebreakers , 349.
27. As with much cryptographic security, proper procedure was everything. Kahn
tells the story of the German takeover of a number of Dutch underground emitting
stations: “Eventually the GiskesSchreider combine was running fourteen funkspiels.
. . . Hitler himself was regularly reading reports on it that gave the texts of many of
the messages; these were submitted by Himmler. The all-important security check
continued to be omitted from many of the transmissions. . . . S.O.E [Special Opera-
tions Executive, the British organization that managed underground activities in
Europe] actually bestirred itself a few times to wonder whether the Dutch operations
had been penetrated and should therefore be terminated. Each time it decided to
continue them because it felt that the security checks were 'inconclusive as a test.'”
Ibid., 536. As a result, within a mere twenty months, fifty-four agents were captured
in Holland, forty-seven of whom were shot without trial at the Mauthausen con-
centration camp.
28. Ibid., 32.
29. Ibid., 527-528.
30. I give here a simplified account of the operation of the Enigma. For a more
technically detailed description, see Rebecca A. Ratcliff, Delusions of Intelligence:
Enigma, Ultra and the End of Secure Ciphers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), 14-18. For the genesis of rotor machines, see Kahn, The Codebreakers ,
410-434.
31. Ratcliff, Delusions of Intelligence , 24.
32. Ibid., 27.