OK Bryan, here we go (and please forgive any wierd line
breaks...they're just d**m hard to avoid).
==========
The New York Time?s archives at:
http://www.nyt.com
include excerpts from Secretary of State Cordell Hull?s memoirs, where
he has this to say about the note from Roosevelt:
-----
The Memoirs of Cordell Hull
By CORDELL HULL
New York Times, Feb 21, 1948
pg. 15
Dear Cordell
Shoot this to Grew - I think it can go in gray code [our least secret
code] - saves time - I don't mind if it gets picked up.
FDR
-----
From the context, it is clear that the remark in brackets in Hull's,
and it certainly seems to confirm your contention that the Gray Code
was a pretty leaky sieve. Furthermore, Hull also writes, in the
paragraph preceeding the note:
"It was the President's opinion the moment had now come to send his
message to the Emperor. He sent me a draft which mains was the same
as one I had sent him the week before but with some changes and
additions of his own. I...found several statements in it that seemed
to require revisions...and sent the draft back to the White House.
That evening, Mr. Roosevelt sent it to me with no further changes,
accompanied by this note...
Clearly, Roosevelt intended the message to get to the Emperor, and
from all appearances, was not terribly concerned about security.
==========
This note, from the FDR Library archives, may shed some light...or it
may not. The language and context is a bit ambiguous I'm afraid:
-----
DEPARTMENT OF STATE
THE SECRETARY
October 24, 1941
Dear Miss Tully:
With reference to your conversation with Mr. Gray I attach five copies
of Zurich's telegram No. 481 regarding the program of the National
Reich' s Church. A paraphrase was not necessary as the Gray code is
not a confidential one.
John F. Stone
-----
Huh? Not confidential....go figure.
==========
This site:
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/11/09/147211.shtml
contains a forum discussing intelligence codes, and includes this
reference to a book from a few years back:
"I have just been reading Anthony Cave Brown's history of intelligence
and deception in the Second World War, "Bodyguard of Lies" (1975), and
it certainly was not just the Allies making extensive use of signal
intelligence...The German navy had cracked certain Admiralty ciphers
in early 1940 and again in 1943, which were of considerable importance
in the naval actions off Norway, and then in the battle of the convoys.
Luftwaffe cryptanalysis also penetrated some of Bomber Command's
ciphers. Even some of the private messages between Churchill and
Roosevelt were intercepted, in 1940 when the American "Gray code"
cipher was betrayed by a State department clerk in London, and at
intervals between 1941 and 1943 when parts of telephone messages could
be read due to deficiencies in the AT&T "A-3" scrambler.
-----
This betrayal by a clerk is an apparent reference to Tyler Kent, more
of whom you will find several excerpts below.
=========
At this site:
http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/20/04713186/0471318620.pdf
is an excerpt from a book with intriguing name of:
Undercover Tales of World War II
William B. Breuer
and it contains this equally-intriguing (if hard to verify) story
about espionage at the US consulate in Japan by a tailor hired by the
consulate staff:
-----
Actually, the ?tailor? belonged to the kempeitai, Japan?s secret police
force. Cagey but cautious, he bribed a junior member of the consulate
staff ?borrow? the key to the safe, after which the spy had a wax imprint
made. From this imprint a key was fashioned.
On a Saturday night in late April 1933, when the ?tailor? knew that the
consul and a few of his staffers would be at a local geisha house, a
squad
kempeitai men, thoroughly briefed in advance and provided with a
drawing of the consulate floor plan, pulled a ?black-bag job,? as a
surreptitious entry is called in the espionage business. With ease,
they pried open the office door, used the spy?s key to open the safe,
and removed a book containing the U.S. State Department?s Gray Code.
Like a well-oiled machine, the burglars rapidly photographed each page,
then replaced the book in the safe, being exceptionally careful to put
it precisely where it had been lying. Then the intruders sneaked out
of the building. The venture had been conducted so skillfully that
the Americans would not learn for several years that their Gray Code
had been pilfered by the Japanese.
==========
From www.questia.com comes another
hard-to-be-sure-what-it-really-means-but-here-it-is-anyway tidbit:
-----
Hard Bargain: How FDR Twisted Churchill's Arm, Evaded the Law, and
Changed the Role of the American Presidency.
Robert Shogan
Westview Press, Boulder, CO. 1999.
Page 15.
CHAPTER ONE "I Want to Get My Hand in Now"
The cable followed a well established path. From the desk of newly
installed Prime Minister Winston Churchill at Admiralty House, where
he had until recently served His Britannic Majesty as First Lord and
was still temporarily headquartered, it was hand carried by Naval
courier to the United States Embassy, only minutes away at Prince's
Gate on Grosvenor Square. Arriving there in late afternoon in its
sealed envelope, it was immediately forwarded to the code room. In
this sacrosanct chamber it was encrypted in the Gray code, one of the
simplest and therefore one of the fastest ciphers. Then came the long
telegraphic leap across the Atlantic, directly to the White House,
where after being swiftly decoded it was placed at the right hand of
the 32nd President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The date was May 15, 1940, eight months into a world conflict suddenly
transformed from a phony war into a blitzkrieg which now threatened to
engulf the Western democracies.
Roosevelt had no reason to expect good news from Churchill. Five days
earlier Adolf Hitler's armies had swarmed across northern France and
the Low Countries and all reports made clear that the Allies faced an
epochal disaster. The morning's Washington Post recorded astounding
new German victories. Rotterdam had fallen and the Dutch government
announced the capitulation of its army, "to avoid the complete
destruction of the country." Elsewhere Hitler's forces had reached the
Meuse on a broad front from Liege to Sedan.
Even so, it took only a quick glance at Churchill's message to tell
the President that Britain's plight was much graver than he had
surmised. "The scene has darkened swiftly," Churchill wrote,
emphasizing that the French had been stunned by the speed and force of
the Nazi assault. "We expect to be attacked here ourselves," he wrote.
"But if necessary we shall continue the war alone, and we are not
afraid of that.
-----
So apparently, the Gray Code was considered the "simple" and "fastest"
which sort of implies not terribly secure.
==========
Also from Questia, a reference in a book to the Hull story:
From the Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbor: Japan's Entry into World
War II.
David J. Lu
Public Affairs Press, Washington, DC. 1961
Page 236.
"The idea of sending a personal message to the Japanese Emperor had
been under discussion since October. Hr. Hull was not favorably
inclined to it. As he later recalled: "I felt that the Emperor, in any
event, was a figurehead under the control of the military Cabinet. A
message direct to him would cause Tojo's Cabinet to feel that they
were being short-circuited and would anger them." 31 However, on
December 6 the message was sent as a last-minute resort, and strictly
"for the record." There was no hope of a favorable response. It was
sent in gray code, the least secret one, which could easily be
deciphered.
==========
An inside-the-book search at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com
on: "gray code" and "state department"
turns up some other (and not entirely consistent) information. For
example there's this:
Unexplained Mysteries of World War II
by William B. Breuer
"...Tyler Kent handled the Gray Code, a cipher system that the State
Department thought to be unbreakable. It was the Gray Code that
Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt used for their most secret
communications.
-----
Another book at Amazon is:
Spying for America: The Hidden History of U.S. Intelligence
by Nathan Miller
which includes this:
"One of the major reasons the president turned to outside sources of
intelligence was his distrust of the State Department... The
president also distrusted the State Department's notoriously
unreliable Gray Code, which, in fact, was being read with ease by the
Germans*
The asterisk leads to a footnote with the unattributed (and pretty
unbelievable if you ask me) statement:
"*The Gray Code was so compromised that in the 1920s the American
consul in Shanghai made his retirement speech before the entire
diplomatic community in
(note this is the same author as the "Undercover Tales of WWII" cited
above in the Japanese tailor story).
==========
So...bottom line appears to be this. The Gray Code is widely beleived
to have been an unreliable, insecure code, except for an occasional
reference referring to it as our most reliable and most secret code.
Take your pick.
pafalafa-ga
search strategy: Google search on ("gray code" OR "gray cipher") (
"state department" OR "department of state")
and similar searches of other databases like Questia and Amazon.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you want to change the formatting, tweak things below.
OK Bryan, here we go.
==========
The New York Time?s archives at:
http://www.nyt.com
include excerpts from Secretary of State Cordell Hull?s memoirs, where
he has this to say about the note from Roosevelt:
-----
The Memoirs of Cordell Hull
By CORDELL HULL
New York Times, Feb 21, 1948
pg. 15
Dear Cordell
Shoot this to Grew - I think it can go in gray code [our least secret
code] - saves time - I don't mind if it gets picked up.
FDR
-----
From the context, it is clear that the remark in brackets in Hull's,
and it certainly seems to confirm your contention that the Gray Code
was a pretty leaky sieve. Furthermore, Hull also writes, in the
paragraph preceeding the note:
"It was the President's opinion the moment had now come to send his
message to the Emperor. He sent me a draft which mains was the same
as one I had sent him the week before but with some changes and
additions of his own. I...found several statements in it that seemed
to require revisions...and sent the draft back to the White House.
That evening, Mr. Roosevelt sent it to me with no further changes,
accompanied by this note..."
Clearly, Roosevelt intended the message to get to the Emperor, and
from all appearances, was not terribly concerned about security.
==========
This note, from the FDR Library archives, may shed some light...or it
may not. The language and context is a bit ambiguous I'm afraid:
-----
DEPARTMENT OF STATE
THE SECRETARY
October 24, 1941
Dear Miss Tully:
With reference to your conversation with Mr. Gray I attach five copies
of Zurich's telegram No. 481 regarding the program of the National
Reich' s Church. A paraphrase was not necessary as the Gray code is
not a confidential one.
John F. Stone
-----
Huh? Not confidential....go figure.
==========
This site:
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/11/09/147211.shtml
contains a forum discussing intelligence codes, and includes this
reference to a book from a few years back:
"I have just been reading Anthony Cave Brown's history of intelligence
and deception in the Second World War, "Bodyguard of Lies" (1975), and
it certainly was not just the Allies making extensive use of signal
intelligence...The German navy had cracked certain Admiralty ciphers
in early 1940 and again in 1943, which were of considerable importance
in the naval actions off Norway, and then in the battle of the
convoys. Luftwaffe cryptanalysis also penetrated some of Bomber
Command's ciphers. Even some of the private messages between Churchill
and Roosevelt were intercepted, in 1940 when the American "Gray code"
cipher was betrayed by a State department clerk in London, and at
intervals between 1941 and 1943 when parts of telephone messages could
be read due to deficiencies in the AT&T "A-3" scrambler."
-----
This betrayal by a clerk is an apparent reference to Tyler Kent, more
of whom you will find several excerpts below.
=========
At this site:
http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/20/04713186/0471318620.pdf
is an excerpt from a book with intriguing name of:
Undercover Tales of World War II
William B. Breuer
and it contains this equally-intriguing (if hard to verify) story
about espionage at the US consulate in Japan by a tailor hired by the
consulate staff:
-----
Actually, the ?tailor? belonged to the kempeitai, Japan?s secret police
force. Cagey but cautious, he bribed a junior member of the consulate staff to
?borrow? the key to the safe, after which the spy had a wax imprint made. From
this imprint a key was fashioned.
On a Saturday night in late April 1933, when the ?tailor? knew that the
consul and a few of his staffers would be at a local geisha house, a squad of
kempeitai men, thoroughly briefed in advance and provided with a detailed
drawing of the consulate floor plan, pulled a ?black-bag job,? as a
surreptitious entry is called in the espionage business. With ease,
they pried open the office door, used the spy?s key to open the safe,
and removed a book containing the U.S. State Department?s Gray Code.
Like a well-oiled machine, the burglars rapidly photographed each page,
then replaced the book in the safe, being exceptionally careful to put
it precisely where it had been lying. Then the intruders sneaked out
of the building. The venture had been conducted so skillfully that
the Americans would not learn for several years that their Gray Code
had been pilfered by the Japanese.
==========
From www.questia.com comes another
hard-to-be-sure-what-it-really-means-but-here-it-is-anyway tidbit:
-----
Hard Bargain: How FDR Twisted Churchill's Arm, Evaded the Law, and
Changed the Role of the American Presidency.
Robert Shogan
Westview Press, Boulder, CO. 1999.
Page 15.
CHAPTER ONE "I Want to Get My Hand in Now"
The cable followed a well established path. From the desk of newly
installed Prime Minister Winston Churchill at Admiralty House, where
he had until recently served His Britannic Majesty as First Lord and
was still temporarily headquartered, it was hand carried by Naval
courier to the United States Embassy, only minutes away at Prince's
Gate on Grosvenor Square. Arriving there in late afternoon in its
sealed envelope, it was immediately forwarded to the code room. In
this sacrosanct chamber it was encrypted in the Gray code, one of the
simplest and therefore one of the fastest ciphers. Then came the long
telegraphic leap across the Atlantic, directly to the White House,
where after being swiftly decoded it was placed at the right hand of
the 32nd President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The date was May 15, 1940, eight months into a world conflict suddenly
transformed from a phony war into a blitzkrieg which now threatened to
engulf the Western democracies.
Roosevelt had no reason to expect good news from Churchill. Five days
earlier Adolf Hitler's armies had swarmed across northern France and
the Low Countries and all reports made clear that the Allies faced an
epochal disaster. The morning's Washington Post recorded astounding
new German victories. Rotterdam had fallen and the Dutch government
announced the capitulation of its army, "to avoid the complete
destruction of the country." Elsewhere Hitler's forces had reached the
Meuse on a broad front from Liege to Sedan.
Even so, it took only a quick glance at Churchill's message to tell
the President that Britain's plight was much graver than he had
surmised. "The scene has darkened swiftly," Churchill wrote,
emphasizing that the French had been stunned by the speed and force of
the Nazi assault. "We expect to be attacked here ourselves," he wrote.
"But if necessary we shall continue the war alone, and we are not
afraid of that.
-----
So apparently, the Gray Code was considered the "simple" and "fastest"
which sort of implies not terribly secure.
==========
Also from Questia, a reference in a book to the Hull story:
From the Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbor: Japan's Entry into World War II.
David J. Lu
Public Affairs Press, Washington, DC. 1961
Page 236.
"The idea of sending a personal message to the Japanese Emperor had
been under discussion since October. Hr. Hull was not favorably
inclined to it. As he later recalled: "I felt that the Emperor, in any
event, was a figurehead under the control of the military Cabinet. A
message direct to him would cause Tojo's Cabinet to feel that they
were being short-circuited and would anger them." 31 However, on
December 6 the message was sent as a last-minute resort, and strictly
"for the record." There was no hope of a favorable response. It was
sent in gray code, the least secret one, which could easily be
deciphered."
==========
An inside-the-book search at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com
on: "gray code" and "state department"
turns up some other (and not entirely consistent) information. For
example there's this:
Unexplained Mysteries of World War II
by William B. Breuer
"...Tyler Kent handled the Gray Code, a cipher system that the State
Department thought to be unbreakable. It was the Gray Code that
Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt used for their most secret
communications."
-----
Another book at Amazon is:
Spying for America: The Hidden History of U.S. Intelligence
by Nathan Miller
which includes this:
"One of the major reasons the president turned to outside sources of
intelligence was his distrust of the State Department... The
president also distrusted the State Department's notoriously
unreliable Gray Code, which, in fact, was being read with ease by the
Germans*"
The asterisk leads to a footnote with the unattributed (and pretty
unbelievable if you ask me) statement:
"*The Gray Code was so compromised that in the 1920s the American
consul in Shanghai made his retirement speech before the entire
diplomatic community in Gray"
(note this is the same author as the "Undercover Tales of WWII" cited
above in the Japanese tailor story).
==========
So...bottom line appears to be this. The Gray Code is widely beleived
to have been an unreliable, insecure code, except for an occasional
reference referring to it as our most reliable and most secret code.
Take your pick.
pafalafa-ga
search strategy: Google search on ("gray code" OR "gray cipher")
("state department" OR "department of state")
and similar searches of other databases like Questia and Amazon. |
