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Q: For Pafalafa only ( Answered 5 out of 5 stars,   4 Comments )
Question  
Subject: For Pafalafa only
Category: Miscellaneous
Asked by: probonopublico-ga
List Price: $25.00
Posted: 05 Dec 2003 08:57 PST
Expires: 04 Jan 2004 08:57 PST
Question ID: 283846
Please do the necessary, as hinted in your Comment to 283761.

Many thanks

Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 05 Dec 2003 13:15 PST
Hello again, Bryan, if that really is your name. 

Thanks for inviting me to "do the necessary" but I'm afraid I'm not
sure what "the necessary" is.

This Gray Code business grows more and more mysterious.  Everyone
treats it as an easily-breakable code that the Germans and Japanese
were fully conversant in, yet I can't really find any in-depth
information about it, much less an actual means of translating from
text to code.  On the other hand, there's a lot of post-WWII
information about rather sophisticated Gray Code efforts.

From reading a bunch of snippets, I suspect the Gray Code is actually
part of a chain of encoding that goes something like this:

--text is "translated" by a codebook (e.g. "battleship" = "cupcake")

--the written message is translated to numbers via a complex algorithm

The above steps AREN'T they Gray Code, as far as I can tell (the ZOXIL
story notwitstanding).  Gray Code doesn't happen until the final
step...

--The numbers are translated to the dih/dah language of Morse Code. 
It is only at this point that the Gray Code is applied -- altering the
numerical message created above to further encrypt it by scrambling
the numbers.

Morse Code is a binary system that drove a lot of the early
development of binary/digital encryption theory.  That's why I suspect
the Gray Code of the computer era, that journalist-ga uncovered a lot
of links to, may be the same as the pre-computer Gray Code of the
telegraphy era.  Then again, maybe not!

I'm not answering your question because there's an enormous amount of
speculation on my part.  I've read snippets of info here and there,
and sort of pieced together a very murky picture.

If you can, tell me a bit more about what it is you're after...if I
understand the context a little bit, I may be able to "do the
necessary" that you've so kindly invited me to attempt.

Thanks.

paf

Clarification of Question by probonopublico-ga on 06 Dec 2003 01:05 PST
Hi, Paf

Sorry ... I thought you were a mind reader.

In the early months of WW2, Churchill & Roosevelt exchanged several
supposedly 'top secret' cables via the American Embassy in London.
This is a fact and some copies of the plaint text of the cables in
question are prefixed by the word "GRAY".

At that time, the Gray Code was reputedly the least secure of the
codes in the armoury of the US Diplomatic Service.

Roosevelt was apparently aware of this and he supposedly used it when
he wanted to send a message to 'the other side'. Supposedly, he used
it to send a message to Mussolini during the Abyssinian crisis.

Conversely, when Roosevelt wanted to keep his messages from the other
side, he used the US Naval Codes.

In his book The Codebreakers, David Kahn includes a photocopy of a
handwritten note from Roosevelt to Cordell Hull dated December 1941
(page 496). This says:

[STARTS]

Dear Cordell

Shoot this to Grew - I think it can go in gray code - saves time - I
don't mind if it gets picked up.

FDR

[ENDS]

Joseph C Grew was the American Ambassador in Tokyo.

Churchill also knew A LOT about codes.

It's my hypothesis that both Churchill and Roosevelt wanted their
messages to be 'picked up'.

Why? Well, thereon hangs a tale.

But, before spinning the tale, I thought I would try and get a copy of
the Gray Code, which I supposed was simply a code book.

Of course, Journalist threw a spanner in the works when she uncovered
what appears to be yet another Gray Code.

I am now expecting the men in white coats to come and take me away ...
Unless the men in black suits arrive first.

The race is on ...

Can you beat them all, in this race against time?

Kindest regards

Bryan

(I've just checked my birth certificate and, Yes, it really is my name.)

Clarification of Question by probonopublico-ga on 06 Dec 2003 01:20 PST
And, ideally, what I would like from you is ...

Confirmation(s) that the Gray Code in question was, indeed, the least
secure code in the armoury of the US Diplomatic Service in 1939/1940.
Answer  
Subject: Re: For Pafalafa only
Answered By: pafalafa-ga on 06 Dec 2003 09:49 PST
Rated:5 out of 5 stars
 
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.

Clarification of Answer by pafalafa-ga on 06 Dec 2003 12:17 PST
Wow.  Thanks for the early holiday present.  I'm sure you know you're
quite the well-regarded customer around GA, so I'm glad I had the
chance to work on this for you.

All the best...

paf
probonopublico-ga rated this answer:5 out of 5 stars and gave an additional tip of: $25.00
WOW!

Many thanks, Paf, I am delighted that I posed the question.

Now, please take a well-earned vacation in ... Las Vegas(?)

Kindest regards

Bryan

Comments  
Subject: Re: For Pafalafa only
From: fp-ga on 06 Dec 2003 02:41 PST
 
Well, according to William B. Breuer (my comment to 283761):

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.
Subject: Re: For Pafalafa only
From: probonopublico-ga on 06 Dec 2003 03:48 PST
 
Hi, Freddy

Great stuff.

The more the merrier.

Thanks again.

Regards

Bryan
Subject: Re: For Pafalafa only
From: kemlo-ga on 07 Dec 2003 16:29 PST
 
Hi Bryan
Just think about it. One day you send your embassy a top secret
encyphered telegram and the next day it will be passed onto the
foreign office as a diplomatic note.
Thus they still need a code that only stops the clerks and underlings
from reading it.
Regards Kemlo
Subject: Re: For Pafalafa only
From: probonopublico-ga on 17 Dec 2003 11:39 PST
 
I've now got the 2 books cited in 283761 and/or 283846.

It's now evident that the Gray Code was a book code comprising 1173
pages. The codes were in 5-letter groups and two groups were added
together to save on transmission costs. (A 10-letter word counted as
one word.)

So, I simply cannot believe the claim that ...

[QUOTE]

The Gray Code was so compromised that in the 1920s the American 
consul in Shanghai made his retirement speech before the entire 
diplomatic community.

[UNQUOTE]

Thought you'd like to know.

Bryan

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