Signal Corps officers at the SIGSALY SAMPLE terminal in Paris, 1944. (Courtesy National Archives/NSA) (illustration credit 2.3)
A transducer microphone worn on the throat, the Bell Labs Laryngophone plugged into tank and plane radios, enabling communication over “noisy mechanized forces.” Photograph by Dan Winters (illustration credit 2.4)
HOW TO RECOGNIZE BREACH
On February 15, 1941, W.G. Radley of the Dollis Hill Research Station in London wrote to Bell Labs requesting information on the vocoder: “This is of particular interest to us, not less so on account of present war conditions.” Bell Labs agreed to send the specs by courier but withheld any details concerning speech privacy. Three months later, on May 15, 1941, the ship delivering the documents to Britain was torpedoed and sunk.
The U-boat control of FDR’s Lend-Lease supply corridor in the Atlantic would be broken when England’s chief cryptanalyst, Alan Turing, helped solve the German ENIGMA cipher in 1942. In January 1943, Turing visited Bell Labs to vet the vocoder but was initially denied admittance. (Despite the importance of the ENIGMA breakthrough, history has been reluctant to acknowledge Turing’s war hero status because he was gay.) As the only British officer permitted to evaluate the X-System, Turing would generate enough Bell Labs and Pentagon memoranda to choke a file cabinet. He would ultimately receive clearance from the White House and enemy of the telephone, George Marshall.
Chief British cryptanalyst Alan Turing was the only British officer cleared to evaluate the SIGSALY vocoder at Bell Labs. When testing his own scrambler Delilah (which was not a vocoder), Turing sampled chopped up recordings of Churchill speeches. In 1945, Turing made a secret trip to Feuerstein, a German vocoder lab in upper Franconia, to investigate encoded transmissions intercepted over Hanover. (illustration credit 2.5)
In 1936, the year the vocoder sang “Barnacle Bill” at Harvard, Turing published “Computable Numbers,” an essay proposing that a machine could mimic the human brain. (Turing once dreamt of engaging a supermachine in chess and outsmarting it by playing so dumb that the machine was depressed by the ignorance of its creator and committed suicide.) At 463 West Street, Turing met Claude Shannon, author of “Communication in the Presence of Noise,” which defined noise as a precise measure of compressed intelligence that could “wiggle.” Though discussing the military’s artificial speech analyzer was prohibited, artificial intelligence was another story. Over lunch in the Bell Labs cafeteria, Turing and Shannon decided that the brain was no longer sacred and called for an assault on inner space. It was time to feed “cultural things” to machines, including music. Turing held forth in a voice that his biographer Andrew Hodges likened to a vocoder. He declared that Bell Labs president O.E. Buckley had a mediocre brain and that he could build a better one. Tables rattled, faces fell, phones rang, and coffee flew from noses.
The vocoder would pass Turing’s inspection, and on July 15, 1943, the inaugural link was established between the Pentagon and the basement of Selfridges, a London department store connected to Churchill’s bunker. The 805th division of the Signal Corps was charged with overseeing maintenance and operation. The Signal Corps named the system SIGSALY, which stood for nothing, while Bell Labs called it Project X, as if choosing the most obvious mysterious alias. In the official SIGSALY user manual, its main component, the vocoder, is never mentioned by name. Nor does the word appear in the SIGSALY “Secret Telephony” patent, ultimately awarded on June 29, 1976.
SIGSALY vocoder photographed in Guam, circa 1944. Each seven-foot “cabinet” of transformers and vacuum tubes served as a vocoder channel. At one point, Bell Labs had designed a 30-channel model that occupied two floors. This would be the first articulate modular synthesizer. (Courtesy National Archives/NSA) (illustration credit 2.6)
Two weeks after SIGSALY’s de but, the German Research Bureau picked up yet another call between Roosevelt and Churchill. Mussolini, prime minister of Italy, aka Il Duce, had resigned. The boot was open. Using the A-3, Churchill and Roosevelt’s conversation was decoded virtually in real time, and Hitler knew to bolster his forces in Italy. Still, Roosevelt refused to have a vocoder in the White House, perhaps due to Churchill’s inobservance of time zones—a fear of being drunk-dialed at any hour of the night. The prime minister, however, accumulated hundreds of SIGSALY calls in one year. Roughly a year after the German intercept, FDR and Churchill were on the vocoder, joking about the clout of the presidential dog while planning a surprise landing on the beaches of Normandy in early June.
SHIPPING AND HANDLING
During the war, a network of twelve SIGSALY terminals would be installed worldwide, including an OL-31 barge that ended up in Tokyo Bay, with vocoder and non-skipping turntables operating in the hold.
“It was a major technological weapon with human appeal,” says Dr. Robert Price, a SIGSALY historian who estimated that the system trafficked millions of words through the ether in 1945 alone.
Though General Douglas MacArthur didn’t trust SIGSALY, brass like Chester Nimitz, Hap Arnold and Manhattan Project foreman Leslie Groves all frequented the secret channel. Ralph Miller still can’t believe it worked. “They actually transmitted speech from North Africa to the US, across the US to Australia. On the vocoder. On that system. It actually worked, clear down around that loop.”
With forty rack-mounts of gear, SIGSALY averaged fifty-five tons and occupied 2,500 square feet, essentially a three-bedroom home and a garage. “A couple pounds less than a sawmill,” cracked General Dayton Eddy, who claimed to have “nursemaided” the vocoder. The vocoder itself was a dainty forty tons, with one rack tower assigned to each of its ten voice channels. “The size of the X-System is not an accomplishment to be very happy about,” wrote Ralph Miller in A History of Engineering & Science in the Bell System. Despite this, the army believed that its 850 boxes of equipment could be air-dropped into Berlin. With production costs topping a million dollars per terminal, Project X was billed in the ledger, somewhat innocently, as “Overseas Telephone Service.” When General Eisenhower saw these walls of relays, transformers and vacuum tubes, he was believed to have grunted, “You can make a whole lotta bullets with all that copper.”
SIGSALY was the fat kid in the wagon, requiring a barge and an aircraft carrier to tow the terminal to its designated theater. Shipping and handling in a U-boat world was not easy. According to Miller, one vocoder fell off a barge in the Philippines and had to be rescued by frogmen. Another, intended for New Guinea, contracted a fungal infection and had to be de-spored on a beach in Hollandia. Humidity was to blame.
The last SIGSALY oscillator, photographed in an NSA storage room, 2009. William Bennett, a Bell Labs engineer close to the vocoder, called SIGSALY “a book with seven seals.” According to Bennett, the Bell Labs film High Speed Motion Pictures of the Human Vocal Cords was shown in theaters in Europe. (illustration credit 2.7)
Bell Labs’ first vocoder singer, Charles Vadersen, would find himself deposited on a beach near Townsville, undercover and 800 miles from the terminal in Brisbane. Most of the 805th Signal Corps had been recruited from the Bell system. Eggheads who had been splitting speech in New York found themselves packing service revolvers in New Guinea. Fresh out of the Bell Labs School of War Training, one officer was photographed in a Manhattan hotel room posing in a gas mask, while another brandished a pair of pliers. Another identified himself as a “X-Toll Test Board Repeater Man.” Another would accidentally overhear the date of the D-Day invasion over a SIGSALY line and immediately destroy the recording. The detachment in Algiers would receive bronze stars for service in the North African campaign. A detachment in the Mediterranean was commended for reporting approximately zero cases of venereal disease. Their mascot: a thyratron tube.
805th Signal Corps graduates of the Bell Labs School of War Training, one brandishing pliers, the other in a gas mask, circa 1943. Members of the 805th weren’t allowed to discuss SIGSALY, not even among themselves, until it was declassified in 1976. (Courtesy National Archi
ves/NSA) (illustration credit 2.8)
THE WHISPER CONDITION
During World War II, artifice—the illusion of conflict—was a weapon in itself. There were wooden bombs, fake factories, inflatable tanks, synthetic fogs, electronically generated ghost armies, psychoacoustic ventriloquists, and magicians hired to make the coastline disappear. A synthetic reenactment of the voice was just another Decepticon. Even without the vocoder, speech sent across the globe over radio channels often arrived in pieces. A relatively new technology, long distance may as well have been outer space. “The SIGSALY voice was artificial, sure,” says Lieutenant Donald E. Mehl, who supervised terminals at the Pentagon and then later in Manila. According to Mehl, callers often had to become “psychologically adjusted to reaction time,” if not be outright told who was on the other end. “It made a curious kind of robot voice,” said Henry Stimson, the newly appointed secretary of war. William Bennett, a Bell Labs engineer who worked on SIGSALY, had his own motto: “Accept distortion for security.”
The Signal Corps was more concerned with the vocoder’s ungovernable pitch than a failure to recognize. Occasionally, Ralph Miller reported to the Pentagon for tech support. “I was working on extracting the pitch. They were trying to get Eisenhower to use it in North Africa. So they got Mamie, his wife, to go into [the Pentagon terminal] and get on the phone. I was scared to death because the pitch channel wasn’t designed around women’s voices. But apparently her voice was low enough.” Ike thought the vocoder turned his wife into an old woman. Mamie told him to come home.
Ralph grins. “We had a saying back then: ‘Pitch is a bitch.’ It was crazy. With your pitch jerking around at five levels, it would make your speech jump all over the place.” Ralph would issue a memo concerning the “Whisper Condition,” toying with the unvoiced circuit. “We even tried cutting out the pitch altogether,” he continues. “Then you get whispered speech. Well, this is supposed to be a secret system, so why not whisper it? This didn’t go over with the people who wanted to use it. Churchill did not want to whisper.”
SOMETHING TO THAT EFFECT
In 1940, Royal Air Force pilot Roald Dahl awoke in a flying hospital bed, losing altitude somewhere over Libya. He smelled oranges, lemons and melting steel. There was singing. He recognized the melody as “Bells of St. Clement’s,” a seventeenth-century nursery rhyme about a group of church bells who haggle over fruit prices until someone gets beheaded. Dahl’s brain telegraphed him. Down here there is a great hotness. What shall we do? He noticed the rhymes weren’t coming from bells but planes, circling him from above. The black crosses painted under their wings had joined hands, their engines chanting, “Here comes a chopper to chop off your head!” Dahl cried out for the nurse. He was being taunted by the German Messerschmitts that he believed had blown him out of the sky. The morphine seemed to be working.
VARIATIONS IN TIMBRE AND ATTACK
Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean just put his foot through a cloud. He has jumped out of a plane over Yugoslavia with an autographed glossy of Winston Churchill in his rucksack. The sky is quickly upon him, snatching at his ears, chasing him into darkness. It is the fall of 1943, possibly the worst time to be dropping into Eastern Europe. Yugoslavia is under German occupation and the airwaves hiss with radio spooks who have taken an interest in Maclean’s whereabouts. He pulls the ripcord. If things go as planned, he will bloom into a nylon jellyfish and float into the mountains of Bosnia.
Ralph Miller on the vocoder at Bell Labs, 1954. In addition to helping design the Voder and SIGSALY, Miller was a pioneer in Pulse Code Modulation. (Courtesy Scientific American) (illustration credit 2.9)
As Churchill’s personal emissary, Maclean, a Scottish-born “correspondent,” has been dispatched to meet with Josip Tito, rebel leader of the Yugoslav Communist Party. For the past two years, Tito’s guerrillas have defied Hitler’s invasion of Yugoslavia, but at great cost. They wear the uniforms of dead German soldiers while fighting for an independent communist state. Churchill wants to back Tito despite worries that Yugoslavia could become another satellite for Josef Stalin, once an amateur meteorologist, now dictator of one-sixth of Earth. Stalin can’t be trusted any farther than you could throw Churchill. Churchill can’t be trusted any farther than you could throw the Politburo. Stalin once trusted Hitler but now only trusts the weather. Russia’s ice-pick winter has been a dependable ally during the German invasion and, better yet, when terrorizing one’s own people and cultivating loyalty in the Arctic Circle. Nor does Stalin trust Josip Tito, a man who once barfed at a Kremlin banquet.
Tito’s desire to be Moscow-free is encouraging to Churchill. In the spring of 1943, he invites Fitzroy Maclean over to his bomb shelter at 10 Downing for a final briefing on the Tito mission. There will be whiskey and Disney cartoons. Dumbo’s talking steam engine and the helium sailor duck without pants were good for laughs at a time when machines spoke death and ducks sat in their shadows. That spring, a German V-2 rocket exploded thirty feet from Churchill’s subterranean vocoder booth in London.
“We shall fight on the beaches,” said Winston Churchill to Parliament in 1940. (illustration credit 2.10)
The next time Fitzroy Maclean heard from Churchill, it was over the phone, through the vocoder, and it was unpleasant. In April 1944, after spending nearly a year with Tito’s rebels, Maclean reported to a SIGSALY terminal in the wine cellar of the St. George’s Hotel in Algiers, wearing a highland kilt. Allied forces had been using St. George’s as a communications center since the defeat of Rommel’s Afrika Korps in 1943. The British Eighth Army would recover a variety of sophisticated voice gadgets from captured Panzer tanks, including a “Photophone” (or “Optiphone”), a device that transmitted radio conversations over a primitive laser beam. The Photophone was invented by Telefunken engineer Paul Kotowski, godfather of the German vocoder who was interned in the United States at the time.
The first two words Churchill’s spy Fitzroy Maclean, pictured above, heard on the vocoder were shut up. Undercover in the mountains of Bosnia, Maclean was a key liaison between Churchill and rebel communist leader Josip Tito when Tito’s guerrilla forces drove the German Army out of Yugoslavia. (illustration credit 2.11)
The telephone is alien enough for Fitzroy Maclean, sitting in a rigged conference room under the desert, waiting to have his voice launched across the ionosphere to Churchill’s bunker. He is handed a phone with a gouted mouthpiece, called the “Mysterious Microphone,” and the link with Churchill is consummated. The Scot identifies himself. Thinking their voices aren’t scrambled, Churchill’s robot tells him to shut up. Maclean drops his stomach. The prime minister can be a tough read at times—a split-fingered peace sign could easily break into a fuck-you at the last second. But hadn’t they recently shared Disney cartoons back in Churchill’s bunker in London? Hadn’t the prime minister fogged him in second-hand cigar smoke?
On the other side of the conference room wall, the vocoder ensures that Churchill’s two-syllable gag order has arrived in Algiers, undetected though somewhat bent out of shape. Maclean stares at the receiver in his hand, thinking the boss has chosen an inconvenient time to lose his mind. He hears an “inhuman wailing” noise, some banshee interference, and then Churchill yelling for Pippin and Pumpkin. Maclean looks at the stenographer for help. Churchill cries, “Good god! They haven’t got the code!” A Signal Corps officer intervenes, assuring both parties that the line is secure, and that the callers are indeed who they claim to be.
Churchill liberates something mucosal from his throat. “Shall we scramble?” Maclean provides the Tito intel and receives orders to return to London with Tito’s major, Vlatko Velebit, in tow, a sign of Britain’s commitment to the Yugoslav rebels. Pleased with the call, Churchill has a bottle of scotch sent to Algiers. Maclean, who is thrilled to be done with the phone, sneaks a glance at the stenographer, who listens to a recording of the conversation, perhaps wondering what the vocoder had done to his sexy Gaelic accent. He shakes his head, in need of a Bromo Selt
zer. In the SIGSALY engine room, the vocoder runs hot. An officer in starched khaki sweatstains douses a stack of vinyl records with gasoline and sets them on fire.
PHANTOM OF THE FRONT
Writing about the 1939 World’s Fair in the Atlantic Monthly, Vannevar Bush said, “Whenever thought for a time runs along an accepted groove, there is opportunity for the machine.” The groove ran deep during World War II as Bell Labs mixed recordings of battlefield noise on three turntables. Using artificial screaming bombs, these ghost armies were part of sonic deception strategy overseen by the Army Experimental Program.
BEES TO MEN
What do you mean random? You can’t control anything with random noise!
— Theodore Sturgeon, The Pod in the Barrier, 1957
It was not good to listen to what they whispered at night in the forest with voices of bees that tried to be like the voices of men.
— H.P. Lovecraft, The Whisperer in the Darkness, Special Armed Forces GI Edition, 1943
It was never confirmed whether Churchill’s bottle of scotch made it to Algiers, or if the 805th drank it. Perhaps they expected cigars. In the basement at St. George’s, on the table across from the phone, sat a special SIGSALY ashtray. This lump of melted copper tubing—maybe five bullets’ worth—had been converted from the air conditioner, perhaps the unsung hero of Project X. Engineered to cool off an airplane hangar, this overstated metal box weighed five tons and stood nine feet tall.
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