by Howard Blum
13
UNKNOWN TO BOB AS HE tried once again to make sense of his life, just a few miles away, Meredith Gardner was staring at a bullet hole. Or was it a bullet hole? It certainly looked like one. Still Meredith Gardner, always one to value accuracy, couldn’t be sure. When asked, he would be of two minds. But even Meredith had to concede the events that had brought the KGB codebook to his desk at Arlington Hall certainly made the likelihood a genuine possibility.
It was quite a story. And, Meredith was sternly warned, a top-secret one. Yet the way his superiors told it, it might have been a fairy tale. Once upon a time, they near enough began, on a windswept promontory in Finland, a long-forgotten hero bravely reached into a roaring fire as bullets whizzed all around him. . . .
JUNE 22, 1941. A CHAOTIC day when German troops marched into Russia, and Finland once again changed sides in the country’s musical-chairs-like struggle for survival. Two years earlier, in what became known as the Winter War, the outnumbered Finns had stood up to an invading force of twenty-six Red Army divisions, fought them tooth and nail for 105 days, and in the end earned a compromise that was no small victory. The Russians wound up occupying a small, icy, albeit strategic, isthmus due north of Leningrad, but the rest of the country remained as it was before the war. And Finland and Russia made peace.
But the Finns’ embrace of the Russian Bear would be short-lived. They had simply pretended to let bygones be bygones; yet all the while their silent thoughts ran to revenge. In early 1941, the foreign minister sneaked off to Berlin and the country took the first tentative step toward reclaiming the territory it had lost. The pragmatic Finns forged a secret alliance with the Nazis. It was agreed: when Germany invaded Russia, Finland would join the assault.
On that June day, as the first waves of German troops and tanks rolled into Russia, the Finns charged into action, too. In a maneuver inspired as much by pride as sound tactics, one of the initial Finnish military objectives was to retake an isolated building overlooking the deep harbor in Petsamo. It had been serving as the Soviet consulate. At just before nine in the morning, the Finns stormed the building.
Scrambling Russian security forces formed a makeshift battle line across the consulate’s entrance hall. In the cipher room, the lone duty clerk had no time to initiate Moscow Center’s careful emergency procedures for the destruction of the coding materials. Instead, racing about in full panic, with the assistance of a couple of armed guards, he got a fire going and started throwing whatever he could into the flames. But just minutes later, the heavily armed Finnish troops broke through the consulate door, and the Soviet guards raised their hands in surrender. A special squad, led by Finnish intelligence officers who’d been previously briefed about the classified treasures to be had, hurried to the cipher room.
A valiant last stand ensued. The Russians desperately hoped they could win the time needed for the blazing fire to complete the incineration. But even as the bullets flew about, the Finns were determined to claim their prize. Four singed Russian coding books, one after another, were gingerly plucked from the flames. It was an unprecedented trove of Moscow Center material. The real jewel, however, was a partially burned codebook from the First Chief Directorate of the KGB—the intelligence group that directed spying abroad.
The victorious Finns dutifully shared photostats of the Petsamo haul with their new ally, the Germans. And then—nothing. The Wehrmacht did not attempt to exploit the secrets the codebooks held. For all operational purposes, it was as if the Petsamo material had simply vanished.
AS THINGS WORKED OUT, WHEN the codebooks finally reappeared four years later, it wasn’t the work of a magician pulling them from a hat, or even a fire. But it might as well have been magic. They were found buried in a pile of abandoned papers in the damp basement of a medieval German castle.
The Target Identification Committee—TICOM, to those in on the existence of this top-secret Anglo-American unit—had been set up as the war drew to a close. Its mission: to recover German cryptographic material. And what they couldn’t take, they were to destroy before the advancing Russian army got their hands on it. From its inception, the brass at Arlington Hall considered the entire operation fanciful; the Nazis were too shrewd to let any of their coding material be seized. And their skepticism was confirmed, when in April 1945, an eager TICOM team rushed to the site of a Wehrmacht sigint unit in newly liberated Leopoldsburg, Belgium, only to find the facility had been meticulously destroyed—except for a welcoming note in English the Germans had tauntingly left.
Nevertheless, as the war was in what would be its final weeks, when the commander of the One Hundredth Infantry sent a flash signal about some intriguing civilian prisoners they had captured fleeing from a tenth-century castle in Saxony, TICOM Team 3 rushed into action. Under the command of Colonel Paul Neff of the Army Security Agency, a convoy of trucks left Paris that day. They drove at mad speed through Verdun and continued on without stopping in Germany, arriving with the new morning at the ancient castle towering above the Unsutt River.
A narrow bridge led to the Schloss, and as Colonel Neff headed across with his men, he had few expectations. Despite the haste, his trip to Saxony had been largely dutiful, at best a bit of wishful thinking. Deep down he suspected the prisoners, civilians after all, would be of little value. If anything of cryptological importance had been stored in the remote castle—of all unlikely places!—the retreating Wehrmacht troops would have made sure it was destroyed. But for once everything worked in TICOM’s favor.
The dozen prisoners were indeed civilians, but they were Reich Foreign Ministry officials who had fled in January from a secret base near Breslau. Hoping to avoid both the advancing American and Russian forces, they took refuge behind the closed gates of the castle. For four carefree months, they lived in splendid isolation; incredibly, the castle had been untouched by the war. But when the American infantry took control of the tiny village outside the castle walls, the Germans decided the time had come to move on once again. Only they ran straight into an American patrol.
Now they faced Colonel Neff and his team. The TICOM interrogators were all sigint specialists and so when the anxious prisoners revealed they had worked with the Balkanabteilung, an alarm might just as well have started clanging. This was the German cryptographic unit tasked with “solving the Russian problem.” They were the Nazi wranglers who tried to make some sense of intercepted Russian signals.
Still, the colonel did his best not to betray his growing excitement. As if there were nothing in this revelation that was of any genuine interest, Colonel Neff asked his next matter-of-fact question. When you left the Breslau base, had you, by any chance, happened to bring any papers along?
Not much later the astonished TICOM team was in the castle’s clammy basement, staring at the entire records of the Balkanabteilung cryptographic unit. There were rows of boxes arranged in tall towers, one carton neatly balanced on top of another.
Over the next busy days, the boxes were transported to the nearby Kolleda airfield. From there they were flown by special plane to England. By the time the Russians marched across the bridge leading to the castle on June 23, the cache of valuable papers had made its way to Arlington Hall. It was a mother lode that included the codebooks the gritty Finns had rescued from the flames during the taking of the Soviet consulate at Petsamo.
AND NOW A COPY OF KOD 14—the Russian KGB First Directorate’s codebook—was on Meredith’s desk. Day after day, he sat bowed over it, poring through it with an intensity so deep that it seemed to isolate him from all the others at the rows of tables in the large room. From time to time, he could be observed staring blankly into space. At other moments, he was seen absently tracing a finger around the small, irregular black oval on the singed cover. When any of his fellow code breakers dared to ask about the mark, his answers varied. One time he said it was caused by a bullet. Another, by the fire. Perhaps his judgments kept changing; but just as likely, he enjoyed having a bit of fun with his inquis
itors before he got back to work.
He understood the magnitude of the specific challenge he was facing. The cipher strippers had done their job. Thanks to brains, ingenuity, and an incredible stroke of luck—the Russians having committed the sin of all cryptological sins by reusing their one-time pads—the encipherment had been wiped away. Now it was his turn. He had to decode the blocks of numbers that remained. He must translate seemingly random digits into words.
Meredith knew too well the codebook could not serve as a crib; the underlying code in the cable traffic he was grappling with was something newer, a different language. All the Petsamo codebook could offer was insight; a familiarity with the structure of a Soviet codebook, with its vocabulary. It was as if someone had given an aspiring writer a copy of Moby-Dick and said, “This is what a novel looks like. Now go write one.” Yet when Meredith finally returned to the task of breaking the Soviet code, it was with a newfound confidence.
14
OF ALL THE WRANGLER’S DARK arts, bookbreaking was the oldest—and the most challenging. At the same time, it offered the greatest prize. The lofty goal was to reconstruct the enemy’s codebook. If you succeeded, a world of secrets would be revealed: you’d have a dictionary that’d allow you to read an adversary’s mail.
Like other puzzles, bookbreaking had its own time-proven strategies. They were not so much foolproof rules as bits of leverage, procedures that experience had shown could, in the right hands, help jimmy open a code. The cardinal one: There’s always a weakness. The canny bookbreaker shakes the pieces until he finds this weakness, and then he exploits it for all it’s worth. Or, as the Arlington Hall wranglers, partial to wartime analogies, put it: You establish a beachhead, and day after day you continue to extend it.
And so as Meredith, a man apart, a bookbreaker locked into the clarifying calm of his own solitude, took on the Russian code, he set out to look for its weakness. To his credit, he did not rush. His hunt began with preparation, the tedious preliminary work that’s the elbow grease behind any decoding success. The tortoise always beats the hare, code breakers were fond of saying.
His desk was a battlefield, and across it stood five columns of papers in neat, parallel rows. To his left were the original cables: impenetrable five-digit blocks of numbers. Next in line were what the professionals called the “message prints”; that is, the cables reduced to their basic code groups, the concealing encipherments stripped away. Occupying center stage was the “Index.” This was invaluable: a list of the specific five-digit code blocks that appeared more than once in the cable traffic. Over several weeks the IBM machine had done the heavy lifting, and now there was an inventory that logged each of the messages in which the identical groups of numbers occurred, highlighted the position in that message, and—another rich potential clue—showed the code groups that preceded and followed it. Then, in an attempt to narrow the problem even further, came his fourth column of papers—the “Inverse Frequency List.” This ranked the blocks of codes by how frequently they appeared in messages, the most-often-repeated five-digit groups put at the top of the list. And, finally, on the extreme right flank of Meredith’s desktop battlefield, was the “Lane Log.” This allowed him to see at a glance the circuit—military, trade, or diplomatic—over which any message had been sent, and the date of the transmission as well.
These were his tools; and, at the same discouraging time, also his scant clues. He started out trying to recognize sentences, only he had no idea which blocks of numbers were the verbs, adjectives, and nouns. And, giving the problem a further malicious twist, the original words would have been written in Cyrillic. Still, the Russian language had rules. It was rational. He had no doubt it would yield to a systematic interpretation. That’s what Meredith kept telling himself as he went to work.
The days were long and slow. There were periods when nothing much seemed to be happening, when he’d stare vacantly toward the ceiling and those around him would quip, “There’s Meredith praying to the heavens for guidance.” Perhaps that was true; there were certainly days, he’d later confess, when he’d have been glad for a little divine inspiration. But even when all seemed lost, he never quit playing with the pieces of the puzzle, juggling them in his head and on his work pad, trying to find the pattern.
When an identical block of numbers had been repeated in a single message, he compared the locations in the text, and he came up with some preliminary, and perhaps promising, findings. Since the block was always preceded by two different groups, it might very well be a verb. So then the block that follows should be, according to the rules of Russian syntax, the subject, a noun. Which Meredith found interesting, a handle to grab on to. But in the end, the handle slipped from his hands. What verb? What noun? He was certain of his logic, but he still had no answers. He couldn’t take things any further.
Now he backtracked. Over several focused weeks, he returned to the lists of repetitions. He compared; he annotated; he cross-referenced. And in the process he noticed something curious, something that had escaped his scrutiny. Previously, he had been attempting to work out the role a single five-digit block might play in a sentence, whether it would logically translate into, say, an article, verb, or noun. But when he looked again he saw that entire blocks of numbers—long bodies of text—were introduced by the identical five digits. And at the end of this long chunk of text, another five-digit group, also always the same numbers, would appear.
Could it be that these were the encoded digits that announced “to” and “from”? But no sooner had he considered this possibility than Meredith realized it didn’t make sense. The cipher clerk would put that sort of information at the beginning and end of a transmission—not in the middle. So what could they be? Two code groups always used in conjunction with each other, one at the start, the other at the end of a block of text. He lived with the question for a couple of days, and for a while he thought he’d cracked it: They must be quotation marks, one block of code signaled “open quote,” another “close quote.” Only the frequency with which the blocks appeared seemed to undermine this theory. With some disappointment, he put this hypothesis aside. Don’t force the pieces, he reprimanded himself. Still, Meredith felt he was on the right track: the two code groups worked in conjunction with each other. But how?
And then suddenly he was there.
All at once, it was obvious. Why hadn’t he seen it before? The Russians were sending their messages to and from America. It was only reasonable to assume the traffic would contain words in English—names, places, transcripts of conversations, official documents—that could not be rendered in Cyrillic. QED: the initial five-digit block told the cipher clerk: Start spelling with Latin letters. The concluding one announced: All done; return to Cyrillic. They were the “spell” and “end spell” indicators.
Which meant, Meredith deduced in a triumphant jolt, there was a code within the code! The Soviet cipher clerks, he realized, had a separate dictionary that assigned numeric code groups to letters, even phrases, that were to be transmitted in English.
At last he had found the weakness. And his entry point: he would concentrate on re-creating this English dictionary. It would be a considerable challenge, but one that, over time, would be susceptible to analysis. All at once he felt that the entire Russian problem had abruptly become more manageable. With renewed confidence, a plan of action took shape. He would make his beachhead, and then, with one determined push after another, extend it.
IN A CROSSWORD PUZZLE, YOU fill in the blanks. One letter leads to informed suspicions about the next. The discovery of a repeated vowel can be the key that opens an entire word. And the placement of a word can lead to the recognition of a familiar phrase. So it is in codes. The bookbreaker deduces unknown values from the known. Guided by logic and common sense, he, too, fills in the blanks.
Over the next six plodding months, one daunting letter at a time, Meredith began to reconstruct the coding dictionary that the Soviets used for sending words and phrases in
English. “My hunt for the Great White Whale,” was how he’d remember the time; and the description, several observers would agree, was an accurate measure of the self-absorbed, obsessed mood in which his restless days were spent.
It was in the winter of 1946 that Meredith decided the time had come to put his creation to the test. He selected a message that, if his theory was correct, had been transmitted entirely in English; it began with the “spell” code block and concluded with the “end spell” indicator.
Slowly, with studious attention to each new letter, he translated one block of numbers into an English word and then moved on to the next. The process of watching the message slowly come to life on his work pad, of numbers becoming words, of words becoming sentences, filled him with an incredible excitement. He had started in a state of total ignorance, and even as he continued he had no idea what would ultimately be revealed. It was as if he had set off on a long voyage across a murky sea, all the time wondering what strange land he’d find at the far side of the world. And in his desk-bound way, Meredith was a true explorer. No one had ever gone where he was heading.
In the end, what he discovered, after all his strenuous efforts, was not only mundane but also demonstrably wrong. The revealed message read: “If election were held today R [President Roosevelt] would probably obtain slender majority of popular vote but lose election due heavy concentration his vote in South.”
Yet Meredith was elated. With a professional’s pride, he quickly made a list of what he’d learned.