Transcripts For CSPAN3 Breaking The German Enigma Code 20240713

Serving as the Bletchley Park visiting fellow at oxford. Ember of themumbe honorary board here at the International Spy museum and he is a tremendous supporter of our efforts. Were excited to have dermot here today to tell us how enigma was really broken with the cooperative efforts of britain, poland, and france. We would presentation, like you to walk up to the microphones on each side of the theater and ask your questions. There will be plenty of time to ask your questions and get them answered. Join me in giving a warm welcome to dermot turing. [applause] chris, andy thanks, to all of you for the welcome home. Before i start, i would like to say to chris and to the team here, i think it is amazing to see how this place has transformed since the move last year. You have an amazing array of things going on here. All wondering with the real story of enigma code breaking is because otherwise you would not have showed up to this talk. I think you probably know it already. Laid my cumberbatch uncle, the gentleman on the left. Did i get that right . Are here remedy irredeemably confused. Maybe it is Sherlock Holmes on the right . Of enigmaw the truth code breaking but it is more involved than what you may have come away from the movie with. Not going to give you a movie synopsis. You can buy the dvd. Here is a memo. From where im standing the print is big enough to read. The british in National Archives and it dates from 1938. The year before war broke out in europe. Its written by one of the tanalysts, a guylyst called tiltmon. Dont retire. When he retired from the u. K. The time he was required retired it was called gchq. He worked here in the United States for a while. This is what he wrote. Writing about the enigma machine. The enigma machine. 1941, we were provided by the french instructions for the german enigma machine. The photograph shows an attachment on the front which does not appear on the model available to the public. Wasenigma machine commercially available but not in the form that the german army was using. Tiltmanthe thing that is asking about, this plugboard arrangement on the front. The directions do not fully explain the function of this attachment. This is 1938 and the british do not understand how this german already german army model works. Describe the parts. Right before the outbreak of war, and this state of ignorance goes on until the outbreak of war. 1939. S on through july the brits dont know the answers to these questions. If they dont know how the enigma machine works, this raises a question for me. Contrary to is, what you may have come away from the intake imitation game finding the daily settings of the machine, that design was ready and in the hands of the engineers by no 1939. Than november between july when they have no understanding of how it works and november when they are able to start the engineers designing a code breaking machine, something miraculous has happened. Knowledge has been transformed in that time. Thats a puzzle. What im going to talk about for the next few minutes is what is the answer to that particular mystery. Im going to introduce you to some of my friends. Ill introduce you to these particular friends. Im a geek. I like finding old documents in archives. Weve got some photographs taken in 1931. I will talk about how those came to be taken. You can see that there is a photograph of an enigma machine. We have a document on the left, berline 1930. You can see that the number of documents has been redacted by the photographer. Top righthand corner. The reason for that being that we dont want anybody to know whose copy it is we got hold of. The plot thickens. This is the operating instructions for the and nick my machine. Enigma machine. Middle says,the if you the law of 1914, give this to the enemy, you will go straight to jail and you will not pass go. Famousse are the documents that tiltman was talking about that were handed over by the french in the 1930s and the ones that do not explain the operation of this fiendish plug device. Brits get hold of these documents . This is where i get to introduce you to some real friends of ise, every one of whome a spy. On the left, this is my friend hanz schmidt. His brother was the head of the german armys Cipher Office. Demobbed at the end of wwi, he wasnt doing well and he begged his brother to give him a job. His brother gave him a job in the Cipher Office. Hanz had access to the say for the certain documents were kept. Unfortunately, the period was not particularly great. We know what happened to the british economy German Economy during the between the britains economy during the between the war period. The, he joined nationalistic german workers party. The nazis. That was a bit later after hitlers had come to powerj. We are still stuck in the 1931 period. Kittler is trying to get his machine going to get himself is trying to get himself elected. The person likely to buy them from him, the french embassy. He walks straight up and offers andpeak to the at cacheattachee he says, i have documents that might be of interest to you. The capital city of spying. Tits not surprising to discover that the french had a process for walkin spys. What they would do is refer the thein to the gentleman in middle. Hes very charming looking, his intake . Isnt he . His career was as a professional card shark. He started in the 1970s and he had been banned across most casinos. Few timesto jail a but had managed to amass a tidy typically, charming some young man, pouring lots of champagne down their throats, and winning lots of money off of them at cards. Hes got many names. Most of the time when he was gambling, he was going by the kerney which was a false name. He acquired french citizenship, spoke 11 languages, but german and french completely fluently. Moin. Came rudolph le some of the time. His spy coveras name. Its easier than any of the other things. Rex, having retired from gambling, was hired by the the frenchry, by intelligence service. This is a natural career progression. Job is to fit the walkin spy with the same steely gaze that he would fix on his victims in the casino. Hed suss out these guys. Hes the ideal person to check him out because he is a native german speaker. A meeting schmidt to and this happens to be set up in the proper le carre fashion. ,heres a liston to schmidt tter tohere is a lesso schmidt, telling him where to go. All of the other meetings are set up with unsigned, anonymous postcards with coded information about where he can find information about where documents have been dropped. Le carre didnt make it up. He just looked at the handbook. Ually, we get to the stage where rex has met schmidt and checked him out. He has documents. Whetherot the expert on documents are the real thing or not. He calls in help from the cipher experts in france. That would be captain bertand, the man on the right. Oftain bertrand is the head section d. Section d consists of captain bertrand. Thats fine because his job is to buy and sell foreign code books because the french Cipher Bureau have all retired. They were good in world war i but they reached retirement age. When you retire from being a cryptanalyst, you can go to to gambling. To get them for him was to buy the codebooks from people like hans schmidt. Now we need to set up a meeting bertrand,rke trend rex, and schmidt so he can look at the book and see if it is the real deal. Rex and schmidt go to the bar and drink champagne. Has a photograph of stuff and he is realizing that he has got the real deal, the and make a machine operating instructions. Photographer to the bathroom on the second floor of the hotel. They do the photography. There was always the question of why were they using the bathroom . I think the reason is because the photographic apparatus was large and clumsy and probably noisy. They needed to go somewhere where they were not going to attract a lot of attention. We know they took the photographs in the bathroom and it was these photographs which i showed you before which i found in the french archives. The original photographs taken of the enigma operating instructions and the machine itself. Gma is nobertrand, eni longer a problem. He goes to his colleagues in the ptanalytical unit, they y probleman arma solved. they say, au contraire. You have given us operating instructions but would we need our diagrams and we need to know what that funny looking thing on the front is and how it does what it does. Bertrand is not dismayed. He gives a documents of the brits, people like captain tiltman, who says, look, old chap, its very kind of you to give us this but you have given us operating instructions and they are not helpful without the wiring. If you give us the wiring instructions, it would be better. Bertrand is not dismayed. The year before, bertrand has been instructed to reach out. A commond france have problem which is that germany is aggressive and wedged between those countries. Polish intelligence objectives are probably aligned. Bertrand has made friends with the head of the polish Cipher Bureau. He offers the documents to colonel langer. He says, these are fantastic. This is what we have been waiting for all along. I know they are only operating instructions but it gives us something to dig our teeth into. If we get anywhere, we will let you know. Langer puts his own team onto it. I will introduce you to another friend who is an unlikely spy. He looks like a mathematician. He is a mathematician. Spying transformed itself in the middle of the 20th century into something that geeks and nerds can do. There is hope for all of us. This is a mathematics graduate erom the university of and h a sent to a he is given commercial enigma machine. Hes given the document that bertrand photographed in the bathroom and a bunch of enigma intercepts, radio messages that have been intercepted in morse code and written down. This is one of the things that i being one of the top three code breaking achievements. Hes the first of the top three. The problemo turn of the wiring of the and nick my machine and its coding roters ofrotors into a set mathematical equations and permutation theory. All of us remember algebra and high school. Some of us loved it and some of us didnt. You remember if you multiply both sides by two, five minutes letter you can divide both sides by two and you end up in the same place. I want you to try to imagine to do that with on boiled eggs. Take eggs out of the fridge and divide them by two. Now multiply them by two. Do you get back to where you started . No, you dont. You have to call the cleaners urgently. This is how permutation theory is. It works like eggs not algebra. Taught permutation theory in his Mathematics Co urse and was able to deduce the wiring and its coding rotors. For those of you who are mathematically inclined and speak polish, we have these equations here and perhaps one of you would be kind enough to explain them to me later. 1933, thes that by year hitler comes the power, the have managed to reverse engineer the german army and nick my machine German Army Enigma machine. On the right, it looks a bit machine. Nigma if you look closely, there is a jumble of wires in the back. Your of you who brought Long Distance glasses can see that the keyboard is all wrong. It is in alphabetical order. Order. T in qwertz i spoke american correctly. And not zed. That is a polish fake and nick ma machine. Its a polish analog of a german enigma machine. It is now in london and has been on show at the Science Museum in londo, bun. Its one of two or three surviving polish fakes. Theyre able to they solved britsoblem that the were still agonizing over in 19 39. They know where the wiring is in the machine. That means they can start on the real problem, the code breaking problem. You have to know how the machine is set up everyday in order to decipher enigma messages. 115 millionly million million ways of setting up the machine every day. Not going to do it by brute force. It would take all the time left in the universe to get there. Therought in the rest of mathematical cryptanalytical team. These guys come up with a host of code breaking techniques which will enable them to figure machinethis enigma has been set up by the germans every day. Ofse guys are the pioneers an electromechanical approach to code breaking. In the old days, wwi, code breaking was more about getting what the enemeys codes were. If you came because across a code group that was 6942, it could mean the battleship queen elizabeth. Could meanoup 8422 tomorrow morning. Linguists are great at this because they can interpolate between the known code groups to work out the one they dont know. This is a pencil on paper exercise and requires legalistic skills. Se guys are mathematicians requires linguistic skills. These guys are mathematicians. They are trying to figure out how the cipher might be working. They have invented this machine side. Righthand mechanistics a brute force approach which goes through all of the different rotor settings. Possible 17,556 positions. It clanks through each of them for a likely rotor setting which is halfway to the solution of how is the machine set up problem. They developed this machine and they are able to read german army, air force, and even navy enigma messages in real time in 1938. I told you this would be about spying. We have done the math now. I will take you to switzerland. Nsthilo schmidt did not drop out of the picture after he handed over those documents and had to put them back in the safe by monday morning. He developed a thirst for cash. Well come onto that. Having regular meetings other officerse of French Military intelligence. Hes not just handing over codes and cipher material. Mid1930s, after hitlers had come to power, he set up this meeting in this quaint swiss village. You can just kind of make out. The reason that it is dark blue on the lefthand side is that really is a 1000meter drop. It is perched on the edge of a cliff. It is picturesque but dont get too close. It is a ski resort in the winter and a hiking resort in the summer. A perfect tourist industry spot. He set up a meeting there. French military intelligence guy sit in the hotel there. Usualusual bid business of brandy and cigars. Apparently they have a nice band as well. Very civilized, this spying business. Schmidt turns up with these illgotten proceeds of his activities, hes got this nice case made of soft, polished leather. It is very impressionable and very chic and visibly very expensive. He says, ive got good news and bad news. They say, go on. Not longer so closely associated with the Cipher Bureau, at which point the french guys look dejected, but he says, i have been appointed as the Liaison Officer for the and they say, the what . You have to imagine you are in nazi ok, so. Hermann goering, who was hitlers favorite guy for a long time, the head of the German Air Force and so forth, his role in the nazi party was very significant. Because it was the nazi spate, there were many spying organizations, many of which were spying on everybody else in germany. The Research Office, that is a cover name that means nothing, the Research Office was specifically set up to keep an eye on everybody else that need ed an eye on them in case they were going to conspire against hitler and the nazi party and so forth. You can imagine this in these totalitarian states. Schmidts role is to find out whats going on, and he is offering this to the french, who havent even heard of this organization yet. There was a code breaking operation as well as internal spying, and it is so closely intertwined in the thinking and military decisions that schmidt has got almost perfect knowledge of germanys strategic intentions, and hes able over the years to share this with french intelligence. Let me give you some examples. Tank warfare development. This is a new science in the 1930s. He is closely associated with all of the documents and strategic meetings and decisions that have been taken about how to do tank battles, how to use tanks in a modern warfare scenario. He is selling this information to the french. No hes not. He is getting an annual salary every time he delivers this priceless information. As war gets closer, hes able to explain precisely when the attack on poland is going to come. He is able to explain exactly when the attack on france is going to come, and he also explains how the maneuvers of the german army, which was was a sickle cut designed to cut off the British Expeditionary force in the dunkirk area, destroy them in detail before moving on to take over the rest of france. Does that sound like something that might or might not have happened . He divulges all of these details. We have details of tactics and strategy. Details of weaponry. And we have a reasonably constant flow of codes and ciphers material, over 600 documents counted in his 300 memoir. Schmidt is the spy to end all spies. David, who you will all have heard of, the master of crude to analyst at history, said he was world war iis greatest spy. History, saidytic he was world war iis greatest spy. What was schmidt doing with this money and how was he concealing it . If you are a badly paid civil service, how can you explain having this swiss nice suit and the posh briefcase and all of that . Not to mention the expensive holidays with his wife, wearing an expensive dressing down. It was not just the wife, schmidt had other expensive habits. Champagne, brandy and cigars. There were girlfriends, and more brandy, and then the girlfriends needed brandy and maybe not cigars. There were nannies, and they were hired by him on the basis that they might become girlfriends, and then fired by mrs. Schmidt. The nannies got progressively uglier. The kids noticed. [laughter] very embarrassing. Ok. So we hit on this. The french said we are worried about you and this cash because you are visibly living a lifestyle that is not commensurate with what your earnings are supposed to be. So they hit on something called a Money Laundering scheme. Schmidt had run a failed soap factory business in the early 1930s, and so they invited schmidt to revive the soap factory idea, and he could present the earnings from spying as being the prophets of his soap factory. The soap factory became solvent because they literally laundered the fruits of his labors through the soap factory business. He truly is a star of a spy. He is fantastic. I like rex a lot, but i have these two criminals competing for my affections as to which is the most splendid spy. We are going to have to go back to britain and deal with more normal kind of guys. Im going to introduce you to some british spies. The chap with the cigarette is alastair denniston, head of the government code and Cipher School up until 1942 when he was fired. The man in the middle is his number one crypt analyst. He is essentially a professor of ancient greek. What he did as a professor of ancient greek is quite astonishing. He was trying to reconstruct a set of dodgy poems, this is like fourth century bc porn. [laughter] dodgy poems. The problem was the author had written his poems on something that was basically crumbling papyrus. All of the bits of greek were in fragments. Knoxs job was to reassemble these fragments into meaningful porn. Which was sort of great, but you can see this is like a code breaking exercise because youre piecing together it is partly a jigsaw puzzle and partly a linguistic puzzle. And it is all going on in ancient greek, and a slightly odd ancient greek because the author had an unconventional approach to writing verse. Why am i introducing these guys to you . Because by 1938, britain had woken up to the idea that adolf hitler was not going to be a good thing. They had realized the immediate threat to peace in europe was not the bolsheviks, who they had thought it was, but the nazis. They started communicating with the french about the possibility of something that might look like an alliance. A bit late, but they got there in the end, 1938. Thats why there are letters starting to be written about asking the french about the enigma machine to see what they know. The french invite the british to a conference in paris in january of 1939, to discuss code breaking problems, and particularly the enigma. Bertrand, the mover and shaker behind this, thinks it is a bit suspicious that he handed all of the stuff over to langer in poland in 1931 and has not heard a whisper since then about whether the poles have made any progress, so he invites them to the conference as well. The three countries turn up to the conference and paris and earnestly discuss the enigma machine. Everybody agrees it is a difficult problem and it is important to solve it as soon as possible. Which is deceptive on the part of the poles. When you think about it, who are you going to tell . Which allies do you think are real allies and which ones do you think are fickle . To which extent are you really willing to trust people with the secrets of your own intelligence gathering . This is a problem not specific to 1939, but all eras. So i dont think it is surprising that they said nothing at this meeting in 1939. You might think therefore the conference was a complete failure, but i dont think it was. Two things come out of it. One in particular. This is the memorandum of agreement. It is in french, by bertrand. It says for greater convenience and discretion, from now on we will call ourselves by the following initials. And to please number the documents so we can keep track on them. That is also important because what they are doing is sharing everything, except for this piece of information that the polish know but nobody knows that they know. Picking up radio traffic, poland has radio masks so they can pick up signals that are not by the british or the french. They are providing information that is valuable. They are also agreeing to cooperate on codes and ciphers programs. Enigma is not the only fruit. There are loads of other codes and ciphers. There is a lot of correspondence going on between the three countries, in german because that is the common language. I find that amusing. But they are cooperating. From january 1939, and marks the beginning of this special info sharing relationship. The other thing that comes out of the conference is it is agreed that if any of the three countries makes a breakthrough on the enigma problem, they have to tell the others by sending out a telegram that says something has come up. In july, the poles are confronted with some problems. One is that they cannot break enigma codes anymore. The germans have added additional rotors to the machine so there are now five to choose from. There are now 60 different ways of putting three rotors into an enigma machine, whereas previously there had only been six. The poles have six of their famous machines, but not 60. Without 60 of them, they were not able to rapidly enough break the enigma messages and they needed help with technology. The other thing that happened by july 1939 is blindingly obvious, that hitler was rattling the saber very loud and they were feeling that they really needed to transform their intelligence sharing relationship into something that felt more like a tough military alliance. So polish intelligence was given authority from on high to show the enigma secrets. They sent out a telegram. Il y a nouveau. Bertrand goes to warsaw with his number two. They are told the secret of enigma. Told the secret in this building. I like this building because this is still a center of spying. This is a 1938 building that was built for a polish bureau and still exist outside warsaw. It is now the headquarters of nato air Traffic Control for eastern europe. So you are not allowed in command were not ever allowed in. You can see it has soldiers guarding it. That thing is a memorial plaque to the polish code breakers. These grills on the windows it is much bigger underground, it is like doctor whos tardis. The grills on the windows have pockmarked from german machine guns when poland was invaded in 1939. Quite an interesting building but you cannot go in. What they came away with from this twoday meeting is this list. You can see it is in german. That was the common language. Each one of these is an entire chapter of the enigma story. We have things like how to reconstruct the cipher wheels in the enigma. The machines, and various other things. The last one, other possibilities is number 17. Theres a lot of information. Pausing there, i think ive answered the question i started with, which is how come the british went from zero knowledge not quite zero knowledge but close to zero knowledge about the enigma sheen in july 1939, to the point where alan turing can design his machine and be discussing how it might work with engineers as soon november 1939 . It is because of this. This transfer of knowhow. It transformed the ability of a british team to get on with the problem. What happened next . I probably dont need to introduce these gentlemen, he is not one of my friends and some of you would probably say he is not a gentleman. He is taking a salute in the sachsen square after the conquest of poland. This was taken about october 1939. The reason it is my favorite world war ii photograph is because hitler has no idea that in the building behind him, they uncovered the secrets of the enigma machine. So whats going on . The polish code breakers did not get trapped in poland, they were ordered to escape with their precious knowledge and eventually wound up in france working for bertrand, who has been promoted to major. In this building on the right here, just outside paris. This is interesting, because the xyz triangle is reconstituted with the french and polish in this building, and a telegraph link to Bletchley Park. The three code breaking teams are all working harmoniously together and breaking enigma. Meanwhile, alan turing is working on his design for a bomb. This commemorative stamp always amuses me. The british like doing these commemorative stamp collector stamps. This was done in the early 1990s. They did a series on famous scientists. Most of them had their faces on the stamps. Apparently that is what alan turings face looked like. [laughter] they didnt have benedict in those days. It would be a problem now. This is interesting. The only problem is germany has its eye on invading france. Sooner or later, this arrangement is not going to survive. The french and polish team have to escape, and they set up in the unoccupied part of france. But we have a problem. We have several problems. When germany occupied warsaw in 1939, they took back to berlin as many documents, as many secret documents as they could find. This is normal practice. The reason i am here researching on code breaking in america is that the americans took all of the german intelligence documents they could find and stuck them in the National Archives here, which is helpful. Dont ask me, it is confusing. What the germans did was they analyzed documents they found in warsaw and came across some really quite alarming material that suggested the polls have a polish had been reading enigma messages before the outbreak of the war. They concocted wanted lists, heres an example of one of them on the left. They have the names of the polish code breakers, and they had mugshots of the polish code breakers, and they were looking for these guys in france. Their intelligence was not bad, they had tracked these guys to france. They did not know where they were but they thought they were in france somewhere. Hence the wanted list. They had obviously come across this guy, who is looking slightly older and a bit more seedy, but the cigar gives it away. That is my friend rex. That is rex probably in the 1940s, i would think. May be late 1930s, but probably 1940s. They had got the baron von keurnig on the list as well. They did not have a mug shot, fortunately. Probably people dont want to look at x spies. This is a problem because everybody in german intelligence wants to track down rex because they know he holds all the secrets. You may be asking yourselves who the gentleman on the right is. You will want me to introduce him. Hes not my friend he is a , panzer general, Rudolph Schmidt. He is the guy in the Cipher Office in the 1920s and 1930s, and gave hans his big break in the spying times. By 1943, 1944, he is a highly regarded german tank officer and he has a problem. Hes got a problem because rex is found. The wanted list has done its work. Rex was arrested in early 1943. Because he is rex, you dont get taken to a dank cell and get his toes stomped on to tell the truth. He gets fed with cigars and brandy. That makes him talk. He is installed in a very nice hotel in paris and his interrogation takes about two months. It is heavily loaded with highquality food and drink and lots of cigars. And he tells everything. In particular, he tells the story of schmidt and the safe. General Rudolph Schmidt is relieved of his command. It is kind of unfair, isnt it . What did he do wrong . He gave his brother a job. But anyway. This is a map of the south of france with some red dots on it. This is the fate of these guys. Once the wanted lists are out and the french excuse me, the germans have decided they are invading the unoccupied part of france and the americans have landed in north africa, the world has suddenly turned upside down. The polish code breakers are on the run for the third time. Significantts are places in their story. This one is where rex was holed up in the spanish mountains. In the mountains near the spanish border. I think it is probably just a coincidence that these other places are also close. These places are within 10, 15 minutes drive, and this is maybe an hours drive through the mountains. This is the base of operations for trying to get the polish out of what is now fully occupied france. There are pickups in the mediterranean organized with british submarines. These operations dont work and the polish are realizing that the only way they will get out is to cross the mountains into spain and hope they dont get picked up by the not very neutral spanish. The base of operations, some of manpolish, and equations and a code breaker in particular, they make it to this place, and they have to bribe their guide because this is people trafficking. You know how it works. You pay the fee to be traffic. Half of the fee is supposed to be paid for Safe Delivery of people over the border. It doesnt work that way because they get halfway across the mountains and then the guide robs them, took all their valuables, lifted all of their money, and then the fee is doubled, a complete disaster. They are abandoned at the top of the mountain and it is the second week of january, 1943. There is a foot and a half of snow on the ground. It is minus heaven knows what. They are told spain is that way, off you go. They make it across the border, and they get arrested. They get arrested and spent the next six months in a spanish jail. From which the red cross managed to get them out and back to the u. K. , which was great, so they could carry on doing cobreaking code breaking in britain. There is another town that some of the other polish code breakers, but in particular langer, the head of the team, there was some sort of bonkers story about them enable to walk being able to walk from there into spain. Its about 15 kilometers, and through the snow in the middle of the night over the mountains. It was not going to happen. They took a taxi. [laughter] that was what you did. They got most of the way and there was a roadblock, and it turned out once again, their guide it was people trafficking, so their guide was in cahoots with the gestapo. They got arrested and ended up in a german prison camp. What happened to the rest of them in the end . One of them died in a shipwreck in 1942. Its amazing we actually have a photograph of the ship going down. Some people survived but he was not one of them. This is the schloss eisenberg, now in the czech republic, this is the place where langer and his number two were sent after they were arrested. After the rex saga, they were interrogated about what it is they had been able to achieve with the enigma in the prewar period. It was only by langer and his colleagues subtle preparation, of that interrogation, for the enigma secret. The fact the allies had broken the enigma was kept secret. They did it in the most astonishing way. They said, well, of course we broke the enigma, but you changed the system and changed rotors, extra procedures, and locked us out. All of which was completely true. It played straight into the hands of the germans because the y had known that. The guys that were interrogating them were the experts who had recommended the changes in the first place. They felt vindicated so the interrogation ended where it ought to have begun. So well done langer for keeping the secret secret. Eventually got released from that spanish jail. The mostem did extraordinary thing. When the war was over, he decided to go back to poland. Most polish servicemen who were in intelligence during world war ii did not return to poland after the war, because it was too dangerous. Poland was now a satellite of the soviet union. Guysdy, particularly these , after they got back to britain, were put onto decoding russian material. Of course, russia was supposed to be an ally, so this was very dangerous. The idea that they could go back to poland knowing what they knew and having blank Service Records and enable to escape investigation by the secret police, it beggars belief. So the most unlikely character to be a spy, he actually did that brave thing and got investigated by the polish secret police. It was only once stalin was dead and the socalled reforms of communism took place in the mid1950s that he was effectively free. And able to pursue a normal life. He looks a little like a 1950s film star in this. 1960sits a shame he actually that is Barclays Bank behind him. He has kind of a cool guy. He stayed in the u. K. For the rest of his life and had a very nice family life and became a mathematics professor. You wouldnt have minded being taught math by this guy, he is great. A proficient musician and stuff. For him, it was happily ever after. The real star is look at this french general at the top right. Look at all of those medals. That is bertrand, he is taken on by general de gaulle for the French Military intelligence, that is associated with signals intelligence. He finishes his career in the 1950s. He is only a brigadier general, but that is pretty good for the guy who started off as a captain who was photographing stuff in the bathroom. That is a pretty cool combination of a career. When he stopped spying, he became the mayor of his village and there is a nice commemorative plaque to him in the village. Bertrand probably gets all of the owners here. Honors here. So there we are, i am done. We promised you the opportunity for questions and i would be happy to invite them. Perhaps we can have the house lights up and we can start that process off. [applause] we have microphones at either side of the room and if you are trapped, i can also try to get to you with a microphone if you have a question. They are stunned by you, durmot. Dermot. [laughter] mr. Turing if you want to make a line behind the microphone, i will go left, right. Please. Go ahead. Can you explain what the commercial use for the machine was before it was converted it was available to the public, what were they doing with that . Mr. Turing industrial secrets mainly, i imagine. Codes and ciphers have been used for all kinds of industrial purposes for centuries. In the old days when you had to pay by the number of words and in telegrams, people used to use codes to cut down on the number of words they could use. You could find that most companies would have a code book and they would send stuff and code. This doesnt do that, it doesnt cut down the number of characters you will send, but there was stuff you probably did not want people to know. Imagine you are a bank and you are trying to arrange a letter of credit for international trade. Your customers dont want everybody to be able to read how much they are paying for whatever it is, a shipment of something or another. It would be wise to encode that kind of stuff and cipher it. The military started getting excited about this machine when it came onto the market. They were looking for ways to adapt it, make it suit military purposes, but it was originally conceived as an office thing. I have two questions. Mr. Turing that is all right, you have the floor. Who got the first working german enigma machine and did it play a role in the development of the bomb . Or was a purely theoretical from the instruction booklet . Mr. Turing in the early months of the war, it was purely theoretical from the instruction booklet. The brits were very excited to have one of the polish fakes given to them in 1939 1939, which happened after the warsaw meeting. It was the first time they have actually gotten their hands on the functional equivalent of an enigma machine. Sooner or later, it was bound to that gothe one captured in a combat situation. The germans were winning the war for the first few years, so the likelihood of a capture was quite low during that period. There were some ships sunk and boarded, which enabled the british to get a hold of some naval enigma machines. I think it wasnt until 1941 that they got a complete set of rotors to go with the machine. Really the breakthroughs were mostly dependent on the theoretical analysis, and later in the war when the germans adapted the enigma machines, we were relying on information given about the adaptations rather than actual captures of pieces of kit. My other question is, do you think that alan turing read the math paper, or a translation of it . Mr. Turing no, that wasnt written until 1967. What i showed you is memoirs, he had said these are the equations that i constructed. He explains them. But certainly, what was explained in that meeting in warsaw, turing was not present in that meeting, but the explanations given to knox and denniston, were related back to turing in the u. K. Knox in particular was quite skeptical whether the polish breakthrough could have been done by pure mathematical analysis. He felt that the polish had cheated in some way, stolen some information or done something through spying or whatever. Turing said no, i can see exactly how he did it, this theory. Of course, once you know what the answer is, youve looked at the back of the book and you can see what the answer is, it is a little easier. But he did meet, they did meet in paris in january 1940. How good the conversation was, i dont know, because he didnt speak any english. He wouldve been beginning to speak some french. He spoke fluent german. Was prettys german rotten, about as good as mine. Good enough to order things in a restaurant, but not great for talking about code breaking. Of course, all mathematics graduates in the 1930s, the lingua franca for mathematics was german. All the really good mathematicians were german. All the papers were written in german. Some in french, but most in german. If you wanted to keep up with the cutting edge of mathematical thinking, you had to be good enough in german to read a technical paper. I think probably the german language is what was spoken around the table. It is intriguing, though. [laughter] ok, please. You have been very patient. What do you think the german militarys reaction was when they found out that the allies had control of a real enigma machine . Mr. Turing this is almost like a sort of history in its own right. You have a great question there, how many hours we have . You dont want dinner. [laughter] the initial reaction, as i explained earlier, when they found out about the polish successes, their own developments have been vindicated. In fact, quite a few historians have been quite snippy about the way the germans reacted to security scares. There were at least a dozen scares during the course of world war ii, which, in the opinion of historians, also told the germans that the enigma machine was not secure. Or at least not securing the way they were using it. And they ought to have therefore changed things. We angloamericans were so much more clever and did not make those silly mistakes. I think that story is slightly biased and slightly unfair. The germans were constantly investigating the security of enigma. What they did not foresee was that the quality of the code breaking devices that were available to the allies would be so superior to what they had. They were, as were the allies, using punchcard Type Technology to do code breaking on their side. So were we on our side. We got things like bombs and the colossus machine, which were immeasurably more sophisticated than what they had. Then so then did they actually know that the enigma had been broken aside from the success of the polish . I think they didnt. They probably should have done but they didnt. Many of the senior polish code breakers were in denial about it until many decades after the war. So when the enigma code breaking story broke and the public in the mid1970s, some of the german code breakers were still alive. They said, this is nonsense, this is fiction, this is spy stuff. The first books written about it were full of rubbish anyway, not very accurate. It was easy for them to say the enigma was perfectly secure and this is rubbish, dont believe these popular books you can find in station bookstores. Now we have more detail and we know where the truth is. I think its quite interesting that they were still in denial about it in the 1970s. Ok. One of the slides you showed was a replica that the polish built with the keyboard. One of the outcomes of the july 1939 conference was the polish gave the english and the french copies of that machine. Another chronicle claims that when the french and polish, in france before it was totally occupied, were cooperating with the british at Bletchley Park, that the only secure means of communication they had was using those replica enigmas. They further embellished that claim with the fact that the french operator always started his messages with heil hiller. Hitler. That means no messages were started with the letter h. I find that improbable. I wonder if your research in the french record could substantiate a claim like that. Mr. Turing i believe this to be true. This comes from bertrands number two. To explain about the machines, Gustav Bertrand had this one polish fake machine given to him in warsaw in 1939. It was crucially important to build more of these fake enigma machines. When the polish team reached him later in 1939, bertrand requisitioned, or put in an order and his Favorite Manufacturing Company in paris for additional enigma machines. He had just got the quote it was very expensive for what he was ordering, in april 1940. That was like three weeks before the germans arrived. Somehow, miraculously, bertrand managed to convince the Manufacturing Company to continue with its work and he managed to pay them even though they were working in the occupied part of france. By the early part of 1942, he had begun to take delivery of parts of fake enigma machines made by this factory. He was smuggling them into the unoccupied zone, bits at a time, where they were reassembled by the polish in his chateau in the south of france be a by the summer of 1942, the polish had created a fully operating ending enigma machine and could communicate with Bletchley Park. Bletchley park was very concerned about the security of thenot just on account of heil hitler thing. There was a communication, does your machine have a plugboard . They figured this stuff out. By september 1942, the polish and french in the south of france were communicating using an enigma machine. Now, your question about the heil hitler thing, is they thought it was so hilarious they were using the germans own machine to communicate in a way that was shielded from the germans. The irony of this, he said, just to rub it in, we signed off our messages heil hitler. Not every single one, but i think that means he did it occasionally. I dont think there is any evidence the germans were aware that the brits and francopoles were trading messages using an enigma. I think its quite likely they never knew, because it was such a shortlived thing. They managed to get the Communications Protocols agreed by the end of september 1942. The cooperations in the south of france came to an end in november 1942 when the germans invaded the south of france. There was only a month they were doing this. It was probably just long enough for anything significant to happen. I will come back to you in a minute. Sir. Was turings design based on bomb . Lish mr. Turing good question, this one will take about four hours and i will need a blackboard. [laughter] all right. While they are getting the blackboard, let me give you the quick answer. At the heart of both machines is the idea that you get the machine to do the brute force, cranked through the 17,000 settings of the three rotors, and then stop when it comes up with a plausible setting of the three rotors. The polish were doing a logic test based on the indicator, the first part, the methodator part, tadata part of the preamble. The germans had changed that. Turings design did not depend on the preamble process that the germans had been using before that date. It was testing for a probable word in the body of the message. If you think the message contains the word weather forecast, and they all did, a nice, long german word, you can test that against your intercepted morse code. Qkqwab, and find a place where it turns into that gobbledygook. If it does, if there is a rotor setting that consistently transformed those letters and in the observed fashion, it would stop. His machine was little more sophisticated and that it was doing what is called a probable word test. But its also testing for the plugboard settings as well, which the polish machine could not do. That was the really imaginative bit. That would seriously take me four hours, some not going to do it. When you look at the bomb replica, you get the full on story. Please. My question was, how does alan turings contribution to this compare with the spies in poland . Mr. Turing i would not trust alan turing with the dead letter drop. He never wore hats, and to be a proper spy, you have to wear a hat. My father wore hats all the time. Not his brother. [laughter] its really hard to compare the contributions. There is lots of without this , it is difficult to imagine the next stage. Without the oldfashioned spying being done by rex and schmidt, and the bathroom photography of bertrand, would the polish have made their breakthrough in the 1930s . It is possible. But one of them says he was significantly helped by having the operating instructions given to him. He said later in his life he thought he probably could have figured it out without the instructions. So maybe it was not as crucial, but we know it was in the chain of causation. Would the british have gotten there without the polish contribution . I think they would have done. They were capable of doing a mathematical analysis once they hired the mathematicians, which was in 1938. The polish hired mathematicians in 1928, 10 years ahead of the game. The british would have gotten there, but later. What would the consequences of that have been, particularly when you think about the operational use being made of enigma intelligence early in the war . Whose contribution was more significant . Would the brits have been able to invent a machine of the quality of the british bomb without alan turing . I think the answer to that again is probably yes. If you look at the other machinery that alan turing was not involved in, he did not design the colossus, and if you look at another bomb machine in the u. S. Army bomb machine were doing, completely different designs. They were relying on some of the ideas that have been shown to them by alan turing, but these are very sophisticated pieces of engineering. I am fairly sure that somebody would have come up with a similar thing, and might have been later in the war. All of these things are, if this hadnt happened, it wouldve been different. That is clear. But whose contribution was more significant . I dont know. I will tell you whose contribution was more fun, come on, we are going to the casino right now and smoke some cigars, and we are going to go to the soap factory to pay homage. That stuff is just so good. Carre could not have written that. Who is next . You mentioned early on that the polish code breakers had enough information to know when the invasion of poland was going to take place. Were they able to use this information in any way . Mr. Turing its not the polish that got the information, the french got that information from schmidt. The interesting thing about all of that priceless information that schmidt gave, the highest quality human intelligence you could get, it was all obstinately ignored. You have to ask yourself why that was. Why, when the french were given the stuff and it was proved time and again to be 100 accurate, why were they not paying more attention . There is this problem with human intelligence. You say your spy is really good, and 100 accurate, and i say my spy is really good and 100 accurate, and somebody else says there spy is 100 accurate, and you have all this conflicting noise. The job of a good Intelligence Department is to sift through that and work out the consensus. All of these spies are doing it for dodgy reasons that dont stack up morally. Frankly, human intelligence is very difficult to rely on. I think the french can be forgiven for ignoring schmidt. He was just one of a number of people, and it is only hindsight that has proven he was right. I think a more difficult and possibly more interesting question, why the french did not make more serious operational use of the enigma intelligence that bertrand was giving them during the battle of france. Bertrand is almost crying through his memoirs, and langer working with him at the same time, expressing exactly the same emotions. The luftwaffe attack on paris during the battle of france was foreseen in immense detail through enigma decrypts given to French Military planners. They knew how many german aircraft, exactly what direction they will be coming from, what time the attack was coming. It was perfectly possible for the French Air Force to intervene, and they did not. They just let the luftwaffe come. It wasnt because they did not have aircraft to retaliate with. Why didnt they do it . I dont know the answer. Bertrand said it was like feeding sweeties to the swine. We gave them this priceless information. The generals did not know how to use signals intelligence and we have the same problem and in britain with the British Royal navy. The admiralty did not know how to use signals intelligence. They were being told things, but it was just another piece of intelligence and we will treated treat it like all of the other stuff. They did not realize you could treat it as being on a higher plane than human intelligence. I think that is what went wrong. But those generals are not here to answer for their conduct. Most of them disappeared into obscurity after the fall of france and i dont think they were regarded as National Heroes and nobody wanted to speak to them. So we dont know. Could you possibly explain in more detail how and when the polish contributions became known to the general public, and what was the role of the polish military historians and his personal interactions . Mr. Turing its easy to answer your question in a negative sense. There was a polish historian who was writing about polish military intelligence between the wars period. He was researching, this was in the 1960s. He was researching in the polish military archives in warsaw and came across a paper written by a mathematician. This was quite interesting because he claimed that the germans had been using a machine called enigma for enciphering their secret stuff, and this guy said that we could read the na, messages, and i was one of the team that broke them. He wasracked him down, still alive, and calls on him to write up his story and more story in a more detailed, which is why we have this account, the memoirs written in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But i told you that poland was still a communist country then, and we folks in the west that there was this thing called the iron curtain, and not many people who could actually make sense of polish. The fact that this guy had written this book published in poland in a language called polish meant that it was still a wellkept secret as far as we were concerned. But gradually, the story it leaked out. Bertrand wrote his memoirs in the 1970s because he was very keen that some misinformation that had gotten out there, probably by somebody who had he was trying to set the record straight. But he wrote in an obscure language called french which nobody can read. One or two alarmed brits got a hold of it. Eventually there was an official, semisanctioned book written by a guy who probably knew some of what was going on, frederick, who had a significant role in exploiting intelligence during world war ii. He wrote a book called the ultrasecret and it sold more books than the enigma code breaking ever. That was full of nonsense two. Gradually, the story i am sorry, i think i probably have not answered your question. I am talking about all i know that pertains to what you asked. The books were translated to several languages. Including english and german. Mr. Turing the more recent books. He wrote a book that was much more detailed. It is called enigma in english. It is called i do not know what it is called in polish. The german and english versions are very different. Polish is probably different again. [laughter] you will have to help us with that. But these kind of accounts, i believe that the british account was first and they took all credit. Mr. Turing that is part of the mismanagement of the story. For those of you who are not of polish origin, let me explain. The poles had been angry for many years because the first stories that came out of the enigma code breaking in the west, there was no credit to the polish for their achievement. Which i hope i have explained with was absolutely central to the allied achievement. There is a reason they are not given credit. It was not a conspiracy against poland. It is simply that the people who were involved personally in the early stages of the enigma story were not around when the the time the official history intelligence was written in the late 1970s and 1980s. Lets go through the list of people who we know about. Williston was sacked in 1942 and died in the early 1950s. Knox died in 1943. Alan touring was alan turing moved out of ashley park into 1943 and moved on to other projects and we all know what happened to him after the war. Those were the three guys who had personal contact with the polish code breakers. There was another guy called John Jeffries died in 1942 as well. 1941 even. Those guys were the ones who personally knew what the poles had done. Everybody else who was involved and who was a rounds to write official accounts and interviewed by official only hearsayd knowledge about what the polish had done. The british gave british names to the polish techniques. For example the clock method was rechristened because the paper sheets they were used were made in a town called banbury. They just gave british names to things. The sheets were renamed. Jeffrey sheets. You had to call them different things. This meant that what the polls had done was lost to memory. This is a struggle for them to understand because they assume we are lovely in the west, but we keep our secrets. Scarily keep our secrets. I have been in the National Archives here today and i wanted to look at files on enigma that were put in the archives in 2010. They are still classified. I was not permitted to look at the code the files. They are still classified in 2020. That is how obsessive we are about the enigma secret, 75 years after the war ended. This stuff was a secret. People were not allowed to know. While he was free to write books in communist poland, he was not allowed to write books in the west on the subject. So these halftruths and mistaken accounts were all that was available and it took until midway through the 1980s when he put a counter blast to the official history about what had happened at [indiscernible] the record was able to be corrected. So the perception is the brits were trying to whitewash the polish out of history, and it is not true but we understand why how you think that way. Have alet somebody else go . Whatever happened to schmidt who delivered the goods, and his brother . Mr. Turing i told you about his brother because that was sort of slightly less dramatic. There was a reason why Rudolph Schmidt was relieved of his command when his brother was arrested. We do not know exactly what happens to schmidt, but we know he never made it out of jail and dead body wasis found in his cell in september, 1943. There is enough circumstantial evidence to indicate he probably took his own life. That is a rather sad ending for someone who, ok, he betrayed his country and did it for the most deplorable of motives, many people would say that it is just deserved. But i am disappointed because he never got to write his memoirs. I think rudolph, i feel very sorry, why did he get relieved of his command just because his brother betrayed his country . I dont have a brother, but if my brother betrayed my country should i not be allowed to talk to you guys . Thank you. They might want you to sign your book which you will be doing out in the hallway. Mr. Turing it would be a pleasure. Thank you. [applause] you are watching American History tv, covering history cspan style. Lectures and college classrooms. And visits to museums and historic places. 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