Cryptanalyst alan turing. Prior to his writing career, he worked for the Government Legal Service and then the International Law firm clifford chance. He is currently a trustee of the trust. Trust turing he is also a visiting fellow at oxford. Last but not least, he is a member of the honorary board here at the International Spy museum. And he is a tremendous supporter of our educational efforts at spy. We are excited to have government here today to discuss how enigma was we are excited to have him here today to discuss how enigma was broken with the cooperative efforts of poland, britain, and france. After the presentation, we invite you to walk up to the microphones on each side of the theater and ask questions. There will be plenty of time to ask your questions and get them answered. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to dermot turing. Thank you. [applause] dermot many thanks for the warm welcome. I think it is amazing to see how sincepace has transformed the move last year from your previous premises. You have an amazing array of things going on here. It is a very exciting museum to be associated with. It is a privilege for me to be here today and be associated with you more generally. Now, you are wondering what the real story of enigma code breaking is because otherwise you would not have shown up to this talk. But i think you probably know it already because you have seen the movie and you know benedict gentleman onthe the right, played my uncle who is the gentleman on the left. Did i get that right . These characters get confused. Anyway, never mind. We all know the truth, or at least we think we know the truth, about enigma code breaking. But it is actually a little more involved than what you may have come away from the movie with. Im not going to give you a cane synopsis because you look it up if you have not already seen it. Here is a memo in the British National archives. 1938, the year before war broke out in europe. And it is written by one of the at whatryptanalysts shortly thereafter became Bletchley Park who subsequently worked for the nsa here. This is what happens to old spies. They dont actually retire. When he retired from the u. K. School that was later gshq, he worked here for about 20 years. This is what he wrote in 1938. That is Benedict Cumberbatch on the right. That is the enigma machine. 1931, we weres in provided by the french with photographs and directions to use the German Army Enigma cipher machine. A pictureraph shows not available to the public. The enigma machine was commercially available but not in the form the german army was using. This is the thing he is asking this plug board arrangement on the front which was not available on the commercial machine. The directions do not fully explain the function which is still not understood yet. This is 1938. The british did not understand basically how this German Army EnigmaMachine Works. He says, Kenneth French be asked to give us can the french be asked to give us all the information they have . Quite interesting. This is right before the outbreak of war. The state of ignorance, if you like, goes on until the outbreak of 1939. Rough july the british still do not know the answers to these questions. If they dont know how the enigma Machine Works, this raises a question for me. The question is this. Contrary to what you may have come away from the movie understanding is that alan Machine Design for the that would find the daily settings for the enigma machine, that design was ready and in the hands of the engineers by no later than november of 1939. Have nojuly when they understanding of how the enigma Machine Works and november when to design a code breaking machine, something almost miraculous has happened. Knowledge has been transformed in that time. 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. First of all, im going to introduce you to this group of friends. Here we go. We have got some photographs taken in 1931. I will talk about how those photographs came to be taken in a moment. You can see there is a photograph of an enigma machine. It is not a very good picture but that is clearly what it is. We have a document on the left, berlin 1930. You can see the number of documents has been redacted in the top righthand corner. Interesting. The reason for that being that we dont want anybody to know whose copy it is that we got hold of. Interesting. The plot thickens. And this is the operating instructions for the enigma machine. The document in the middle is what you see on the inside front cover of this which tells you that under the law of june 3, 1914, if you give this away to the enemy, you will go straight to jail. You will not be able to pass go and you will not be in to collect 200. Ok. So, these are the famous documents tillman was talking about that were handed over by 1930snch in the early and the ones that do not explain the operation of this fiendish plug board device at the front of the machine. How did the brits get hold of these documents . This is where i get to introduce you to some real friends of mine. Every one of whom is a spy. Beginning on the left, this is my friend. His brother was the head of the armys Cipher Office. At the end of world war i, he was not doing very well and he begged his brother to give him a job. His brother gave him a job in the Cipher Office. Had access toans the say for certain documents when certainsafe documents were kept. Unfortunately, the salary of a german Civil Servant between the wars was not particularly great. We all know what happened to the German Economy between the wars, so hans was thinking of ways to supplement his income. I will explain in a moment why he needed to supplement his income. This is about the time he joined something called the nationalistic socialistic german workers party. In other words, the not faze nazis. That is the photo of him on his nazi membership card. Afteras the mid1930s hitler came to power. We are still stuck in the 193031 period. Hitler is still trying to get himself elected. He needs the money. He has got the documents. What does he do . He goes to the obvious person likely to be able to buy them from him which is the French Embassy. He walks up the street in berlin to the French Embassy and asks to speak to military action shea and says i have some documents that might be of interest to you. And says i attache have some documents that might be of interest to you. Berlin believes it is the capital city of spying. Not surprising to discover the french between the wars had a process for walk in spies. They would refer the walkin to the gentleman in the middle. He is very charming looking, isnt he . I tell you, he is very charming indeed because his career was as a professional card shark. He started his career in about the 1870s and he had been banned for most casinos across europe and went to jail a few times. And he had managed to amass a tidy fortune by fleecing, typically he would charm some young man and win lots and lots of money off of them at cards. He has very many names. Most of the time when he was gambling, he was going by the name of the barren from kearney baron from kearney. When he was born, he acquired french citizenship. He spoke about 11 languages. Botherman and french completely. ,y the time he is meeting hans he has a french name. Rex, that was his spy cover name. And it is a lot easier than the other things. We will call him rex. Rex, having retired from gambling, was fired by the german sorry, by the French Intelligence Service. This is kind of a natural career progression, isnt it . The French Intelligence Service rex, and his job is to spy with thein same kind of steely gaze with which he would fix his victims in the casino. He would suss out these guys. He is the ideal guide to check out hans because he is a native german speaker. Meeting setans to a up in the proper approved fashion. First of all, there is a letter that goes to hans inviting him to come to a particular address where there will be a letter waiting for him that will tell him where to go for the meeting. All of the other meetings after that are set up with unsigned, anonymous postcards which have coded information about where he can go find out information about where documents are to be dropped and that kind of stuff. It is fantastic. He did not make it up. He just looked at the handbook. Eventually, we get to the stage where rex has met schmidt and checked him out. Yes, he has got some documents. Rex is not the expert on whether documents are the real thing or not. From thels in help cipher experts. And that would be captain burt ertrand on the right, the head of French Military intelligence. Section d consists of captain bertrand. But that is fine because his job is to buy and sell foreign codebooks because the french cipher bureau, the decoding guys , have all retired. They were really good in world war i, but they reached retirement age. Unfortunately when you retire from being a cryptanalyst, you cannot go into gambling. They were just no longer around. Ertrand was not a cryptanalyst. The only way to read them was to buy things from people like hans schmidt. We have to set up a meeting so bertrand can look at the stuff a safe has lifted from and see if it is the real deal. They meet in a hotel in a small town in belgium. This is where it gets fun because and schmidt go into the bar, listen to the music, and drinks champagne, and brandy, and smoke cigars. Bertrand realizes he has got the real deal. He has the enigma machine operating instructions. He takes his photographer and camera up to the bathroom on the first floor, sorry, on the second floor of the hotel, and they do the photography there. There is always the question of why they were in the bathroom. I think they were using the bathroom because the photographic apparatus was large and clumsy and probably quite noisy. And therefore, they needed to go somewhere where they would not attract a lot of attention. We know they took the photographs in the bathroom. It was these photographs that i showed you before but i found in the french archives two or three years ago, the original ertrandaphs taken by bart of the team in 1934 instructions and the machine itself. Enigma is no longer a problem. He goes to his colleagues in the crypt analytic unit and shows things and says enigma, problem solved. Ontraire. Au c you have given us operating instructions. We need wiring diagrams. And we need to know what that funny thing not available to the public is and what it does. Bertrand is not dismayed. He gives the documents to the , captain tillman, who say it is right kind of you to give us this stuff, but you gave us operating instructions and those are hopeless if we do not know what the wiring is. If you gave us wiring diagrams, things would be a lot better. Bertrand still is not dismayed by this because the year before, bertrand has been instructed by reach out to polish military intelligence because poland and france have a common problem, which is that germany is aggressive and is wedged firmly between those countries. Intelligenceh objectives and french intelligence objectives are probably aligned. Bertrand has made friends with the head of the polish cipher bureau. So he offers the documents to colonel langer. Colonel linger says these are fantastic, these are what we have been waiting for all along. Lets give it a go. If we get anywhere, we will let you know. He puts his own team onto it. Im now going to introduce you to another one of my friends who looks like a mathematician. He is a mathematician. And really, he is the most unlikely spy. Itself in thermed middle of the 20th century into something geeks and nerds can do. There is hope for all of us, even people like me. Graduate mathematics from university in poland. He is sent into a small, dark room and given a commercial enigma machine. He is given the documents bertrand photographed in the bathroom, and he is given a bunch of enigma intercepts. Radio messages that have been intercepted in morse code and written down. This is one of the things i regard as being one of the top three code breaking achievements of the 20th century. And he is the first of the top three to do this. Problemes to turn the of the wiring of the enigma machine and its coating the road rotors intoing mathematical equations of permutation theory. Some of us loved algebra in high school and some of us did not. You remember if you multiply both sides by two, five minutes later, you can divide both sides by two and end up in the same place. Now, i want you to imagine trying to do that with an boiled eggs. Unboiled divide them by two and multiply by two. Do you get back where you started . No, you have to call the cleaners urgently. This is what permutation theory is like. They work like eggs, not algebra. He had been taught permutation theory in his mathematics course and he was able to solve the permutation equations and deduce the wiring in the enigma machine and in its coding rotors. For those of you who are mathematically inclined and speak polish, we have his equations here and perhaps one of you will be kind enough to explain them to me later. By 1933, theat , by hitler comes to power 1933, the poles have managed to reverse engineer the german armys enigma machine and then building their own fake enigma machines. That machine on the right looks a bit like an enigma machine. If you study it carefully, there are wires at the back. You can see the keyboard is wrong. It is in alphabetical order. Tz whatever. Qwer there might be some canadians in the audience that understand. An enigma machine. It is a polish fake enigma machine. It is not a fake. It is a reverse engineered analog, if you like, of an enigma machine. That was built in france during london and is now in has been on show at the Science Museum in london, but it belongs to the institute in london and is one of two or three surviving fakes. Thepolish they are able to solve the problem that the brits were still itemizing over in 1938 and 1939. They know what the wiring is inside the machine. That means they can start on the real problem which is the code breaking problem. It is all very well to know what the wiring is in the machine, but you have got to know how the machine is set up every day in order to decipher enigma messages. Million,nly 150 million, million different ways of setting up the machine every day. Youre not going to do it by brute force. With that number, it would take all the time left in the universe to get there. You cannot do it that way. You have got to do something clever. So they brought in the rest of the mathematical crypto analytical team. Guys come up with a host of code breaking techniques which will enable them to figure out how this enigma machine has been set up by the germans every day. Pioneers ofre the an electromechanical approach to code breaking. In the old days, by which i mean world war i, code breaking was more about getting what the enemys codes were. If you came across a code group mean the4, 2, it could battleship queen elizabeth. 8, 4, 4, 2 could mean tomorrow morning. You would have to guess. Linguists are great at this because they can interpolate to work out the missing ones they dont know. This is a pencil and paper exercise in the parsley with stick skills. These guys and requires linguistics skills. These guys are mathematicians. They are coming up with logic tests to figure out how the cipher might be working. They have invented this machine on the righthand side of the slide which is called a bombe and this combines a mechanistic approach to go through all the different rotor settings. Possible 5376 positions. They are testing each one for unlikely rotor setting a likely rotor setting which is halfway to a solution of how the machine is set up, probably. That is amazing. They developed this machine and are able to read german army, air force, and even maybe enigma messages in real time in 1938. Ok, i told you this was going to be about spying. We have done the math now so we can talk about something else. Im going to take you to switzerland. Hans schmidt did not drop out of the picture after he handed over those documents to be photographed and then had to put them back in the safe by monday morning. Otherwise, he would have been caught. He develops a thirst for cash. The key promising to tell you about the cash. I keep promising to tell you about the cash. He is having regular meetings and the other officers of French Military intelligence. And he is not just handing over codes and ciphers material because one day in the mid1930s after hitler had come to power, he set up a meeting in this rather quaint swiss village. You can just about make out from the photograph the reason it is very dark blue on the lefthand side of the photograph is that really is a 1000meter drop. He is perched on the top of the cliff. It is incredibly picturesque, but dont get too close to the edge. It is a ski resort in the winter and a hiking resort in the summer. Perfect tourist industry spot. He sets up a meeting there. French military intelligence guy sit in the hotel there. It is the usual sort of business with brandy and cigars. Apparently, they had a nice band as well. All very civilized, this spying business. With thesens up illgotten proceeds of his activities. Very nice f. S. A. Case attache case made out of soft, polished leather. And fashionable and chic quite visibly very expensive. And he says, i have got good news and bad news. Says i am no longer quite so closely associated with the cipher bureau. At which, the french guys looked very dejected. But he said i have been appointed Liaison Officer for the [indiscernible] they said, the what . You have to imagine you are in nazi germany. This will be tough. 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. Office, that is a nothing,e that means the Research Office was specifically set up to keep an eye on everybody else that need and