Crypto analyst alan turing. Prior to his writing career, dermot worked for the governor Legal Service in the International Law form law firm clifford chance. Bletchleyustee of park and the turing trust. Hes serving as the Bletchley Park visiting fellow at oxford. Last but not least dermot is a , member of the honorary board here at the International Spy museum and he is a tremendous supporter of our educational efforts here. Were excited to have dermot here today to discuss how enigma was really broken with the cooperative efforts of britain, poland, and france. After the formal presentation, we would like to invite 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. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to dermot turing. [applause] dermot many thanks, chris, and to all of you for coming and for the welcome home. Before i start, i would like to say to chris and to the team here at the spy museum, i think it is amazing to see how this place has transformed since the move last year. I think you have an amazing array of things going on here. Very exciting to be associated with. Now youre 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. You have seen the movie and you cumberbatch played my uncle, the gentleman on the left. Did i get that right . These characters are confused. Maybe Sherlock Holmes is the guy on the left. We all know the truth of enigma code breaking but it is more involved than what you may have come away from the movie with. I not going to give you a movie am synopsis. Dvdkly, you can go by the if you have not already seen it. Here is a memo. From where im standing the print is big enough to read. If you are at the back, you may not be able to see this. This memo is in the British National archives and it dates from 1938. The year before war broke out in europe. Its written by one of the senior cryptanalysts, a guy called tiltmon. This is what happens to old spies. They do not actually retire. When he retired from the u. K. Government, by the time he was 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. Thats the enigma machine. He says in 1931, 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. The enigma machine was commercially available but not in the form that the german army was using. This is the thing that tiltman 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 army model works. He goes on to describe the parts. Right before the outbreak of war, and this state of ignorance goes on until the outbreak of war. It goes on through july 1939. The brits dont know the answers to these questions. If they dont know how the enigma machine works, this raises a question for me. The question is, contrary to what you may have come away from the imitation game understanding, finding the daily settings of the machine, that design was ready and in the hands of the engineers by no later than november 1939. 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, berlin, 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 enigma machine. Then this in the middle says, base on the law of 1914, if you give this to the enemy, you will go straight to jail and you will not pass go. So, these are the famous 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. 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. On the left, this is my friend hansthilo schmidt. His brother was the head of the german armys Cipher Office. When he was 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. Hans had access to the safe where the certain documents were kept. Unfortunately, the period was not particularly great. We know what happened to the German Economy during the between the war period. Here, he joined the nationalistic german workers party. The nazis. That was a bit later after hitlers had come to power. We are still stuck in the 1931 period. Hitler is trying to get himself elected. He goes to the person likely to buy them from him, the French Embassy. He walks up the street to the French Embassy and asks to speak to the attachee and he says, i have documents that might be of interest to you. Berlin it is the capital city of spying. Its not surprising to discover that the french had a process for walkin spys. What they would do is refer the walkin to the gentleman in the middle. Hes very charming looking, isnt he . His career was as a professional card shark. He started in the 1970s and he had been banned across most casinos. Hed been to jail a few times but had managed to amass a tidy typically,fleecing, 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 name baron von kerney which was a false name. He acquired french citizenship, spoke 11 languages, but german and french completely fluently. He became rudolph lemoin. Some of the time. So rex, that was his spy cover name. Its easier than any of the other things. Rex, having retired from gambling, was hired by the german, sorry, by the french intelligence service. This is a natural career progression. His job is to fix 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. He invites schmidt to a meeting and this happens to be set up in the proper le carre fashion. There will be a letter waiting for him 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. Eventually, we get to the stage where rex has met schmidt and checked him out. He has documents. Rex is not the expert on whether documents are the real thing or not. And that would be captain bertrand on the right, the head of French Military intelligence. Section d consists of captain bertrand. [laughter] but that is fine because captain bertrands job is to buy and sell foreign codebooks because the french cipher bureau, the decoding guys, the decrypt analysts 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. Bertrand was not a cryptanalyst. The only way to read them was to codebooks from people like hans deal of schmidt. Hansthilo schmidt. We have to set up a meeting so that bertrand can look at the stuff that schmidt has lifted out of the safe 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 rex and schmidt go into the bar, listen to the music, and then they drink champagne and then they drink brandy, and smoke cigars. Bertrand realizes he has got the real deal. He has got the enigma machine operating instructions. So he takes his photographer and his 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. But anyway we know they took the , photographs in the bathroom. And it was these photographs that i showed you before, which i found in the french archives two or three years ago, the original photographs taken by and his team in 1940 of the instructions and the machine itself. But as bertrand. That is bertrand. Enigma is no longer a problem. He goes around to his colleagues in the cryptoanalytic unit and shows them these things and says enigma, problem solved. They say au contraire, monsieur le capitaine. You have given us operating instructions. What we really need is wiring diagrams. In particular we need to know what that fine thing on the front of the machine that is not available to the public is and what it does. Bertrand is not dismayed. He gives the documents to the brits, people like captain tillman, who say it is right kind of you to give us this stuff, but you have given us operating instructions, and operating instructions are hopeless if we do not know what the wiring is. If you gave us wiring diagrams, things would be a lot better. So bertrand still is not dismayed by this because the year before, bertrand has been instructed by his boss to reach out to polish military intelligence because poland and france have a common problem, which is that germany is aggressive and it is wedged firmly between those countries. And so, polish intelligence 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 is a very unlikely spy. He looks like a mathematician. He is a mathematician. And really, he is the most unlikely spy. This is the thing. Spying transformed itself in the from the middle of the 20th century into something geeks and nerds can do. There is hope for all of us, even people like me. I might make us by one day. This is Marian Rejewski. He is a mathematics graduate from a university in poland. He is sent into a small, dark room, because that is appropriate if you are a spy and a nerd and given a commercial enigma machine. He is given the documents that 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. And 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. He manages to turn the problem of the wiring of the enigma machine and its coding rotors into a set of mathematical equations in permutation theory. Permutation theory is a horror. All of us remember doing algebra in high school. Some of us loved it and some of us did not. You remember if you multiply both sides by two, then 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 unboiled eggs. Take some eggs out of the fridge and divide them by two and multiply by two. Do you get back where you started . No, you dont. No, you dont. You have to call the cleaners urgently. This is what permutation theory is like. Permutation theory works like eggs. They dont work like algebra. But Marian Rejewski had been taught permutation theory in his mathematics course, and he was able to solve the permutation equations and thereby deduce the wiring in the enigma machine and in its coding rotors. I have got so for those of you who are mathematically inclined and speak polish, we have got his equations here and perhaps one of you will be kind enough to explain them to me later. Ok. This means that by 1933, the year hitler comes to power, by 1933, the poles have managed to reverse engineer the German Army Enigma machine, and theyre building their own fake enigma machines. That machine on the right looks a bit like an enigma machine. If you study it carefully, there is all that sort of jumble of wires at the back. Those of you who are sitting in the front row and remembered to bring your longdistance glasses with you, you can see the keyboard is all wrong. It is in alphabetical order. It is not in qwertz whatever. Good, i spoke american correctly. I said z, not zed. There might be some canadians in the audience that understand. That is an enigma machine. It is a polish fake enigma machine. Or rather it is not a fake. It is a reverse engineered analog, if you like, of an enigma machine. That one was built in france during the war, and it is now in london and has been on show at the Science Museum in london, but it belongs to an institute in london and is one of two or three surviving polish fakes. It is great. They are able to solve the problem that the brits were still agonizing over in 1938 and 1939. They know what the wiring is inside the machine. And 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 be able to decipher enigma messages. Theres only 150 million, million, million different ways of setting up the machine every day. Youre not going to do it by with force, are you, not that number. It would take all of the time 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. This is jersey rated ski and henrykejewski and zygalski. These 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. These guys are the pioneers of 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 that was like 6, 9, 4, 2, it could mean the battleship queen elizabeth. And code group 8, 4, 4, 2 could mean tomorrow morning. And so you would have to guess. Linguists are great at this because they can interpolate between the known code groups to work out the missing ones they dont know. This is a pencil and paper exercise and requires linguistic skills. These guys are mathematicians. Together with their engineer colleagues, they are coming up with logic tests to figure out how the cipher might be working. And they are doing it, particularly they have invented this machine on the righthand side of the slide which is called a bombe, and this combines a mechanistic brute force approach to go through all the different rotor settings. Three rotor enigma, there are 5376 possible positions. Link through those, testing each of those for a likely rotor setting which is halfway to a solution of how the machine is set up problem. That is amazing. They developed this machine and they are able to read german army, air force, and even navy enigma messages in real time in 1938. Ok, i told you this was going to be about spying. So we have kind of done the math now so we can go on and talk about something else. Im going to take you to switzerland. Hansthilo 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 really. I keep promising to tell you about the cash. I will come to that. He is having regular meetings with rex 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 is really is a 1000meter drop. ,it is perched on the top of the cliff. There is a 1000 meter vertical drop. It is incredibly picturesque, but dont get too close to the edge. It is a ski resort in the winter and it is a hiking resort in the summer. It is great. Perfect tourist industry spot. He sets up a meeting there. And rex and the French Military intelligence guy sit in the hotel there. It is the usual sort of business with brandy and cigars and what have you. Apparently, they had a nice band as well. All very civilized, this spying business. Schmidt turns up and he has these illgotten proceeds of his activities. He has got this very nice sort of attache case made out of finally finely soft, polished leather. Very fashionable and chic and quite visibly very expensive. And he says, i have got good news and i have got bad news. Go on. He says, i am no longer quite so closely associated with the cipher bureau. At which the french guys looked point very dejected. He says, but i have been appointed as the Liaison Officer for the they said, the what . Ok, you have to imagine you are in nazi germany. This is going to be tough. So hermann goering, who was hitlers sort of favorite guy for a long time, the head of the German Air Force and so forth, goerings role in the nazi party was very significant. Because it was the nazi state, there were many spying organizations, many of which were spying on everybody else in germany. Calledgoerings it is the Research Office, that is a cover name that means nothing, goerings Research Office wa