Washington, d. C. , host this is event. Im very excited to introduce the program with author dermit turing. He is the author of a number of books including allen tearing and the bomb breakthrough. He is the nephew of the famous analyst allen turing. Prior to the writing career, he worked for the International Law firm clifford chance. He is currently a trustee of bluchly park and turing trust. He serves as the bluchly park fellow of college in oxford. Last but certainly 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 here at spy. So we are excited to have dermit here today to discuss how enigma was really broken with the cooperative efforts of poland, britain, and france. After the formal presentation, with he would like you to invite to walk up to the mikes on each side of the theater and go ahead and ask your questions. Tlcht is plen there will be plenty of time to ask your questions and get them answered. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to dermit turing. Thank you. [ plaus ] many thanks, chris. And to all of you for coming and for the welcome. Just before i start, i just like to say to chris and to the team here at the spy museum, its amazing to see how this place has transformed since the move last year from your previous premises. Its very, very exciting museum to be associated with. Its a privilege for me to be here today and to be associated with you more generally. Youre wondering what the real story is behind the enig many code breaking. Youve seen the movie and you no he that benedict is a gentleman on the right. He played my uncle who is the gentleman on the left. Have i got that right . . Yeah, i got that right. Anyway, these two characters are sort of confused or maybe holmes is the guy on left. Anyway, never mind. So we all know the truth. At least we think we know the truth about enigma. A little bit more involved. Can you go by the dvd if you havent already seen it. It is a memo which from where im standing, the print is big enough to read. I guess if youre at the back you may not be able to see this. This memo is in the British National archives. It dates from 1938 and the year before wall breaker and europe, theyre written by the crypt analyst which shortly became bluchly park and john tiltman. He subsequently worked for the nsa here in this is what happens to old spies. Dhoe they dont actually retire. When you retire from the uk, government it wasnt called the government code anymore. It was called gchq. When you retire from there, then he is hired by the nsa. Thats how things work. John tiltman worked here for a while. For about 20 years, in fact. This is what he wrote in 1938. He is writing about the enigma machine. I dont need to introduce that. That is benedict over there on the right. Were provided by the french. With photographs and directions for use of the German Army Enigma machine. There is an attachment on the front of the machine which does not appear on the model available to the public. This is the thing that tiltman is asking about. This plug board arrangement on the front. Which was not available on the commercial machine. Directions given, tillman goes on, do not fully explain the function of this attachment which is still not understood here. This is 1938. The british do not understand base he cannily how this german army model of the enigma machine works. This is interesting. This is right before the outbreak of war. En that state of ignorance if you like goes on right up until pretty much the outbreak of war. It goes on right through until july of 1939. The brits still dont know the answer to these questions. So if they dont know how the enigma machine works, this raises a question for me. Contrary to when you come away from the imtagitation game understanding and find the daily settings of the enigma machine, that design was ready and in the hands of the engineers by no later than november of 1939. Something almost miraculous happened. Knowledge has been just transformed in that time. And thats a puzzle. So what im going to talk to you about for the next few minutes is what is the answer to that particular mystery . Im going to introduce you to my friends which are documents. Im a geek, like finding old documents in archives. Im talking about how the photographs came to be taken in a moment. There is a photograph of an enig many machine. Its not a very good picture of an enigma machine. We have a document on the left. Berlin, 1913. You can see the number of the document is redakted by the photographer. Dwoent want anybody to know who it is who is connie it is. And this is the operating instructions for the enigma machine. The document in the middle is inside front cover of this which tells you that under the law of 1914, if you give this way to the enemy, then you will go straight to jail and you will not be able to pass go and you will not be able to collect your 200. They will hand it over to the french by the early 1930s. And the ones that do not explain the operation of this plug board device at the front of the machine. Everyone of whoom m is a spy. Beginning on the left, this is my friend hunt schmitt. His brother was the head of the german armys Cipher Office. And wasnt doing very well. And he begged his brother to give him a job. And his brother gave him a job in the Cipher Office and good old hans tilo had access to the safe where certain documents were kept. The salary of a german Civil Servant in between the wars period wasnt particularly great. And we know what happened to the German Economy between the wars period and so hans was thinking a ways to supplement his income. It looks smart in this one. This is about the time he joined the something called the nationalistic, socialistic german workers party. In other words, the nazis. And thats the photo of him on his nazi membership card. That was mid 1930s after hitler had come to power. Were still stuck in the 1930, 1931 period. Hitler is still trying to get his machine going to get himself elected. Hans schmitt needs the money. Hes got the documents. And so whats he do . He goes to the obvious person who is likely to be able to buy them from him which is the French Embassy. He walks up to the street in berlin to the French Embassy and he asks to speak to the military lead eastern says i have document thats might be of interest to you. I think is quite interesting. Berlin believes unlike certain other cities that or maybe even certain like other cities that it is the capital city of spying. And so its not surprising to discover the french in between the wars merdperiod had a proce. What they would do is refer the walk in to the gentleman in the middle. Hes very charming looking, isnt he . I tell you, hes very charming indeed. His career was as a professional card shark. He started his career in the 1870s and he was banned from most casinos across europe. He had been to jail a few times. And he managed to get quite a tidy fortune by charming a young man and pour lots of champagne down their throats and then win lots and lots of money off them at cards. So this hes got very many names. Most of the time when he was gambling he was going by the name of the baron from kerney which is a false name. But when he was born he was called rudolph stallman. He smoke 11 languages, german and french completely fluently. He became rudolph number one. Bhi the time he is meeting hans schmitt, he is rudolph some of the time. When hes not baron from kerney. He was baron from kerney for some of the time. Okay. So rex, that was the spy cover name and a lot easier than baron flon kerney or any of the other things. So we call him rex from now on. Rex, having retired from gambling, was hired by the german sorry, by the French Intelligence Service. This is a natural progression, isnt it . So the French Intelligence Service hire rex. And his job is to fix the walk in spy with the same kind of steely gaze that he would fix on his victims in the casino. He is the ideal person to check schmitt because he is a native german speaker. So he invites hans schmitt to a meeting. This has to be set up in the proper approved fashion. So there is a first of all there is a letter that goes to hans schmitt in fighting him to come to a particular address where there will be a letter waiting for him that will tell him where to go to go to the meeting and so forth. And then all the other meetings after that are set up with unsigned anonymous postcards which have sort of coded information about where he can go and find out information about where documents are to be dropped. Its fantastic. So eventually, get to the stage where rex met schmitt and checked him out and, yes, hes got some documents. But schmitt is not the sorry, rex is not the expert on whether documents are the real thing or not. So he calls in help from the experts in france and that would be captain bertrand who is the man on the right. Captain bertrand is the head of section d of French Military intelligence. Section d consists of captain bertrand. But thats fine. Captain bertrands job is to buy and sell foreign code books because the french Cipher Bureau, the decoding guys who are all retired. They were really good in world world i but they reached retirement age. When you fryar being a crypt analyst, you cant go into gambling. Its sort of like the street works the other way. So the crypt analysts were no longer around. Bertrand wasnt a crypt analyst. So the only way for them to read foreign codes is to buy the code books from people like hans schmitt. Okay. We have to set up a meeting so bertrand can look at the stuff that schmitt lifted out of the safe and see whether its the real deal. They meet in a hotel in a small town in belgium and this is where it all gets fun. Rex and schmitt go into the bar and they listen to the music and drink champagne and then brandy and they smoke cigars and bertrand has to look at the documents. Hes the one that cant drink the champagne and brandy and the cigars and he has photographs so he realizes he actually has got the real deal. Hes got the enigma machine operating instructions. So he takes the photographer and camera to the bathroom on the first floor, sorry, im an american, on the second floor in the hotel and necessity do the photography there. Where are they using the banl room . I think the reason they were using the bathroom is because the photographic apparatus is large and clumsy and probably quite noisy. And therefore they need to go somewhere where they werent going to tract a lot of attention. They took the photographs in the bathroom. It is these photographs that i showed you before that found in the french archives two or three years ago. The original photographers taken by bertrand and his team in 1930 of the enigma operating instructions and the photos of the machine itself. So says bertrand, enigma is no longer a problem. Sow goes around to the colleagues in the crypt analytical unit and shows them these things and says, German Army Enigma. Problem solved. They say au contraire captain. Not at all. You get operating instructions. What we need is wiring diagrams. And in particular, with he need to know that what that fwhat tfn the front is. He gives the documents to the brits. People like captain tiltman. Who say, look, bertrand, old chap, very kind of you to give us this stuff. But you gave us operating instructions and operating instructions are hopeless if we dont know what the wiring s if you gave us wiring diagrams, thing was be a lot better. Sofr bertrand still is not dismayed by this. The year before, eyhes been instructed to reach out to poland. Poland and france have a common problem. Germ i wedges between the two countries. And so polish and german objectives are probably aligned. He made friends with the polish Cipher Bureau. And sow offe he offers the docu to colonel langer. Colonel langer says, hey, these are fantastic. This is what weve been waiting for all along. I know theyre only operating instructions but it gives us something to get our teeth into. Lets give it a go. If we get anywhere, well let you know. Langer puts his own team on to it. Im now going toingo introduce to another one of my friends. He looks like a mathematician. He is a mathematician and really, hes the most unlikely spy. This is the thing, spying transformed itself in the middle of the 20th century into something that geeks and in other words can do. So there is hope for all of us, even people like me. I might make a spy one day. This is a mathematics graduate. And he sent in to a small dark room because thats appropriate if youre a mathematician to spy and a nerd, and he is given commercial enigma machine, one without a plug board on the front. 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 and in morris code and written down. This is one thing i regard as being one of the top three code breaking achievements of the 20th century. And hes the first of the top three to do this. He manages to turn the problem of the wiring of the enigma machine and the coding rotors into a set of mathematical equations. In permutation theory. Some of us loved algebra in high school, some of us didnt. 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. Okay. So you take some eggs out of the fridge. You 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. Okay . This is what permutation theory is like. They work like eggs. Dhoenlt work like algebra. But marian had been taught permutation theory in the mathematics course and able to solve the permutation equations. And deduce the wiring. This is the path. And the German Army Enigma. The fake enigma. There is a jumble of wires at the back. Those sitting in the front row, can you see that keyboard is all wrong. Its in alphabetical order. Its not in q, w, r, t, z, whatever, i spoke american correctly. I said z, not zed. There may be canadians in the audience. Okay. So that is an enigma machine. Its a polish fake enigma machine. Its no the a fake. Its a reverse engineered an log if you like of an enigma machine. That one was built in france. Its one of two or three surviving polish fakes. Thats great. So theyre able to so they solved the problem. The brits were still agonizing over in 1938 and 1939, they know what the wiring is. And that means they can start on the real problem which is the code breaking problem. Its all very well to know what the wiring is in in the machine. You got to know how the machine is set up every day in order to be able to decipher enigma messages. There is only 150 million million million different ways of setting up the machine. It will take all the time in the universe to get there. You have to do something clever. They brought in the rest of the mathematical team. This is a gentleman on the left and another on the middle and these guys come up with a host of code breaking techniques which will enable them to figure out how this enigma machine is set up by the germans every day. And these guys are the pioneers of an electromechanical approach to code breaking. In the old days, world war i, code breaking is more about guessing what the enemys codes were. If you came across a code group that 16, 4, 9, 2, it could mean the battleship queen elizabeth. And code group 8, 4, 2, 2, could mean tomorrow morning. And so youd have to guess. And people are great at this. They can interpret the known code groups to work out what the missing one they dont know is. This is a pencil and paper exercise and requires linguistic skills. These guys are mathematicians. And together with their engineer colleagues, theyre coming up with ways of creating a logic test to figure out how the cipher might be working and theyre doing it particularly they invented this machine and the right hand side of the slide which is called a bumbaren that combines a mechanism brute force approach which goes through all the different rotor settings. So they go through them and test each of nem for a likely roto setting which is half way to the solution of how is the machine set up problem. Thats amazing. They developed this machine and theyre able to read german army, air force, and even navy enigma messages in real time in 1938. I told you this is going to be about spying. So we have kind of done the math now. We can go on and talk about something else. So im going to take you to switzerland. Schmitt 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. He developed a thirst for cash, really. Well come to that. I keep promising to tell you about the cash. Ill come to that. But hes having regular meetings with rex and the other officers of French Military intelligence. And hes not just handing over codes and ciphers material. Because one day in the mid 1930s, after hitler had come to power, he set up a meeting in this rather quaint Swiss Village which is called mirian. The reason it very dark blue on left hand side of the photograph is that really is a 1,000 meter drop. It is on the top of a cliff and a 1,000 meter drop. Dont get too close to the edge. But its a ski resort in the winter and hiking resort in the summer pt it summer. Its great. Perfect tourist industry spot. He sets up a meeting there. And rex and the French Military intelligence guy sit in the hotel there and its a usual sort of business with brandy and cigars and what have you. And parentally they have nice band as well. That is all very civilized this spying business. Schmitt turns up. He has this case that is made out of very finally soft polished leather. Its absolutely sort of very fashionable and very chic and quite visibly very expensive. He says i have good news and bad news. They say go on. I no longer quite so closely associated with the Cipher Bureau which at which point the french guys looked very dejected. He says, but i have been appointed as the Liaison Officer for the [ mumbling ] they said, the what . You have to imagine that youre in nazi germany. This is going to be tough. But okay. Gering, hitlers favorite guy for a long time and head of the German Air Force and so forth, gerings role in the nazi party was very significant. And be