Cryptoanalyst alan turing. Prior to his writing career, he worked for the International Law firm clifford chance. He is currently a trustee of Bletchley Park and the turing trust. He serves as the Bletchley 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 dermot here today to discuss how enigma was really broken with the cooperative efforts of poland, britain, and france. After the formal presentation, what we would like you to invite you to walk up to the mics on each side of the theater and go ahead 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. Thank you. [ applause ] many thanks, chris. And to all of you for coming and for the welcome. Just before i start, id just like to say to chris and to the team here at the spy museum, i think its amazing to see how this place has transformed since the move last year from your previous premises. I think youve got an amazing array of things going on here. Its very, very exciting museum to be associated with. So its a privilege for me to be here today and to be associated with you more generally. Now, youre wondering what the real story is behind the enigma code breaking. Otherwise, you wouldnt have shown up to this talk. Youve seen the movie and you know that Benedict Cumberbatch is the 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. But its actually a little bit more involved. Im not going to give you a movie synopsis. You can go buy the dvd if you havent already seen it. Here 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 war broke out in europe, its written by the one of the cryptoanalysts which shortly became Bletchley Park and john tillman. Old spies dont retire. He subsequently worked for the nsa. 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 tillman 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 Cumberbatch over there on the right. He said in 1931, we were provided by the french, ill come back to that in a minute, 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. It was commercially available, but not in the form the german army was using. This is the thing that tiltman is asking about. This plug board arrangement on the front. Which was not available on the commercial machine. In the directions given, tillman goes on, do not fully explain the function of this attachment which is still not understood here. So this is 1938. The british do not understand basically how this german army model of the enigma machine works. He says, can the french be asking to tell us everything on the following points. A, b, c, d, so on. This is interesting. This is right before the outbreak of war. And 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. And the question is this. Contrary to when you come away from the imitation game understanding is that they were going to 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. So between july, when they have no understanding of how the machine works, and november, when they were ready to start the codebreaking machine, something almost miraculous has 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 some of my friends. First of all, these particular friends, which are documents. Im a geek, i like finding old documents in archives. So weve got photographs taken in 1931. And ill talk about how those photographs came to be taken in a moment. There is a photograph of an enigme machine. Its not a very good picture of an enigma machine. But thats clearly what it is. We have a document on the left. Berlin, 1913. You can see the number of the document has been redacted by the photographer. Top righthand corner. Hmm, interesting. The reason for that being that we dont want anybody to know who it is, whose copy it is that we got hold of. That is interesting. The plot thickens. And this is the operating instructions for the enigma machine. And then 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 3rd, 1914, if you give this away 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. Okay. So these are the famous documents handed over by the french in the early 1930s. And the ones that do not explain the operation of this fiendish plug board device on the front of the machine. How did the brits get hold of these documents . This is how i will introduce you to some real friends of mine, every one of whom is a spy. This is my friend, 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. Unfortunately the salary of a german Civil Servant in the between the wars period wasnt particularly great. And we know what happened to the German Economy in the between the wars period and so hans was thinking of ways to supplement his income. I will explain in a moment why he needed 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 later, mid1930s after hitler had come to power. Were still stuck in the 1930, 31 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 attache and says i have some documents that might be of interest to you. I think is quite interesting. Berlin believes unlike certain other cities that or maybe even like other cities that it is the capital city of spying. And so its not surprising to discover that the french in the between the wars period had a process for walkin spies. What they would do is refer the walkin to the gentleman in the middle. Hes very charming looking, isnt he . I tell you, hes very charming indeed. Because his career was as a professional card sharp. He started his career in the 1870s and he had been banned from most casinos across europe. He had been to jail a few times. And hed managed to get quite a tidy fortune by fleecing, 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. Then he acquired french citizenship. He spoke about 11 languages, but german and french, both completely fluently. He became rudolph. By 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 his spy cover name and its a lot easier than baron 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 kind of a natural career progression, isnt it . So the French Intelligence Service hire rex. And his job is to fix the walkin spy with the same kind of steely gaze that he would fix on his victims in the casino. He would suss out these guys. 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 le carre approved fashion. So there is a first of all there is a letter that goes to hans schmitt inviting 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. And all this kind of stuff. Its fantastic. Le carre didnt make it up. He just looked at the handbook. So eventually, we get to the stage where rex met schmitt and has 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 cipher 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. Because captain bertrands job is to buy and sell foreign code books because the french Cipher Bureau, the decoding guys, have all retired. They were really good in world world i but they reached retirement age. Unfortunately, when you retire, you cant go into gambling. The street works the other way. So the cryptoanalysts were no longer around. Bertrand wasnt a cryptoanalyst. So the only way for them to read foreign codes is to buy the code books from people like hans schmitt. Okay. Now we have to set up a meeting so bertrand can look at the stuff that schmitt has lifted out of the safe and see whether its the real deal. So they meet in a hotel in a small town in belgium and this is where it all gets fun. Because 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. So hes the one that cant drink the champagne and brandy or smoke 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 his photographer and camera up to the bathroom on the first floor, sorry, im an american, on the second floor in the hotel and they do the photography there. So, why are they using the bathroom . 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 attract 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 photographs 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. So he goes around to the colleagues in the cryptoanalytical unit and shows them these things and says, German Army Enigma. Problem solved. They say, au contraire, monsieur le captain. You gave us operating instructions. What we need is wiring diagrams. And in particular, we need to know what that funny thing on the front is. What it does, and how to do it. Bertrand is not dismayed. He gives the documents to the brits. People like captain tiltman, who say, look, bertrand, old chap, its 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 is. If you gave us wiring diagrams, thing was be a lot better. So bertrand still is not dismayed by this. Because the year before, hes been instructed to reach out to polish military intelligence. Poland and france have a common problem. Germany is aggressive, and its wedged firmly between those two countries. And so polish and french objectives are probably aligned. He made friends with the head of the polish Cipher Bureau. And so he offers the documents 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. Now langer puts his own team onto it. Im now going to introduce you to another one of my friends. An unlikely spy. 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 nerds 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 is sent in to a small dark room because thats appropriate if youre a mathematician, a spy, and a nerd, and he is given a 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 morse code and written down. This is one of the things i regard as being one of the top three codebreaking 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 its coding rotors into a set of mathematical equations. In permutation theory permutation theory is a horror. 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. And now multiply them by two. Do you get back to where you started . No, you dont. No, you dont. You have to call the cleaners urgently. Okay . This is what permutation theory is like. Permutation theory works like eggs. They dont work like algebra. But he had been taught permutation theory in the mathematics course and was able to solve the permutation equations. And deduce the wiring. And the coding row rotors. Okay. This means that by 1933, this is the year that 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. Okay, that machine on the right, it looks a bit like an enigma machine. But there is a jumble of wires at the back. Thats the plug board. Those of you who are sitting in the front row, can you see that keyboard is all wrong. Its in alphabetical order. Its not in q, w, e, r, t, z, whatever, i spoke american correctly. I said z, not zed. There may be some canadians in the audience who would understand. Okay. So that is an enigma machine. Its a polish fake enigma machine. Its not a fake. Its 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 it has been on show at the Science Museum in london. But it belongs to the studeinst in london, its one of two, maybe three surviving polish fakes. Yeah, thats great. So theyre able to so they solved the problem. But 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 codebreaking 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. Youre not going to do it by brute force, are you. It would take all the time in the universe to get there. You have to do something clever. So they brought in the rest of the mathematical team. This is a gentleman on the left and another in the middle and these guys come up with a host of codebreaking techniques which will enable them to figure out how this enigma machine has been set up by the germans every day. And these guys are the pioneers of an electromechanical approach to codebreaking. In the old days, world war i, codebreaking was more about guessing what the enemys codes were. If you came across a code group that was 6, 9, 4, 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 linguists are great at this. They can interpolate between 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 theyve invented this machine and the righthand side of the slide which is called a bumba which combines a mechanism brute force approach which goes through all the different rotor settings. It clanks through those, testing each of them for a likely rotor setting which is halfway to the solution of how the machine is set up. 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. Okay, i told you this is going to be about spying. So we have kind of done the math now. So we ca