Code Warriors: NSA’s Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union

My mother still knows how to run Colossus at Bletchley Park NMoC. She's 97 now.

I can’t recommend this guy’s book ‘Code Warriors ‘more strongly. Some of the Amazon reviews say it is too technical as an audiobook and that it’s too in-depth in general. I so strongly disagree. Absolutely love that he respects his readers to give us an advanced, (well advanced for a lay person anyway) glimpse at this world. It is so fascinating and well paced. Plus he’s funny in this lecture. Really like this guy.

Speaker intro begins at 2:25; actual talk begins at 5:05.

Fascinating channel, thanks very much

Budianski's books are the very best in this field IMO.

What is not mentioned is that the NSA got a huge break post war because there had been a bag job done at the soviet consulate , photographing a huge number of documents before they were encoded. The coded version was available from the wire services (any telegram going out from the US would be copied and the Russians and British knew this). Now many of these encoded items really did not need to be - they purchasing documents. They were very formulaic so for instance you knew where the date and the name of the issuing city would be. Often the opening address would be the same. This would give a rabbit hole into the layout of the one time pad that had been used to construct this message. That's the simple version . What complicates matters is that the russkies and germans would use a dictionary which allocated four digit groups to a whole word. But reissuing the dictionaries was painful and did not happen that much with the Russians.

Great topic, but hopefully he'll touch upon why sometime they had actionable data and didn't use it. We owe inumerable amount of gratitude for the silent heros.

As always a brilliant talk. As the producer of The Bletchley Park Podcast, I’m always happy to hear us mentioned. I was also lucky enough to record when the current directors of the NSA & GCHQ met at Bletchley Park to celebrate, 75 years later, the visit of those first 4 US codebreakers.

Glad I found this channel:interesting content, thanks

Do not forget Gordon Welshman and Tom Jericho he broke the German U boat enigma 4,000000,000,000, combinations

My Great Grandfather was a cryptographer. He had fought battles on the islands, the snowy mountains, and then in the shadows. He lived a long live, I barely knew him though, I was too young to remember very much.

Let's not forget WindTalkers ! Their hardly mentioned or spoken about

Brilliant informative exposition. I noted that you showed a photograph of Gordon Welchman, but did not attribute his contribution to traffic analysis.

Excellent presentation

Brilliant.

As a partial history it is one of the best

Michigan Agricultural College is today's Michigan State University.

A couple more snippets. The UK and US kept the breaking of Enigma very secret for about thirty years... until '73-74. This would have been hard to do as some Polish had been doing work on it too and some of them would have presumably gone back to Poland (I think one might have been extracted to the UK)... anyways the idea was that say the Czechs for Soviets might adopt a re engineered Enigma machine and use it to transmit messages in the Cold war and the US or others could perhaps break them. It sounds as if this was a forlorn hope. The KGB are not stupid at the top level. If they found that post WWII the US /UK were not using Enigma derivatives they'd reach a conclusion - a lot of work needed to be done to make the concept safe. As far as the Venona decripts.. they too had a problem. Because Venona was kept secret because the work was on going (and I guess if the soviets could be forced into reusing One time pads).. .no prosecution could be attempted based solely on Venona information. Ted Hall who passed atomic weapon data to the Soviets and admitted it very late in life went off to the UK , which was a wise move. Venona made it clear to those who needed to know that Ted was involved in moving data but without a confession the US could do nothing. He kept quiet, kept out of the US and also kept out of prison.

Were there any variations of "Point AF" where we could send something believable but not true out & see if they would react, thereby showing that our code was broken?

By education, both undergraduate and graduate degrees, I am a mathematician. Although I never spent a tremendous amount of time on the subject of coding I did spend some time on this subset of mathematics and I found it immensely interesting, and dare I say beautiful too. Unfortunately I suspect for many it's a topic similar to Rembrandt's "The Night Watchmen" where if you can't see the painting in enough detail you can't see the beauty and significance of what is being observed.