Abstract
William Friedman (1891–1969) was introduced to ciphers in an unexpected way. As a young man he developed an interest in genetics and studied this field at Cornell University from 1911 to 1915. He was then put in contact with George Fabyan, a wealthy man with many interests. Friedman commenced work in the genetics section of Fabyan’s Riverbank Laboratories on his farm in Illinois, set up with the aim of improving some of the farm’s products. Fabyan had also brought Elizabeth Gallup to these Laboratories, with financial support to assist her attempts to prove that the real author of the body of works attributed to William Shakespeare was in fact Francis Bacon. Fabyan’s interest in this was to provide Friedman with a new career.
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Notes
- 1.
Ronald W. Clark, The Man who Broke Purple: The Life of the World’s Greatest Cryptologist, Colonel William F. Friedman. It is hard to dispute Clark’s thesis that Friedman was a true genius. Indeed, more on this is to be found in Chap. 20 The website www.nsa.gov gives access to the publications of the history unit of the modern National Security Agency: these include material on the Friedmans.
- 2.
Pages 40 and 51–52 of Clark’s book describe Friedman’s encounter with the Vernam enciphered teleprinter mentioned in Sect. 8.5.
- 3.
An early indication of the sophistication of the statistics underlying WW2 cryptology is to be found in Jack Good’s paper The Population Frequencies of Species and the Estimation of Population Parameters published in Biometrika 40(3) (1953) 237–264 and repeatedly cited ever since. Good had worked with Alan Turing at Bletchley Park: ‘The formula (2) was first suggested to me, together with an intuitive demonstration, by Dr. A. M. Turing several years ago.’
The GCHQ released in April 2013 two reports by Turing. They are in the British National Archives:
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HW 25/37 Report on the Applications of Probability to Cryptography, and
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HW 25/38 Paper on the Statistics of Repetitions.
Much of HW 25/37 is at least implicit in TNA files HW 25/4 and HW 25/5, which are available on line and contain the 1945 General Report on Tunny.
The index of coincidence now seems to be known as the Simpson index. This is an outcome of the paper published in Nature in 1949 by the British statistician and later civil servant Edward Simpson. Simpson was employed at Bletchley Park from 1943 to 1945, initially on Italian communications and later on the JN-25 series of IJN ciphers.
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- 4.
Researching Pacific War Sigint requires the collection of a list of jargon. Some of the more significant items were: cages, click, conversion square, Copek, decheesing, dendai, depth, Dexter, discriminant, dragon, E.5., eclectic, false addition, females, Fish, flag, flash, forcing, garble table, GYP-1, Hypo, indicator, kiss, Kodak, krack, NC4, Negat, Nocke, null, REB, recorders ‘W’, scanned, stripping, Susan, Thumb, Ultra and Yoke. The function of the ‘Y’ Hut at Harman radio reception station near Canberra should be clear. The ‘GT’ room in the building used for naval Sigint in Melbourne in 1944 is harder, but eventually one works out that it was named after the Op-20-GT section of the USN unit Op-20-G and so it must have been used for traffic analysis. A photograph of it is in the Canberra NAA as part of digitalised item A10909 3 as well as in the NARA RG457 (Historic Cryptographic Collection) material at the end of SRH-275.
In section 8 of Part A of the CBTR, quoted in Sect. 17.8, the use of ‘BJ’ or ‘UBJ’ for ‘report’ may confuse. Presumably this practice is derived from the earlier British practice of encasing diplomatic Sigint in blue jackets.
- 5.
In general, Army officers needed to know something about traffic analysis and also the basics of elementary encryption systems, such as the Playfair method. Dorothy Sayers’ novel Have his Carcase gives an account of a Playfair code being broken. See NARA RG457 Box 936 Item 2699 for the more secure double Playfair cipher.
- 6.
This is now available as eight (C–11, C–40, C–42, C–43, C–44, C–45, C–60 and C–61) of the extremely useful Aegean Park Press series of booklets on cryptology. Another (C–65) in this series contains Safford’s SRH-149 report which states that the USN received and used Friedman’s ‘instructional literature’ (pages 7 and 17). Those with experience in teaching mathematics know the value of a bit of written material. Friedman published several notes in the American Mathematical Monthly between the wars. His student Abraham Sinkov contributed a chapter to the 1939 revised edition of the classic Rouse Ball book Mathematical Recreations and Essays and much later wrote a book Elementary Cryptanalysis. This was updated and republished in 2009.
- 7.
This book can spare little space for Yardley. However David Kahn has written a biography, The Reader of Gentlemen’s Mail, Yale University Press, 2004.
- 8.
But not secure enough! See Chap. 8.
- 9.
The SIS later became the Signals Security Agency (SSA) based at AHS. The first name survives in the somewhat rare book: Special Intelligence Service in the Far East 1942–1946: An Historical and Pictorial Record, published by the S.I.S. Record Association, New York, 1946. This gives a pleasing account of Central Bureau, Brisbane (CBB) (see Chap. 17) without revealing what its functions, if any, actually were. However the reader is told that ‘Actually most sections combined the aspects of such a laboratory, a grammar school and the Ford assembly line. The work often provided the sort of thrill that is known only to scholars and labyrinth makers. Independent and individualist characters of several nationalities were always around to provide local color.’
- 10.
Chapter 9 gives more information on the principal WW2 cipher machines. The full text of the patent may be found by asking Google for Friedman 6097812.
- 11.
One may speculate that if the USA had instead spent more money on Friedman’s unit and less on the naval Op-20-G it would have had a much more difficult time in the Pacific in 1942.
The CBTR refers to the call signs on IJN messages being less secure than those on IJA messages.
The relative weakness of IJN communications security is of the greatest importance in the understanding of Allied Comint in the Pacific War.
- 12.
NAA Melbourne file MP150/1 544/201/217 gives a commercial proposition made to the RAN in 1942 to provide a card-based payroll system at Garden Island naval base in Sydney. Once the cards—not standard IBM cards—were punched and verified the tabulator could process 4,800–9,000 cards per hour. Clearly the significance of civilian use of card-based accountancy systems was not widely understood in Australia in 1942.
- 13.
William and Elizebeth Friedman were each inductees in the initial 1999 batch of eight in the NSA Hall of Honor. The others were Herbert Yardley, Laurance Safford, Frank Rowlett, Abraham Sinkov, Solomon Kullback and Ralph Canine.
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Donovan, P., Mack, J. (2014). William Friedman and the US Army. In: Code Breaking in the Pacific. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08278-3_4
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