Coding and Decoding

Coding and Decoding. Cryptography, the art of creating or deciphering secret writing, is an ancient military process with a rich history in the American military experience. U.S. coding and decoding expertise trailed that of European nations, particularly Britain, until World War II, but America became the premier cryptographic power during the Cold War and has maintained a lead in this field ever since. While military cryptography has been a powerful tool for uniformed leaders in obtaining information about an enemy's capabilities, limitations, and intentions, it is just as important to the commander in masking his own powers, vulnerabilities, and plans. In the rare case, such as the naval Battle of Midway in 1942, American deciphering abilities have proven decisive. Cryptography normally supplies only partial solutions for military intelligence and counterintelligence problems. Coding and decoding is and has always been a “cat and mouse” game, the coder occasionally gaining a temporary advantage on those who intercept and decode, only to experience the shock of a role reversal at other times.

From the outset of U.S. military operations, cryptography was practiced, but the security of American codes and the ability to read an enemy's secret writing lagged behind the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy's mentors, the British. Codes and ciphers were personally used in the Revolutionary War by both Gen. George Washington and the Continental Congress's Secret Committee. However, British agents were quite successful in penetrating Washington's headquarters as well as gaining knowledge of Benjamin Franklin's diplomatic operations in Paris. American cryptographic skills made little difference in the outcome of the Revolutionary War.

During the nineteenth century, American military cryptography suffered from the same ills that plagued U.S. military and political intelligence in general. There would be a flurry of coding and decoding activity in time of war, but with the coming of peace, cryptographic knowledge and skills would atrophy and have to be relearned again at the next outbreak of hostilities. The entire U.S. intelligence capability in this era can best be described as primitive. Those Americans who engaged in the craft were invariably amateurs.

This cycle was broken during the twentieth century through the efforts of Herbert O. Yardley, a State Department code clerk who demonstrated a capability to break foreign ciphers before World War I. During that war, Yardley was used as an instructor and organizer for U.S. military cryptography. Afterward, he resumed his State Department work in the 1920s, and much to the advantage of U.S. negotiators, broke the Japanese diplomatic code during the Washington Conference that led to the Washington Naval Arms Limitation Treaty of 1922. When the State Department discontinued this work, Yardley retired and wrote The American Black Chamber (1931), exposing his feats and causing foreign nations to manufacture ciphers that were far more difficult to decode.

The next master American codebreaker was the War Department's William F. Friedman, who managed to create a machine that could decipher much of the Japanese Foreign Office's “Purple” Code in 1940. Army and navy intelligence officers coordinated the placement of radio intercept stations, exchanged information, and produced signals intelligence known as MAGIC even before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. However, the Japanese main naval code was not broken until early 1942. During World War II, the army and navy became adept at both signals intelligence and the ability to create codes that were nearly impossible for the Axis powers to decipher. But American intercept and deciphering capabilities were no panacea; for example, in late 1944 there was a rapid decline in the quality of U.S. Army intelligence as American forces approached the German border. Telephonic communications of the German Army had been monitored and reported to the Allies by the French Resistance. Learning or suspecting this, Germans defending France were forced to use their radios more often than they would have liked and these coded radio messages were intercepted (as they had been since 1940) by the British and decided through the process called ULTRA. But as the German forces withdrew into Germany in late 1944, they traded radio communications for the comparatively secure German telephone system, and other land lines. The concentration of troops that led to the rapid and initially successful German thrust into Belgium in December 1944 in the Battle of the Bulge was not detected by a U.S. intelligence system that had grown too reliant on communications intelligence.

Following World War II, the Department of Defense (DoD) combined army and navy cryptography and in 1952 designated the resulting organization the National Security Agency (NSA). Headed by a military officer and making its headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, NSA kept a low profile during the Cold War. By the 1990s, it had created over 2,000 air, land, sea, and space‐based intercept sites. During this period, it gained the largest budget and the most personnel of any element of the U.S. intelligence community, including the Central Intelligence Agency. Much of the reason for this size and expense stems from the fact that NSA's work is not only dependent on the latest technology, it is also labor‐intensive. Cryptanalysis, particularly work in breaking some of America's adversaries' high‐level codes, requires large numbers of people who must endlessly toil to decipher critical foreign communications for the use of U.S. decision makers. The same applies to the creation of secure communications for the U.S. government. Secure communications also demands manpower and equipment. And NSA's work is not limited to creating or deciphering “secure” communications between people. As the missile age developed from the 1950s on, telemetry between instruments, guidance systems, and detection systems was increasingly deciphered or encoded.

Since most industrialized nations have created sophisticated codes for use in their most sensitive communications, NSA cannot quickly decipher an opponent's high‐level messages. Lower‐level codes, those associated with typical military units, are somewhat easier to break; but here some of the best information may be which units are communicating with a particular headquarters. This “traffic analysis,” the art of associating one organization with another in time and space, is a specialty of military intelligence analysts and has contributed to several American military successes, particularly before and during the Persian Gulf War, 1990–91. But as U.S. cryptographic achievements have become known, opponents have avoided radio communications, relying on face‐to‐face meetings or the simple use of messengers. Electronic intercept is only one of several components the American military intelligence community uses to provide their commanders with the best information about an adversary.
[See also Cold War: External Course; Cold War: Domestic Course.]

Bibliography

Herbert O. Yardley , The American Black Chamber, 1931.
Fletcher Pratt , Secret and Urgent: The Story of Codes and Ciphers, 1939.
David Kahn , The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing, 1967.
Ronald W. Clark , The Man Who Broke Purple: The Life of Colonel William F. Friedman, 1977.
U.S. Army Security Agency , The History of Codes and Ciphers in the United States Prior to World War I, 1978.
U.S. Army Security Agency , The History of Codes and Ciphers in the United States During World War I, 1979.
James Bamford , The Puzzle Palace: A Report on NSA, America's Most Secret Agency, 1982.
Thomas Parrish , The American Codebreakers: The U.S. Role in ULTRA, 1986.

Rod Paschall