The Desire for Enigma: The Mysterious Theft of the Code Machine

Days to Centenary: 234

On April 1, 2000 someone pulled a major April Fool’s prank, stealing one of only three Enigma code machines in the world from Bletchley Park. The Abwehr Enigma G312 machine was valued at £100,000.

Police believed that the machine had simply been carried out of the historic site, but don’t blame Bletchley Park. The enigma was secured in a glass cabinet which was not broken in the theft. An alarm system was in use and volunteers were watching over the site’s displays. Whoever carried out the theft was either very lucky or, more likely, very professional. All the more so because the theft happened just a week before a new infrared security system was to be installed.

Just what had happened to the machine was a mystery for several months. Then, in September 2000, police began receiving letters from a man who referred to himself as “the Master,” who claimed to be acting on behalf of a third party who had innocently purchased the machine, not knowing that it was stolen.

At one point police entertained the charmingly recursive theory that the letters from the Master contained coded clues as to the Enigma’s location and called in expert code breakers.

The Master’s letters demanded £25,000 for the machine’s return, to be paid by October 6, 2000. Bletchley Park announced that it would pay the ransom and had the money ready, but even as the deadline passed the Master failed to make contact to collect it.

Two weeks later Jeremy Paxman, a television presenter at the BBC, opened a parcel at his office and found the Enigma machine inside. It was missing a few parts, but these were later delivered as well.

Paxman and the purloined Enigma

Ultimately a dealer in World War Two memorabilia named Dennis Yates was charged with “handling” the stolen merchandise after admitting that he sent the letters and delivered the machine to Paxman. Yates was scheduled to stand trial at Aylesbury Crown Court, but decided at the last moment to plead guilty and was sentenced to ten months in jail.

In court, Yates said he had become involved in a scheme which soon passed out of his control and that his life had been threatened by persons involved in the theft. He never named the actual theives and they were never caught.

The title of this post is an allusion to a painting by Salvador Dali called The Enigma of Desire — My Mother, My Mother, My Mother (1929). Details of its creation and underlying psychology here.

Grokking the Enigma

Days to Centenary: 246

The term “grok” comes from the novel Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein.  The novel’s own definition of grok is as follows:

Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because of our Earthling assumptions) as color means to a blind man.

It might be permissible to say that Alan Turing grokked the Enigma, the encoding/decoding device used by the German military during World War II.  Probably the closest any of us mortals will come to reproducing his experience will come from reading the Enigma web page mounted by Erik Vestergaard, a Danish mathematician and high school math teacher.

The Enigma plugboard

The site is full of useful information, but so is a corporate prospectus — that doesn’t make them a great read.

Luckily the site is also lively and well illustrated and provides clear explanations of how the Enigma worked and how its codes were broken by Turing and company.  And when an explanation isn’t enough, the page has vivid diagrams that help the reader understand what’s going on.

An encryption diagram from the page

And for those who are upset by the fact that Turing’s renown often means that his predecessors in Poland — who worked out early Enigma cracks — are overlooked, the page has an extensive section on Marian Rejewski and the Poles.  This includes links to pdfs of mathematical papers on the methods used by Rejewski and his compatriots.

Marian Rejewski

Finally, Vestergaard took his students on a trip to Bletchley Park in 2007 and his photographs not only provide a homelier view of the place than one gets on many other web sites, but it gives us a glipse at just how badly in need of repair this historic site is.  As I recently wrote, the site has just been awarded funds by the Heritage Lottery for a major reconstruction project, but the Bletchley Park Trust must raise over a million pounds on its own before it can access the lottery funds.  You might want to think about making a small donation so that the Trust can reach its fundraising goal and unlock the endowment it needs.

Hut 6 at Bletchley Park, photographed during Vestergaard's class trip

For a well rounded introduction to the historical role and the functioning of the Enigma machine that presented such a challenge to Allied codebreakers, I have found no better resource than this page.

Churchill: Turing made the single biggest contribution to the war effort

Days to Centenary: 248

It’s sometimes easy all these years after the end of World War II to lose track of the significance of events and individuals, even when at the time the events were staggering and the individuals were critical to the course of history. It’s even easier to lose track of an individual’s impact when it was a closely guarded government secret during the war and for a long time afterward.

Alan Turing’s work at the centre of the extremely successful Bletchley Park codebreaking efforts is now a well documented matter of historical record, but even so it’s easy to underestimate it because the secrecy which earlier surrounded it prevented it from gathering to itself the attributes of a legend in the way that contributions that were publicized as they took place (or shortly afterward) were able to do. It never gained the momentum to reach critical mass, to mix physics metaphors for a moment.

And, in today’s computer-dependent world, it may be that Turing’s other contributions — as the intellectual father of the universal computer and the instigator of artificial intelligence — are so glaringly relevant to our day to day lives that it’s easy to allow those aspects of his life to overshadow his war work.

Finally, Turing did so much, and the praise that’s resulted has (much after the fact) become so effusive, that it’s tempting to assume that it’s overblown. One might even be forgiven for thinking that in a rush to distance itself from its shameful gay-bashing past, modern Britain has overshot the mark and exaggerated Turing’s importance to the Allied war effort.

So just how important was he? Winston Churchill said that Turing made the single biggest contribution to Allied victory in the war against Nazi Germany and its Axis partners. Not one of the biggest, or really bloody huge, or damned near incalculable, but the single most estimable contribution of any person, period.

Captain Jerry Roberts, who worked with Turing at Bletchley Park and who was in a position to see firsthand exactly how his codebreaking interacted with the rest of the war effort, says “without him we would have lost the war.” Roberts told the BBC:

You have to understand the measure of what Turing did. Early in the war, in 1939, he had broken the Enigma used by the Luftwaffe and the German army but he’d been unable to break the naval Enigma.

In 1940/41 the German U-boats were sinking our food ships and our ships bringing in armaments left right and centre, and there was nothing to stop this until Turing managed to break naval Enigma, as used by the U-boats. We then knew where the U-boats were positioned in the Atlantic and our convoys could avoid them.

If that hadn’t happened, it is entirely possible, even probable, that Britain would have been starved and would have lost the war.

Of course Turing didn’t do the work at Bletchley Park single-handed. Mightn’t he be receiving credit that’s due to the entire team of men and women who worked there? There’s no doubt that every person who worked in the cryptography effort has a right to be immensely proud of the results of their work, but Roberts still insists that Turing’s role was essential:

Interviewer: A number of your colleagues were unsung heroes because of the secrecy surrounding the work of Bletchley Park. Should Alan Turing be singled out do you think?

Roberts: Yes, because without him, I and many people are convinced that we would have lost the war.

Even if you don’t take Churchill and Roberts at their literal word, it seems clear tht Turing’s contribution to the Nazi defeat would be hard to overstate . So on June 23, 2012 when you’re honouring Turing (as I know you will be), be thankful for your laptop, sure, and be grateful for your iPhone. They both rely on Turing’s pioneering work. But you might also want to be thankful that we’re not all living in one of those alternate histories where the Nazis won the war and established dominion over the world.

YouTube hosts a documentary called World War II, Mind of a Codebreaker, which documents some of what took place in that long ago time at Bletchley Park. The video quality is low, and it’s broken up into twelve pieces, but it’s well worth watching anyway. All parts are embedded below.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

Part Seven

Part Eight

Part Nine

Part Ten

Part Eleven

Part Twelve

Turing News Update – Bletchley Park Gets £4.6M For Preservation… But There’s A Catch

Days to Centenary: 260

The Bletchley Park Trust, which has custody of Alan Turing’s wartime codebreaking stomping grounds, has just been awarded £4.6 million by the Heritage Lottery Fund to restore and preserve the historic site, which at one point was nearly bulldozed to make way for a Tesco supermarket.

Bletchley Park

Still, the Trust must first raise £1.7 million on its own in order to unlock the lottery funds.

Much of Bletchley Park is in poor condition and is deteriorating, making this fundraising — as the Trust web site puts it — “a race against time.”

Hut 6 at Bletchley Park during the war.

Consider making a donation to the Trust today to help preserve this monument to Alan Turing and the many, many others who worked tirelessly (and in the obscurity required by national security) to defeat Naziism. You can find details about the campaign here, make a donation here, or shop for Bletchley Park merch.