Any talk that starts with “I hope you’re all here because you like history and you like numbers, because we’re going to do a lot of math later on…” has a vast amount to commend it already (in my books, at least).

And Anja Drephal’s talk on pen-and-paper crypto hacking from Stalinist-era Russia just keeps on getting better (she was doing her doctorate on metahistory in Vienna at the time of the 30th Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg in December 2013, where she made this presentation).

Richard Sorge, the subject of the talk, belonged to the same pre-WW2 Soviet ‘out-reach’ spy wave that carried ‘Otto’ to London (who recruited Kim Philby, etc) and so forth. To get messages back to Vladivostok from Japan, the Russian military devised a pen-and-paper additive book cipher for him – he chose a German statistical yearbook for 1935 as his book, and away they went.

Sorge and his group was captured in 1941, and put in jail: he was sentenced to death (mostly in the hope that the Russians would swap him for a Japanese spy in a Russian jail), but because the Soviets denied all knowledge of him, he was executed before the end of the war.

Most of the Soviet and GDR historiography about Sorge later painted a heroic picture of him: while most of the West German historiography focuses instead on his drunkenness, his numerous affairs, his illnesses and so forth. As always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle: but perhaps that’s the nature of the spy ‘trade’, to fall into every historical crack.

Anyone hoping to find insights into other well-known unbroken ciphers (I’m thinking in particular of the Somerton Man’s Rubaiyat cryptogram) will doubtless come away dissatisfied: but it’s not really that kind of a thing. I liked it anyway. 🙂

7 thoughts on “World War II Crypto Hackers presentation…

  1. Diane on June 4, 2015 at 10:44 am said:

    I enjoyed hearing the session, though the images didn’t work for me.

    Of course, if you espouse the ‘history is just subjective’ philosophy, then my telling you that the vid part didn’t work for me can’t be considered to recount an objectively true historical event, so that instead of taking what I say as a fact (fact? what fact?), you can now invent some theory of your own about why I should want to say that it did/didn’t occur – and what’s more, since your theory is as good as anyone else’s – so long as you announce your position – then in the end it just comes down to whether you or I are better at swaying the masses.

    It’s a ridiculous philosophy for an historian – it ends in the negation of one’s calling, or a cold-blooded near-religious pragmatism akin to certain books written in the 1930s. “It’s not whether what you say is true; it’s how many you can convince”.

    I’m going back to re-read Herodotus: now there was an intelligent man! Wrong sometimes, but intelligent.

  2. Diane: I didn’t say I agreed with her take on metahistory (or indeed on history in general), but I did like the whole sorry / Sorge saga. Someone may be a bad swimmer but still find themselves in a beautiful swimming pool. 😉

  3. Diane on June 4, 2015 at 11:35 am said:

    For those who didn’t follow that link – the speaker refers to her teacher as belonging to one historical school and then mentions another which describes the aim of writing history objectively as a form of self-delusion.

    (The ‘you’ is not particular; English equivalent of Fr. “on”)

  4. Diane on June 4, 2015 at 11:40 am said:

    Oh – there you are *jumps*. You appeared while I was writing the sequel.

    Yes, I’d have loved to see the vid. The speaker sounded like a go-ahead sort of person. But *oooh* the air was so thick with competitive self-righteous clever-mick angst.

    I wouldn’t be a cryptanalyst for anything – need a slower sort of life.

  5. SirHubert on June 4, 2015 at 12:11 pm said:

    “Most of the Soviet and GDR historiography about Sorge later painted a heroic picture of him: while most of the West German historiography focuses instead on his drunkenness, his numerous affairs, his illnesses and so forth.”

    Goodness. Anyone would think there was a subjective element going on.

  6. SirHubert: certainly selective. 😉

  7. xplor on June 6, 2015 at 7:14 pm said:

    Spies come in all types. The one they called Ramsay was one of the best. Was he the model for James Bond ? In 1939 he ran his Zundapp into the wall. Hoping to keep his information flowing he gave his cipher to his radio operator Max Clausen.. After that his team went down hill. Interesting two British spies, Ruth Kuczynski and Roger Hollis were in his circle.

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