Bigrams in the pigeon cipher…

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I’ve been wondering whether the pigeon cipher might be based around bigrams, i.e. where you split the cipher into pairs. If you disregard what seems to be the ‘AOAKN’ key indicator at the start and end, there are two basic ways to split the message into pairs. What is immediately interesting is that if you start immediately after AOAKN, you get three repeated pairs in the message (rather than just one), and that four of those six repeats occur every other pair along a short stretch towards the end of the message.

AOAKN
HV PK DF NF JW YI DD CR QX SR DJ HF PG OV FN MI AP XP AB UZ WY
YN PC MP NW HJ RZ HN LX KG ME MK KO NO IB AK EE QU AO TA RB QR
HD JO FM TP ZE HL KX GH RG GH TJ RZ CQ FN KT QK LD TS GQ IR U
AOAKN

AOAK
NH VP KD FN FJ WY ID DC RQ XS RD JH FP GO VF NM IA PX PA BU ZW
YY NP CM PN WH JR ZH NL XK GM EM KK ON OI BA KE EQ UA OT AR BQ
RH DJ OF MT PZ EH LK XG HR GG HT JR ZC QF NK TQ KL DT SG QI RU
AOAKN

The WW2 “Slidex” code works by having a table of codes particular to each arm of the armed forces (i.e. Royal Engineers, Operations/Signals, etc) where each bigram pair encodes a particular word often used by that arm. To encipher numbers or words, you bracket them inside a pair of SWITCH ON and SWITCH OFF bigram codes (there are several of each), and pick bigrams that correspond to each letter or digit or digit pair.

Hence I strongly suspect that what we are looking at in “GH RG GH TJ RZ CQ FN” is a sequence of letters enciphered in the Slidex SWITCH mode, i.e. where each letter is enciphered as a bigram.

Unsurprisingly, I would really like to read the 1944 Revised Instructions for using the Slidex R/T Code, and to have copies of the various Slidex code sheets and coordinate offsets used by the Royal Engineers and Infantry Brigade on D/Day, as I suspect these will allow us to read this message (does anyone have copies of these I can see?) Fingers crossed!

The unfortunate life of the Army’s Cysquare cipher…

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When I was trawling through WW2 pigeon / cipher-related documents at the National Archives, I found a brief mention of a medium grade Army cipher called “Cysquare”. I half-remembered the name and that it was (unsurprisingly) a cy[pher] based around a square, but couldn’t remember the context at all.

However, when I later searched for it on the Internet, it all started to come back to me… because Cysquare had been devised by my cryptological hero, master codebreaker Brigadier John Tiltman (‘The Brig’). Very much as the NSA PDF paean to him would have it, few would disagree that Tiltman was indeed “A Giant Among Cryptanalysts“.

Tiltman himself wrote a short introduction to his Cysquare (recently declassified, though brutally redacted) called “A Cryptologic Fairy Tale“, on the basis (a) that he’d lost the original material and had had to make up some examples, and (b) that it had a happy ending (which I guess was that the Allied Forces won the war). Here’s how The Brig described it (though with a few linefeeds added to make it acceptable to our modern short attention spans):-

Sometime later in 1941 I produced the “Cysquare” which was accepted by the War Office as a low-echelon cipher to replace the “Stencil” cipher and issued to the Eighth Army in North Africa, Figures 8 and 9 [both redacted, *sigh*] give photographs of two pages of the printed instructions.

The grille has 676 (26 x 26) squares. Each column and each line contains 10 white (permitted) squares, with the exception of 3 “plus” lines containing 20 white squares each and 3 “minus” lines which contain no white squares at all. The key for the day consists of 26 letters of the alphabet in random order with the numbers from 1 to 26 written under them also in random order. For each message the operator selects a 4-letter indicator from a random list of such groups provided him for use in turn. The indicator in the case of the example given [but redacted] is GMBX. The numbers corresponding to this indicator are 11 19 20 7, i.e., position 11, line 19, column 20, taking out number 7. The grille could be used with any of its sides at the top. Position II indicates that the grille is used as shown with numbers 8 to 13 at the top.

The numerical key for the day is written from left to right at the top of the grille and from the bottom upwards on the left hand side. The plain text is written into the grille starting at the next white square after the square described by the line coordinate 19 and the column coordinate 20, using the elements of the key to define the corresponding lines and columns. If and when the operator reaches the last white square in the grille he proceeds from the top left-hand corner. He then takes out the columns of letters starting at the top of the grille and in the column designated by the taking out number, i.e., in this case 7.

The message is written out in 4-letter groups preceded by the 4 letter indicator and followed by the number of letters, the indicator repeated, and the time and date. No message of more than 220 letters was permitted. If a message handed in for transmission exceeded this length it had to be divided into parts, none of them exceeding 200 letters in length.

However, somewhat contrary to Tiltman’s story’s name, Cysquare itself didn’t really have a happy ending. For a start, a number of people thought that cryptanalysts such as Tiltman shouldn’t be messing about with making their own cipher systems, and so there was a certain amount of resistance to it from within, right from the beginning.

The second problem was to do with implementation: even though it relied on disposable pads containing pre-printed grilles, somewhere along the line someone had the bright stupid idea that they could economize by getting the Army cipher clerks in North Africa to reuse the pads, by writing messages in pencil and then erasing them with a rubber. However, before very long it became impossible to tell a blank square from a dark square – everything in the grille ended up fifty shades or grey (so to speak). Hence the cipher clerks refused to use the system, and it was quietly abandoned.

However, when Germans captured Cysquare pads and implementation notes, their cryptographers rather liked it. And so in 1944, a new system started to appear in German messages: the Rasterschlüssel (also known as RS44), a system derived directly from Tiltman’s Cysquare cipher. Of course, Tiltman quickly recognized it: and had the Germans not made some mistakes when designing their pads’ grille designs, they might have been extremely hard to decipher.

So… was Cysquare a success, or a disaster? It was certainly quite secure (if somewhat awkward to use): but in the end, it nearly gave Germany a cryptographic edge late in the war.

For fans of the pigeon cipher story, it seems unlikely that its message used Cysquare… and so the search for that goes on.

PS: there’s an 2004 article in Cryptologia by Michael J. Cowan called “Rasterschluessel 44 — The Epitome of Hand Field Ciphers“.

On irony, question marks, brackets, and the Voynich Manuscript…

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It may surprise you a little, but sometimes I do like to think about things which aren’t to do with cipher mysteries at all. Today I stumbled upon a short video on situational irony that, just like Alanis Morissette’s song “It’s Ironic”, professed to explain irony by example yet failed miserably. Having said that, perhaps the creator’s inability to explain irony despite setting out to do so is the best example of irony that could be given… but I’ll leave you to decide for yourself.

But that set me thinking about irony punctuation, specifically the reversed question mark ‘⸮’ which your browser may or may not support. And that set me thinking about the 16th century English origins of the modern question mark glyph ‘?’. And that set me thinking about the late mediaeval abbreviation for ‘quaestio’ (‘what’) i.e. ‘qo’ or ‘4o’, where (many typography historians believe) the ‘o’ subsequently migrated down beneath the ‘q’/’4’ to yield the modern question mark shape.

But that reminded me of a decade ago when I was tracing the origins of the ‘4o’ shape seen in the Voynich Manuscript: back then, I stumbled across some late 14th and early 15th century examples of ‘4o’ in legal documents, but have been unable to find any since. In retrospect, I think that what I was looking at were very probably examples of abbreviated ‘q[aesti]o’, i.e. prototypical question marks. In fact, this ‘4o’ glyph pair appears in a number of Northern Italian fifteenth century ciphers, particularly in Milan (but that’s another story).

Yet in Voynichese, the ‘4o’ shape almost always appears at the start of words (which isn’t where question marks go), and at the start of multiple adjacent words such as ‘qokedy qokedy’ etc (which is also not how question marks work). Hence I believe that what we are looking at in Voynichese’s ‘4o’ is a 14th century abbreviation-cum-shape being appropriated and put to some other confusing use within a non-obvious textual system, in just the same way that the Voynich’s ‘aiir’ / ‘aiiv’ family of shapes appears to be a 13th-14th century page numbering abbreviation-cum-shape being appropriated and put to some other confusing use within a non-obvious textual system.

If you can think of a better definition of cryptography, please let me know. 🙂

But while I was idly looking all this up, I noticed several mentions of medieval brackets: apparently, the widely used convention for these was to surround the contents with reversed brackets (i.e. back-to-front relative to modern brackets) and to underline the contents. So, whereas we would write (tum ti tum), a medieval scribe would write )tum ti tum( instead.

Wait just a minute, I thought, I’ve seen these early on in the Voynich Manuscript. Isn’t it the case that what researchers sometimes call “split gallows” enclosing text is simply visually hiding an upside-down medieval bracket set?

Just to be clear, here’s what I’m thinking:-

This visual trick only occurs right at the start of the manuscript (in fact, the above example is from f8v, on the back of the first bifolio). However, I suspect that splitting gallows in this way served to highlight the contents rather than to hide them, and so the encipherer then finessed the cipher system to use other (far less obvious) ways of achieving the same end through the rest of the document. Hence I believe that this was an early experiment in hiding the contents of the split gallows, which morphed into the far less visually obvious horizontal Neal keys (pairs of single-leg gallows, usually placed about 2/3rds of the way across the top line of a page or paragraph).

So… I started out trying to read about irony (and not do Voynich research), and ended up doing Voynich research after all. Is that ironic?

“Small explosion in Unicode factory, nobody hurt”… :-)

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Well, that was what I thought when I first saw the ciphertext in Part 2 Chapter 8 of “The Fates Unwind Infinity“, an online book detailing the anonymous author’s thoughts on a whole load of speculative-philosophy-style stuff (a great big hat-tip to Richard Greendale who passed a link to it my way, sorry it’s taken so long to post about it!) It’s the kind of obsessively intense book that seems to have been written in a three-day sleep-free trance: as far as I can tell, you might well need to enter a broadly similar state in order to make proper sense of it.

All the same, there’s something quaintly naive about the cipher alphabet used, in that it is made up of a load of rare characters all thrown together, like one of those abysmal Chinese emails where the proper character encoding has failed to arrive with the main text:-

˛¿?,.ç*ϕ , ¥ϕ’¡ˇ∆-.#-ϕπ¡q.µ•∆ˇ•.,*ϕ ,˚ç¿¡˛¡ç˚•ç¡çq˘.Ω’*ϕ¡Ô.çº-.¿˚¡∆ ,. ¥µç,.˛
¡*º•¡º•ˇ.˚’ϕ.ˇ¡π.ç∞¿µ¿.ç¡∆-.y¡,ˇç*•¡•˚.¿¡’•˛•¥ç¡çµ•¿,¿.ç.•Ωç¿ϕ¡’.ˇ˚.ºÔq.¿ π˘
¡-*˚∆.•*.•#-˛¿ˇ’ç.¥¡ˇ¿¡ π¿µ¡¿.ç∆’,Ω.,˚¡•˘.ˇ•∆.¿,˘¡˛¡ç.µ•¥.•*∞Ô¡º-∆¿˘ç˚ϕ-**.
¿¥¡ç.•.ç¡,.¿πˇ•.q’ˇ¡˘’,º-ˇ∆.•ºΩ.#¡•µ*˘.˚¥¿ç.-∆’¡˛ π˘.ç•¿*•,.ç.Ôqç,¿¡ç-
∆º.•˘’¿’•.ˇµ˛ç,ˇ˚ˇ∆¿¡*y,∞¿µ¿ç.˛Ωπ.-.,•¡’º•.ç∆ ¥ yç˚.ç¿,¿ç*Ô¡’•.πϕ-˘*•ç.•˛¡-.
¿,.µç•Ω¡¿.º-µˇ•.^ˇ˚∞¿ π*ç’∆•µ¡Ô˘ˇ.µ ¥*µ˚∆.¿¡Ω•.-ˇ¿•., πç˘º.-º*∆¡*˚•qÔ
¡’.˚’#¿˛*ˇ.˘ πçˇ•Ω¡¿¥ π.µˇ¿˘.∆º˚µç˚•.*’∆µ¡-˘¡¿-ç.,¿.¿*∆.,•¡¿ç π*.-.
¿˘,Ω’Ω.ç#ˇµ•’˚µÔ¡¿˛*¥¡’.¿∆ç π*.• ¥Ωq,˘∞.¿¿-*µ-*¥¡•µçµ¡•.,˛.¿µ∆˚,.º-
çµ πˇÔµ¡’µ.’•ϕ’ ¥-#y˚∆µº-¡ˇ¿µ•ç.µ¡˛.•˘π¡Ô,µ¡˚˚µ’µ,¿,∆-˛.Ωç•.¿¥µ.µçµ,-˘¿π
¡q•.Ô∆.˚ˇ-,µˇ’µç•’¿µ-˘¡ˇ¡µ˚.π∆.•∞-µç*Ô˛˘¿.Ω¡¥˚ˇ,•y.,∆•¡˛-¡*,¿π ,,µ.˛ç∆-
µ˚*˘•.’•.ˇ’-µ¿.ˇΩçyÔçˇ¡•˘¡˚*’,.∆º¿ç•ç π , ¥˘•¿.∞-¡˚˘*µ.Ω•.¿-˛qç,¡,•∆˛¿˘-
¿.•ˇ¥µçˇ,,’*ç’*˚ˇ¡∆ π ,*Ô¿’˛¿•.µy¡,畺Ωç-˚ ¥ ,ˇ•¿∆¿µ˛¡˘-¿•,¡*. π∆qç.º•,º*¿#
¡˛.,µ˚.¿çq˛çˇ,ç’¡µ•.¿’.,.qç˛¥∆硢*•,-∞•¿,˘¡qÔ¥.∆µ˛•.˚’¿,-∆^,•Ω
¿*çµπ纕q˘˚-˛¡ˇ-,,.µ#.’*ˇyº˛ϕ ,Ôˇç,˘¡∆q˘¥.¿’ç˛¿,•º*º•Ω¿µ˚,,硲.q¡¿∆π
¿∆µ.,祿-¡¿.˘.ç˛∆¡¿•¡¿çy-.¿º*.¿*ç∞¿∆’¡,µˇ•.’•,.ç¿-¿ˇº*ç*¡˚.’¥π.çºΩ¡*˘˛
¿∆.#.,•¡¿çµµ¿Ô∆•ç*∆-µº*qµ˚.-.¿Ω ,絲¿çˇ¥’¡µˇ•¡ˇ•., π.’ç¥*∆¿µyç.˚’µ¡¿,-
çº*ºµ.•˛.˚Ô¿µq¡ˇ.¥•˘.*,.¿-˚,µπ¡*.¿•µ¿µç˛µ-˚ç¥∞µç.•’¡ˇ,.-.’∆.Ωq’Ô¿•˚¡¿π.#,.
¥.¿˛¡,ç-˘*yµ*.¿•∆.ˇ,¿˚çº-˘¡˛,ç¿¥-*硵.,Ω•.˚ πçq¿•ˇç¿Ô.ˇ¡’Ωˇµ.*∆.ç’˛,¡¿,.
¥-.*˚’•.* π¡ºΩº.yç-.˛µ.¿¡ˇ¥µ,µç•,.˘.,.˛¡¿∆º.qç*ç¿˚-.•*.¿,˘ºç,ç¡∞.Ω’.ˇ˘ˇ
¡¿Ô∆.#ç˚•µçΩµç˛¿µµ ¥ˇ*ç¿ π*.*∆.•¿µ,ç-‘ç˚-*•¡-Ωπ ,¿¥¡ç∆˚¿.Ôq*¿¿∞.•ˇ.˛
¿çˇ¡q.¿,µ•’¿-,.˚¡’-¡*º•˛ç.ˇ,,¿.µç∆Ωπ.y¥µç˚*¡˛¿,¥,’¥¡∆çµ-ç•*.^Ô˚¿q•Ω.˛,˘µç
¥ˇµ-ˇ∞*.’ π∆¡’*˚q˘•ˇ.q∆¥µ¡˘.*¥Ô¿µ˛∆ç,.?µ˛¿.¡

Note that some of the shapes are in bold, though I haven’t transcribed these any differently (which may well be a mistake). Yet in fact, for all its typographical showiness, it turns out that this ciphertext uses only 27 different characters. Leaving ‘q’ and ‘y’ intact and replacing the rest with A-H and J-Z (I don’t like using ‘I’, it’s too easy to confuse it with ‘1’ and ‘l’), you get the rather more usable:

ABCDEFGHDJHKLMNOEPOHQLqERSNMSEDGHDTFBLALFTSFLFqUEZKGHLVEFWOEBTLNDEJRFDEA
LGWSLWSMETKHEMLQEFXBRBEFLNOEyLDMFGSLSTEBLKSASJFLFRSBDBEFESZFBHLKEMTEWVqEBQU
LOGTNESGESPOABMKFEJLMBLQBRLBEFNKDZEDTLSUEMSNEBDULALFERSJESGXVLWONBUFTHOGGE
BJLFESEFLDEBQMSEqKMLUKDWOMNESWZEPLSRGUETJBFEONKLAQUEFSBGSDEFEVqFDBLFO
NWESUKBKSEMRAFDMTMNBLGyDXBRBFEAZQEOEDSLKWSEFNJyFTEFBDBFGVLKSEQHOUGSFESALOE
BDERFSZLBEWORMSEYMTXBQGFKNSRLVUMERJGRTNEBLZSEOMBSEDQFUWEOWGNLGTSqV
LKETKPBAGMEUQFMSZLBJQERMBUENWTRFTSEGKNRLOULBOFEDBEBGNEDSLBFQGEOE
BUDZKZEFPMRSKTRVLBAGJLKEBNFQGESJZqDUXEBBOGROGJLSRFRLSEDAEBRNTDEWO
FRQMVRLKREKSHKJOPyTNRWOLMBRSFERLAESUQLVDRLTTRKRDBDNOAEZFSEBJRERFRDOUBQ
LqSEVNETMODRMKRFSKBROULMLRTEQNESXORFGVAUBEZLJTMDSyEDNSLAOLGDBQDDREAFNO
RTGUSEKSEMKORBEMZFyVFMLSULTGKDENWBFSFQDJUSBEXOLTUGREZSEBOAqFDLDSNABUO
BESMJRFMDDKGFKGTMLNQDGVBKABSERyLDFSWZFOTJDMSBNBRALUOBSDLGEQNqFEWSDWGBP
LAEDRTEBFqAFMDFKLRSEBKEDEqFAJNFMUGSDOXSBDULqVJENRASETKBDONYDSZ
BGFRQFWSqUTOALMODDERPEKGMyWAHDVMFDULNqUJEBKFABDSWGWSZBRTDDFMAEqLBNQ
BNREDFJBOLBEUEFANLBSLBFyOEBWGEBGFXBNKLDRMSEKSDEFBOBMWGFGLTEKJQEFWZLGUA
BNEPEDSLBFRRBVNSFGNORWGqRTEOEBZDFRABFMJKLRMSLMSEDQEKFJGNBRyFETKRLBDO
FWGWRESAETVBRqLMEJSUEGDEBOTDRQLGEBSRBRFAROTFJXRFESKLMDEOEKNEZqKVBSTLBQEPDE
JEBALDFOUGyRGEBSNEMDBTFWOULADFBJOGFLREDZSETQFqBSMFBVEMLKZMREGNEFKADLBDE
JOEGTKSEGQLWZWEyFOEAREBLMJRDRFSDEUEDEALBNWEqFGFBTOESGEBDUWFDFLXEZKEMUM
LBVNEPFTSRFZRFABRRJMGFBQGEGNESBRDFOKFTOGSLOZQDBJLFNTBEVqGBBXESMEA
BFMLqEBDRSKBODETLKOLGWSAFEMDDBERFNZQEyJRFTGLABDJDKJLNFROFSGEYVTBqSZEADURF
JMROMXGEKQNLKGTqUSMEqNJRLUEGJVBRANFDECRABEL

However, despite the promising-looking frequency counts, I haven’t yet had any luck cracking this as a monoalphabetic substitution cipher. The Friedman index of coincidence for this is 1.52 (slightly too low for English), which makes me strongly suspect that some punctuation is being enciphered here. Yet the commonest letter (‘E’) seems too frequent to be a plaintext ‘e’, and it doesn’t seem to encipher a space either.

As far as n-grams go, repeated 2-grams include:-
* EB (28 instances)
* SE (23)
* DE (19)
* ES (17)
* RF LB EF (16)
* ED (15)
* FE BR (14)
* BE NE BD (13)
* etc

Repeated 3-grams include:-
* GEB OEB MSE (5 instances)
* ETK EOE EBD SED KSE NES FES (4)
* LQE LBF DEJ OUL RMS RTE RFS QGE BEF BDU LBE GNE DBE EDS EBL DUL DEF DSL EKS EQN SDE GWS FTS ESG ERF JRF LKE SME SLB SEB ZSE SGE (3)
* etc

Sadly CrypTool-online only goes up to length-3 n-grams, as I suspect there may be some interesting 4-grams and 5-grams in there. An exercise for the reader! 😉

I don’t know what to make of this: when I first transcribed it, I really thought the answer would just pop out, but I haven’t had any luck with it so far… so I think I’m missing a trick. Any thoughts, codebreakers? 🙂

“The Curse of the Voynich”, now back on sale…

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Just a quick note to let you know that a freshly printed boxful of my book “The Curse of the Voynich” arrived here today, and with shinier covers than ever. 🙂 It is, of course, a perfect last-minute cipher-mystery-related Christmas present (for others or indeed for yourself), so feel free to order a copy (click on the appropriate PayPal-linked Buy Now button at the top there, and off you go).

If you don’t know about my take on the Voynich Manuscript, I’ve posted a 1000-word summary of the book here, part of which was covered in the National Geographic Ancient X-Files half-episode you may have seen (and which YouTube has now taken down). What I like best about “Curse” is that for all the potshots people have tried to take at it, it’s all basically still standing, which – considering that this is a highly-contested field where a typical Voynich theory has a shelf-life of a few days at most – is pretty good going, I think. 🙂

As always, I sign all copies bought direct from the Compelling Press site, and offer the option of adding an anagrammatic dedication at the front: so if your name was (for example) “Leonardo da Vinci”, you could have your copy dedicated to “Vindaloo and Rice” (which remains one of the best anagrams ever, however much you happen to like “Invalided Racoon”).

Incidentally, of all the other books on the Voynich Manuscript out there, I’d strongly recommend Mary D’Imperio’s classic (1976) “An Elegant Enigma”, which is now freely downloadable from the NSA as a PDF. Anyone with an interest in the Voynich Manuscript should read this – even if it is a little bit dated in places, D’Imperio does cover a lot of ground.

Dead WW2 pigeon cipher cracked with WW1 codebook (says the Mail)… errr, really?

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According to today’s Mail on Sunday, Canadian expert Gord Young has cracked most of the dead WW2’s pigeon’s cipher message using a WWI Royal Artillery codebook. It’s not a big old message, so let’s line up the decrypt for ourselves, shall we?

What is immediately clear is that
* The decrypt is done down columns of groups, not along rows of letters (…which isn’t how it was usually done at all)
* Each five-letter cipher group is presumed to be a completely independent initial-based sentence (…which isn’t etc)
* Each independent sentence’s decryption is guessed at somewhat hopefully (…which isn’t etc)
* “J” mostly codes for “J[erry]”
* “Q” pretty much always codes for “[Head]q[uarters]”
* “P” mostly codes for “P[anzers]” (a word which was only coined in about 1940, awkwardly for the WW1 codebook idea)
* Eight of the five-letter cipher groups are skipped because they don’t fit this (already very loose) pattern. (What?)

(1)AOAKN (?)HVPKD (10)FNFJ[W/U] (?)YIDDC
(2)RQXSR (7)DJHFP (11)GOVFN (15)MIAPX
(3)PABUZ (?)WYYNP (12)CMPNW (16)HJRZH
(?)NLXKG (?)MEMKK (?)ONOIB (17)A[K/R/H]EEQ
(4)UAOTA (8)RBQRH (?)DJOFM (18)TPZEH
(5)LKXGH (?)RGGHT (13)JRZCQ (19)FNKTQ
(6)KLDTS (9)GQIR[U/W] (14)AOAKN

(1) AOAKN – Artillery observer at ‘K’ Sector, Normandy.
(2) RQXSR – Requested headquarters supplement report.
(3) PABUZ – Panzer attack – blitz.
(4) UAOTA – West Artillery Observer Tracking Attack.
(5) LKXGH – Lt Knows extra guns are here.
(6) KLDTS – Know where local dispatch station is.
(7) DJHFP – Determined where Jerry’s headquarters front posts.
(8) RBQRH – Right battery headquarters right here.
(9) GQIR[U/W] – Found headquarters infantry right here.
(10) FNFJ[W/U] – Final note, confirming, found Jerry’s whereabouts.
(11) GOVFN – Go over field notes.
(12) CMPNW – Counter measures against Panzers not working.
(13) JRZCQ – Jerry’s right battery central headquarters here.
(14) AOAKN – Artillery observer at ‘K’ sector Normandy.
(15) MIAPX – Mortar, infantry attack panzers.
(16) HJRZH – Hit Jerry’s Right or Reserve Battery Here.
(17) A[K/R/H]EEQ – Already know electrical engineers headquarters.
(18) TPZEH – Troops, panzers, batteries, engineers, here.
(19) FNKTQ – Final note known to headquarters.

Sorry, Mail editors, but you’ve landed yourself a bit of a dud story here. If there is something good about this theory (and I for one haven’t found it yet), it’s hidden beneath a tangled mess of obviously wrong & over-interpretative nonsense, the kind of foolishly hopeful non-decrypticity David Kahn termed “enigmatology”. Ohhhhh dearrrrry me. 🙁

“The Roger Williams Code” cracked (the old-fashioned way)…

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A fulsome hat-tip to Flavia H for bouncing this rather nice Slate article on in my direction. It tells the story of how Brown’s student Lucas Mason-Brown managed to crack a 17th century shorthand system, one that had been used to squeeze a whole load of notes for an unpublished religious book on antipedobaptism (“opposing infant baptism”, if you’re interested) into the margins of a 240-page printed book after about 1679.

Its author was the theologian Roger Williams (as you may have guessed from the title), who was one of the founders of Rhode Island (hence the interest from Brown’s University, and in whose library the book sits). Incidentally, Williams was best known for his books “A Key Into the Language of America” (1643) [a little dictionary of Native American words], and “The Bloody Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience” (1644) [which persuasively espoused the principle of absolute liberty of conscience], the latter of which caused Parliament to order “the public hangman to burn the book”. Really, anyone who can be that annoying in print is more than OK by me.

As to the importance of all this, I’d fully agree it’s hard to talk up unpublished 17th century notes on antipedobaptism: all the same, it’s still a nice slice of research, with history and sleuthery in equal measures – so what I want to say is “well done, Lucas, great job!” Next stop the Anton Transcript? =:-p

At last, the secret history of that dead cipher pigeon…

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I spent last Saturday at the National Archives in Kew, accompanied by fellow programmer Stu Rutter who is just as fascinated by the whole pigeon cipher mystery as I am. Between us we did a kind of “Extreme Programming” two-man research team thing, where every time one found something unexpected or cool or had an insight, he would call the other over to see, or we’d both go downstairs to the café and discuss where we’d got to over a sandwich or whatever (reminder to self: don’t choose the double chocolate muffin again, it wasn’t very good).

The big result is that we ended up (I’m pretty sure) working out the secret history of this dead pigeon… and we didn’t even need to break its cipher (though Stu’s still on the case, more on that below). I’ll divide the overall argument down into a series of individual steps so that any passing Army historian who wants to take me to task over any detail can do so nice and easily. 🙂

1. Percy was an Army pigeon

I was already pretty sure of this: when I looked up all the “A Smith”s in the armed forces, every single “Serjeant” [with a ‘j’] was in the British Army. But what emerged at the National Archives were two widely-distributed pigeon-related documents (one from 1941, the other from 29th Jan 1944) that made it absolutely clear what different colour pigeon-carried canisters meant:
WO 205/225 – see pages 1/2/3 (at the back of the folder)
* Red = US Forces + British Army
* Blue = US Forces + British RAF
* Blue with coloured disk = British RAF
* Blue with white patch = RAF
* Red with coloured disk = British Special Service
* Grey = British Special Service
* Green = British Special Service
* Black = British Civil Police
* Yellow = British Commercial

Hence our dead pigeon was an Army pigeon; or (to be more precise) a NURP pigeon commandeered by the British Army.

2. The signature is that of Lance Serjeant William Stout

Knowing for sure that we’re looking at an Army message helps us narrow down the list of suspects to (I’m quite certain) one and only one individual – Lance Serjeant William Stout of 253rd Field Company of the Royal Engineers (as predicted here before), whose war grave says he died on 6th June 1944, the day better known as D-Day. You’ll read far more about Stout further down…

3. The pigeon was sent from France by a French speaker

I’m 99% certain that the “lib. 1625” writing on the cipher message was short for “libéré” (released) in French, and hence it seems overwhelmingly likely to me that the pigeon was released in France. But because there were no Royal Engineers at all in France (or indeed in Holland or Belgium) between the Dunkirk Evacuation (27th May 1940 – 4th June 1940) and D-Day (6th June 1944), the pigeon can therefore only have been sent either on or before 4th June 1940, or on or after 6th June 1944.

This gives us two “bubbles” of historical possibility to consider, the first ending with Dunkirk, the second starting on D-Day. How can we possibly tell which one of these was the right one? And can we be even more specific?

4. The pigeons were not released on or before Dunkirk

We’re helped here by the two pigeons’ ring tag identifications. Pigeon “NURP.37.DK.76” was the 76th pigeon to be ringed in 1937 by the DK (probably Dorking, we think) group of NURP [National Union of Racing Pigeons] pigeon fanciers, while “NURP 40 TW 194” was the 194th pigeon to be ringed in 1940 by the TW (almost certainly Tunbridge Wells) group. Yet having now read up on war-time pigeon-breeding administrivia at the National Archives, I know that (a) pigeons don’t normally breed in Winter; (b) pairs of pigeons will typically produce up to three pairs of eggs in a year, starting in Spring; (c) a young bird aged 6-8 weeks is called a “squeaker” and needs a fair bit of training before it is ready to race; and (d) pigeon races held in the first part of the summer almost never involve pigeons born earlier that year.

Hence if pigeon “NURP 40 TW 194” flew on 5th June 1940, it would have had to have been born in the middle of Winter right at the start of 1940: and the chances of there having been 193 other birds born and ringed earlier in 1940 among a single group of lofts around (say) Tunbridge Wells are extremely close to zero. Once you look at it like that, I think that there is no real chance that this pigeon was sent back from the Dunkirk evacuation, because it would simply have been too young.

5. The pigeons were released on D-Day itself – 6th June 1944

Here, the letter and number groups in the ciphertext itself give us the clues we need. Having also read up on the multitude of Army ciphers used in WW2 at the NA, I’m 99% certain how the structure of the wrapper around the cipher was contructed. Firstly, whatever system was employed for the cipher itself, the AOAKN letter group (which appears at the start and at the end of the message) is very likely an obfuscated or enciphered key reference for the message as a whole. And if this is right, then 1525/6 must surely hold the time and day of the month the cipher was sent at. “1525” = 3.25pm, “6” = “6th June 1944″… i.e. D-Day itself. But as we will see with Lance Serjeant Stout, this is the only day he could have sent it… though not quite as simply as you might expect from his gravestone.

6. Lance Serjeant Stout was mortally wounded on D-Day, and died on 28th June 1944

Right before the National Archives closed on Saturday, Stu & I managed to sneak a few minutes with the 1944 War Diaries for 253rd Field Company in the locked room at the back (someone else had put these diaries aside for photocopying this precise page, which made Stu and me both wonder if he or she might be a Cipher Mysteries lurker? Well, a big hello to you if that’s you!). Here’s what the entry for D-Day says:-

Well… not really very informative, you might think at first glance. Yet here’s where Stu Rutter really shone: having taken a photo of every page for June in these War Diaries, he then checked them all that evening and was pleasantly surprised to find an informative entry discussing Stout on the 28th June 1944:-

From this, we know for sure (a) that Stout was indeed in Normandy on D-Day; (b) that he was mortally wounded near Hermanville-sur-Mer (where he was later buried in the War Cemetery); (c) that he died of his wounds on the 28th June 1944; and that (d) he was in No. 2 Platoon. Stout was an NCO (“non-commissioned officer”, i.e. someone who had advanced through the ranks, rather than parachuted in from a public school fast-track), and at 37 was doubtless older than most of the men in in his Field Company. As my friend Ian suggested, perhaps this helped make Stout something of a father figure to many, for I think there’s definitely a warm combination of respect and fondness at play in this latter entry, quite a contrast to the consciously dry detachment evident in most of the others.

Combine what we know from this with the entry for 6th June 1944, and we can see precisely what Stout was doing on D-Day: assisting the tanks of 185th Infantry Brigade as they tried (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to push inland to take the town of Caen by nightfall. But… what happened to 185th Inf Bde on D-Day?

7. Meet the unnamed NCO who spiked them all.

Having gone looking for a history of 185th Infantry Brigade, I found this web-page from a group of historical re-enactors who have a particular interest in that very brigade on that very day. Essentially, according to their accumulated history of events on D-Day, what happened is that around about 2pm, 185th Infantry Brigade’s advance was being held up by a group of Germans shooting at it from the cover of some woods. It needed help to make progress against these very well dug-in defences. The web-page continues:-

Eventually a Pole was captured who knew the way through the wire at the back of the battery. The gunners fled into the woods, harried for some hundreds of yards by the Company. The guns were then blown up by an unnamed N.C.O. of the Divisional R.E.s, who, though badly wounded, succeeded in “spiking” them all.

Who was that “unnamed NCO”? Unless anyone can demonstrate otherwise, I think it’s not being overly romantic to believe that this man was Lance Serjeant William Stout – he was an experienced NCO in the Royal Engineers, he was in No. 2 Platoon assisting 185th Infantry Brigade outside their temporary base in Hermanville, he was badly wounded, yet he did the right thing in obviously difficult and trying circumstances. If anyone can be said to be “Stout-hearted”, it was surely him.

8. What kind of cipher did he use?

According to diagrams in the documents we found in WO 193/211, Royal Engineers were only supposed to use low grade ciphers in the field. But which?

One likely candidate is the Double Transposition Cipher (introduced 5th Nov 1943 in document 32/Tels/943). Yet one problem with Double Transposition as a candidate here is that encipherers were required to finish up the message with a pure number group containing the number of letters in the cryptogram followed by a forward slash and the day of the month (i.e. “179/12”), which plainly wasn’t what was used here. For a number of reasons like this, Double Transposition was thought to be “difficult and slow to operate”… possible but not ideal for use in the field.

The other major possibility here is the low grade “Syllabic Cipher”, a system I unfortunately failed to find described in any of the National Archives documents I looked through (which, let’s face it, do tend to be more administrative than operational). However, I do know that this cipher used a book marked “BX 724”, while the Royal Engineers had their own specific version marked “BX 724/RE”: these presumably comprised tables of syllables, which were then offset / obfuscated using a key from a Daily Key Allocation List. Stu has already gone off looking for anything like this and/or any other information on the Army’s Syllabic Cipher, but please email me or leave a comment here if you know where in the archives to find more information on these!

9. After all that… what did Stout’s pigeon message say?

It’s 3pm in the afternoon of D-Day. Lance Serjeant William Stout has just destroyed the arms of a German battery to help clear the way for 185th Inf Brde to move on towards Caen. He’s wounded. He wants to get a message back to his field company, but radio traffic has to be kept to a minimum. My best guess? 185th Infantry Brigade have brought with them some pigeons and a bilingual (but English-born) translator who is also a pigeon fancier. Despite his pain, Stout writes down his message and he (or someone else) rapidly enciphers it using a Syllabic Cipher (or possibly a Double Transposition Cipher, though I somewhat doubt it). This contains 27 groups of five letters, i.e. up to 135 plaintext letters – roughly 25 to 30 words. So, perhaps we can guess it says something along the lines of… SPIKED ARMS OF GERMAN BATTERY OUTSIDE HERMANVILLE 185 INF BDE NOW MOVING FORWARD AM BADLY WOUNDED TELL WIFE AND CHILDREN ETC. He starts copying the enciphered message onto the form at 15:22 (British Time), finishes copying it at 15:25, passes it off to the bilingual pigeon fancier, who signs them off at 16:25 French Time, places them in red Army canisters, attaches them to a pair of commandeered pigeons and then releases them.

However, it’s worth remembering that of the 16,000+ pigeons released on the Continent by SOE, I believe that only around 1,250 returned safely. So perhaps unsurprisingly, it could well be that one of these two pigeons failed to make it back at all; while the other did make the 136 or so miles back to Bletchingley, which I suspect will turn out to be remarkably close to its home loft: flying at 45mph or so, the bird likely took about three hours. Yet as it briefly rested there on top of a roof at about 6.30pm at the end of what had been a thankfully clear day (or else D-Day would have been an unmitigated disaster!), could it be that someone in the house below lit an evening fire in a hearth, unknowingly sucking the poor pigeon to its death down in the chimney?

* * * * * * * * *

All of which makes a great dinner-table story, with the added bonus that a fair proportion of it is certainly true… but will this turn out to be the whole story? Perhaps we’ll find out before too long… fingers crossed that we do! 🙂

Incidentally, has anyone tried to trace Lance Serjeant William Stout’s son (also William Stout) or daughter (Urula Stout)? Perhaps they already know even more about this than we do… I for one hope they do!

2012 Advent Calendar Day #7: Voynich naiad nymph necklace…

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Sometimes I see stuff sold on eBay or elsewhere that namechecks the Voynich Manuscript in a very superficial way, like a fine sprinkling of mystery pixie dust to elevate the ordinary into the not-quite-so-ordinary. But pretty much all I’ve seen before pales when compared with this handmade jewellery sales pages patter for (I swear it’s true, I couldn’t make it up) “NECKLACE of naiad nymph erotic magick sex slave voodoo multi lovers rare djinn“.

What kind of rare genius could construct such a wondrous-sounding sequence of allusive words? Well…

“I am one of the very few. As the last single translator of the Voynich manuscript, I am the only one who knows secret norse runic knowledge, and I have made a rare & amazing strange items to share. I come from a secret sect in Iceland of Ásatrúarfélagið Alchemists of The Exalted Most High Ones of Ásatrú. As a Most High One, I have influenced world leaders and everyday people alike. My power comes from secret sources long put aside by the waning influence of Germanic Norse Paganism and forgotten by modern man. After my teacher died and I am not teaching any further, my death shall mean my secrets will die with me. Knowledge of how to translate the Voynich manuscript with runes is something no other priest, witch, or other energy worker has. Most have no idea of its meaning whatsoever. My talents are more ancient than any other source on heaven, on earth, or in the secret hollow earth cities run by the reptilians.”

Sooooo… what do you get for your 19USD or so? Apparently “two bone beads around a coyote tooth on a hemp necklace“, which yields “an item of ultimate power and wisdom, made with runic wisdom. In this case I have harnessed the powers of the Voynich Runic Writings to achieve amazingly powerful positive results“.

What strikes me most from this is that at some point in the last couple of years, the “mysterious Voynich Manuscript” cultural meme seems to have broken out of its ‘hoodoo history’ micro-cage and gone diffusely viral into the world at large. I doubt if this was triggered by anything so rational or sensible as the Voynich Centenary Conference, or even by the whole Voynich centenary itself: rather, it seems to have “just grow’d”, one twisted little step at a time.

So in many ways I suspect the whole idea of the Voynich Manuscript now finds itself at a kind of Koyaanisqatsi-like paradoxical tipping point: a physical object that remains too incredible to be properly researched, yet which is well-known enough to find itself retrospectively attached to intangible / ethereal / insubstantial subjects that lack external credibility. In our culture at large, is it too credible or too incredible? Really, I just don’t know, sorry. 🙁

2012 Advent Calendar Day #6: “The Encrypted” reveals the history of everything…

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Codes – ciphers – concealed stuff – secret histories – I love it all, really I do. But… in moderation and in balance: and the #1 reason I don’t believe in century-spanning conspiracies (of the kind so loved by trashy novelists) is not “because they’re impossible”, but because I haven’t as yet seen a single shred of evidence that actually supports the existence of such things.

Even the infamous ‘Priory of Sion’ was ultimately no more than an archival fantasy constructed by a man who believed it would help support his delusional claim to be King of France: and that was arguably the best of a bad bunch.

All of this is in my head as I turn to a new book called “The Encrypted“. Its author Loret Love claims to have found and decrypted a code more than 5,500 years old, that is hidden in plain sight in (you probably guessed already)…

“the Declaration of Independence, King Tut’s Throne, The Kensington Stone, The Statue of Liberty, Mt. Rushmore, Newport Tower, the Voynich Manuscript, and many others. Among the famous artists and writers associated with the code were Da Vinci, Jules Vern, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Francis Bacon, J.R. Tolkien, Picasso, Nostradamus, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Nikola Tesla, and Bram Stoker. All of these people, places and objects hold shocking mysteries protected and venerated by the early Knights Templar.”

Countless other historical X-Files get pulled aboard Love’s syncretic rollercoaster ride, which ultimately reveals to the world a “horrifying legacy exposing Vampires, Werewolves and shape shifting monsters“. All that and the Holy Grail too… really, if I didn’t know better I’d say the whole exercise comes across like “National Treasure” on badly cut mescaline.

What I found most, errrm, awe-inspiring when reading about “The Encrypted” was that when I looked back at my 2009 cut-out-and-keep map of historical conspiracy clichés, it was as if Love has treated that diagram as Level 1 of a giant game of ‘Conspiracy Buzzword Bingo’, and then decided to write a book around a brand new Level 2.

As a blogger, I’m supposed to operate under the guiding principle “I check out all this stuff (and then write about it) so that you don’t have to“: but in this instance, I simply can’t bring myself to buy a copy – it’s just too much, even for me. Sorry if this disappoints you!