Mouse over each specialist's image to read a quote from the student-conducted interview
Dr. Duncan Anderson "What enigma allowed us to do was to track the location of German units so that there were no nasty surprises." Professor of War Studies at Sandhurst
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Mike Chapman "Equipment and techniques were developed at Bletchley Park and its outstations which revolutionised code breaking." Volunteer tour guide at Bletchley Park
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David Kahn "In cryptology, solving the enigma was the first time that that system had been broken on a mass production basis." Leading historian in military intelligence
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Dr. Charles Murphy "The psychological part of having broken Enigma was that the Germans could not understand how we knew so much about their troop/air/sub movements." Retired CIA analyst, current professor
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David O'Keefe "So without the ability to read their messages, intercept their communications, you really don’t have much of a chance of pulling off an operation like double cross or deception." Canadian military historian
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Michael Smith "The heavy use of electro-mechanical devices, the Bombes, to break the Enigma ciphers added to the industrialised nature of code breaking at Bletchley, a complete contrast to the more leisurely, more individualistic pre-war codebreaking." Author of Secrets of Station X
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Dr. Gene Poteat "The role of SIGINT has now expanded from “signal intelligence” to include “Cyber Security” as well— a new threat as equally damaging as any military or terrorist threat our nation faces." Former senior executive of the CIA
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Tony* "Enigma marked the move from book-based encryption systems to electromechanical systems, and the experience of WWII was that electromechanical encryption could be beaten by electro-mechanical decryption, and that was scalable to an industrial level." Chief historian at GCHQ
*Last name unavailable due to security |
Patrick Weadon "Talk about being able to stick your nose in the other team’s huddle and understand what they’re going to do before they do it. It’s just huge." Curator, National Cryptologic Museum
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Glossary Page 1
Glossary Page 2
Ultra
"The secret British program to monitor and decipher Germany's Enigma signals"
- Sir Lawrence David Freedman, Professor of War Studies, King's College London
Enigma
“Three rotors, side by side, created an electrical maze. As they turned, they changed the maze - and thereby the encipherment. The result was a rather secure cipher”
- Dr. David Kahn, leading historian
Bletchley Park
“Bletchley Park was concentrated on deciphering, translating, evaluating and distributing the vast amount of information...transmitted by the Germans after they had been rendered 'secure' by encipherment on the famous Enigma machine”
- Ronald Lewin, British military historian
GCHQ
"After the war, it took over from the Government Code and Cipher School the function of receiving and decoding intercepted wireless traffic from listening stations scattered throughout the United Kingdom and from several dozen overseas"
- Lord Jonathan Sumption, British judge, author and medieval historian
Double Cross System
"For the duration of the war, brilliantly orchestrated false reports sent back to Germany by Masterman's tame agents would lead the German high command into one blunder after another at the most crucial junctures - ensuring the success of the Allied landing at Normandy, helping to turn the tide in the war against U-boats in the Atlantic, even tricking the Germans into firing most of their V-2 rockets short of central London"
- Stephen Budiansky, former national security correspondent, foreign editor, and deputy editor of U.S. News & World Report
Communications Intelligence (COMINT)
"COMINT is technical and intelligence information derived from foreign
communications by other than the intended recipients"
- Department of Defense Directive, 2010
Signals Intelligence (SIGINT)
"Intelligence obtained through the interception of transmission signals"
- Merriam Webster Dictionary
Public Key Encryption
“A standard analogy for public-key cryptography is given as follows. Suppose that Bob has a wall safe with a secret combination lock known only to him and the safe is left open and made available to passers-by. Then anyone, including Alice, can put messages in the safe and lock it. However, only Bob can retrieve the message, since even Alice, who left a message in the box, has a way of retrieving the message.”
- Richard A. Mollin, author and professor