NARRATIVE PROVIDES A HUMAN CONTEXT

The power of narrative is evident when dealing with a range of topics, from history to technology.

Back in my college days studying International Affairs at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, I had the good fortune to take a course called "Modern European History" with a certain Professor Christopher Dodd, now the respected Senator from the great state of Connecticut.

I remember it as being the most interesting course I took at GU, no small feat considering the rest of the faculty and the overall course of study. It was clear to me even then that Professor Dodd's great strength as a teacher lay in his ability to bring history alive, as though we were getting an insider's view of the larger-than-life characters and the great events that had helped shape our world.

Looking back, it's easy to see why his presentation was so powerful. Professor Dodd knew his subject so well that he was able to relate the ambitions and fears of people at various crossroads in historical events in a very immediate way. He knew their stories. The result was that, however one judged the actions taken at any given point in history, those decisions were at least understandable within an historical context. And that, of course, was the purpose.

With that in mind, I tried to personalize the narrative when I was recently called on by the Pasadena Educational Foundation to tell the story of the breaking of the German military's "unbreakable" Enigma I coding machine just prior to the start of World War II:

"On a brisk fall morning in 1932, Marian Adam Rejewski, a 23-year-old Polish mathematics student, carefully wiped off his glasses, then leaned over a growing stack of papers in his small office located in the Polish General’s Cipher Bureau.

While studying mathematics at Poznan University with an eye toward a career in insurance, Rejewski had attended a secret cryptology course for German-speaking math students given by the Bureau, and decided to accept a job offer after graduation. Over the next year, he would change the course of history.

One of his early assignments was to tackle the German Enigma I machine, which had baffled British cryptanalysts for six years.
Though Germany had been defeated in World War I, the Poles wisely kept an eye – and an ear – on its neighbors. To the east lie Russia, anxious to export its communist philosophy, and to the west Germany, which had ceded lands to Poland after its defeat and likewise seemed intent on someday taking them back.

The Enigma I was an electro-mechanical device with a 26-letter keyboard and 26 lamps, each corresponding to a different letter of the alphabet. Inside were a plugboard that swapped pairs of letters, and three wired rotors, or “scramblers,” that scrambled each letter as it was input.

What made the Enigma so difficult to crack was that the code was advanced with every keystroke. The only way to decipher the message was to set a second Enigma machine to that day’s code settings.

At the beginning of each message, however, the Germans added day and key settings to transmit a new three-letter (one for each rotor) message key. These message keys contained different scrambler orientations, though the plugboard settings and the scrambler arrangement remained the same as in the day-key settings.

Had the Germans not added the message keys, then each day’s messages – thousands of them – would have been encrypted in the same day key, and the sheer volume of messages would have revealed patterns in the letters, making the cipher much easier to break.

By adding a new message key for each message, it was as though sender and receiver had agreed on a main cipher key, but then only used it to encrypt a new cipher key for each message. No wonder it had cryptanalysts stumped.

Working alone and in secret, Rejewski focused on the one point of the Enigma’s weakness that he could identify – the three-letter message-key setting, which was always transmitted twice at the beginning of each message. The first three letters would establish the setting and the next three would translate the first three into that new setting.

Without knowing the day key or the message key, Rejewski could only track the relationships of the letters in the hope that they would reveal a pattern that might lead to the day key. The relationships he found established chains of letters, and he created tables to monitor and record these relationships, and note the links in each one.

Thanks to the successful efforts of espionage, he eventually received a replica of an Enigma machine, so Rejewski put together a team and assigned them the grueling task of checking – by hand! – each of the more than 100,000 scrambler settings and cataloguing every letter chain that was generated by each.

In the days before computers, it took his team more than a year to accomplish the task with only pencil and paper, but eventually Rejewski was able to compile a complete catalogue of Enigma’s scrambler settings.

Then, in a moment of genuine insight, an inspired Rejewski realized that the parts played by the scrambler settings and the plugboard settings could, to some extent, be disconnected. By removing the cables from the plugboard in the replica machine and entering intercepted ciphertext, Rejewski was able to recognize certain phrases that resulted. The plugboard settings were then easy to deduce.

Solving the mystery of the day/key settings and the plugboard settings together was impossible, but, by separating the two, each was solvable. In a little more than a year – without the use of a computer – Rejewski cracked the Enigma code."

The result, of course, was that the Allies, thanks to the efforts of one inspired Polish cryptographer, broke the "unbreakable" Enigma and were able to intercept and monitor German communications throughout the war.