The Ballad of DBM

I have several indelible memories from appearing in the Mask & Bauble production of OPERATION: SIDEWINDER at Georgetown University's Stage One theater, written by Sam Shepherd with music by the Holy Modal Rounders, but only one involves a midnight run to the E.R. and a subsequent police interview.

OPERATION: SIDEWINDER was originally staged at Lincoln Center in 1970, and fellow GU student Jack Hofsiss wasted no time in garnering the rights to direct the first D.C. area production at G.U. It was an interesting piece about, among other things, the expansion of the West and the destruction of indigenous cultures who stood in the way.

(For the record, I should say that to my knowledge Shepherd’s play has no connection to the real-life Operation Sidewinder, which was later conducted in Iraq as a part of Operation Desert Scorpion in the summer of 2006, despite a parallel storyline about the expansion of the West and several other similarly psychedelic elements of the era.)

As always, our faculty advisor Donn B. Murphy, known affectionately to all his students as "DBM," encouraged us to do more, to take risks, to push the envelope, or whatever the phrase was back in the early ‘70s, to stage this experimental piece in new and unexpected ways. As undergraduates trying to make sense of our lives before we became eligible for the draft at the height of the Vietnam War, we responded wholeheartedly to his infectious enthusiasm.

So one interesting element we introduced to the production staged in the tiny theater-in-the-round named Stage One, where we were never more than 2 or 3 feet from the audience, was live snakes. Toward the end of the second act fellow cast member Paul Hume and I entered brandishing live 4-foot rat snakes for a scene depicting Shepherd’s take on a mystical Native American religious ritual.

Each evening, it was the same – the audience members chuckled when they first saw snakes coiled in our hands, thinking they were made of rubber. “Oh, look, it’s a snake! Ooh…” Once the snakes started to move, however, the mood changed in a heartbeat with a sharp intake of breath by the entire room.

One night, as Paul and I softly stepped close to the audience, undulating reptiles in our hands, a fellow sitting in front of me jerked back suddenly. My snake reared back itself, sliding off my hand. A moment before it fell free to the floor, I instinctively grabbed the snake by the end of its tail. It began whipping around like a spinning lasso as I reached for the head with my other hand.

Before I could seize it, though, the snake embedded its teeth in the webbing between my right thumb and forefinger. I jerked my hand away in reflex, but it managed to bite me twice more before I finally got a grip just behind its head.

Fortunately, Paul had moved quickly to take his snake offstage at the first hiss of trouble and place it back in its cage before returning to see how he might help. I remember that his eyes were very big as I reached out to hand him my snake—“Could you do me a favor?”—but he silently took it and disappeared quickly offstage before returning to continue the scene.

I later learned that all animal bites must by law be reported to the police. Around midnight in the hospital I was still waiting for my tetanus shot among that evenings’ casualties when a tired-looking policeman shuffled up to me, clipboard in hand.

“You the guy with the dog bite?”

The next morning I was still sleeping off the previous night’s adrenalin when the phone rang. It was a cub reporter new to his job at The Washington Post, though he tried hard to sound like it was the fourth snakebite story he’d written that week.

When the piece broke later that day, the headline was, Snake Bites GU Actor, Show Goes On and the first sentence read, “A 4-foot-long yellow rat snake starring in a Georgetown University performance of the play OPERATION: SIDEWINDER became annoyed with one of his fellow actors Saturday night and bit him three times…”

That afternoon I went to Stage One, where several other cast members were concerned that the newspaper write-up would result in the show being closed early. Jack, however, knew better. “Wait ‘til we hear from DBM,” he said.

When Donn appeared, he walked right up to me, a look of real concern on his face. “Bill, are you all right?” When I waved my bandaged hand with a sheepish smile, he said, “Thank you for holding on to that snake. If you’d dropped it in the audience, well, that wouldn’t have been good, would it?”

I shook my head in agreement. Then he flashed me that DBM smile.

“But what exciting theater that was!”

I couldn’t have felt prouder if I’d planned the whole thing.

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.