THE ULTRA SECRET

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01350R000200700002-5
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 12, 2004
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: December 29, 1974
• Content Type: NSPR

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pproe~ dF~r~~a9a7l0lre0i mesn
s
The i sec~ 5
with sketches of the famous as Winter- cry 30 years after the events, using' (cr
botham, this bringer of good and bad messages in the German archives to re-
Secret- tidings, saw them (Churchill was al- fresh his recollection of intercepts _3 v c,
By F. W. Winterbotham.
199 pp. New York:
Harper & Row. $8.95.
ways polite). This makes exciting read- where he could, so it is not surprising
ing, and it constantly provides fresh that errors?stipple the text. The Arneri-
t
insights into some of the best-known can solutions of the Japanese diploma
episodes of the war, for even the offi- is and naval cryptosystems had noth-
cial historians did not have access to ing to do with the breaking of Enigma.
Ultra intercepts. The new material Winterbotham's attributing the origin-
makes the book essential to the histori- al Enigma solution to information from
ography of World War II . ! a polish employe of the cipher ma
But all is not exactly as Winterboth- chine factory cheats the Poles of credit
am tells it. He exaggerates the impor- for one of the great cipher solutions of
tance of Ultra, calling it "decisive" and history. The facts are these-
writing as though it alone won the On July 15, 1928, Polish cryptana
war. l lysts noticed a? decided change in the
Everyone now agrees that Ultra was ! letter frequencies of German army
of supreme- importance, and that with- cryptograms, which they were inter-
out it the war would have lasted. Tong cepting. The Poles quickly concluded
er. Even Gen. Mark Clark, criticized that the Germans had begun using the
here for not exploiting Ultra properly ; Enigma, which was invented and pub-
during the Italian campaign, acknowl- licly sold early in the 1920's. Purchase
edges that the reading of some Hitler of one of the commercial models showed
signals saved his neck during the An-' that the Reichswehr had altered it for
zio landings. But neither' Marshal of the secrecy.
Royal Air Force Sir' John Slessor, who ! In 1932, the polish Biuro Szyfrbw
wrote the foreword, nor Vice Admiral (cipher bureau) got additional man-
Sir Norman Denning,` who was in power In the form of three young
By DAVID KAHN
This book reveals the greatest secret
I World War Ii after the atom bomb.
is Lmust for World War II and intel-
gence buffs. But it has to be read
Jith caution.
"The Ultra Secret" tells how theBrit-
ah and the Americans exploited the
-iformation they obtained from crack-
ing German messages enciphered with
cipher machine named the "Enigma."
iio valuable was this intelligence that
it was given a special security classifi-
ration, "Ultra," which the intelligence
tself came to 'be called. The author, an
:1,.A.F.'officer, was put in charge of dis-
-ributing Ultra under tight security
-o Churchill and to commands around
=he world. Winterbotham therefore
;aw much of the output and in this
book has correlated it with the events
Mf the war.
charge. of the Admiralty s U-boat mathematicians, Henryk Zygalskm, Ma-
tracking room, would say, in answer to rian Rejewski and Jerzy Rozycki. They
my questions, that without Ultra, Brit- had achieved a partial solution in their
ain would have lost the battles of office, hidden in the forest of Pyry out-
The stories he tells are revelations.,
During the Battle of Britain, Ultra
told the R.A.F. Fighter Command well
in advance of radar detection how
many bombers would be thrown
against England and when. This ena-
bled the British-to parcel out their few
-fighters so that some would always be
available to attack an oncoming wave.
These tactics denied the Germans com-
mand of the air Aver England and con-
sequently any possibility of invasion.
During the campaigns in North Afri-
ca, Ultra kept Gen. B. L. Montgomery
informed fairly exactly of Gen. Erwin
Rommel's order of battle and, in some
cases, of his plans. It also enabled the
British to know when supply ships
would sail -from Italy-and to sink
them, thus eventually starving Rom-
mel of vital fuel. Another intercept led
to the Battle of Cape Matapan, which
turned the Mediterranean from an Ital-
ian to a British lake.
The tide of the Battle of the Atlantic
turned when Ultra dug deep into the
naval Enigma in 1943 and revealed
where the U-boats met their milch-cow
supply submarines. Throughout the
tough fighting in Normandy, Ultra de-
livered masses of intercepts from Hit-
ler's messages on- down, often within
hours of their dispatch. This, "proba-
bly Ultra's greatest triumph," Winter-
botham says, led to "the destruction of
a large part of the German Army in the
west."
Winterbotham, however, seems often
to suggest that merely cracking the
Enigma sufficed to win the war. Of
course it did not: otherwise things
would have been a lot easier. But
though Winterbotham himself. some-
times gives cases' where knowledge ? of
German signals could not affect a
lies furnished some key Enigma doc-
uments. Major Gustave Bertrand of
French cryptographic espionage had
obtained them from a Reichswehr ci-
pher unit ; employe, Hans-Thilo
Schmidt, who wanted money. (Ber-
trand has told this story in his book,
"Enigma.") With this help, the Poles
completed their solution,. and on July
26 1939, presented two reconstruc-
battle, usually for lack of men or guns,
cases where no messages were inter-
cepted, and also cases where a change
of plan falsified Ultra information, his
attitude of Ultra-won-all negates them.
This tone is the basic flaw of the'.
book, the reason the general reader,
needs to salt its information with
knowledge of how wars are won. It is
why the book is not history but merely
a contribution to It. One that has to be ;1
tions of the machine to the French
and two to the English.
These enabled the British codebreak-
ing unit at Bletchley, a small town 50
miles northwest of London, to solve
the later variations of the machine and
other machines . used for different
branches of the German armed forces.
Security forbade Winterbotham from
recounting these details, but he
properly and generously credits the
achievement. To generate up-to-the-
minute solutions for these other ma-
chines, incidentally, the Bletchley gen-
iuses evolved perhaps the first mod-
ern electronic computer, which they
nicknamed the "Colossus."
Why has this story remained under
tight wraps so long? It seems that after
World War Il, Britain gathered up as
many of the tens of thousands of Enig-
mas as she could -find and later sold
them to some of the emerging nations.
Presumably if she could read Enigma
messages in 1940, she could do so in
1950. Only recently have these coun-
Approved For Release 2004/11/01: CIA-RDP88t-,0ds354RO&02WCOQ*2,.Z with new
cryptosystems. 1
 Approved For Release 2004/11/01 : CIA-RDP88-0135OR000200700002-5
David Kahn is author of "The Code-
breakers."
Approved For Release 2004/11/01 : CIA-RDP88-0135OR000200700002-5