Seizing the Enigma (15 page)

The meetings from 1934 on took place in Switzerland, usually in Basel or Bern, except for one in Copenhagen in 1935 and one in Paris in August 1938. After his arrival in the City of Light, Schmidt drew the Enigma cipher keys for August and September out of a package of delicatessen food; he had given the package to the train conductor to put in a cool place, the conductor himself agreeing that the heat in the compartment would ruin the food. Schmidt expressed a desire to visit the Moulin Rouge nightclub in Montmartre, famous for its gorgeous seminude showgirls. Bertrand took him, accompanied by a young member of the French intelligence service, Paul Paillole. When Schmidt danced with one of the pretty women who hung around the club, Paillole was impressed by his unexpected grace and elegance. The two Frenchmen left Schmidt, in high good humor, drinking champagne with not one but two attractive women.

A few days later, Bertrand left for Warsaw, his twelfth trip delivering keys. But out of all this effort, the French were getting, they felt, no results. Bertrand had wondered about this situation as early as 1932. He had given the Poles the operating and keying instructions
and one month’s keys in 1931 and had personally delivered three months’ worth of keys in two trips to Warsaw in 1932. As far as he knew, the documents had produced nothing of value. Was Schmidt feeding him phonies? Such things had happened before in espionage.

At the meeting at the Hotel d’Angleterre in Liège, Belgium, on October 29 and 30, 1932, Schmidt, after handing over a report on German maneuvers and the Enigma keys for November and December, had remarked to Bertrand, addressing him by his cover name: “Monsieur Barsac, I hope to be able to give you the daily keys every two or three months. With that you ought to be able to solve messages without too much trouble!”

Bertrand did not reply to Schmidt’s comment, asking him instead, “Are you sure that the documents you have given us are those for the machine currently in service?”

When
REX
translated the question, Schmidt started. He frowned. He looked at Bertrand, then back at
REX
.

“I’m not a crook,” he replied. “If you have such doubts, it’s because your cryptographers are incompetent.”

Another French intelligence officer present quickly turned the conversation to the prospect of food, and the matter rested there.

Bertrand asked the question because the French cryptanalysts had not been able to break the Enigma, even with the help of the Schmidt documents. Nor had the Poles reported any successes. Yet they seemed glad to have Schmidt’s keys. Langer and Ciȩżki were friendly to Bertrand. They told him of their intercepts of German messages; they even invited him in 1938 to Pyry.

But they never told him of their reconstruction of the Enigma or showed him a single Enigma solution. Their discretion probably stemmed from a fear that any leak about their reading of German messages would degrade relations with Germany after the signing of the nonaggression declaration. Bertrand perhaps understood this aspect of Poland’s delicate international situation, pressed as she was between two vengeful powers, just as he understood the need for a
French ally in the east to threaten Germany from the rear. Apparently, his superiors also understood the situation. France had nothing to lose by supplying keys to the Poles, so Bertrand was allowed to continue doing so. Altogether the French gave the Biuro Szyfrów keys for thirty-eight months out of eighty-one. Surely the French hoped that eventually something would come out of it.

Astoundingly, however, none of these later contributions reached the Polish codebreakers. They were not given a single one of the keys that Bertrand delivered during those five years!

What made the superiors of the codebreakers deliberately withhold documents that would have so lightened and accelerated their travails? The only answer that makes sense is that the chiefs wanted to develop a cryptanalytic capability that would function even if Schmidt quit or was caught, transferred, or turned, or if France, which was irritated at the Polish–German nonaggression pact, ceased supplying his data. Denying the cryptanalysts the keys indeed reduced the volume of Polish intelligence—but increased its independence. And if the cryptanalysts failed to make progress, they could always be given the keys, as was done in 1932, when the bosses finally gave Rejewski the first keys that Schmidt had provided. The withholding succeeded, and even better than the chiefs had hoped. For not only did the codebreakers resolve by pure analysis the fundamental problem of reconstructing the daily keys, not only did they keep up with the successive German security measures, but they continually improved their methods, thereby putting out more solutions faster.

This progress ended abruptly on December 15, 1938. On that day, the Enigma messages became unreadable. The Poles soon learned that the Germans had put into service two additional rotors. Though the Enigma still held only three rotors at a time, these were now chosen from a group of five instead of three, raising the number of rotor choices and orders from six to sixty. And the wiring of the two new rotors was unknown.

Fortunately for the Poles, however, the nets of the
Sicherheitsdienst
, or SD, the Nazi party intelligence service, had not shifted over to a new indicators method that the army nets had begun to use on September 15. The SD messages enabled the Poles to use their old methods of determining the rotor order and rotor setting as well as the ring positions and the plugboard connections; with this knowledge, Rejewski could reconstruct the wiring of first one, then the other of the two new rotors, as he had done in 1932.

But the new number of rotor orders expanded the task the Poles faced by an order of magnitude. Instead of six
bomby
, they would need sixty, at a cost that was fifteen times the whole equipment budget of the Biuro Szyfrów for fiscal 1938–39. Instead of 156 Zygalski sheets, BS-4 would need 1,560—and it had by then punched only 52. Nor was there any way out of this, for the Poles could no longer fall back on Schmidt’s supply of Enigma keys. He had transferred on September 28, 1938, to a better job in another communications intelligence agency, Luftwaffe chief Göring’s
Forschungsamt
. Though he still provided other information for money, he no longer had access to the Enigma keys.

The new situation overwhelmed the heroic capabilities of the Polish cryptanalysts. To make matters worse, on January 1, 1939, the number of plugboard connections rose to ten.

The head of the general staff’s intelligence bureau proposed a meeting with the British and the French in hopes that they would have something to contribute. By chance Bertrand, in France, was then considering the same idea. The meeting took place on Monday and Tuesday, January 9 and 10, 1939, in the French intelligence service headquarters, which was housed in prefabricated structures huddled against the Invalides, the domed tomb of Napoleon; the
Service de Renseignements
had moved there in 1932. Present were Bertrand; a French cryptanalyst, Captain Henri Braquenié; Langer, the head of the Biuro Szyfrów; Ciȩżki, the head of BS-4; Alastair Denniston, the head of Britain’s codebreakers, who had been one of the original
members of Room 40; and two other Britons. The atmosphere was cordial, but no one revealed any solutions of the machine: the British and French because they had none, the Poles because they had been instructed to say nothing unless they got something in return. The conclusion of the conference was pessimistic:

Reconstruction of the machine solely by the study of enciphered texts is proving itself practically impossible; this was, furthermore, the view of the German specialists who devoted themselves to the same task before putting their machine into service…. The labors undertaken [by the three nations] seem to have ended in an impasse from which only information from an agent will enable them to escape, so a technical questionnaire, as simple as possible, has been drawn up, to be given to an agent judged able to carry out such an assignment.

Two months later, Hitler, who had said at Munich that he wanted only the German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia, occupied the rest of that country. The scales fell from the eyes of the British and the French. On March 30, Britain, seconded by France, guaranteed Poland “all support” in the event of an unprovoked attack by Germany and six days later signed a provisional treaty of assistance with Poland. On April 27, Germany, blaming that agreement, declared that its 1934 nonaggression agreement with Poland was “null and void.” This declaration eliminated one of Poland’s chief reasons for not revealing her cryptanalytic successes to France and Britain: fear that a leak would provoke Germany into denouncing the agreement, with all the bullying that might follow.

Then, in May, two developments impelled Poland to share the results of her codebreaking. First, in a secret agreement, France promised to advance with the bulk of her forces against Germany fifteen days after any German invasion of Poland, and Britain began military talks in Warsaw. Second, tension between Poland and Germany approached the breaking point. Hitler’s anti-Polish speeches incited
Germans in both countries; the fatal shooting of a German by someone in an official Polish car became a cause célèbre; Nazis marched in the Free City of Danzig, and Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels warned that no power on earth could prevent the return of that city to the Reich; Poles and Germans fought in Polish Silesia; bombs exploded in Polish homes; a German plane was downed over a Polish naval base; the Reich press reported attacks on Germans in Poland.

It was in this atmosphere that Langer, on June 30, telegraphed London and Paris. He said that something new had come up since the January meeting and invited the French and the British to another conference, this one in Warsaw.

On the morning of Monday, July 24, Bertrand and the cryptologist Braquenié arrived in Warsaw by the overnight Nordexpress, which linked Paris and Moscow. Three Britons flew in: Denniston, Dillwyn Knox, and Commander Humphrey Sandwith, the head of the section that had developed and controlled the Royal Navy’s intercept and direction-finding stations. The French were put up at the Hotel Polonia, and the British at the Bristol, where Mayer, the head of intelligence, Langer, Ciȩżki, and the three young cryptologists entertained the visitors at lunch. The conversation, which dealt only with banalities, was, ironically, in German, the only common language of the Poles, the Englishmen, and Bertrand.

Later all the cryptologists traveled out to Pyry. Langer gave them a short tour of the cryptologic center and then took them into the cryptologists’ office. On tables stood several objects under covers. When all had gathered around, Langer, without a word, removed the covers, revealing the Polish replicas of the Enigmas, which the French and British cryptologists recognized at once. They were utterly astonished.

“Where did you get these?” Bertrand asked.

“We made them ourselves,” Langer replied.

The Britons examined a machine closely. Sandwith threw Langer an incredulous glance, and Langer repeated that the Polish cryptologists
had built it. Knox, who was intimately familiar with the Enigma from his own work on it, asked the most questions.

One question was, what was the wiring from the keyboard to the first rotor? This problem, which Rejewski had solved in a flash of intuition, had frustrated Knox. He felt cheated when he was told that it was Q to Q, W to W, E to E, and so on. Denniston wanted to ring up the British embassy to have London send draftsmen and electricians to draw up the plans of the Polish machines so that they could be reproduced. Langer restrained him: more was to come.

In the next room, the foreign cryptologists saw six cupboards about four feet high: the
bomby
. Langer demonstrated how they worked. Rejewski answered questions, since the machines had been built to his design. Zygalski explained how his perforated sheets worked. The Poles described the various methods for recovering keys; they explained that for a long time, using the
bomby
, they had been able to find an Enigma key, under the right conditions, in two hours. Then the Germans had placed two additional rotors in service. Cryptanalysis now required ten times as much equipment as before if solutions were to be anywhere near current, and the Poles’ capabilities had been outstripped. France and Britain had greater resources. Poland’s sharing of her cryptanalytic knowledge with her two allies would enable them to continue solving the German cryptograms. This would be Poland’s contribution to combating the common German menace.

The Britons and the French expressed their delighted thanks. Denniston again sought to telephone for the technicians. He could hardly believe his ears when Langer told him that the Poles had prepared two Enigma replicas for their visitors: one for the French, one for the British. These would be given to Bertrand for shipment under diplomatic seal to Paris and then for forwarding to Britain. The conference ended on Tuesday in an atmosphere of warmth, astonishment, gratitude, and anticipation.

A few days later, Langer, on his way to Britain, passed through Paris. Bertrand and one of his superiors took the Polish cryptologic
chief to lunch at Drouant, a classic Paris restaurant, where they feted him with champagne. “We owed him at least that!” said Bertrand. Soon afterward, the machines arrived. The equipment destined for Britain was packed into the largest diplomatic bags available at the embassy and placed under British diplomatic seal. The British intelligence liaison officer to the French, Dunderdale, and three assistants brought it to Paris’ St. Lazare railroad station. Bertrand joined them on the boat train, the Golden Arrow. It was August 16. In Germany, troops were readying an attack on Poland. Captain Karl Dönitz, the submarine commander, had ordered his U-boats to their war stations at sea.

At Dover customs in England, Dunderdale ran into the French playwright Sacha Guitry and his wife, the actress Yvonne Printemps, on their way to the opening of a play of Guitry’s in London. Dunderdale knew them by sight since they lived opposite him in Paris. Their luggage was voluminous, and Dunderdale made a deal with them: he would get it through customs duty-free if they would pretend that the bulky diplomatic baggage was theirs, to throw off the suspicions of any spies. The couple agreed and were waved through; the Enigma bags drew the attention of no German agents. That evening, the Golden Arrow pulled into London’s Victoria Station near the end of the rush hour. The deputy chief of the British foreign intelligence service, Colonel Stewart Menzies, on his way to a reception, awaited them in black tie.
“Accueil triomphal!”
(Triumphal welcome), thought Bertrand. Menzies’s men carted away the precious mechanism.