Seizing the Enigma by David Kahn Read Free Book Online Page B

Keynes, who followed him to King’s, said, “He has got one of the most confused brains I have ever come across.… He is quite abnormally untidy in his work and always forgets to write down the most necessary steps.”
    Knox, tall, thin, light of build, with full lips and a receding forehead, was elected a fellow of King’s in 1909, and for a short time he tutored Harold Macmillan, the future prime minister. He worked with his own tutor, a classics scholar, in preparing an edition of the minor Greek dramatist Herodas, whose sketches had been discovered at Oxyrynchus in Egypt in 1889 on a roll of papyrus. The copyist of this manuscript, Knox wrote, was “constantly puzzled by the form of the letters which he was copying,” was “prone to all the common errors of copyists,” and made “stupid alterations.” Knox and his tutor had to determine the correct meanings. The intense analysis and detailed reconstructions required by this kind of study are also needed in cryptanalysis, and when Knox was recruited for Room 40 early in 1915 at age thirty-one, he found codebreaking congenial.
    He was followed to Room 40 by a younger friend from King’s, Frank Birch. Birch was seen as “a many-sided human being—a ratherdull historian, an acceptable drinking companion, a mysterious private personality, a brilliant talker and a born actor. In his impersonations, as in those of all great comedians, there was a frightening element.” One of his best was of a classics tutor, who had only one eye and one hand; in Birch’s pantomime, he took himself apart so thoroughly in his room each night that nothing was left of him at all. Birch, an Etonian and a keen yachtsman, had served at sea during the first part of the war. He and Knox shared a house at 14 Edith Grove in the Chelsea section of London, where Birch gave weekly musical parties; Knox chose those occasions to work all night at Room 40. Birch excelled less in codebreaking than in collating and explaining the results.
    Room 40 was one of the Admiralty’s deepest secrets. This secrecy, combined with the great human capacity for denial, worked its woes upon the Germans during the first year or so of the war. They refused to believe that their codes had been jeopardized and their communications compromised. Neither direct evidence nor circumstantial persuaded them.
    In reporting on the
Magdeburg
disaster, the admiral commanding the squadron in which the cruiser had served never mentioned that the codebook might have been lost. He restricted himself to the much less damaging statement that “the encipherment key to the codebook [was] not destroyed with certainty.” The naval staff could not shut its eyes so tightly to the possible survival of the code, but it took the hint proffered by the admiral and concluded that “no serious consequences are feared here from the possible loss of the codebook.” It merely ordered the printing of a new encipherment key.
    A special investigation into the disposal of the
Magdeburg
’s secret documents likewise led to no overhaul of naval cryptography. The probe was ordered by the commander of the Baltic naval force, Prince Heinrich of Prussia, the kaiser’s bearded younger brother. Heinrich had been viewed before the war as unqualified for high command, but in pursuit of code security, at least, he proved dogged and imaginative.
    His investigation reached the disturbing judgment that the Russians had probably fished up some of the German charts from the sea, and “in the same way the Russians probably also got their hands on the cipher key that was lost in the water, and finally the possibility must also be considered that the Russians, by diving, got one of the codebooks out of the shallow, clear water.” Heinrich proposed a new codebook and even urged mechanical encipherment. His proposals were ignored. In March 1915, a letter from a German naval officer who was a prisoner of war said in a veiled way that Britain possessed the German