The Spanish Link In Cracking the Enigma Code

peetm sends this quote from the BBC: "When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, both Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy sent troops to help the nationalists under Franco. But with the conflict dispersed across the country, some means of secure communication was needed for the German Condor Legion, the Italians and the Spanish forces under Franco. As a result, a set of modified commercial Enigma machines were delivered by Germany. ... A key figure in trying to understand it was Dilly Knox, a classicist who had been working on breaking ciphers since World War I. He was fascinated by the machine and began studying ways in which an intercepted message might in theory be broken, even writing his own messages, encrypting them and then trying to break them himself. But there was no opportunity to actually intercept a real message since German military signals were inaudible in Britain. However, the signals produced by the machines sent to Spain in 1936 were audible enough to be intercepted and Knox began work. ... Within six or seven months of having his first real code to crack, Knox had succeeded, producing the first decryption of an Enigma message in April 1937."

Comments

False claim?

[dbthelinguaphile]

Maybe the first Brit to read the code, but not the first person. The Poles began to read Enigma messages back in 1932-33 according to the excellently-researched "Enigma: Battle For the Code" by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore. The article is a little clearer, but still can lead one to assume that Dilly Knox was the first to break Enigma messages. He was not. Not to diminish his part in the Enigma saga, but the Poles were reading it long before any other nation.

Re:False claim?

[Snowgen]

Not to diminish his part in the Enigma saga, but the Poles were reading it long before any other nation.

I'm pretty sure the Germans were reading it before the Poles.

(Note to mods: this is "-1 Lame Joke", not "-1 Pedantic"

Not the only Spaniard who helped

[K8Fan]

Actually, a different Spaniard may have had more to do with breaking the German codes.

Joan Pujol Garcia was a Catalan double agent known to the Germans as Arabel and to the British as Garbo. He became so trusted by the Germans that they gave him their current codes (though not an Enigma machine). He would encrypt his reports, transmit them by radio to Madrid, where they would be re-encrypted and sent on to Berlin. Thus he was able to supply Bletchley with both a current code and the plaintext.

For his services to the Allies, he was awarded an MBE by King George VI.

For his services to the Third Reich, he was awarded the Iron Cross by Hitler.

He was a vital part of Operation Fortitude and convinced the Nazis that the Normandy invasion was a dirversion. He may well have been the greatest bullshit artist who ever lived.