Cryptologic Quarterly, #41

Cryptologic Quarterly #41, 2023-02
Images used for educational purposes only.

Cover: “World War II cryptolinguist Elizabeth Boba and husband Imre at Radio Free Europe, around 1954. Photograph courtesy of the Boba family.”

[My opinion: Things seem to be winding down with the Cryptologic Quarterly, at least with the fact that issue #40 came out around Jan. 2021, and #41 in maybe Feb. 2023 (if I’m reading the issue numbering correctly). The numbers of articles are down, and the subjects are ok, if not earthshattering. This is the last issue publicly available on the CCH website, although there are individual declassified/unclassified articles in the NSA.gov Helpful links area. Not sure how many of those I’ll get to, because my to-read list never gets shorter.]

The Editor’s View

My Experiences during World War II
… by Elizabeth H. Boba with introduction by Brenda McIntire
From Hebern to SIGABA and Beyond – A Cryptographic Odyssey
… by Patrick Bomgardner
The Risks of Taking Risks or, What Every High School Student and NSA’er Should Know About Taking Chances
… by Rob Bonney

Book Review
… The Secret War: Spies, Ciphers, and Guerrillas, 1939-1945

The Editor’s View: Human Stories All
Jennie Reinhardt starts out by writing that all forms of writing (including technical) are in one way or another really about how the author, or subject, responds to life situations. She then moves on to introduce all of the articles in this issue.

My Experiences during World War II
Elizabeth Herndon Hudson Boba moved from the U.S. to Munich, Germany, in the 1950s to work at Radio Free Europe. While there, she met, and married, Imre Boba, a Polish-Hungarian refugee. “The Bobas later moved to Seattle, where Imre taught history at the University of Washington while Elizabeth worked as an administrative assistant in the Classics Department. In the ensuing decades Elizabeth enjoyed frequent return trips to Europe, continued her lifelong interest in music, and kept up with a wide network of friends and family, including two grandchildren.” She passed away in Dec. 2020 at age 100. In Jan. 2021, her family contacted the Center for Cryptologic History to donate her memoir to the CCH. This article then is a reprint of her memoir.

(Elizabeth Boba)

The booklet starts out in 2007 by stating that she’s noticed a growing body of books and writings on events from WW II, and she’s decided to write about her own experiences to let her family know what she’d lived through. In 1939, Elizabeth was a junior at Illinois College in Jacksonville (her father was the college president), and she transferred to Sweet Briar College in Virginia (he’d taught history there). She’d studied “English history, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Greek, philosophy, and counterpoint, and taking piano lessons.” She graduated in June 1941, and moved back home to Jacksonville, where she studied music as a postgrad.

After the Pearl Harbor attack, she finished her classes in the Spring of 1942 and was preparing for the next set, however her father, as a college president, was receiving recruiting notices, and she left for Washington to work at Arlington Hall. She took a 6-week training program to get her security clearance, then remained at Arlington another 6 months as an instructor. Her first real assignment was to an operations unit “working on intercepted radio messages between Japanese military attachés and their headquarters in Tokyo.”

She writes a little about the work, which involved attacking codes in various messages, then “overlapping” them with other messages that used the same key for figuring out the missing codewords (Liza Mundy mentioned not understanding what “overlapping” was in her presentation on The Code Girls), and there’s a short lesson on the Japanese language. At one point the Japanese Army changed their codebook and they had to start all over again. She mentions a large machine being installed in the “big room” which made a lot of ticking noises. She identifies it as an early computer, but falls short of calling it a Bombe.

After the War, she transferred to the Soviet program and studied Russian for a while at the Columbia University Summer School in New York City. She left Arlington in 1948 and returned to her parent’s home in Jacksonville. Later, while visiting Seattle, she stopped at a library and found “a book or two expressly about the US cryptographic work during World War II in the Northeast Branch Seattle Library! It was written by a well-known cryptographer, [William] Friedman, who along with [Herbert] Yardley really got US cryptanalysis up and running. So, I decided I could finally talk about my experiences!!” The memoir ends here.

In short, this is a good addition to The Code Girls, and gives a little more of a look at how the SSA attacked the Japanese codes.

From Hebern to SIGABA and Beyond – A Cryptographic Odyssey
This is a much more in-depth look at the life of Edward Hugh Hebern, and the struggle for developing a secure cipher machine for the U.S. military. We get a lot of the same details that David Kahn wrote about in his Codebreakers, but there’s more information on how the Hebern machines were developed and functioned. While the Army and Navy ultimately decided against buying any version of his machines, it’s pretty clear that William Friedman, Frank Rowlett and Laurance Safford (among others) designed the Converter M-134 based on ideas covered by Hebern’s patents. The final machine with most of the weaknesses ironed out was released as the joint Army-Navy SIGABA/ECM Mark II, which was “manufactured by the Teletype Corporation” (they couldn’t even throw Hebern a bone and give him the contract for building the thing).

(Early design)

The ensuing lawsuit, settlement, and Hebern’s death from a heart attack are as described in The Codebreakers. Safford and others freely admitted that the Navy had treated Hebern badly, but the decisions were out of their control, being made by beancounters higher up the food chain.

(Finalized SIGABA (Army) / ECM Mark II (Navy))

The Risks of Taking Risks or, What Every High School Student and NSA’er Should Know About Taking Chances
Just a short statistics lesson on risk assessment, which turns out to be similar to noise measurements in electronics systems. Reprinted from Cryptologic Quarterly 199 (vol. 15, no. 4).

Book Review
The Secret War: Spies, Ciphers, and Guerrillas, 1939-1945, by Max Hastings (2016)
Reviewed by David Hatch. Quote “Although his narrative talent often is a great asset, particularly in a book of this heft, Hastings often gets bogged down in unnecessary details and trivia.” The main point is that Hastings focuses on missed opportunities in using the information gained from intercepted intelligence, and all sides spend about as much time fighting internal squabbles between departments or groups as they do against the actual enemy. In short, David summarizes his review as “Despite unevenness of coverage and a tendency to discuss diversions at length, The Secret War has plenty of insights from which intelligence producers and consumers alike can benefit.”