Talk:Fish (cryptography)/Russian Fish

Since this source is fairly scare, here is a transcript of the relevant section:

Thomas Parrish, The Ultra Americans, pp. 282-284

''Then came May 21, a day that, most regrettably, Ralph Tester had to miss. To those devoted to cryptanalysis it possesses something of the quality of the moment in 1922 when Howard Carter, chiseling through the door of Tutankhamen's tomb, reported to the breathless Lord Caernarvon that through the aperture he had made he could see "wonderful things." On the morning of the 21st a party of seven left Berchtesgaden for Rosenheim, where Campaigne, Capt. Edward Rushworth of British intelligence, and Tom Carter, a U.S. officer who had joined the group, were to question an OKW-Chi (intelligence department of the High Command of the Armed Forces) cryptographer. Whitaker, Norland, and two British officers who were likewise newcomers to the team, Pickering and Cockrell, were to continue on in search of various wanted persons. (Pickering quickly proved a notable addition to the group, because of his marvelous Hitler act. One evening, with a lock of hair pulled over his face, he harangued the staff of a hotel with a Ftihrer-style monologue - to such effect, Levenson said, that "they were ready to follow him anywhere.")''

''In the evening, after a fruitless search, Whitaker's group returned to Berchtesgaden. Here they found the rest of the TICOM team seething with excitement. A soldier had come to Campaigne, Rushworth, and Carter while they were at Rosenheim, with a message that some prisoners in the cage nearby wished to speak with the "proper people."''

''These prisoners had served at OKW-Chi headquarters. What they were burning to tell the "proper people" was that, fearing the advance of the Russians, they had buried a great mass of cipher equipment under the cobblestones in front of their headquarters. They were sure that this equipment would be of the greatest interest to the Western Allies and to the Russians, because by means of it the Germans could read Red Army signals - and not just any signals, but the most secret ones. It seemed that the Russians would split the message being sent into nine elements, transmitting it on nine different channels, and this German equipment could reintegrate it; having developed this capacity, the Germans had then succeeded in decrypting Russian traffic. The prisoners who were pouring out this news to Campaigne, Rushworth, and Carter had no way of knowing two facts: a) the western Allies very much wished to obtain information about the nature and significance of various Soviet troop movements in Germany, information which even then the Soviets were bluntly refusing to provide; and b), the Allies had no capacity to decrypt this Soviet radio traffic. It was a momentous discovery, more of one, perhaps, than the TICOM team realized at the moment; "iron curtain" and "cold war" had not yet entered the language. Certainly the Germans' viewpoint was clear. Already, just two weeks after the surrender had been signed at Reims, the prisoners in their cage were hailing their American and British captors as comrades, men who must see the need to make common cause with them against the Russian hordes. They were eager to dig up the buried equipment and demonstrate its wonders to the TICOM team.''

''It was an offer the team could not refuse. The next day Campaigne's group returned to Rosenheim to supervise the recovery and sorting out of the equipment, and on May 23 Whitaker joined Campaigne and Carter on the sortie to Rosenheim. By the time the team arrived, "a little twenty-year-old German sergeant had the group well under control and working like beavers. They had one of the sets all set up and receiving traffic." On studying and analyzing their find, the TICOM team realized that what they had been presented with was nothing less than a system that received and decrypted the Soviet equivalent of the German Fish traffic. And the Soviets, it was obvious, had no inkling that the Germans had developed this capacity. Nor could they know that the Western Allies had now inherited it. TICOM had made itseff into a truly Top Secret operation.''

''The Germans "had put the equipment together down in the basement of part of this barracks complex. They were intercepting Russian traffic right while we were there. And pretty soon they had shown us all we needed to see." The Allied team ordered the prisoners to dismantle the setup and return it to its crates along with the rest of the equipment. In sheer bulk the treasure was phenomenal. It filled twelve huge chests weighing more than 600 pounds each, fifty-three chests weighing about 100 pounds each, and about fifty more weighing 50 pounds each - some seven and a half tons altogether. It filled four large German trucks to capacity.''

''Rushworth and Norland were assigned to accompany the equipment and some of the technicians to England, where a highly select audience would see a demonstration. One wonders what General Marshall thought when he received word of this remarkable convoy. He never put his thoughts about it on paper, and he died fifteen years before the existence of Ultra would even have been confided to his official biographer. TICOM and its amazing secret have remained unknown till this day.''

''On June 2 Whitaker was ordered to take six of the OKW-Chi prisoners to the Albrechtstrasse jail in Wiesbaden, where they were to be confined until official papers came through authorizing their being taken to England. "Those boys," Whitaker said, "were very downhearted at being left in a prison after what they had done." He assured them that their stay at Albrechtstrasse would only be temporary, and a week later they were flown to England, where the equipment was set up at an installation about twenty miles from Bletchley. It appears to have been put to work by the Allies immediately.''

Noel (talk) 21:34, 16 February 2011 (UTC)