Chapter XLIII - Ciphers, Rotors, Jumbled & Foreign
28th of December 1938
15:15 PM
Deuxieme Bureau
Paris
France
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It was dusty, a dry air with a pungent smell of paper mixed with the uneasy smell of paint, a smell you could almost taste as a metallic mixture on your lips, tongue and the back of your mouth.
Hidden in a corner of the Bureau headquarters, the clang of typewriters resonated every millisecond, the clicks of rotors being twisted rasping through the air. Codebreakers were perched over tables in small teams, analysing assiduously all of the codebooks and ciphers that spelled out the enemy intelligence reports. A flurry of activity erupted in these offices in the past three days, since Elbe's escape and the close shave for Reythier, but nothing ever surprising for the tactical teams of the Bureau. Constant connections with their English and Polish collaborators made this area of the Bureau a Babel's tower of sorts, mixing multiple languages to decipher the reports in another foreign language.
Perched over a table in one of the darker corners, Reythier and Klaus stood beside Horace as they waited for Colonel Raymond to join them. They stood silent, their eyes observant on the scurrying of the intelligience officers between the cipher teams and the secretaries typing furiously to relay the orders to the army. The colonel joined them as they rather ogled at an officer trying to talk up a secretary, only to have his advances rebuffed rather rapidly before one of his superiors dragged him by the arm back to the decipher job. Raymond, stern and with a buzz cut underneath his cap, saluted and took his cap off in a ceremonious manner.
"Gentlemen." Raymond saluted again. "Monsieur Reythier, I've heard of your exploits. I am glad you are with us."
Reythier smiled, his shoulder still in a sling. "Always ready to serve our France."
"Good to hear that. Please, come this way, we need to show you some information."
Raymond dragged them to a table in the midst of the sea of analysts' tables, a table flanked by two young officers who seemed to be twin brothers. They saluted and gave Raymond a stack of small sheets. Raymond held them up and dropped them, rather unceremoniously, on the table. Reythier stood rather behind, but Klaus and Horace stood by the edge of the table, expectant.
"Gentlemen, what you have here is our codebreaking expertise. We have been furiously trying to find, intercept and analyse all of the information that the Germans have been relaying to their teams. Army, intelligence, police, whatever goes we need it." Raymond drew his breath, his speaking pace rather rapid even for him. "We try to analyse what is being output from a machine called the Enigma. It's the way of the army to encrypt and jumble their transmissions, but our friends from Poland have been helping us to decipher it. More than that, one of our double agents, Agent Axel, has supplied us with a lot of valuable information and first hand documents, plus components."
Reythier looked at Klaus. "I presume Agent Axel is German?"
"Correct. He provided us with a whole stack of Enigma operating books, ciphers and we managed to even get some components such as rotors."
"How do we stand then?" asked Reythier.
"Relatively good. We can intercept about seventy to eighty percent of the Army communications. It's not enough but more than doable for what we need."
"Do you have a full machine?"
"Unfortunately we don't. Neither do the Poles. Neither do the English."
Klaus shifted on his feet. "How did you decipher it then?"
"Using the codebooks and ciphers provided. Based on the transmissions, jumbled as they are, we managed to understand most of their communications and how the system works. For the most part, it's a relatively simple substitution cypher. It means they substitute some letters with others from the alphabet, and we know how they do it. Most of the time."
"What about when they don't use that?"
"Well, this is where it gets complicated. As I said, most of the information is available to us, and we have some commercial versions of the Enigma machine. But those are different from the military versions." Raymond paused. "And, to be frank, the High Command uses a different machine or a different set, we do not know yet."
"So you can't break that code?"
"Not yet. The British have something up their sleeve to solve that."
Klaus and Reythier glanced at Horace. Raymond nodded to him.
"The Special Operations has a mission planned out to usher the Polish codebreakers out of Poland. We know that an invasion is planned, and the divisions are massing, but we need to get them out to help us in our codebreaking otherwise we have no chance of knowing what the German army will plan any time soon."
Reythier looked at the analytical reports. "But you know what the military does, no?"
"The brass. The local batallions. Brigades. Soldiers. Not the generals."
"And what will this take?"
"Save the codebreakers, get them out, and have them sent through Romania and then to us or to England. We need their expertise." Raymond paused again. "Apparently, they have more components as well and they know more of the system than we do. Since 1932."
Klaus frowned. "You're saying we're behind."
"Not behind, but not ahead either."
Reythier turned to Horace. "I guess you know now why they agreed to send you back, my friend."