http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Pujol
Somebody needs to make a movie about this man.
The piece of paper that fooled Hitler
11–20 of 53 posts
Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler
#12From the headline I thought this was going to be about Operation Mincemeat ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat ) which is a pretty amazing story.
I thought the same thing, and was very skeptical about all this 'published for the first time!' as I could swear there was a fictional-historical movie made around the 60's based on the premise of Operation Mincemeat!
Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler
#13http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Pujol Somebody needs to make a movie about this man.
There's a documentary (2009, imdb link: http://www.imdb.es/title/tt1344315/) called "Garbo, the Spy" (Garbo was one of his nicknames). It's in spanish but i'm pretty sure there are english subtitles on the DVD.
This work won the Goya (Spanish National Cinema Award) last year for better documentary.
I read the article and thought: "At least, some british recognition to Pujol" :-)
Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler
#14From the headline I thought this was going to be about Operation Mincemeat ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat ) which is a pretty amazing story.
Easily my favorite spy story from WWII. For those interested, fantastic book on Operation Mincemeat:
http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Never-Was-Counter-Intelligence...
Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler
#15I want to know how one actively becomes a 'double agent' - anyone know any books that tell the 'story' here or in similar cases?
Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler
#16In light of this I'd like to point out jgc's efforts to help preserve Bletchley Park: http://blog.jgc.org/2010/01/1000-for-bletchley-park-thanks-t...
Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler
#17I want to know how one actively becomes a 'double agent' - anyone know any books that tell the 'story' here or in similar cases?
Because of their code-breaking, British intelligence was able to catch most German agents as soon as they arrived. Some of them were given the opportunity to "turn double". One example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Chapman
Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler
#18Does anyone know if all the intercepted German WW2 dispatches have been decrypted? If there's a pile of undecrypted dispatches sitting in a vault somewhere, it could be of great interest to historians if someone applied modern computers and code-breaking techniques to them.
We wouldn't need any codebreaking techniques; we know their encryption method. I suspect feeding the papers through OCR would be the most time consuming part. I doubt decrypting would take any longer than SSL.
Actually, there is one message left to be decrypted. See http://www.bytereef.org/m4_project.html . Since the link points to a distributed project dedicated to decrypting the last 3 undecrypted Enigma messages, we can safely assume there's significant computational effort necessary.
Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler
#19This is very tangential, but I just happened to finish the "Guns of August" by Barbara Tuchman last night. If any HN military history buffs have not read it yet, do pick it up. Although about the opening of WWI, it provides some great insight into both World Wars.
Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler
#20I from a crypto history book I read in high school: in WWI, German intercepts of Russian transmissions have the Russians illusions of German tactical genius. Somehow, Germans would often be in position to confound the Russians. The reason for this: Russian code clerks were badly trained. Sometimes there would be a couple of attempts to send a message followed by a plain-text transmission by the frustrated code clerk. This was a tremendous boon to German cryptographers in the long term as well as a giveaway of tactical maneuvers in the short term.
In WWII, the Germans had their turn at incompetence. Enigma machines were supposed to be "warmed up" by 3 random characters. The purpose of this is like an Initial Vector or a "nonce" in modern block cipher use -- a bit of entropy to help obscure often almost identical message headers. A lot of German code clerks were lazy and just typed in "AAA", which helped out the Bletchley Park cryptographers a lot.
Modern crypto technology is often very good, but only if used correctly. Security fails most often because of human error. (This includes programmers!)