The Role of Female Spies in World War II by Hallie Murray

Author:Hallie Murray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cavendish Square Publishing, LLC
Published: 2019-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

Two members of the Women’s Royal Navy Service operate the Colossus, the first electronic programmable computer, which British code breakers used to crack the German Enigma code with the help of information gathered by Pack and other spies.

One of the first important men she met was Count Michal Lubienski. He had access to government documents, and she knew he would have top-secret information on Poland’s dealings with Germany. Pack began an affair with him, and it is believed that one of the most important things she learned about was the Enigma machine. The SIS suspected that Poland might know how to break the Enigma code, and they hoped Pack could get information from Lubienski. Pack was able to find out where Polish research on the Enigma was being done, and she confirmed that the Poles were reading Enigma messages. The full extent of her help isn’t known for sure because the existence of the Enigma was not even revealed until the 1970s.

Breaking the Enigma

The Enigma machine was a cipher machine invented at the end of World War I by German engineer Arthur Scherbius. There were many versions of the machine, but the ones used by Nazi Germany during World War II were particularly complicated; the codes produced were impossible to break unless you knew how the gears had been set when the code was originally written. No matter how many messages the Allies intercepted, they couldn’t learn anything about the Germans’ plans without cracking the Enigma code. The British assembled thousands of code breakers, including computer scientist Alan Turing and many female mathematicians, to try to break the cipher. They broke many Enigma codes, but the real goal was to create a program that could decrypt any Enigma cipher. They were successful: by 1945, nearly every German Enigma code could be broken by the British within a few days.

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