A Man Called Intrepid by William Stevenson

Author:William Stevenson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781629143606
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2013-12-19T16:00:00+00:00

Although INTREPID’s headquarters were in New York, he traveled frequently and to far places. He virtually commuted to London by military aircraft to see Churchill and others involved in his secret operations. Churchill here broods among the bombed ruins of the Houses of Parliament. The dark figure silhouetted in the foreground is INTREPID.

Kim Philby, the Soviet superspy who tried covertly to undermine the Anglo-American wartime intelligence alliance, had earlier followed his masters’ directives by openly expressing pro-Hitler views. Here (marked by arrow) he sits at a dinner, held by the Anglo-German Fellowship on July 14, 1936 in London, soon after Hitler proclaimed his anti-Jewish “Nuremberg Laws.” Another member of the Fellowship was Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the London Times, who was “doing my utmost, night after night, to keep out of the paper anything that might hurt their [the Germans’] susceptibilities.” The Nazi Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, was Ambassador to Great Britain when he harangued this gathering on the need to fight “Bolsheviks.”

Enigma, the German coding-decoding machine, posed a seemingly insoluble puzzle to the British. This version of Enigma was photographed directly from the operational manual issued by the German Army. (Other branches of the armed forces and the government used different versions of the device.) A huge variety of code wheels, called rotors, each wired differently from any other, and used in combinations of three, provided the enciphering-deciphering variable of the system. Three rotors are visible at the left rear of the machine illustrated. Not only did a letter or number entered emerge as a different unit, but also after each entry the rotors automatically turned; thus, the identical letter entered in immediate succession would not emerge as a coded duplicate. Decoding depended on precise knowledge of how the rotors were set for each specific encoding. The wire cables on the front of the machine permitted many additional changes in the circuitry and thereby provided even more individual code patterns. With so complex—yet fast and portable—a system, the Nazis quite naturally believed their Enigma communications were unbreakable.

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