The Secrets of Station X: The Fight to Break the Enigma Cypher (Dialogue Espionage Classics)

Station X a history of the British effort to decrypt the secret foreign military and diplomatic traffic of the Germans, Russians and Japanese. As a history, it begins with the roots of this effort during World War I and the inter-war period. My interest in this topic is due to my interest in computer security, and the story of Bletchley Park ("Station X") is a nexus of events in cryptography, cryptanalysis and computer engineering. And of course of the craft of intelligence.The book makes clear that the encryption implemented by Enigma was or would have been practically unbreakable, were it not for the mistakes that the Germans made in implementation. The substitutions were not truly random. Letter and letter pair frequency in German were not completely randomized. The codes were vulnerable to known plain text attacks: Standard message texts were used repeatedly. Messages were sometimes sent in weaker ciphers that had already been broken, providing further known plain texts. This book provides real-life examples for students of cryptography about to strengthen ciphers and how to attack them.The Bletchley park code breakers were also assisted by German faults in key initialization and propagation. Soldiers in the field used non-random, guessable initialization sequences. And eventually, code books with random keys were captured. All of these factors made what was certainly a monumentally challenging task of code breaking possible.No one should underestimate the manual work that went into the cryptanalysis, to reverse engineer each modification to the Enigma engines, to identify the daily keys based on partial texts and garbled interceptions. The code breakers were hard working geniuses, worthy of respect from generations of cryptologists.Another important achievement of the Bletchley group and their supporters was the introduction of machinery to speed up the trial and error matching of the possible substitution and scrambling sequences. Some were designed by memorable names such as Turing, but others were invented by engineers at the Postal Service.The Bletchley code breakers built on a history of prior achievement. The talent and skills of the British began with the Foreign Office code breaking efforts during World War I. And the first to decipher Engima codes were Polish scientists who shared their understanding and methods with the British during the run-up to World War II.I enjoyed the level of detail and biography in the book, and the flow of history it depicts. I would have appreciated more description on the manual methods used to break the codes, before the machines came into use, and that were required on a daily basis to determine the keys as they were changed.There is a 4 part BBC documentary from 1999 also called Station X. Many of the same people were interviewed for the documentary and for the book, and many of the quotes are identical. Nevertheless, the visual presentation of the documentary and the detail of the book are complementary. The documentary is available on YouTube. I recommend both.

In preparation to a trip to Bletchley Park (BP) this year I obtained this book to provide background and to understand more about this aspect of WW II. To my surprise this was the underling factor that contributed to winning the war. Michael Smith does an extraordinary job of compiling many interviews, diaries, correspondence and records of BP and chronologically organizes the material into a story that is easily followed.I was especially interested in the Bismarck, Operation Barbarossa, Dieppe, U Boat North Atlantic War, Sword Operation of North Africa, Overlord, and Double Cross which BP played decisive and significant parts in each. Reading the Nazi mail allowed the Allies to play them like a fiddle! By way of attrition then at Normandy siege warfare the Allies were able to overcome the Nazi advantage in short time, all through Ultra.Although I have read a great deal about the Enigma machine and still do not totally comprehend its working, the chapter on Colossus, the first computer, developed at BP provides more understanding. This book does provide the importance of Station X and the individuals who interacted there. It appears from this account the UK Nerds won WW II.

A little drawn out in the beginning . Gave a great appreciation for the people who worked at BP and the incredible amount of talent.

The analysis of the code breaking work at Bletchley Park is detailed, humanly captivating, and so hard to put down!

I was betrayed by the folks who gave this book 5 stars....this book is horrendously dry and boring. If I read a good book in bed at night, I will stay up all night reading because I am interested. This book, by contrast, put me to sleep in about 30 seconds every time I tried reading it. The book basically talks about the people who worked at Bletchely park and their personalities. Very little about the enigma machine or how the code was broken. It reads like a soap opera, very touchy feely with lots of focus on the emotions of the people at Bletchley park. In addition, almost every single page has a long one paragraph first person quotation which completely breaks up the flow of the book. Would have been much better to simply paraphrase.I tried for several weeks and gave up; just could not read more than 3-4 pages at a time without being bored out of my mind.

This is an entertaining, very readable narrative about the immensely important code breaking operation at Bletchley Park during World War II. A lot of ordinary people and some eccentric geniuses came together in this ramshackle estate in the countryside and helped to mortally wound the German war effort. The story is interleaved with reminisciences of people who were there and that provides insights into the time, the place, the struggles, the ups and downs and the occasional frivolity that got them through it all.

The book gives the chronological story of Bletchley Park. It does try to give a few of the steps involved in actually breaking a code and I think in these sections more diagrams would have been useful. There is maybe more information than most people want to know, but the book feels very complete.

I'm interested in cryptanalysis mainly to understand how this science is used covertly. The only way to discover this is to read its history that has been declassified and then use imagination to understand the present post Snowden world. This book fills that need and more because there are excerpts from survivors of the BP data spill. Smith combines the technical at a simple level with the human story. It is a nice read.

I am sure this book deserves five stars for the comprehensiveness of its account of the code-breaking activities at Bletchley Park; but stars are intended to indicate whether “I love it” (5) or “I like it” (4). I have given it only four stars because there were several times when I considered giving up the book: when its technical details were so dense, when I could not understand the descriptions of the decoding machines, when I lost track of the meanings of abbreviations or indeed of the huge cast of characters.But each time, just as I was about to give up, the book would spring to life again: we have the depiction of the amazing atmosphere in a military establishment in which so many eccentric academics were allowed to be eccentric. We find young men who will have very distinguished career is later life (Roy Jenkins, for instance; Peter Benenson who would become the founder of Amnesty International; the novelists Angus Wilson and Ian Fleming; the chess master Harry Golombek; others would become well-known academics like the historians Trevor-Roper, Asa Briggs, J.H.Plumb, T.S.R.Boase and the American William Bundy). And of course there are the giants of code-breakers, including Dilly Knox, John Tiltman, Alan Turing, Hugh Alexander and Tommy Flowers. In John Cairncross Bletchley Park had a Soviet double agent who passed information on to the Soviet Union. He was not suspected at the time; but there were often suspicions that American colleagues could not be trusted to keep the strict secrecy to which everyone at Bletchley was so committed that, except at the top level, the great majority of the people who were working there did not even tell each other what they were doing and often did not know what role their individual work was playing in the overall picture. This total secrecy was maintained until the late 1970s, long after the war was over. All loved the work for which their minds - trained in mathematics, in languages, in crossword puzzles, in chess - were so well suited. All always showed utter dedication, but they also had fun, not only in dances and various japes, but also in discussion groups and groups devoted to music, to Scottish dancing and to drama. We are given descriptions of the physical circumstances under which they worked. We see the growth and physical spread of the establishment from 110 people in August 1939 to more than 10,000 at the beginning of 1945, some two thirds of whom were women. And these figures do not include the “thousands more [who] were based at ninety locations in the UK and others around the world.”Gripping above all, of course, was the real drama of what went on there: the thrill when an enemy code was broken; the even greater thrill when that resulted in victories; the despair when a new code took so long to break that in the interval hundreds of merchant ships were sunk by U boats in the Battle of the Atlantic; the dismay also when the codes were broken but the military possibilities to make use of it were so limited (as, for example, in the German attack on Crete), or when the military, Montgomery especially, chose not to act on the information given to it: he ignored the information which would have speeded up his destruction of Rommel’s army in Tunisia, and - worse - which would have prevented the disaster of the Arnhem airdrop. Intelligence about the impending German counter-offensive in the Ardennes was also ignored. And it was known weeks before Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the Japanese would have surrendered if they could be assured that the Emperor would remain on the throne.Bletchley Park also ran the Double Cross system, by which false information was ingeniously leaked to the Germans, and then intercepts could tell the occasions when the Germans had fallen for it. So, for example, the Germans were led to believe in 1943 that the Allies would invade Greece rather than Sicily, and, most importantly, that the main landing on D-Day would be near Calais and that any landing in Normandy would be merely a feint. Intercepts then showed that the Germans stationed large bodies of troops near Calais who could have made all the difference in Normandy. Indeed almost all the German dispositions before D-Day were known in detail, partly because messages sent to Tokyo by the Japanese miliary attachés who had inspected the German defences had been decoded. “The achievements of trhe British codebreakers against Japanese codes and cyphers have been persistently underplayed.”I was amazed how very much Bletchley Park knew about German plans, and how skilfully the intelligence was used in such a way that the Germans did not know that their codes had been cracked. (I wondered whether the Germans ever cracked any of the codes the Allies were using: if so, there is no reference that in this book.)

Where this book is very strong, is giving the tectical and strategic value of the enigma decrypts typically in the Atlantic war and in Africa where the inteliigence seems to have been decisive.It's also good on how decrption changed from its basically WWI state in the early 30s, to highly mechanised/ computerised by the end of WWII.It's clear, well researchd and well written, if you're primarily interested in how Enigma was broken I still think Simon Singh's Code book is the clearest explanation.Well worth a read for the general context of Bletchley Park.

A lot of information to assimilate in 12 organised chapters. Nevertheless, an interesting account and well worth the read. This book nicely compliments the recent film - ‘The Imitation Game’ and a visit to Bletchley Park. Choose your order of attack - and afterwards, you will have a decent overview of the secret world of code breaking that went on behind the scenes during WW2. This book is probably the best and most recent account of BP operations & skilfully documents the much wider perspective to WW2 code breaking. An invaluable addition to my library. Highly recommended.

If you are interested in Bletchley Park then this really is a must-read book. It is absolutely astonishing just how much the Allies were able to de-cypher German codes and use them as intelligence during WW2. It makes you look at documentaries, memoirs such as Churchill's, and films, from a slightly different angle when you appreciate just how much knowledge the Allies had about the Axis powers' dispositions, accessible firepower etc.Totally absorbing.

Powerful detail and a flood of names but the cream came when the intercepts were directly related to an action or re-action. It should have delivered more on the reality but it was a book about Station X after all. Perfect "Lockdown" reading.