The CodeBreakers

David Kahn9780684831305, 0684831309

The magnificent, unrivaled history of codes and ciphers — how they’re made, how they’re broken, and the many and fascinating roles they’ve played since the dawn of civilization in war, business, diplomacy, and espionage — updated with a new chapter on computer cryptography and the Ultra secret.
Man has created codes to keep secrets and has broken codes to learn those secrets since the time of the Pharaohs. For 4,000 years, fierce battles have been waged between codemakers and codebreakers, and the story of these battles is civilization’s secret history, the hidden account of how wars were won and lost, diplomatic intrigues foiled, business secrets stolen, governments ruined, computers hacked. From the XYZ Affair to the Dreyfus Affair, from the Gallic War to the Persian Gulf, from Druidic runes and the kaballah to outer space, from the Zimmermann telegram to Enigma to the Manhattan Project, codebreaking has shaped the course of human events to an extent beyond any easy reckoning. Once a government monopoly, cryptology today touches everybody. It secures the Internet, keeps e-mail private, maintains the integrity of cash machine transactions, and scrambles TV signals on unpaid-for channels. David Kahn’s The Codebreakers takes the measure of what codes and codebreaking have meant in human history in a single comprehensive account, astonishing in its scope and enthralling in its execution. Hailed upon first publication as a book likely to become the definitive work of its kind, The Codebreakers has more than lived up to that prediction: it remains unsurpassed. With a brilliant new chapter that makes use of previously classified documents to bring the book thoroughly up to date, and to explore the myriad ways computer codes and their hackers are changing all of our lives, The Codebreakers is the skeleton key to a thousand thrilling true stories of intrigue, mystery, and adventure. It is a masterpiece of the historian’s art.

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Table of contents :
A Note on the Abridged Version……Page 2
Preface……Page 3
A Few Words……Page 4
1. One Day of Magic: I……Page 6
2. One Day of Magic: II……Page 31
3. The First 3,000 Years……Page 64
4. The Rise of the West……Page 79
5. On The Origin of a Species……Page 86
6. The Era of the Black Chambers……Page 98
7. The Contribution of the Dilettantes……Page 108
8. Room 40……Page 127
9. A War of Intercepts……Page 150
10. Two Americans……Page 164
Secrecy for Sale……Page 190
12. Duel in the Ether: I……Page 210
13 Duel in the Ether: II……Page 241
14. Censors, Scramblers, and Spies……Page 270
15. The Scrutable Orientals……Page 294
16 Russkaya Kriptologiya……Page 337
17. N. S. A…….Page 375
18. Heterogeneous Impulses……Page 399
19. Ciphers in the Past Tense……Page 419
20. The Anatomy of Cryptology……Page 435
Suggestions for Further Reading……Page 454
Index……Page 457