Geniuses at War

Chapter 1

The Right Type of Recruit

In the years after the Great War, as it was called at the time, and continuing through World War II, the United States maintained two agencies for decoding intercepted communications: one in the army and one in the navy. This arrangement may have had the merit of making the maximum number of bureaucrats happy, but it sometimes led to counterproductive results. For instance, in September 1940, after the army s codebreakers solved Japan s most secure diplomatic code, known to the Americans as Purple, the question arose as to how to do the voluminous work of actually reading each day s messages. Each service felt an imperative to keep not only the Empire of Japan, but also the other service, in its place. After protracted negotiations, the two sides agreed that the navy s outfit, OP-­20-­G, would handle the messages received on odd-­numbered days while the army s Signal Intelligence Service would handle those received on even-­numbered days. The fruits of their labors would be given to the president by his army aide in odd-­numbered months, by his naval aide in even-­numbered months. The scheme was internally logical but ludicrous. In another instance when the rivalry showed itself, after the war with Hitler was under way, a British representative to the U.S. codebreaking units found himself forbidden by the U.S. Army from sharing details of their conversations with the U.S. Navy.

The British had endured similar rivalries between their own services during World War I. Unlike the American government, however, the British sought to avert such issues in the future by fusing their army and navy codebreaking services into a single unit following the end of the war. In October 1919, eleven months after the armistice, Prime Minister David Lloyd George s war cabinet ordered the creation of a new organization, the Government Code & Cypher School, to be located in the Watergate House in central London. Its publicly

DAVID A. PRICE was educated at the College of William and Mary, Harvard University, and the University of Cambridge. He is the author of The Pixar Touch and Love and Hate in Jamestown. Price lives with his wife in Richmond, Virginia.

Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction of the Year
Winner, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Middleton Award

A remarkable book. Highly accessible, with many historical details formerly unknown to me. The book is empathetic and engaging with a three-dimensional and rich texture. I felt as if I were there. What was accomplished, especially with Colossus, is nothing short of amazing. Reading excerpts from correspondence about predictions for artificial intelligence and networks was astonishing for its accuracy looking back nearly 75 years. Price deserves great praise for a historical gem. Vint Cerf, father of the Internet

David Price has produced the riveting story of how a team of colorful geniuses in Bletchley Park, England broke the most secure German World War II codes. The tale of Alan Turing and the Enigma machine is well known, but Price describes the very secret code-breaking project that Turing and his colleagues tackled later in the war, which involved building the world s first electronic computer. Thus was the digital age born. Walter Isaacson, author of The Innovators

World War II opened two legendary gateways to the modern age: Los Alamos and Bletchley Park. A declassified report on the construction of the atomic bomb was released just six days after Hiroshima, while the Official Secrets Act lingered for thirty years over the codebreaking at Bletchley Park. David Price has distilled the available knowledge into an authoritative yet fast-paced account, lending the characters behind Colossus a voice that was silenced for far too long. George Dyson, author of Turing's Cathedral

"A methodical account of the secret British code-breakers working to decode Adolf Hitler s wartime communications. . . . Gripping. . . . A narrative worthy of James Bond." Foreign Policy

"[Price] weaves a superb narrative, at once compelling and relatable. . . . Incredibly