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A British security classification (the very highest) given during World War 2 to intelligence gathered from the breaking of the key German military codes used with their ‘Enigma’ encryption device. ‘Ultra’ intelligence was available to the British high command from the outset of the war, and was of crucial importance during the Battle of Britain and the Battle of the Atlantic.

For other usages, see Ultra (disambiguation).

Ultra (sometimes capitalized ULTRA) was the name used by the British for intelligence resulting from decryption of German communications in World War II. The term eventually became the standard designation in both Britain and the United States for all intelligence from high-level cryptanalytic sources. The name arose because the code-breaking success was considered more important than the highest security classification available at the time (Most Secret) and so was regarded as being Ultra secret.

Much of the German cipher traffic was encrypted on the Enigma machine, hence the term "Ultra" has often been used almost synonymously with "Enigma decrypts."

Until the name "Ultra" was adopted, there were several cryptonyms for intelligence from this source, including Boniface.

Later the Germans began to use several stream cipher teleprinter systems for their most important traffic, to which the British gave the generic code-name FISH. Several distinct systems were used, principally the Lorenz SZ 40/42 (initially code-named TUNNY) and Geheimfernschreiber (code-named STURGEON).

These also were broken, particularly TUNNY, which the British thoroughly penetrated. It was eventually attacked using the Colossus, considered to be the forerunner of the electronic programmable digital computer. Although the volume of messages read from this system was much smaller than that from the Enigma, they more than made up for it in their importance.

F.W. Winterbotham, in The Ultra Secret (1974), quotes the western Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight D. These messages were generated on several variants of an electro-mechanical rotor machine called "Enigma." The Enigma machine was widely thought to be in practice unbreakable in the 1920s, when a variant of the commercial Model D was first used by the German Navy. The German Army, Navy, Air Force, Nazi party, Gestapo, and German diplomats all used Enigma machines, but there were several variants (eg, the Abwehr used a four-rotor machine without a plugboard, and Naval Enigma used different key management from that of the Army or Air Force, making its traffic far more difficult to cryptanalyze). Dilly Knox, of GC&CS, is said to have broken it during the 1920s.

Breaking the cipher

Main article: Cryptanalysis of the Enigma

The fundamental break into the Enigma systems that were to be used by Nazi Germany was made in Poland in 1932, just on the eve of Adolf Hitler's accession to power, by Marian Rejewski. The 27-year-old mathematician used advanced mathematics (group theory, particularly permutation theory) and cracked the Enigma system. Together with two colleagues at the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau (Polish: Biuro Szyfrów), he went on to develop practical methods of decrypting Enigma traffic. They designed working "doubles" of the Enigmas and developed equipment and techniques which helped in finding the keys needed for decryption (including the "grill," "clock," cyclometer, cryptologic bomb, and perforated sheets). Well before 1938, much German Enigma traffic was being routinely decrypted by the Poles; This happened during the famous meeting at Pyry, in the Kabaty Woods south of Warsaw, on July 25, 1939. Since neither the French nor the British had succeeded in breaking Enigma traffic, this was a major cryptanalytic windfall for Poland's western allies.

Armed with this Polish assistance, the British began work on German Enigma traffic. Work on Enigma after the outbreak of World War II in France, at PC Bruno outside Paris, was done by Polish Cipher Bureau cryptologists who had escaped Poland. Early in 1939 Britain's secret service had installed its Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, 50 miles (80 km) north of London, to work on enemy message traffic. They also set up a large interception network to collect enciphered messages for the cryptologists at Bletchley and at five near-by off-site outstations at Adstock, Gayhurst, Wavendon, Stanmore, and Eastcote. Strict rules were established to restrict the number of people who knew of Ultra (and its origins) in the hope of ensuring that nothing (e.g., leaks, actions) would alert the Axis powers that the Allies were reading any of their messages. Such was the secrecy surrounding reports from "Boniface" that "his" reports were taken directly to Prime Minister Winston Churchill in a locked box to which he personally held the key.

The Bletchley Park workers included a mix of crossword enthusiasts, chess mavens, mathematicians and pioneer computer scientists. Amongst the latter was Alan Turing, one of the founders of modern computing. By 1943, a large proportion of intercepts (over 2,000 daily at the height of operations) were routinely read, including some from Hitler himself. 31, 58.)

One mode of attack on the Enigma relied on the fact that the reflector (a patented feature of the Enigma machines) guaranteed that no letter could be enciphered as itself, so an A could not be sent as an A. With a probable plaintext fragment and the knowledge that no letter could be enciphered as itself, a corresponding ciphertext fragment could often be identified.

Use of Ultra

Usable Ultra information came too late to be of great help during the Battle of Britain.

The Allies were seriously concerned with the prospect of the Axis command finding out that they had broken into the Enigma traffic. This was taken to the extreme that, for instance, though they knew from intercepts the whereabouts of U-boats lying in wait in mid-Atlantic, the U-boats often were not hunted unless a "cover story" could be arranged — Ultra information was used to attack and sink many Afrika Korps supply ships bound for North Africa;

In the summer of 1940, British cryptanalysts, who were successfully breaking German Air Force Enigma-cypher variants, were able to give Churchill information about the issuing of maps of England and Ireland to the Sealion invasion forces.

From the beginning, the Naval version of Enigma used a larger selection of rotors than did the Army or Air Force versions, as well as operating procedures that made it much more secure than other Enigma variants. Different and far more difficult methods had to be used to break into Naval Enigma traffic, and with the U-boats running freely in the Atlantic after the fall of France, a more direct approach recommended itself.

On 7 May 1941 the Royal Navy deliberately captured a German weather ship, together with cipher equipment and codes; and 2 days later U-110 was captured, together with an Enigma machine, code book, operating manual and other information that enabled Bletchley Park to break submarine messages until the end of June. And it was done again shortly afterwards.

Naval Enigma machines or settings books were captured from a total of 7 U-boats and 8 German surface ships. These included U-boats U-505 (1944) and U-559 (1942) and a number of German weather boats and converted trawlers such as the Krebs, captured during a raid on the Lofoten Islands off Norway. More fantastic scenarios were contemplated, such as Ian Fleming's James Bondian suggestion to "crash" captured German bombers into the sea near German shipping, hoping they would be "rescued" by a ship's crew, which would be taken captive by Commandos concealed in the plane who would capture the cryptographic material intact.

In other cases, the Allies induced the Germans to provide them with cribs. Charting decrypted Enigma traffic against British shipping losses for a given month shows a strong pattern of increased losses when Naval Enigma was blacked out, and vice versa. From this point on, Naval Enigma messages were being read constantly, even after changes to the ground settings.

However, the new tricks only reduced the number of possible settings for a message. Karl Dönitz received reports of "impossible" encounters between U-boats and enemy vessels which made him suspect some compromise of his communications. In one instance, three U-boats met at a tiny island in the Caribbean, and a British destroyer promptly showed up. The more so, since his counterintelligence B-Dienst group, who had partially broken Royal Navy traffic (including its convoy codes early in the war), supplied enough information to support the idea that the Allies were unable to read Naval Enigma.

In 1941 British intelligence learned that the German Navy was about to introduce M4, a new version of Enigma with 4 rotors rather than 3. Realizing the error, the U-boat retransmitted the same message using the 3-rotor Enigma, giving the British sufficient clues to break the new machine soon after it became operational on February 1, 1942. Its traffic was routinely readable.

It is commonly claimed that the breaks into Naval Enigma resulted in the war being a year shorter, but given its effects on the Second Battle of the Atlantic alone, that might be an underestimate.

Breaking of some messages (not in German Enigma) led to the defeat of the Italian Navy at Cape Matapan, and was preceded by another "fortuitous" search-plane sighting. British Admiral Cunningham also did some fancy footwork at a hotel in Egypt to prevent Axis agents from taking note of his movements and deducing that a major operation was planned. Ultra information was of considerable assistance to the British (Montgomery being "in the know" about Ultra) at El Alamein in Western Egypt in the long-running battle with the Afrika Korps under Rommel and Intelligence from signals between Adolf Hitler and General Günther von Kluge was of considerable help during the campaign in France just after the Allied D-Day landings, particularly in regard to estimates of when German reserves might be committed to battle. The Red Army was well aware of the German buildup, locations and attack time precisely, prior to the battle of Kursk due to Ultra information provided to them.

By 1945 almost all German Enigma traffic (Wehrmacht, Navy, Luftwaffe, Abwehr, SD, etc.) could be decrypted within a day or two, yet the Germans remained confident of its security. Rommel's intentions just prior to the Battle of the Kasserine Pass in North Africa in 1942 had been suggested by Ultra, but this was not taken into account by the Americans. Likewise, Ultra traffic suggested an attack in the Ardennes in 1944, but the Battle of the Bulge was a surprise to the Allies because the information was disregarded.

After the War, American TICOM project teams found and detained a considerable number of German cryptographic personnel. (See Bamford's Body of Secrets in regard to the TICOM missions immediately after the war.)

An intriguing question concerns alleged use of Ultra information by the "Lucy" spy ring. It has been alleged that "Lucy" was, in major part, a way for the British to feed Ultra intelligence to the Soviets in a way that made it appear to have come from highly-placed espionage and not from cryptanalysis of German radio traffic. The Lucy ring was operated, apparently, by one man, Rudolf Roessler, and was initially treated with considerable suspicion by the Soviets. The information it provided was accurate and timely, and Soviet agents in Switzerland (including Alexander Rado, the director) eventually took it quite seriously.

Purple decrypts in Europe

In the Pacific theater, the Japanese cipher machine dubbed "Purple" by the Americans, and unrelated to the Enigmas, was used for highest-level Japanese diplomatic traffic. It was also cracked, by the US Army's Signal Intelligence Service.

The Japanese are said to have obtained an Enigma machine as early as 1937, although it is debated whether they were given it by their German ally or bought a commercial version which, except for plugboard and actual rotor wirings, was essentially the German Army / Air Force machine. First, as David Kahn pointed out in his 1974 New York Times review of F.W. Winterbotham's The Ultra Secret, after World War II the British gathered up all the Enigma machines they could find and sold them to Third World countries, confident that they could continue reading the messages of the machines' new owners. A second explanation relates to a misadventure of Winston Churchill's between the World Wars, when he publicly disclosed information obtained by decrypting Russian secret communications; this had prompted the Russians to change their cryptography, leading to a cryptological blackout. The third explanation is given by Winterbotham (The Ultra Secret, introduction), who recounts that two weeks after V-E Day Churchill requested that former recipients of Ultra intelligence be asked not to divulge the source or the information they had received from it, in order that there might be neither damage to the future operations of the Secret Service nor any cause for the Allies' enemies to blame it for their defeat.

Since it was British and, later, American message-breaking which had been the most extensive, this meant that the importance of Enigma decrypts to the prosecution of the war remained unknown. Nevertheless it was the public disclosure of Enigma decryption, in the book Enigma (1973) by French Intelligence officer Gustave Bertrand, that generated pressure to discuss the rest of the Enigma/Ultra story.

The British ban was finally lifted in 1974, the year that a key participant on the distribution side of the Ultra project, F.W. Winterbotham, published The Ultra Secret.

The official history of British intelligence in World War II was published in five volumes from 1979 to 1988. It was chiefly edited by Harry Hinsley, with one volume by Michael Howard. There is also a one-volume collection of reminiscences by Ultra veterans, Codebreakers (1993), edited by Hinsley and Alan Stripp.

As mentioned, after the war, surplus Enigmas and Enigma-like machines were sold to many countries around the world, which remained convinced of the security of the remarkable cipher machines.

Some information about Enigma decryption did get out earlier, however. In 1967 the Polish military historian W?adys?aw Kozaczuk in his book Bitwa o tajemnice (Secret War) first revealed that the German Enigma had been broken by Polish cryptanalysts before World War II. The same year, David Kahn in The Codebreakers described the 1945 capture of a Naval Enigma machine from U-505 and mentioned, somewhat in passing, that Enigma messages were already being read by that time, requiring "machines that filled several buildings." In 1971 Ladislas Farago's The Game of the Foxes gave an early published version of the myth of the purloined Enigma that enabled the British (according to Farago, Alfred Dillwyn Knox) to crack the cipher (Farago also mentions an Abwehr Enigma). It was shortly after this (1974) that a decision was taken to permit some revelations about some Bletchley Park operations.

The United States National Security Agency retired the last of its rotor-based encryption systems, the KL-7 series, in the 1980s.

Difficulties with some disclosures

Many accounts of the Enigma-decryption story, and of other World War II cryptological happenings, have been published. The story about Churchill deliberately not interfering with a Luftwaffe bombing of Coventry which was known through Enigma decrypts is one such. Peter Calvocoressi's book, Top Secret Ultra, contains a sounder account of the episode than the commonly recounted allegation. The fate of the German Enigma spy "Asché" was not publicly known till Hugh Sebag-Montefiore tracked down Asché's daughter about 1999.

Wartime consequences

An exhibit in 2003 on "Secret War" at the Imperial War Museum, in London, quoted British Prime Minister Winston Churchill telling King George VI: "It was thanks to Ultra that we won the war." Churchill's greatest fear, even after Hitler had suspended Operation Sealion and invaded the Soviet Union, was that the German submarine wolf packs would succeed in strangling sea-locked Britain. A major factor that averted Britain's defeat in the Battle of the Atlantic was her regained mastery of Naval-Enigma decryption. As the air gap over the North Atlantic closed and convoys received escort carrier protection, airborne anti-submarine aircraft became extremely efficient hunter-killers with the use of centimetric radar and airborne depth charges. Improvements to Huff-Duff (radio-triangulation equipment used as part of ELINT) meant that a U-boat's location could be found even if the messages they were sending could not be read. Improvements to ASDIC (SONAR), coupled with Hedgehog depth charges, improved the likelihood of a surface attack sinking a U-boat.

From February 1942 when Air Marshal Arthur Harris became Commander-in-Chief of RAF Bomber Command, the RAF implemented large scale night area bombardment of German cities. The historian Frederick Taylor argues that as Harris was not cleared to know about ULTRA, he was given some information gleaned from Enigma, but not where it had come from. Winterbotham, the first author to limn, in his 1974 book The Ultra Secret, the influence of Enigma decryption on the course of World War II, likewise made the earliest contribution to an appreciation of Ultra's postwar influence, which now continues into the 21st century — and not only in the postwar establishment of Britain's GCHQ (Government Communication Headquarters) and the United States' NSA (National Security Agency).

Further reading

A fictional version of this story is told in the novel Enigma by Robert Harris (ISBN 0-09-999200-0), the movie made from the novel—see "Enigma (2001 film)"—and is somewhat covered, also fictionally, in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (ISBN 0-09-941067-2).

A short account of World War II cryptology is Battle of Wits (2000) by Stephen Budiansky; David Kahn's Seizing the Enigma (1991) is essentially about the solution of Naval Enigma, based on seizures of German naval vessels; British success in the endeavor almost certainly saved Britain from defeat in the crucial Battle of the Atlantic and thereby made the United States' entry into the war's European theater possible. Thomas Parrish's The American Codebreakers (earlier published as The Ultra Americans) concentrates on the U.S. contribution to the codebreaking effort.

A brief description of the Enigma, as well as other codes/ciphers, can be found in Simon Singh's The Code Book (1999). he also co-edited, with Alan Stripp, a volume of memoirs by participants in the British cryptological effort, Codebreakers: the Inside Story of Bletchley Park (1993). Marian Rejewski wrote a number of papers on his 1932 break into Enigma and his subsequent work on the cipher, well into World War II, with his fellow mathematician-cryptologists, Jerzy Ró?ycki and Henryk Zygalski; most of Rejewski's papers appear in W?adys?aw Kozaczuk's 1984 Enigma: How the German Machine Cipher Was Broken, and How It Was Read by the Allies in World War Two (edited and translated by Christopher Kasparek), which remains the standard reference on the crucial foundations laid by the Poles for World War II Enigma decryption.

Broken Enigma messages are still extremely valuable today, as they provide some of the best surviving direct accounts of the Nazi war effort.

References