Missing Nazi Code Machine Becomes Mystery

L O N D O N, Oct. 11, 2000 -- An Enigma machine — the device the Nazis used toencrypt top-secret messages during World War II — has becomewrapped in a riddle.

Since it was stolen on April Fool’s Day, Bletchley Park MuseumDirector Christine Large has been issuing appeals through the mediaand fielding middle-of-the night phone calls in an attempt toarrange a clandestine meeting with a letter-writer who says hedidn’t steal the machine, but wants a lot of money to give it back.

Two weeks ago, the museum received a letter demanding $36,000for the safe return of the machine that resembles a clunkytypewriter in a box. The writer claimed to be acting for a thirdparty who had bought it innocently.

Destroying a Record of History?

According to police, the letter-writer said the Enigma machinewould be destroyed if the money were not paid by midnight lastFriday.

The museum agreed to hand over the sum, donated by an anonymousbenefactor, but the deadline passed without word from theletter-writer.

On Saturday at 4:30 a.m., Large got a phone call from a personclaiming to be the writer.

“I felt pretty confident that we had reached a businesslikeagreement,” said Large. “But since then, nothing. We just have towait and see what happens next.”

More than 70 Enigma machines are known to survive, according toa list compiled by data-security researcher David Hamer.

But the stolen one — serial number G-312 — is a rarer andespecially complex encoding machine used by Abwehr, German militaryintelligence. The only other one on public display is at theNational Security Agency’s National Cryptologic Museum in FortMeade, Md.

G-312 was one of several key exhibits at Bletchley Park, the countryestate 50 miles northwest of London where an eclectic assortment ofmathematicians, chess masters, linguists and crossword-puzzleexperts labored throughout World War II to crack Nazi codes.

Famous Men of ‘Station X’

Thousands of staff members — including the brilliantmathematician Alan Turing and James Bond creator Ian Fleming — worked in the mansion house and in hastily built wooden huts on the55-acre compound, code-named Station X.

Historians say the codebreakers’ work shortened the war by asmuch as two years. The messages they deciphered provided crucialinformation during the Battle of the Atlantic, the desert campaignagainst German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and the preparations forD-Day.

“Bletchley Park didn’t win the war, that was won by people withguns and bullets and things out in the field, but I think BletchleyPark is a great exemplar, particularly to the younger generationnow, of brains over bullets,” the museum’s founder, Tony Sale,said in a television documentary last year. “You can defeat anenemy intellectually, and that was shown here.”

Enigma — which the Nazis considered unbreakable — generated aconstantly changing code, so that each message had 150 millionmillion million possible encodings.

Cracking the Enigma

To help crack it, Turing developed an electromechanical searchmachine dubbed the Bombe, and Post Office engineer Tommy Flowerscreated Colossus, the world’s first programmable computer. It couldrun through possible combinations at the rate of 5,000 letters persecond.

“This was the birthplace of modern communications and theinformation security techniques we see underlying the Internet,”Large said.

The work of Bletchley Park emerged only when documents from thewar began to be declassified in the 1970s. By the early ’90s, thebuildings were slated to be demolished to make way for new homes.

Volunteers formed the Bletchley Park Trust, leased a portion ofthe site and established a museum and conference facilities. Thetrust has obtained $14.5 million to establish a business incubatorand “enterprise hub” and plans to turn Bletchley Park into aheritage park dedicated to the science of communication.

Sale quit the Trust last year to protest the “commercialexploitation” of the site and has set up his own preservationgroup, the Bletchley Park Heritage Society.

But Large says the plans are a fitting tribute to a slightlyeccentric, particularly British episode of heroism.

“One of the great things that happened after the theft is thatthere was a great wave of popular support and interest,” she said.“People’s imaginations are fired by the story of Bletchley Park.”