» Delusions of Intelligence: Enigma, Ultra, and the End of Secure Ciphers

Delusions of Intelligence: Enigma, Ultra, and the End of Secure Ciphers Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Interesting
Comment: This book is written in the style of a serious piece of historical analysis (with plenty of footnotes), as opposed to a popular history or science style. Thus, some readers may find it dry; it also assumes the reader already knows the basic history, so it's best to read one of the more popular books first. But if you have sufficient background and interest, it reads very easily.

It argues that the main reasons for the allies' relative success in signals intelligence was their different organizational and institutional approach than the axis. The case is laid out very clearly and persuasively, although there is too much repetition and overlap for my taste.

I did not like the short section at the end about the internet -- I did not find the specifics very persuasive. It would have been better to stick to the lessons about effective use of intelligence and how to build a good organization.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: The Business of Reading Other Gentlemen's Mail
Comment: While there are many books describing WW-II code-breaking techniques (starting with the bible: David Kahn's "The Codebreakers"), few describe the operation of how it was actually done. R.A. Ratcliff remedies that omission with this thorough and highly detailed survey of how British, U.S. and German code breaking was organized as a business.

He describes the way the various militaries of WW-II set up their code breaking operations and highlights how different they were--both in organization and effectiveness. The answers he provides offer exciting lessons for how to (and how not to) run any effective business organization where the output is cerebral. Here are some major take-aways from this fascinating book:

* Everyone's codes were broken to some degree or another. Reading the books in this genre--particularly about the astonishing successes of the British Bletchley Park operation--one does not notice that, as good as they were in decrypting enemy code, the British and American codes were also broken by the Germans.

In the German case, this led to a sense of invincibility of "We're smarter than they are" that doomed their own code security.

* The Bletchley Park code breaking established the gold standard for how to let intellectuals do what intellectuals do best--think--and keep hide-bound military structure out of their way. Under the nominal control of the British military, Bletchley was run loosely enough inside the walls of the compound so that analysts of could easily seek each other out, compare notes, and spot chinks in the armor across regional and service lines. The German code-breaking effort was a model of military turf battles, with each service jealously guarding its own efforts, and breakthroughs by one group rarely communicated to others.

* A key tactic--and one unrecognized by the Germans--was that of maintaining an iron-clad provenance of any code-breaking results. It was forbidden (and strictly enforced) for any Bletchley results to be recoded and retransmitted without first having the original information paraphrased. This prevented German analysts from obtaining a key to a secure code by being able to decrypt the same message content sent via a broken code. Many German codes were cracked in this manner, as, for example, the same weather forecasts were retransmitted by the different services.

The secret work and great success of Bletchley Park was not revealed to the public until 1974! The final astonishing lesson of this operation was that by trusting the workers with continual cross-discipline updates, everyone was brought more fully into the big picture. This facilitated trust among the workers to help insure security. It also caused small inconsequential-seeming details to be caught, correlated, and fitted into a mass of yet incomprehensible data as a missing link that made sense of the whole thing. One cannot help thinking that this same trust-oriented operation in a single location must have been the model for the U.S.'s Manhattan project. The difference being that Manhattan was as leaky as a sieve from Day One; the 10,000 workers at Bletchley Park kept its secrets for 35 years.

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