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Marie Stuart Klooz. Japanese Diplomatic Secrets (1933 Manuscript). The Only Publication Ever Seized by the U.S. Government with Analytical Articles from Cryptologia. Ed. Emil Levine
Published as a CD at Laguna Hills, California, by Aegean Park Press, 2001
ISBN 0894122932

Emil Levine, a retired U.S. Navy intelligence officer, has had the interesting idea of publishing the long-lost, seized manuscript of what was thought to be Herbert O. Yardley’s second book on the Washington naval disarmament conference of 1921-22. The book was too old, too long, and too limited to interest even an academic press, so he brilliantly had it published as a compact disk. It pictorially reproduces the original document but also permits its text to be searched for individual words.
A word about the origin of the work may help. Herbert O. Yardley, the legendary American codebreaker, had written a memoir, The American Black Chamber, that had become a best seller when it was published in 1931. Two years later, seeking to repeat that success, he planned to tell in more detail his greatest coup: his solution of Japanese codes that helped American negotiators at the disarmament conference compel Japan to accept fewer warships that the empire wanted. Unwilling to do the work, he used a young free-lance journalist, Marie Stuart Klooz, to write it for him. Everyone thought that he was the author. The manuscript consists essentially of hundreds of intercepted Japanese diplomatic dispatches with scraps of connecting text.
When the U.S. government heard that it had been offered to the Macmillan Company for publication, it seized the work on the ground that it violated the Espionage Act of 1917. Congress then blocked publication by making it a crime to publish "any matter which was obtained while in the process of transmission between any foreign government and its diplomatic mission in the United States." The manuscript languished in government archives until I found it in the files of the Department of Justice, saw that not Yardley but Klooz had written it, and wrote a short notice about it. This is the manuscript on the CD.
Its literary merit is nil – Klooz is banal (chapter 1 is entitled "Who Killed Cock Robin?") and unperspicacious. And its historical value is small. The intercepts carry no code designation and, most importantly, no date of solution, making them useless to the historian who needs to know when the American negotiators received them. The American Black Chamber flaunted the most significant solutions; the new ones given here add little. Still, the work gives many more Japanese messages than ever before – more perhaps even than wartime and postwar destruction have leftin the Japanese archives – and they are in English. They will be of most use, despite their flaws, to the historians of disarmament and of Japanese politics.
The preface contains a few minor errors. In an article reprinted from Cryptologia, Robin Dennistron ascribes the manuscript to Yardley. But Klooz’s name appears on the titlepage; her soporific style is far from Yardley’s coruscating one; Levine says, and I agree, that the handwritten corrections are not in Yardley’s hand. He did not write "Japanese Diplomatic Secrets." Levine errs in saying that Yardley, in The American Black Chamber, discusses his interception methods. Yardley, however, writes on page 241, "Our problem was to obtain copies of messages. How? I shall not answer this question directly." He never answers it at all. Finally, Levine, like many other scholars, asserts that, after the publication of The American Black Chamber, the Japanese "of course changed codes," implying a loss of communications intelligence. But a tally of the solutions of Japanese messages for 24 months following the 1 June 1931 publication shows that in fact their numbers increased.

David Kahn
Great Neck, NY

Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II. By Stephen Budiansky
New York, NY: The Free Press, 2000. Photographs. Appendices A-E. Notes. Glossary and Abbreviations. Bibliography. Index. Pp. 436
ISBN 0-684-85932-7

In January 1943 the forty German U-boats on patrol in the Atlantic failed to intercept even one of the eight Allied convoys they had been expecting. Admiral Karl Dönitz, Commander-in-Chief of Germany’s U-boats, launched an investigation to determine whether or not the Allies could possibly be reading Enigma messages. The Germans considered the idea that Enigma had been cracked, but this was too fantastic a possibility for them to accept. As U-boat losses steadily mounted that summer, Dönitz apparently focused on infrared detection and emissions from German radar warning receivers. Even decades after the war veterans of B-Dienst (German Navy radio "observation service") still insisted that "all these stories of the British having broken Enigma were so much nonsense: the British were incapable of die geistige Arbeit - the mental work - required for cryptanalysis" (p. 294).
The truth, of course, is that England (plus crucial contributions from Poland, and later collaboration with the United States) did have what it took to break Enigma, and this Herculean effort is the central story Budiansky tells. But this title would be quite incomplete without including American efforts against Japanese codes, so the book begins in the Pacific in 1942. Before continuing with World War II, however, Budiansky delves into the history of British and American cryptanalytic efforts during World War I and throughout the interwar years.
From national leaders to mathematical geniuses to code clerks to front-line soldiers, Budiansky doesn’t miss the human elements driving the successes and failures of this history. In the summer of 1939, for example, a contingent of French and British cryptanalysts traveled to Poland to discuss Enigma. After the Poles astounded their visitors by unveiling the Enigma machines they had built from scratch, "Dilly" Knox, a member of the British team, asked a question whose answer had eluded him up to that point: what was Enigma’s wiring sequence from the keyboard to the entry ring? There were 400 million million million million possible solutions. The Poles told Knox that the Germans had wired the keys in simple alphabetical order. This answer infuriated him. "Knox was indignant that a challenging mathematical puzzle had a trick answer. It was a swindle. It was too simple, and that was an affront to his sense of the universe" (p. 95). In another episode, a British Jew remembers being on duty when a message intercepted from a ship mentioned "the final solution. ‘I had never seen or heard this expression before, but instinctively I knew what it must mean, and I have never forgotten that moment’" (p. 328).
Budiansky also recounts the many frontline successes and failures, such as the Battle of Matapan ("the first battle of any kind in the Second World War in which the timely use of signals intelligence played the decisive role" – p. 186), the seizure of documents off of captured or sinking German vessels, the Doolittle Raid, and even Ian Fleming’s "hare-brained" scheme (never initiated) to capture German documents.
I would not agree that Battle of Wits is the "complete" story of Word War II codebreaking. After such detailed analysis of British and American codebreaking, this reviewer was left wanting to learn more about German, Japanese and Russian efforts (which were mentioned briefly). But the book is well written and the author has an engaging style that will satisfy both the scholar and general reader. However, Budiansky is a mathematician and he devotes entire chapters to explaining the mathematics behind codebreaking and the engineering behind the machines. A predisposition to math would serve the reader well in order to fully appreciate these sections.

David Gonnerman
Northfield, MN

Delo Penkovskogo
Moscow: TERRA, 1997
ISBN 5-300-00992-X

In spite of the promising title, The Penkovski File contains nothing more than the already well-known protocols of the public hearings conducted by the military division of the USSR supreme court between 7 and 11 May 1963. On trial were the GRU-Colonel Oleg Penkovski (1919-1963), who had been accused of espionage, and his English liaison, Greville Wynne. But even after thirty-four years and notwithstanding the political changes that had occurred in Russia in the meantime, the protocol of the third day (9 May), which had been closed to the public, is still missing. It was at that day when the extent of the material that Penkovski had leaked to British and American secret services was discussed.
The question arises as to why the contemporary Russian reader should be interested in this show trial; after all, it had been planned and even rehearsed carefully with the defendant beforehand, and Wynne, too, was given ‘his’ statements spelled out in writing as he recalls in his memoirs. The short preface by the former lieutenant Karcevskii, entitled "selling one’s soul," sets out to enlighten the matter. It is a reflection on the ethics of high treason and the damage that any such acts instill upon one’s homelands. Hence, Russian intelligence obviously has not yet recovered from the "Penkovski Syndrome." What a shock it must have been for the political leadership of the Soviet Union when a routine shading of the British diplomate Chisholm’s wife revealed by chance that she was meeting the Soviet intelligence officer Penkovski (see E. Grig, Da, ia tam rabotal). Chrisholm had been a colleague of George Blake in West Berlin and for that reason he was known to the KGB as an intelligence officer.
Colonel Penkovski was a battle-tried former commander of a Red Army regiment who had participated in three wars and received five military decorations. His wife was the daughter of a general, his paternal friend an artillery marshal, and he a high-ranking officer with the reconnaissance section of the Soviet General Staff. Yet it was on his own initiative that he had contacted the British secret service, and within one and a half years Penkovski passed on 106 films containing roughly 5000 shots of a variety of secret documents. When on missions abroad, the only reason why he never defected to the West was the thought of his family.
Even though the court presented Penkovski as an example of a morally corrupted human being who in his decadence would not shy away from drinking wine out of his lover’s shoe, there are hints at the existence of quite a different Penkovski. The latter would betray the leading caste of his motherlands for purely patriotic reasons. He would refuse any payment for his services from Western secret services. His statements in court made it possible for Wynne to play the role of a businessman who had been used by intelligence despite the fact that Wynne had been a British secret service man since 1939. When first interrogated by the head of the KGB Vladimir Semicastny, Penkovski insisted on being innocent and also emphasized his faithfulness to his homelands (see L Mlecin, Predsetatel KGB—rassekrecenye sud’by, Moscow 1999).
To the reader of the protocols, Penkovski appears to be less of an unscrupulous traitor but rather the personification of a tragic patriot who for love of his country resorted to treason and for that had to pay with his life. Still, it is questionable whether this conclusion really reflects the ideals of the present day Russian leadership. Thus, it is somewhat astounding that a book like The Penkovski File could have been published at all.

Jürgen Schmidt
Oranienburg