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Leigh Sales, Detainee 002: The Case of David Hicks
Melbourne University Press: Melbourne 2007. $Aust. 38.40. ISBN 0522854001

Leigh Sales’ book about the imprisonment of the working class lad from Australia, David Hicks, for five years in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on accusation of being a Taliban terrorist and the Australian government’s abandoning him to the Americans is a sorry tale. But the book is more than a story of injustice and political opportunism in Canberra and Washington in that it discusses how President Bush and the body of neo-conservatives around him led the US into the War in Iraq and Afghanistan as a result of the carnage of 9/11 in 2001. These wars produced thousands of ‘enemy captured’ who were classified not as PoWs, but under the new American category of ‘enemy combatants’. Military Commissions were thereafter established to try some of these detainees under uncertain American legal principles which were then challenged in the US courts. Unlike other governments who had their nationals released from Guantanamo Bay, the Australian government under its conservative Prime Minister, John Howard, found it electorally useful to leave Hicks in Cuba. He was then able to win two successive national elections by demonstrating his greater awareness of national security issues of which his response to the Hicks issues formed one element. Howard had attached his government to the actions of Bush by joining the Coalition of the Willing based on his personal liking of Bush.
David Hicks, like thousands of young men in the West, was attracted to the Islamic faith and from his semi-skilled job as a boner in a chicken factory found the money to travel to northern Pakistan and live in a madrasa and join in military training. This soon after landed him in Kandahar armed with an AK-47, that he never fired, and guarding an abandoned Taliban tank when the forces of the Northern Alliance swept over the region. The Alliance seized him and sold him to the US forces for US$1,000. He was then flown to Guantanamo Bay to be the second prisoner to enter the camp, hence his identification as Detainee 002. The American, John Walker Lindh, was numbered 001.
It was politically advantageous for Howard to leave Hicks in Cuba, since there was no legislation under which he could be prosecuted if returned to Australia because the battery of Acts to prosecute terrorists was passed after his capture. The two intelligence agencies, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and the Australian Federal Police (AFP), interviewed him in Cuba and while establishing that he was not a terrorist, they were not prepared to challenge the Prime Minister’s portrayal of Hicks as being just that. Fortunately for Hicks, the US military challenged the President’s notion of the structure of Military Commissions, and the permanent detention of these men in Guantanamo Bay, as being contrary to long-established principles of US military law dealing with prisoners. Major Mori of the US Marine Corps’ legal unit was allocated to defend Hicks and he battled to have him either tried by a proper military court or have him released. Mori was an impressive figure who was well received on his several visits to Australia and his addresses to law faculties in the Australian universities and to the various Law Societies. This helped to swing public opinion in favour of Hicks once his non-combative status had been explained. Thanks to Mori’s intervention, Hicks was tried in Guantanamo Bay and sentenced to a jail term which he was allowed to serve near his home in Australia. Electoral opinion had turned against Howard and his conservative government by early in 2007 and Howard’s refusal to rescue Hicks from Guantanamo Bay contributed to his defeat in December 2007. Hicks was freed in December 2007 to commence study for a university degree.
Sales’ book provides a thorough analysis of the legal cases brought by the civil rights lawyers in the US Supreme Court to allow habeas corpus to apply to prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and the responses by the Bush administration in passing countering legislation through the Congress. Other Courts’ decision concerning the constitionality of the Military Commissions and judgement that the Geneva Conventions did in fact apply to the detainees are all explained in simple terms. The book is of some importance to intelligence historians in introducing them to the changed roles of the intelligence agencies caused by the War on Terrorism. The predictability and insights that marked their conduct during years of the Cold War have been displaced by their subordination to the political wishes of their governments. The ‘sexing up’ of the intelligence reports for the Blair government in London has become an example of the prevailing subordinate role of intelligence agencies and in the American case it was to be seen in the disinformation provided by the US agencies to the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, for his address to the Security Council in February 2003. The same situation occurred in Australia when Prime Minister Howard committed the nation to the Iraq War by using the false information manufactured by the intelligence agencies about the weapons of mass destruction. The distorted reports of ASIO and the AFP had Hicks confirmed as a terrorist whereas he did nothing more that guard a Taliban tank well after the Taliban had fled the field. It is doubtful if the intelligence agencies will be able to recover what independence they may have had from the political dictates of their governments occasioned by the War on Terrorism. This book is an introduction to how that decline occurred and how it was the courts and the civil liberty lawyers who demonstrated how hollowed-out the intelligence agencies had become.

Frank Cain
University of New South Wales

Sinagra, Filippo, ed., La Crittografia nel Movimento di Liberazione Italiano (Cryptography in the Italian Liberation Movement), 2007, incl. CD. €29.50

Sinagra is a noted expert on crypto equipment and the author of a comprehensive description of cipher machines and code books used during WWII. For over 40 years he has been a keen researcher of the contacts between the Italian Partisans and the Allied Intelligence during the German occupation of Italy. He published several technical papers on this subject.
His new book deals for the first time with the codes and ciphers used by the Italian Liberation Movement, the SOE, and the SIS and OSS agents operating in Italy. Utilizing original documents found in many military archives and depositories he describes the methods used to communicate with London and the ruses employed to defy the ever present German intercept stations.
Among the radiograms exposed is the complete codebook in use by the units of the Garibaldi-Carnia Division, the crypto systems used between the Liberation Movement and the SOE, the systems and texts of messages of the Appomatox Mission.
Other sections include the codebooks of the “Martini Rocco Service”, the cipher book of Mussolini’s “Brigate Nere”, the liaison code between the Corpo Volontari della Libertà, the tables used by SOE, the 1945 German field code, the “Q” service code used by the Tuscan Region and that of the Ligurian partisans. The 57th Berto Brigade is also included. The typed keys supplied by SOE are exhibited in facsimile.
In the final part many radio sets used by the SIS and SOE agents in Italy are described in detail. Sinagra also examines a number of radio receivers/transmitters, bugs, Russian and East German radio sets of 1980. The CD contains a large number of color pictures of sets not described in the book.
This collection is a precious tool for historians and students of the WWII intelligence activity.

Augusto Buonafalce
San Tererizo

David Kahn, The Reader of Gentlemen’s Mail: Herbert O. Yardley and the Birth of American Codebreaking.
Yale University Press: New Haven, CT, 2004. $32.50. ISBN 0300098464

David Kahn is the dean of American intelligence studies. In 1967, much to the consternation of the NSA, he published the first edition of his groundbreaking and voluminous The Codebreakers, a history of cryptology from ancient times to the modern which is remarkable at once for its accessibility and its intellectual seriousness. Since that time, he has continued to write and speak on intelligence, particularly cryptology, eventually becoming a favorite of NSA for his work explicating the history and importance of their field to the scholarly and lay publics. Who better, then, to write a biography of Herbert O. Yardley, the founding father of American cryptology? In Reader of Gentlemen’s Mail, Kahn has succeeded admirably in describing Yardley and explaining and bounding his significance.
In 1917, the United States, alone among the great powers, had no cryptologic organization. The Army relied on volunteer labor – cipher-savvy officers working in their spare time, an English professor at the University of Chicago, a group of people working to prove that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays – to do what little cryptanalysis the country required. Once the United States became embroiled in World War I, it became clear that such ad hoc methods would not be adequate.
Yardley, a young and more than a little self-aggrandizing State Department code clerk, stepped into the breach. He volunteered to serve in the Army’s new intelligence branch, where he became the head of MI-8, the Code and Cipher Section. He was an able manager who built a strong organization and made it an indispensable part of the government, in the process forging an alliance with the State Department.
After the war, the War Department and the State Department jointly funded a reconstituted version of MI-8, the Cipher Bureau or, as it has become popularly known, the American Black Chamber. It operated covertly in New York City, and acquired much of its material through agreements with the telegraph companies. As Yardley put it, the Black Chamber’s “very existence depended on the violation of Federal laws.” Its big triumph was providing intelligence support to the American negotiators at the Washington Naval Conference, allowing them to reach an agreement that was advantageous to the United States at the expense of Japan. Kahn suggests that this was the group’s only important triumph, but that it alone was worth the third of a million dollars that the government spent on the Black Chamber.
Despite this, in 1929, Henry Stimson, a new Secretary of State was outraged when he learned of the Cipher Bureau’s existence. Stimson withdrew the State Department’s share of the funding with the famous phrase “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” The organization closed its doors a few months later. Yardley soon found himself strapped for cash, so he published The American Black Chamber a book which “exploded into the consciousness of the world” in June, 1931. The book exposed innumerable American secrets and caused tremendous embarrassment. Two years later, when Yardley tried to publish a voluminous, dry, and commercially non-viable book on the cryptologic history behind the Washington Naval Conference, the government seized the document and passed legislation which is still on the books forbidding the publication of codes or coded material.
Yardley’s quest for money to pay the bills dominates the balance of the narrative. From this point on, the book is a blur of short stories, movie scripts, restaurants, puzzles for newspapers, a book on poker, a secret ink business, and various pathetic attempts during World War II to get back in the US Government service. These various efforts were punctuated by some two years in China 1938-1940 doing some relatively inconsequential cryptologic work against the Japanese for Chiang Kai-Shek and a few months helping Canada establish its own signals intelligence unit before pressure from the United States and Britain forced his firing.
One shortcoming of Kahn’s book is his treatment of allegations that came to light after Yardley’s death that he might, ironically, have sold secrets to the Japanese during the inter-war period. There is good reason to think this may have been the case. Kahn treats this subject in a curiously dismissive endnote, not in the main text, concluding that an unknown Japanese official concocted the apparently smoking gun proof in an effort to save face after the embarrassing publication of Yardley’s book. Perhaps this is true, perhaps not.
In the end, however, Kahn has painted an evocative portraits of an energetic and entrepreneurial Yardley flawed by a greed for money. Kahn’s Yardley was a “so-so cryptanalyst” who developed no important cryptanalytic methods and whose biggest triumph depended on well-established techniques. Yardley’s legacy, rather, was not technical, but institutional: he gave America “a new source of information” (as well as the corresponding ethical, legal, and political headaches). This was no small contribution because, Kahn provocatively maintains, intelligence “owes its importance” to codebreaking.

Mark Stout
Arlington, Virginia

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