Fwd: How GCHQ kept post-war cache of Alan Turing's 'bombe' machines to beat Enigma again

Nothing to do with the hundreds of ENIGMAs ( and Swiss NEMAs )
being made available to the 'new' states in Africa, Asia and
elsewhere.... (-;

I'm still awaiting the 'discovery' of the burried Colossus...


Saturday 06 January 2018

How GCHQ kept post-war
cache of Alan Turing's 'bombe' machines to beat Enigma again
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- A restored and fully functioning Turing Bombe machine, used
   for cracking German military Enigma codes, at the wartime
   intelligence centre at Bletchley Park.  Credit: PA

By Ben Farmer, Defence Correspondent

Britain stored 50 devices used to beat Germany’s Enigma cipher machines 
in case the technology fell into the wrong hands after the war and 
messages had to be cracked again, it has been disclosed for the first time.

The devices developed by Alan Turing at Bletchley Park to beat Enigma 
were believed destroyed at the end of the war when their job was completed.

But documents recently rediscovered inside GCHQ now show 50 were kept by 
the government’s eavesdropping spy agency.

The equipment was only finally disposed of in 1959 when it was decided 
that Turing’s ‘Bombe’ machines had been superseded by electronic computers.

The documents released to the Telegraph also show that even 14 years 
after the war, officials claimed Germany should not find out Enigma had 
been cracked as it would give them “an excuse” for their military defeat.

Tony Comer, departmental historian at GCHQ, said the deliberations over 
what to do with Turing’s Bombes as the world entered the electronic age 
shed light on the evolution of code-breaking.

He said : “We believed that by the time we left Bletchley Park to go to 
Eastcote in April 1946, that all the Bombes had been destroyed.

“What we now find is that against a rainy day, they had decided to keep 
50 Bombes and 20 Enigma machines in deep storage, just in case anybody 
started using Enigma again.”

One of the rediscovered GCHQ documents discussing postwar storage
of Turing's Bombe machines

- A 1953 GCHQ document shows that officials thought it was still
   premature to destroy Turing's 'Bombe' machines

The Enigma machines resembled typewriters and messages were scrambled, 
letter-by-letter, according to the settings of each machine's internal 
wheels and plugboard.

Alan Turing, whose pioneering achievements mean he is viewed a father of 
computing and artificial intelligence, built his Bombe to recover the 
settings used on military messages.

The Bombes were electro-mechanical devices built from approximately 100 
rotating drums, 10 miles of wire, and about 1 million soldered connections.

- Code-breaking personnel at Bletchley Park in 1943

By searching through different possible positions of Enigma’s internal 
wheels they could determine what settings had been used to code each 
message. Once the settings were determined, the messages could be 
deciphered.

Britain’s ability to decipher the messages was one of the nation’s most 
closely guarded secrets and is credited with saving large numbers of 
lives and dramatically shortening the war.

Mr Comer said : “With the defeat of the Germans, [ the Bombes ] became 
redundant, because their only value is in breaking Enigma messages and 
there was nobody left using Enigma.

“As the Wrens who were involved in this will tell you, before they were 
demobbed from the Bombe outstations, they had to dismantle the Bombes. 
The equipment was all recyclable and in the middle of 1945 the country 
was very, very short of all sorts of raw materials. The metal and the 
wiring that you could recover from the Bombes was incredibly valuable.”
GCHQ bombe storage

- The 'Bombe' machines were gathering dust in underground storage

All the British machines were thought, until now, to have been 
dismantled at the time, though one American version was kept in a US museum.

At the end of hostilities, a large number of Enigma machines had been 
recovered, but they were almost all destroyed to stop the spread of 
encryption. Around 25 were kept back by GCHQ and have since been donated 
to museums.

However the new documents now show 50 Bombes were kept in an underground 
shelter at the Royal Naval stores depot in Copenacre, with a previously 
unknown stash of another 20 Enigma machines.

The machines from both sides that had played such a critical role in the 
war were apparently treated with little sentimentality or care.

One 1953 memo written after a routine inspection described the machines 
as “covered in dust” with “a good deal of breakage which must have 
occured during transit”.

“There are a large number of E machines carelessly stacked, out of their 
cases, in full view of the general corridor. Many are broken.”

Officials decided the machines were still needed though.

Another memo concluded: “The functions to be performed by these Bombes 
are so different from the schemes which have been thought out in high 
speed electronic terms that, at present, it is just not true to say that 
we could replace the many mechanical versions by one or a few electronic 
equivalents”

Six years later, technology had marched on though and the machines were 
declared redundant.

Yet despite being out of date, they were still classified as top secret 
and 1959 documents outline the technical steps to be taken before the 
machines could safely be released for disposal.

One top secret memo also refers to “the political issue that HMG is 
determined that the Germans shall not be provided with an excuse for 
their defeat in the field. We must make sure that our disposal 
arrangements do not conflict with this dictum.”

Mr Comer said : “The 1953 and 1959 documents each belong to a completely 
different part of the information age.

“You have got the fact of the incredible importance that was still 
attached to not letting anybody know of the significance of 
cryptanalysis, the fact that breaking Enigma had been a significant 
contribution to the Allied war effort.

“You have also got the complete lack of sentimentality by technological 
people. This equipment isn’t yet old enough, venerable enough, for them 
to have any sentimental feeling about it. It’s just a pile of junk. 
Their worry is about disposing of it carefully, because it’s still 
classified, rather than just chucking it on a tip somewhere.”

The only intelligence target that kept using Enigma machines after the 
war was the East German police.

Mr Comer said: “The Americans kept one of their Bombe’s operational 
until the requirement to study the East German police had gone. That is 
the only surviving  original Bombe.”

He said there was a myth that Britain had sold redundant Enigma machines 
to neutral countries after the war, so that the UK could read their 
secret messages.

“It’s a complete myth. The Enigmas were destroyed or as we now know 
mothballed because there was no target. We did not want a proliferation 
of serious encryption around the place.”


A major exhibition about the Bombe is opening at Bletchley in March 2018.
It is called "Hut 11A : The Bombe Breakthrough"
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/06/mi5-secretly-kept-alan-turings-spy-machines-20-years-war-case/