Historical Document · 2023
"Give to Ferner": The Untold Story of an American Master Cryptanalyst (Special Series vol. 14)
Robert O. Ferner, co-director of the PURPLE attack; SIS growth 1930–39; J-19 and the GeeWhizzer; B Branch photos (60 pp)
Historical Document · 2023
Robert O. Ferner, co-director of the PURPLE attack; SIS growth 1930–39; J-19 and the GeeWhizzer; B Branch photos (60 pp)
United States Cryptologic History “Give to Ferner” The Untold Story of an American Master Cryptanalyst Special Series | Volume 14 | 2023 Center For Cryptologic History This publication presents a historical perspective for informational and educational purposes, is the result of independent research, and does not necessarily reflect a position of NSA/CSS or any other US government entity. This publication is distributed free by the National Security Agency. If you would like additional copies, please email [email protected] or write to: Center for Cryptologic History National Security Agency 9800 Savage Road, Suite 6886 Fort George G. Meade, MD 20755 Cover: Robert O. Ferner, Arlington, VA, circa 1944-1945, courtesy of Mrs. Jean Ferner “Give to Ferner” The Untold Story of an American Master Cryptanalyst Brenda J. McIntire Center for Cryptologic History 2023 And then, at a certain length, it said, “Give to Ferner.” Oh yes. He was the only one that could solve them if they were really short. Only Ferner.1 — Arthur J. Levenson Prologue In July 1936, a young college graduate from Alliance, Ohio, began working for the US Army in Washington, DC. He was joining an organization that would play a critical role in assuring America’s security during the coming global war and beyond. Without ever firing a shot on a battlefield, this man personally enabled numerous attacks and defenses in a most secret war: a war fought not with kinetic weapons but with weapons of the mind. The man was Robert Orestes Ferner, and the battlefield was the realm of cryptology. Much of the story of US Army cryptology in the 1930s and the impact of American cryptology during World War II is well known. For decades, leaders such as William Friedman and successes such as the Allied breaking of the German Enigma machine have risen to fame. More recently, the cryptologic workforce—including thousands of “code girls”—has received increased public attention. But the stories of other major contributors remain to be told. Robert O. Ferner is one of these. This account is a step toward better understanding the work and impact of one of America’s most outstanding cryptanalysts of the 1930s and 1940s—and most likely far beyond. Because of his involvement with many, if not most, army cryptanalytic problems during this period, the study of his life and cryptologic work also illuminates the broader story of US Army cryptanalysis. 1 To understand Ferner’s work, one must first understand the state of US Army cryptology in the 1930s. Formation of the Signal Intelligence Service In 1930, the army’s sole cryptographer-cryptanalyst in Washington, DC, finally obtained long-sought permission to hire several assistants. The man was William Friedman, a civilian employee of the US Army Signal Corps. The decision to allow Friedman to build his workforce had its roots in an event from the preceding year. From the end of World War I until 1929, the United States had sponsored a covert cryptanalytic presence in New York City. This organization had sprung from a wartime group with a similar mission. Its leader remained the same: Herbert O. Yardley, a former cipher clerk for the Department of State. During World War I, Yardley successfully led MI-8, the unit responsible for solving codes and ciphers within the larger Military Intelligence Division. The State Department and US Army jointly funded a continuation of the capability after the war, with State providing the majority of funding. In 1929, Secretary of State Henry Stimson suddenly terminated the effort, stopping activities and releasing personnel. The organization’s legacy, in the form of records and expertise, shifted to the Signal Corps office in Washington, DC. In July of 1929, the War Department decided to establish the Signal Intelligence Service (SIS), which encompassed not just cryptography and cryptanalysis, but also the related disciplines of intercepting communications and developing secret inks. As the new organization began operations, Louise Newkirk reported to work on March 1, 1930, as an assistant cryptographic clerk. In April, three additional technical workers arrived: Solomon Kullback, Frank Rowlett, and Abraham Sinkov. All were high school mathematics teachers, hired through the civil service system into a new role of junior cryptanalyst. Friedman’s original vision had been for the junior cryptanalysts to double dip: they would be mathematicians, but they also would collectively provide language expertise in 2 French, German, Spanish, and Japanese. He got his wish for three of the four languages, lacking only Japanese. In May, John Hurt, a brilliant Japanese linguist, reported as a cryptanalyst aide. Over the next few years, several more individuals joined SIS as typists, clerks, and a stenographer. But Friedman had no authority to hire any other junior cryptanalysts. Not, that is, until an opening arose at the SIS headquarters. In early 1936, Sinkov, one of the original junior cryptanalysts, was transferred to an American base in Panama. He was to provide cryptanalytic support and training to the personnel on site. As a result, Friedman gained permission to hire a junior cryptanalyst to fill Sinkov’s position in Washington. The man selected was a recent physics graduate from Alliance, Ohio, Robert Ferner.2 Ferner’s Background Robert Orestes Ferner was born in Clear Spring, Iowa, on May 15, 1915. His father, Orestes Asa Ferner, was an educator, whose genealogical studies traced the first Ferner’s arrival in America from Switzerland in the mid-1700s. Robert’s mother, Marie Pfund Ferner, was also of Swiss ancestry. Robert was the youngest of three surviving brothers; the firstborn son had died when still a child.3 During Robert’s early years, the family moved to a farm near Alliance. While Orestes continued working in education, the real farming enthusiast in the family was middle son Terrence, whose high school yearbook noted his “ability to run a 100-acre farm.”4 Robert’s mother also had farm-related skills of her own, winning a local “nail driving contest for women.”5 Despite the family’s best efforts, the impression left with Robert Ferner’s daughter years later was that neither the Ferner farm nor the Ferner family income had prospered greatly during these years, due in large part to Orestes’s reluctance to invest in the farm’s infrastructure.6 Despite the opportunities offered by living in the countryside, Robert’s severe asthma prevented his spending much time outdoors. But his health did not affect his academic life. 3 I. Robert Ferner’s high school yearbook entry, 1931. Courtesy of the Alliance School District, Alliance, Ohio Robert graduated in 1931 from Alliance High School at age 16, near the top of his class.7 He went on to study physics at Mount Union College (now the University of Mount Union) in Alliance, 4 II. Robert Ferner’s college yearbook entry, 1935. Courtesy of the University of Mount Union Library, Alliance, Ohio 5 III. Alpha Kappa Pi group photo, 1935. Ferner is seated in the front row, left-hand side. Courtesy of the University of Mount Union Library, Alliance, Ohio 6 graduating in 1935. Here he served as vice president of the local chapter of Alpha Kappa Pi, an engineering fraternity; joined Psi Kappa Omega, a local fraternity honoring academic achievement; and also found time to assist in the physics laboratory.8 While at Mount Union, Robert met Erma Pauline Woodward whose gregarious nature complemented Robert’s quieter personality. The morning after Erma graduated in June 1937, she married Robert in a small, family-only ceremony on the Mount Union campus. After a celebratory wedding breakfast, the couple departed, but not, it seems, for their honeymoon. Instead, as the local Alliance newspaper noted, “the couple left immediately for Washington, D.C.” where “the bridegroom … is in the employ of the War Department.”9 Ferner’s Early Years at SIS And indeed he was. Ferner had joined SIS on July 1, 1936, aged 21. His starting salary as a junior cryptanalyst was $2,000—exactly that of the first three junior cryptanalysts hired in 1930.10 Although Sinkov was still in Panama and Kullback would soon depart for a similar tour in Hawaii, Rowlett was still in Washington. By the time Ferner arrived, the original junior cryptanalysts had six years of experience. Friedman had developed on-the-job training for the earlier junior cryptanalysts, based on a combination of his own writings; World War I-era encryption problems; real-life projects from the dusty files of the Cipher Bureau; and current encrypted messages, contingent upon SIS’s new collection capabilities.11 Rowlett commented some years later that he and his peers had passed along their training to the new hires. Hurt also ran in-house training in Japanese, which Ferner attended.12 Organizationally, as late as March 1937, SIS still numbered only around a dozen employees. There was an Administrative and School Section numbering five people and the Code and Cipher Solution and Compilation Section comprising Friedman and six others, including Ferner.13 By 1938 though, four distinct cryptanalytic units had emerged, dedicated to the diplomatic traffic of Japan, Germany, 7 Italy, and Mexico, respectively; the latter unit eventually expanded to include other countries using Spanish and related languages.14 It is not certain which of these sections became Ferner’s home base, but, in light of his ongoing association with Rowlett and the Japanese problems under Rowlett’s direction, the Japanese “J section” seems most likely. Regardless of the exact administrative location, Ferner’s career was progressing well. By February 1938, he was characterized as a “cryptanalyst of considerable ability.”15 Within this intimate atmosphere of SIS, Ferner and Hurt became good friends. The Ferners and the Hurts often socialized together outside of work. Robert and Erma’s daughter Jean later recalled that the Hurts shared their love of opera with the Ferners—something the musically inclined Erma probably appreciated more than Robert did. Japanese Red and Purple Machines During the 1930s, the SIS cryptanalysts expanded their understanding of encrypted Japanese diplomatic communications. For some time the Japanese had employed superenciphered code systems, overlaying a robust codebook with a level of encipherment. Both levels could be cryptanalytically and linguistically challenging. Even after solving an encryption system, the American cryptanalysts had to re-solve aspects of the puzzle each time the Japanese changed current settings or modified the underlying system. Within a few months of joining SIS, Ferner developed a system of indexing encoded Japanese diplomatic messages. This index was an efficient way to correlate mentions of certain messages within other messages and also provided continuity when the Japanese moved to new codes.16 Early Japanese diplomatic systems were all traditional manual systems, enciphered and deciphered by hand. But in the early 1930s, the Americans discovered the Japanese had taken a quantum leap: they were encrypting high-level diplomatic communications by machine. 8 Machine encryption was not a new concept in the 1930s. Individuals from several countries had already developed and marketed machines claiming to produce secure ciphers. During World War I and in the 1920s, Friedman had solved several of these systems, including the Navy Cipher Box. The Japanese called the first of their machines Type A; the Americans, using a different color to identify each encryption device, called this machine Red.17 This machine appeared by at least 1932.18 Red gave SIS cryptanalysts an opportunity to examine contemporary real-world communications encrypted by machine. In the early SIS, such a problem would have been an all-hands-on-deck affair. Rowlett, the lead on Japanese diplomatic communications, personally worked on Red, and Ferner did as well.19 To communicate using typewriters and similar machines, the Japanese converted their language’s characters into the romanized letters of the English alphabet. While solving Red, SIS realized that the machine’s cryptography was influenced by the English alphabet’s division into vowels (“the sixes”) and consonants (“the twenties”). This insight would prove most useful in combatting the next development in Japanese machine cryptography. Although SIS fully understood the Red machine by 1936, the cryptanalysts still had to keep up with changes to the machine’s settings, some of which were daily.20 The Japanese did not give the SIS cryptanalysts much opportunity to rest on their laurels. On February 20, 1939, Japanese diplomatic posts began communicating in a new cipher, known to the Japanese as Type B and to the Americans as Purple. Purple was similar to Red in preserving a distinction between the “sixes” and the “twenties,” but overall the Japanese had significantly improved the machine’s security. It took a year and a half to the very day (September 20, 1940) for the SIS cryptanalysts to resolve the last sticking point in their understanding of how the machine worked. After that, it was a matter of scaling up the effort to apply the discovery to all possible machine settings. On September 27, the first Purple translation based on the recent breakthrough appeared. SIS subsequently developed a machine of its own to dupli- 9 cate the Japanese capability to decrypt Purple messages. All of this was accomplished without ever having seen the Japanese device itself. It was an amazing achievement.21 Several weeks after the Purple breakthrough, Friedman documented the success, naming key contributors. At the head of that list, he began with two key players: The specific direction and coordination of all studies on this project was the joint work of Cryptanalyst Frank B. Rowlett and Assistant Cryptanalyst Robert O. Ferner. Their indefatigable labors and brilliant analytical work testify and are a credit to their cryptanalytic skill, training and experience. To their joint direction and efforts are due the extremely fruitful analysis of the cryptographic mechanics underlying the operation of the B-machine as a whole, the theory of its operation, and the development and solution of the “6’s” at [an] early date in these studies. They were also extremely active in pushing the solution to a successful conclusion by organizing and directing the reconstruction of the developments or wirings of the switches for the “20’s.”22 Cryptologic historians and others recounting the Purple story have rightly recognized the contributions of Friedman, Rowlett, cryptanalyst Genevieve Grotjan (later Feinstein),23 and engineer Leo Rosen. But one significant name has fallen by the historical wayside. Future accounts of the Purple success should reinstate the pivotal role of Robert Ferner, the man who, with Rowlett, provided the essential technical leadership and expert analysis that enabled the entire SIS team’s success. And what of the value of Purple? Technically, Friedman considered the success “to have been by far the most difficult cryptanalytic problem successfully handled and solved by any signal intelligence organization in the world.”24 And the intelligence value? Friedman continued, “so far as [Arlington Hall Station] is concerned, this has 10 been and still is the most important source of strategically valuable, long-term intelligence.” One well-known user of Purple illustrates this value: Japan’s ambassador to the Third Reich, Lieutenant General Oshima Hiroshi, had broad, firsthand access to Hitler’s plans and capabilities.25 For the duration of the war and across all theaters of action, Oshima faithfully kept the Japanese leadership apprised of his observations and insights. His Purple-encrypted reports encompassed remarkable breadth and depth, ranging from tactical preparations, operations, and weapons development to strategic partnerships and intent.26 Unbeknownst to him, he was faithfully reporting, in equal measure, the same vital information to the Americans. SIS Prepares for War In response to Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany. These world events triggered—almost immediately—what a decade of pleas from Friedman had been unable to accomplish. In September 1939, the US Army at long last approved funding to increase SIS’s workforce substantially. The new recruits began arriving in October.27 It was a busy time within SIS. Even as SIS was training the new workforce and wrestling with cryptanalytic problems, the cryptologists were still responsible for developing cryptographic solutions to protect America’s own communications. In September, Friedman and Rowlett completed a patent application documenting their joint invention for securing “electrical printing telegraphy.” Kullback and Ferner were their witnesses.28 In late 1941, the SIS reorganized—a theme that would repeat throughout the war—as SIS tried to keep up with an exponentially expanding workforce and an evolving wartime mission. The Cryptanalytic Section was now one of four major sections within SIS, alongside sections devoted to administration, cryptography, and a secret ink and photographic laboratory. Initially the Cryptanalytic Section had six subsections; by May of 1942 this grew to 10. Again, it is not yet possible to place Ferner organizationally during these moves. It is certain, however, that his continuing interest in the 11 IV. With Kullback, Ferner witnessed Friedman and Rowlett’s patent application for a cryptographic invention. Japanese diplomatic target had found a new objective. This time, the challenge was not a machine but a fiendishly difficult enciphered code.29 Japanese Transposition-Enciphered Code On July 1, 1941—five years to the day since Ferner had come to SIS—the Japanese deployed a new enciphered codebook system. Like Purple, this system was used by Japanese diplomats, but, unlike Purple, this was not a machine cipher. Although SIS was familiar already with the initial underlying codebook, it soon changed. The real problem, however, was the superencipherment: a complex transposition system using matrices of variable widths, including blank cells in patterns that changed every 10 days. The diplomatic users of the system were grouped into four sets, each with its own daily 12 changing key.30 Friedman himself initially described the system as “impregnable.”31 A Japanese message announcing the update to all diplomatic users also alerted the SIS cryptanalysts to the impending release of the new system. As SIS began seeing the traffic operationally, they soon realized this encryption would be more of a challenge than its predecessors. Once again, Rowlett and Ferner tackled the problem, along with a third cryptanalyst, Albert Small, who had joined SIS as part of the cadre arriving in the fall of 1939.32 The cryptanalysts recognized that the new system might share similarities with a code active in another place and time: the ADFGVX system used by the Germans during World War I. Friedman had incorporated the older code into his training curriculum for his cryptanalytic new hires, who had documented their success against this system in an early SIS technical paper.33 The army was not the only American service organization closely following Japanese cryptographic developments. Since the 1920s, the US Navy had also been successfully decrypting Japanese systems. And so it came about that the first real breakthrough against the new enciphered code was not through pure cryptanalysis. Rather, the broader US Navy provided help in another form. In a covert operation, naval operatives had acquired photographs of both the code and the transposition matrices. Navy cryptanalysts recognized the potential for the army’s cryptanalytic experts to further the effort and shared the new information with SIS. The purloined material enabled the army to decrypt current and some past messages—for the time being. SIS leadership realized it was just a matter of time until the Japanese would change the system settings. Working against that day, SIS divided the cryptanalytic effort between current decryption and new research into the underlying cryptography, according to Rowlett’s later recollections. Ferner and Small were responsible for the research effort. Rowlett, who still oversaw SIS’s cryptanalysis of Japanese diplomatic communications, detailed in his memoir The Story of Magic the 13 successful collaboration among Ferner, Small, and himself to fully understand and exploit this system. In addition, Rowlett also talked about it in several oral histories. The SIS cryptanalysts astounded their navy colleagues by demonstrating their ability to predict future keys, proving they had completely unwrapped the system’s secrets. Even this full understanding of the system did not eliminate the hard, and sometimes tedious, work of recovering new settings. Part of the process for recovering the transposition settings was a step called anagramming, whereby the columns of the transposition matrix were rearranged back into their original order. Anagramming was a mix of “eyeballing” and employing language-based statistics. It required seemingly endless repetitive and mind-numbing calculations. By 1941, SIS possessed machines to assist the cryptanalysts. By today’s standards, the capabilities were basic indeed: sorting, ordering, and similar processes. Nevertheless, the cryptanalysts appreciated each advance that reduced the number of repetitive steps they would otherwise have to do by hand. Much of this equipment was developed for SIS by IBM, whose representatives were on site to make any required modifications to the machinery. SIS personnel were not authorized to alter the equipment. Regardless, the IBM machines were indeed altered—and not by the IBM representatives. After Small envisioned an innovative way to perform the anagramming calculations, the trio eventually modified the IBM equipment to test his approach.34 Small, Ferner, and Rowlett each brought individual and combined talents to bear on the refinements that produced a successful operational capability. Rowlett believed they had pushed the mechanical devices to new frontiers, approaching the brink (and perhaps crossing the line, in his opinion) of becoming true computing capabilities. The resulting device was formally known as the Electromechanagrammer, although it would always be the “GeeWhizzer”35 to Rowlett, the recorder of these events. SIS enjoyed success against this enciphered code used by Japanese diplomats worldwide for several years. The Japanese finally removed the system from service in July 1943.36 14 Ferner and Small brought complementary skills to this and the other projects they tackled together. Rowlett later summed up what made their teamwork so effective: Small … lived with the machines and he … was the new idea man to develop new programs using the machines and Ferner was just a doggone good cryptanalyst and mathematician and he could take Small’s … brilliant glimpses and … he enhanced these into practical applications and he made them real. He’d sort out the … glint in Small’s eye.37 V. Several generations of GeeWhizzers. The version devised by Rowlett, Ferner, and Small is probably the small box sitting on the left top of the larger version. Collection of the Center for Cryptologic History 15 Halfway through America’s involvement in the war, Friedman wrote a set of award recommendations for personal cryptanalytic successes. Of this project, Friedman confirmed: For the development of the techniques and procedures in solution and for the mechanization of those techniques and procedures, major credit belongs to Major Rowlett and Messrs. Ferner and Small.38 German Enigma The SIS of mid-1942 would have been unrecognizable to somebody who had last seen it in the mid-1930s. First, the name had changed. After several short-lived variations, in July 1943 the organization became the Signal Security Agency or SSA.39 The location had changed too. During the summer of 1942, the organization moved from the national mall in Washington, DC, to the campus of Arlington Hall, a former girls’ school in Arlington, Virginia. And its size had certainly changed: SSA was now a workforce of not dozens or even hundreds but literally of thousands. Once again the cryptanalytic workforce was reorganized. This time the Cryptanalytic Section was divided into two large subsections mirroring the major divisions of cryptography: codes and ciphers. Rowlett was initially in charge of B-3, an organization responsible for solving all ciphers, along with all code encipherments other than additive.40 By November 1942, Rowlett had become the head of Arlington Hall Station’s (AHS) training program. Captain John Seaman became officer in charge of B-3.41 Ferner was responsible for B-3 Special Problems, with a direct relationship to Task Groups.42 It is likely that these Task Groups were similar to or perhaps the forerunners of the Technical Consultants Group that would be formalized later in 1943. By 1942, the army cryptanalysts, like their navy counterparts, had the German Enigma machine in their sights. Initially a 1920s commercial development, the Enigma had been adopted and adapted by the German government and military. Its usage was pervasive during the war. 16 VI. B-3 organization chart, early 1943 American interest in Enigma was fueled by increasing levels of cryptanalytic exchange with the British, a partnership initiated in earnest by the groundbreaking Sinkov mission of 1941.43 The exchange of liaison officers and technical experts furthered the relationship. With a view to establishing their own effort against Enigma, US Army cryptologists developed plans to build an Enigma-decrypting machine. Army cryptanalytic leaders knew about the US Navy’s rotor-based bombe technology but chose to base their own proposed system—also called a bombe—on relay switches.44 The army had experience with cryptanalytic use of switches, having based both the Purple analogue45 and the Electromechanagrammer on this technology.46 The army engaged Bell Laboratories to build the system.47 Events progressed quickly. After a proof-of-concept demonstration in late 1942, the army commissioned a large section of the actual system to be delivered in two installments during 1943. Army leaders made overtures to the British to obtain crucial technical information, in exchange for offers to employ the new machine against the Enigma problem on behalf of the Allies.48 In parallel with efforts to build the machine, Arlington Hall Sta- 17 tion trained members of the cryptanalytic workforce to decrypt Enigma. In November 1942, a group of top AHS cryptanalysts, including Ferner, designed and taught a course on machine cipher systems. The training was something of a roll call for existing machine encryption devices, including, among others, several Enigma variations, the Japanese Red and Purple devices, and several commercial machines.49 In 1943, army representatives met with their navy counterparts for technical discussions about strategies for exploiting the commercial version of Enigma. Ferner, Seaman, Small, and Rosen were among the participants. These discussions were not without complications: the navy surprised the army with revelations of existing projects, and the army tried to preserve their right to keep to their terms for sharing information with the British.50 As it turned out, the army’s preparations to combat Enigma did not materialize as foreseen, owing to one major deficit: the army was unable to establish its own regular feed of Enigma collection. As a result, the army did not participate in the division of effort to decrypt the massive volume of daily Enigma communications with the British. That would fall to the navy. However, SSA’s bombe prototype did play an important role in Enigma solutions of a specialized kind. By mid-July 1943, the first section of the AHS machine, known as Bombe 003 or just 003, was ready for operational use. British cryptologic leadership had agreed to send to Arlington Hall Station certain Enigma messages with anomalies that prevented them from passing through normal bombe processing. The army targeted the 003 against these messages requiring additional work. In effect, “the section at the Signal Security Agency actually functioned as a subsection of the British unit.”51 One type of anomalous Enigma message resulted from Germany’s introduction of a pluggable reflector. The initial solution devised by British and American cryptanalysts was an extremely time-intensive manual process called scritching. The intelligence was valuable, but the diversion of cryptanalysts’ time was alarming, as “the efforts of the entire Cipher Section were devoted for several weeks to scritching.”52 18 Once again, Ferner and Small contributed to the design of a time-saving cryptanalytic device. Their role was to define the problem that resulted in automating the scritching processes. This time they did not have to personally design—or surreptitiously install— the hardware implementation; Arlington Hall Station’s Development Branch took care of that. The resulting machine was dubbed the Autoscritcher.53 Dr. Howard H. Campaigne, a future chief of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) Office of Research, later referred to the scritching devices as “quite close to being digital computers and were probably the most ingenious machines built during the war.”54 Travel to England In mid-1943, Seaman and Ferner became the latest AHS experts to undertake an extended visit to Bletchley Park, the center of British cryptanalysis during the war. Ferner stayed for several months; Seaman remained longer, becoming the first SSA liaison assigned to Bletchley Park. During this trip, Ferner focused especially on machine ciphers, including Enigma.55 While at Bletchley Park, Seaman and Ferner learned of cuttingedge British cryptanalytic developments. The pair sent regular updates on their findings to Arlington Hall Station. The example below, in Ferner’s own hand, describes British efforts to incorporate rapid analytical machinery (RAM) into Bletchley’s cryptanalytic work. In October 1943, while Seaman and Ferner were still in England, Friedman corresponded with one of his British counterparts, Colonel C. V. L. Lycett. At the end of this letter, he inquired whether Lycett had met several visiting Americans, including Seaman and Ferner. Friedman wrote, “Captain Seaman I think you would like very much as an all-round scholar. Ferner is very quiet but extremely able.”56 Brigadier John Tiltman, a renowned diagnostic cryptanalyst who became Britain’s chief cryptographer in 1942, later recalled Ferner as “a very good cryptanalyst” who “made a big contribution to all the diagnostic cryptanalysis.”57 19 VII. Ferner’s handwritten account of the latest British cryptanalytic developments. Research: The Technical Consultants The army’s cryptanalytic organization changed yet again in 1943, both to improve internal collaboration and, especially, to reallocate resources in light of a major success against Japanese Army communications. The designators B-2 and B-3 remained (now usually notated as B-II and B-III), but the organizations’ purposes had changed. B-II was devoted to the Japanese Army problem. B-III, now the General Cryptanalytic Branch, was responsible for nothing less than all other targets.58 Although there were other reorganizations during the war, this two-fold division of cryptanalytic targets remained for the balance of the conflict. Rowlett returned from the training program to lead the B-III organization.59 Upon Ferner’s return from England in November 1943,60 he assumed leadership of a section within the B-III General Cryptanalytic Branch. This organization was called variously Research or Technical Consultants, and both titles were accurate.61 Ferner’s small research staff comprised a handful of SSA’s best cryptanalysts, characterized as “expert cryptanalysts for the most difficult problems encountered by the operating sections.”62 These 20 VIII. Working spaces, most likely in Arlington Hall Station, B-III; Robert Ferner is in the back row on the right. Collection of the Center for Cryptologic History troubleshooters assisted SSA’s operational elements with diagnosing and solving especially important and perplexing cryptanalytic problems. They also developed cryptanalytic techniques and new ways of using machines for cryptanalysis. Their remit included testing of US encryption systems to ensure these were secure.63 In fact, the Technical Consultants concept came about through a cryptographic, not a cryptanalytic, assignment, when four topnotch cryptanalysts had assisted in evaluating and strengthening an American cryptographic machine.64 The concept had worked so well that the group’s function became permanent, even though individual members rotated into and out of the small organization. This was to be Ferner’s final wartime move. A major reorganization in August 1944 left the overall B-III organization largely unchanged. Ferner appears to have found an organizational home 21 IX. Floor plan of B-III (SPSB-III) front office in August 1945. Note location of Research under Ferner directly next to the Chief (Rowlett). X. B Branch Staff, Arlington Hall Station. Left to right, back row: unidentified, Maurice Collens, Dorothy MacCarthy, William Smith, Dale Marston. Middle row: Robert Packard, C. P. Collins, Albert Howard Carter III, William Hazlep, Maurice “Mo” Klein. Front row: Mary Louise Prather, Robert O. Ferner, Frank B. Rowlett, Franklin Bearce, William F. Edgerton. Collection of the Center for Cryptologic History 22 that reflected what he had been doing all along: applying his cryptanalytic expertise to a wide swath of Arlington Hall Station’s technical challenges. In addition to the major accomplishments mentioned above, Ferner participated in successful cryptanalytic team efforts yielding solutions of codes and ciphers, machines, and hand systems across a broad range of wartime targets, as well as helping to improve America’s own cryptographic protection.65 In short, he was a consummate technical expert with knowledge of the entire target set and whose influence extended across the organization.66 German Diplomatic67 The Technical Consultants, under Ferner’s leadership, demonstrated the effectiveness of their technical leadership against another German target: an encryption system used by German diplomats since the mid-1920s. Because this system used keypads with disposable pages designed to be used only once (one-time pads), AHS cryptanalysts for many years had considered it to be secure. Even after the FBI captured actual one-time pads in 1940, the system still remained unsolved. The project was set aside for more-promising cryptanalytic priorities.68 In 1943, the situation changed. The cryptanalysts of B-III’s German Diplomatic Section examined recent intercepts and realized the key might not be secure. SSA’s postwar history noted, “This discovery was like a shot in the arm to the personnel of the German Diplomatic Section.”69 Soon this project had gone from a figurative place on the back shelf to a very tangible position of cryptanalytic priority. Cryptanalysts from other targets converged to reinforce the resources of the German Diplomatic Section. All of the Technical Consultants were among those additions. Ferner had previously worked on German diplomatic communications in the late 1930s.70 Now he returned to this target as a leader of the group, which in turn headed the technical effort to finally break through the system’s defenses: “[c]ryptanalytic activities there 23 were directed by Mr. Robert Ferner, Captain Walter Fried, and other members of the Research Group.”71 It took a year for the resource-intensive combined cryptanalytic effort to yield a successfully decrypted message in January 1945.72 Although late in the war, “[T]heir [the Research Section’s] assistance made it possible to supply a great amount of useful intelligence before V-E Day as well as afterwards.”73 This “useful intelligence”— obtained with the help of IBM machinery—was of “utmost importance in the spheres of politics, scientific advance, technical data, and production” of war materiel.74 As with Purple, the story of the solution of this German diplomatic system is familiar within cryptologic history circles. The initial cryptanalytic detective work by members of the German Diplomatic Section, including Juanita Moody and Thomas Waggoner, has been the focus of the story; without their efforts, there might have been no story to tell. But the full account should acknowledge the contributions of experts in the Machine Cipher Section and the technical leadership of the Research Section, headed by Ferner, in ultimately defeating the hard encryption used to secure the German diplomats’ communications. This project epitomizes the role of the Technical Consultants in coming alongside operational offices to overcome some of Arlington Hall Station’s hardest cryptanalytic challenges. Coordination Across Organizations As a technical expert now in a formal leadership role, Ferner supported SSA senior line managers in cross-organizational efforts, both within Arlington Hall Station and with external partners. In September 1944, Mark Rhoads, assistant director of Communications Research, proposed forming a high-level internal committee to ensure good cross-communication among major agency elements. Participants would represent both the intelligence-producing mission and the defense of American communications. This committee’s mandate would be to address the large-scale 24 growth of the army’s cryptologic service. In the memo proposing the committee, Rhoads wrote, “When the organization was small, the two functions, cryptography and cryptanalysis, were concentrated in the same people, but mushroom growth has segregated them into two entities in direct proportion to the growth.”75 Several examples of the benefits of cross-organizational integration cited contributions of the B Branch cryptanalytic experts in studying American cryptographic machines.76 The proposed committee was to be chaired by Friedman. Most members would be appointed by virtue of their current positions as senior leaders within the participating organizations. But when it came to including technical experts to serve as needed, Rhoads identified these individuals on a by-name basis, including Ferner, Small, and then-Sergeant Walter Jacobs from the Technical Consultants.77 Outside of Arlington Hall Station, during 1944, army and navy cryptologists put formal structures into place to help cross-service coordination. The Army-Navy COMINT Coordinating Committee (ANCICC) first met on April 18, 1944; senior cryptologic leaders from each service attended the meeting.78 Later that year, a new ANCICC subcommittee was formed: the Army-Navy Sub-Committee on Cryptanalysis, which first convened on October 20, 1944. Principals for the army were Kullback and Rowlett. Ferner and cryptanalyst Frank Lewis also attended, likely as technical experts. The group’s focus was to be “cryptanalytic theory, procedure, techniques, and research”—in other words, a perfect fit with Ferner’s expertise and his role as head of the Technical Consultants Group.79 After the War As the war ended in stages during 1945, the Signal Security Agency began preparing for the postwar era. On September 6, 1945, four days after Japan formally surrendered, the army’s cryptologic agency again changed its name, this time to the Army Security Agency (ASA). The changes were not just a matter of nomencla- 25 ture: the organization now fell under a different reporting hierarchy within the army. Most importantly, there were large-sc