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How Alan Turing played dumb to fool US intelligence

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http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/...an-fleming

EXCERPT: On 12 November 1942, the mathematician Alan Turing arrived in New York, bound for Washington DC and the headquarters of the US Secret Service, an organisation now known as the CIA. More than 500 American ships had been sunk by German U-boats since the US began sending supplies across the Atlantic to Europe in 1941 and naval authorities were growing impatient with Britain’s reluctance to share more than cursory details of progress at decrypting messages sent by the German high command and encoded by the Enigma machine.

Officially, Turing was meant to disclose everything he and his team at Bletchley Park knew about the workings of Enigma. In reality, he was under strict instructions from MI6 to act as its official liar and keep the Americans in the dark as much as possible. It was a strange role for a Cambridge mathematician with a fondness for crossword puzzles, but Turing’s wartime work had landed him in the midst of a game of high-stakes diplomacy.

Unknown to the Americans, Britain had been deciphering messages to and from the German U-boat fleet since the summer of 1940. Within weeks of arriving at Bletchley Park, Turing had invented an electromechanical machine called the Bombe that could break any Enigma-coded message.

[...] MI6 was especially wary of letting its American allies into the loop, fearing not only that the information would leak but that Britain would receive little of value in return. With the US Navy and US Army operating almost entirely independently, often plotting against each other, British intelligence was convinced the information would be used unwisely.

Turing’s role in Washington was to liaise with the leading American cryptanalysts and convince them that Britain was struggling to match their expertise while taking note of the machines they were developing, in particular a speech encryption system being developed for private conversations between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. Judging by the minutes of the meetings, it’s a role he played perfectly, in a stark contrast to his common portrayal on screen as someone incapable of judging the nuances of social situations.

“He absolutely hated it because he had to play dumb while being grilled by these mathematicians,” Moore says. “He had to pretend to be wowed by the progress the Americans were making even though they were light years behind the British at that point. But he had them convinced.”

Turing’s own reports from Washington are filled with disdain for what he saw as America’s overreliance on technology rather than thought. “I am persuaded that one cannot very well trust these people where a matter of judgment in cryptography is concerned,” he wrote. “It astonished me to find that they make these elaborate calculations before they had really grasped the main principles. [But] I think we can make quite a lot of use of their machinery.”...
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