Engima machine?

I have heard that the Enigma machine was actually susbequently recycled and used by the CIA....is this true?

 

Hm... This would be interesting to find out.

 

I read that somewhere too.
I also read a great novel about the Enigma, and the UK codebreakers, by Robert Harris (one of the finest novel writers about) simply called "Enigma". Well worth a read, as is all his other novels.

Back to the CIA - they had lots of murky dealings with Germany in the late 1940s / Early 1950s - wouldn't surprise me if they got their hands on Enigma.

 

If this is the case, then you can have a safe bet that somewhere someone is decoding what the CIA are plotting. :silly:

 

I have actually done a bit of reading a while ago about the enigma machine and I do not remember very much about the CIA possibly getting their hands on it. Interesting theory though.

 

One thing I do know is that once the US was on the verge of war in 1941, they sent some of their top Code Breakers to work at Bletchley Park (Station X) alongside their British Counterparts. Whether the Americans took any of the captured Enigma Machines away to examine is pure speculation but I wouldn't bet against it because a lot of captured Axis technology headed back across the Atlantic both during and after the war.

 

Aye along with all the Scientist ...

 

Not forgetting that Moscow also got its fair share of German brains and hardware. The scientists behind the "space race" for example were mostly Germans, on both the American and Soviet sides.

 

If the Cia got its hands on the machine then we probably will not know about it for a while. They have a limited accountability to the public and to congress. They can always classify it under national security.

 

Serious thou, wouldn't todays equipment be much better than the Enigma machine, after all it was cracked by coders during WWII .. :wtf:

 

I think today encryption technology has moved on leaps & bounds. Enigma's main weakness was that it could be broken once the code breakers established a pattern. Sometimes it was hard to break in to, other times they could get in quite easily. The Naval (Shark) Code was the hardest to break, especially after a 4th rotor was added to the machine to increase the number of possible permutations. However with the help of a brilliant Post Office Engineer called Tommy Flowers, The Colossus Machine was designed and built to help break the enigma code more quickly. Colossus was the world's first programmable computer and although it only had the computing capacity of a pocket calculator it was a revolution in number crunching.

 

Interesting to hear Spitfire that the capacity was that of a pocket calculator when here you can see the actual machine is as its name says, Colossus compared to the calculator.

Colossus in the Newmanry at Bletchley Park. This was the tenth Colossus to be installed at Bletchley.​

​