From codes that changed the course of history to lost ancient cultures, here are 10 of the
most difficult codes that have ever been cracked!
10.
The Zimmerman Telegram
During times of war, messages are often sent in code to prevent the enemy from finding
out about secret plans.
Spies are everywhere, and if the message is ever decoded by an unintended recipient, it
can change the course of history… and that’s exactly what happened in 1917.
The first world war was raging, having engulfed much of Europe and beyond.
At the beginning of the year, America was yet to get involved, but the Allies were convincing
them to join the fight and finish the war as soon as possible.
At the time, though, the US government was staying neutral… even facilitating the transfer
of German messages across the Atlantic to prevent the Brits from intercepting them.
This was until the British secret service got their hands on what is now known as the
Zimmerman Telegram.
They decoded it quickly enough that they could read it two days before it reached its destination,
and it detailed a proposal by the Germans to Mexico- asking them to join the war against
the US, and in return they would be given Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
It was politically difficult for the British to show this evidence to American authorities
because it proved that they had been spying on them, but eventually, the truth was revealed
to President Wilson and leaked to the American press.
By April of 1917, US troops had joined the war… and the rest is history.
9.
The Battle of Midway
The Battle of Midway, which took place between the 4th and 7th of June, 1942, was one of
the American military’s biggest victories over the Japanese navy during the second world
war.
In this battle over 3,000 Japanese sailors lost their lives and 4 aircraft carriers were
destroyed, while the Americans lost 300 sailors and one carrier.
It could have all been different, though, had US cryptographers not intercepted and
decoded Japanese transmissions.
In 1921, the Office of Naval Intelligence came into the possession of a copy of the
Japanese Navy's secret codebook, and analysts worked tirelessly to understand how it all
worked.
Despite changes in the code over the years, and the introduction of a new system called
‘JN-25b' in 1939, the principles remained more or less the same.
By 1942, it's thought that the US Navy could decode about 10 to 15 percent of transmissions
that were intercepted.
Might not sound like much, but in some cases it helped change the outcome.
Unfortunately, this wasn't enough to pre-empt the attack on Pearl Harbour, but it did inform
them of a new attack being planned on a place referred to as ‘AF'.
It wasn't clear where this site was, though, but suspecting that it was the military base
on Midway Island, officers sent a fake message from the outpost saying that their water purification
system had broken.
As soon as a Japanese message was intercepted that mentioned AF had issues with water, the
location was confirmed, and US troops were able to prepare, and effectively repel the
attack.
8.
The Babington Plot
The Babington plot was an attempt, in 1586, to assassinate Queen Elizabeth the First,
protestant daughter of King Henry VIII.
The goal was to replace her on the throne with Mary Queen of Scots, who was her Roman
Catholic cousin.
On July 6th that year, Anthony Babington, encouraged by support from abroad (mostly
Spain) wrote a long letter to Mary, who at the time was already in prison.
She was enough of a threat that Queen Elizabeth kept her under arrest and as isolated as possible.
There were others who also wanted a Catholic on the throne and Babington often sent letters
to Mary in code.
He and others were going to rescue her and asked for her permission for ‘the dispatch
of the usurping competitor’, which meant the plan to assassinate the queen.
Mary replied a week later to give her approval…
But despite both letters being coded, they were intercepted and read by Thomas Phelippes,
who informed Queen Elizabeth.
Not coded well enough it seems.
Within days, Babington and his allies were arrested and taken to the tower of London,
with 7 of them being dragged to St. Giles’ Fields and executed on the 20th of September.
Mary was herself put on trial and, despite protesting her innocence, Elizabeth signed
her death warrant on February 1st, 1587, and she was beheaded in the Great Hall of Fotheringay
the following week.
7.
Olivier Levasseur
According to legend, the notorious French Pirate, Olivier Levasseur, managed to acquire
a huge fortune during his piracy across the Caribbean and West Africa- most notably in
1721 when he and his crew captured a Portuguese treasure ship that had become grounded on
a sandbar during a storm- an act that is said to be one of the greatest paydays in the history
of piracy.
Unsurprisingly, with such success came the attention of the authorities, and Levasseur
was caught in the Seychelles in 1730, and hanged for piracy.
So the story goes, as the noose was around his neck, he threw a cryptogram into the crowd,
and said whoever deciphered it would find his treasure.
The supposed cryptogram has been studied ever since, and a number of people have dedicated
their lives to finding the treasure.
It seems, though, that it may have all been a ruse.
There are two different copies still in existence.
One of them has been proved to be a fake, and the other, which has now been deciphered,
doesn’t relate to anything to do with the pirate or treasure.
Maybe a true copy of the cryptogram still exists, though, and some think the treasure
could still be out there!
6.
Poe’s Challenge
Edgar Allan Poe was a renowned writer and poet, known for his stories of mystery…
but he was also fascinated with ciphers and codes.
He even wrote a story, The Gold Bug, about the solution to one.
In 1840, he wrote an article for Graham's magazine called ‘A Few Words on Secret Writing'
in which he invited readers to send him coded messages for him to decipher- offering a free
subscription for ones he couldn't crack.
Six months later he wrote again that he had solved 100 entries that had been sent in and
then published two more to end the contest.
While he said these two were sent in, there were many that believed he created them himself.
It took until 1992 until the first was cracked, and the University of Illinois professor who
managed it offered a 2,500 dollar prize to whoever could solve the second.
Finally, in July of 2000, a software engineer from Toronto successfully managed it.
He found that the lines had been encrypted with a polyalphabetic substitution cipher,
which used 6 different symbols for each letter.
It said ‘It was early spring, warm and sultry glowed the afternoon.
The very breezes seemed to share the delicious languor of universal nature'.
Experts now don't think that Poe wrote this himself… so the solving of one mystery has
opened up another!
5.
Linear B
In 1900, among the ruins of a Bronze age palace in Knossos, Greece, archaeologists found a
script that resembled nothing that had ever been seen before.
Containing images of swords, chariots, and countless other small pictograms, this system
of writing became known as Linear B and would prove to be a mystery for the following 50
years.
Not only did researchers not know what words were written, but they had no idea who had
written it, and in what language it was.
The truth was finally revealed in 1952 by an unassuming architect called Michael Ventris.
He had read works by Alice Kober, who herself tried to understand the writing, and discovered
that it was a very early form of Greek… written more than 500 years before the Greek
alphabet was developed, and pre-dating our knowledge of Hellenic peoples by a number
of centuries.
Thousands of tablets have now been found inscribed with the language, which uses more than 187
different symbols.
It’s thought to have only been used for administrative purposes by professional scribes
and, once the society collapsed, there was just no use for it anymore.
4.
Frank Sidebottom
Frank Sidebottom was the papier-mâché headed comedy persona of English musician Chris Sievey.
Throughout his career in the 80s and 90s, he fronted tv and radio shows and even reported
for the local news.
He created numerous newsletters and writings over this time, too, and these were often
accompanied by symbols around them…
ones that people long suspected had a meaning, but they couldn't work out what it was.
Recently, a filmmaker was researching for a new documentary about Frank Sidebottom and
was speaking to Sievey’s son.
He revealed that his dad would fill in his rows of symbols first, and then let the kids
color in other rows to act as a red herring.
This was the breakthrough needed, and the filmmaker challenged the UK security services
to help decipher the rest.
They used it in a puzzle training exercise, and found that the codes translated to the
type of nonsensical phrases you’d expect from a comedian… including ‘Why does my
nose hurt after concerts?’ in reference to the fact he wore a clothes peg on his nose
to create his characters’ voice.
3.
Chaocipher
The Chaocipher was created by John Francis Byrne in 1918 and was what he described as
being unbreakable… yet simple.
So simple, in fact, that it only required two rotating discs that were small enough
to fit into a cigar box and could be operated by a ten-year-old.
He offered a cash reward to anyone who could crack it, but this is something that would
never be claimed.
Following his death, the Chaocipher became even more of a mystery, and it was only in
2010 that its secrets were revealed.
His son, the only other person to know the secret, died… and his wife donated all of
his papers and artifacts to the National Cryptographic Museum.
The Chaocipher used two alphabet wheels; one used to find the letter you want to encrypt,
and the other to show the corresponding cipher letter.
The reason why it was so difficult to figure out is that the two alphabets would slightly
alter every time a letter was input.
This led to a highly diffused encryption and one that would have been unlikely to be solved
without the original apparatus.
While it was a clever system to design, experts stress that any error made would cumulatively
alter further encryptions, which would have made it far too unreliable to be used in an
important setting like war.
2.
The Copiale Cipher
Created in the 1730s, the Copiale cipher is a 105-page manuscript that has baffled researchers
ever since…That is until 2011 when it was finally decoded.
Consisting of 75,000 handwritten characters; including arrows, shapes, runes, math symbols,
roman letters, and Greek letters… there were only two examples of plain text in the
entire book.
Finally, though, researchers were able to reveal the secrets by using computer algorithms
and could hardly believe what they found.
It was a homophonic cipher that had a complex substitution code and turned out to be an
encrypted German text from a secret society.
Calling themselves the Oculists, they used sight as a metaphor for knowledge… and the
first 16 pages detailed their initiation ceremony.
At first, the candidate is asked to read a blank page.
When saying they were unable to, they were given eyeglasses and had a number of eyebrow
hairs plucked out.
Their eyes were washed, their hands placed on an amulet, and then they were asked to
read another piece of paper and, you guessed it, they were miraculously able to see the
words!
1.
The Enigma Code
The Enigma was an enciphering machine used by the German armed forces during the second
world war to send secure messages.
Early on, Polish mathematicians had figured out how to read these messages, but once the
Germans realized this, they began to change the cipher system daily, making it virtually
impossible to decipher.
It fell to British researchers, led by Alan Turing at Bletchley Park, to carry out secret
work into finding a way to accurately decipher the messages that were being intercepted.
They developed a machine called the Bombe, which means that from mid-1940, German air
force signals were being routinely intercepted, and helping inform the plans of the Allies.
Turing also went on to help develop another system to intercept submarine communications,
and his cryptographic techniques helped him develop one of the first computers.
The meticulous work of Turing and fellow codebreakers is thought to have shortened the war by 2
or 3 years… something that only came to light when it was declassified in the 1990s,
long after the deaths of most involved.
Thanks for watching!!
Which code did you like the most?
Let me know in the comments below!
When I was a kid I always tried to decipher the alphabet from the Disney movie Atlantis!!
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