Cracking Codes

Codes, politics and world history

Codes have played a large role throughout the ages, from securing the launching protocols of nuclear missiles to providing us with a fascinating window on lost ancient languages. Codes have been used for millennia, and some of the messages they have carried have made history.

The unintentional code

Lost ancient languages are unintentional codes. They are simply a forgotten language of a now-dead culture. At the time of their use, they were not specifically intended to create subversive or secretive texts.

Take Egyptian hieroglyphics, for instance. Many appear clearly emblazoned on buildings and monuments for all to see. They only became code once their meaning was lost to us. Without a cultural connection to the past, we lose the ability to understand the ancient writing. Hieroglyphs became code, for which a cultural connection was the key.

Set in stone

In the case of Egyptian hieroglyphics, a language hidden from us for nearly 2,000 years, the key was a stone tablet. As Napoleon charged through north Africa in the closing stages of the 18th century, his entourage of scientists and experts hoovered up treasures and finds. One of the latter was perhaps the greatest archaeological discovery ever made: the Rosetta Stone.

Originally ordered by Ptolemy V Epiphanes, an Egyptian king who ruled in about 200 BC, the tablet is a kind of poster containing a public decree for people to read. The important bit from our point of view is that the same message was written in three different types of scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphics, Egyptian demotic (an ancient common written form) and ancient Greek. As Greek was readily understood by scholars, this meant that they could eventually figure out the message as written in hieroglyphics. When the full translation of the words on the stone were published in 1824, the words and thoughts of the ancient world suddenly started to be revealed.

War! What are codes good for?

Apart from opening doors to our past, codes have a more serious and sinister side. International espionage, national security and the top secret transfer of information all rely on the protection of code.

British history is riddled with codes – from 16th-century plots and royal intrigue to married couples having their own secret codes during World War I so that their private messages could get past military censors.

World War II brought the famous German Enigma coding machine to prominence. As the British researchers at Bletchley Park grappled with the fiendish codes produced by it and developed the Ultra system of code breaking, they also made huge advances in the design of early computers. The cracking of Enigma meant that a number of wartime disasters were averted. For example, because the Allies could determine the course of German U-boats by breaking naval codes, millions of tonnes of shipping and thousands of lives were saved.

Number 9, Number 9, Number 9 ...

During the Cold War, codes were used by spies to communicate with their governments and, increasingly, by the governments themselves to send sensitive information. How vulnerable the latter could be was revealed in 1985 with the exposure of a spy ring consisting of the American John A Walker, Jr, his son, his brother and a friend, who, from 1967, had been supplying the Soviet Union with US Navy codes. It cost the US nearly $1 billion to rebuild their entire communications system.

Remnants of the Cold War remain as mysterious 'number stations' continue to broadcast streams of spoken coded messages over shortwave radio frequencies. Although these strange ephemeral readings have never been officially explained by any government, or indeed confirmed as even existing, it is widely accepted that they are used to transmit code to agents 'in the field' around the world. What messages they carry we can only guess, but in an age of satellites and quantum cryptology, the old methods still have their place as those who work in the underworld continue to influence tomorrow’s history.

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