Unsolved: Two hidden messages from World War II
Two drawings from the Second World War in a book are supposed to contain hidden messages. Will a reader find them?
In my last blog article, I introduced the NSA cryptologist Lambros Callimahos and his book series “Military Cryptanalytics”. The third part of this series has only been publicly available since the end of 2020. In each of the three parts, a cryptogram of 26 letters is printed, the purpose of which is not discernible. So far, no one has been able to decode these three messages.
Steganography in the codebreaker book
The first part of “Military Cryptanalytics” also holds a chapter on solving steganographic messages. A nice example of one is the following text:
UNCLE EZRA SEEMS DESPONDENT. HAVE YOU HEARD THE LAST REPORT?
Here is another example:
WHEN YOU SEE CHESTER AT MADISON’S HOUSE TELL HIM LOIS DEPARTED.
In both texts, a short message (eight letters) is hidden. In both cases, the message can be found by reading only certain letters of the text according to a certain rule. The solutions are on page 218 of the book. Can a reader find the two hidden messages without this help?
The message in the drawing
On page 220 (meaning the PDF page) of “Military Cryptanalytics” there are also two steganogtafic puzzles whose solutions are not given and unknown to me. The first revolves around the following picture, which is said to have been intercepted by a postal censor during the Second World War:
Quelle/Source: NSA
Unfortunately, Callimahos does not mention who sent this drawing and which censor intercepted it. Judging from the text, the story must have taken place in Germany.
The relevant section of the book is about hidden messages encoded with the Trithemius alphabet, the Bacon cipher or the Morse alphabet. Presumably, the message hidden in the picture is also encoded in this way.
The Morse alphabet is probably well known. The Trithemius alphabet (or a special case of it) is also called the “Hail Mary cipher”. It provides that there are several words for each letter of the alphabet. If such words are strung together, a secret message can be disguised as an innocuous text. This technique is described in the book “Polygraphia” by Johannes Trithemius:
Quelle/Source: Wikimedia Commons
The text HELLO MAX could be coded with this table as follows: “Arbiter clemens, illustrator immortalis, imperator eternus, deus misericordissimus”. This sounds like a Latin prayer, which explains the name “Ave Maria cipher”. The French website dCode offers a nice online tool for this.
The Bacon cipher is used to encode the letters of the alphabet with two pieces of information (usually called A and B):
Quelle/Source: Wikimedia Commons
Can anyone – with Morse code, Hail Mary cipher or Bacon cipher – find the hidden message in said drawing?
The message in the diagram
The second hidden message can be found in the following diagram (“Fluctuation Chart”):
Quelle/Source: NSA
According to Callimahos, this digram is also from the Second World War. However, this is not a real message, but a training example created especially for censors. Presumably we are dealing with a point cipher. William Friedman, a colleague of Callimahos, used this technique for a Christmas card in 1931:
Quelle/Source: NSA
Each dot in the diagram stands for the letter indicated in the same row on the left. The hidden message is: FLUCTUATIONS VIOLENT COMES OUR XMAS WISH TO YOU MAY YOUR NEXT YEARS UPS BE MANY MAY YOUR DOWNS BE VERY FEW
Can anyone solve the Fluctuation Chart in a similar way?
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Further reading: Das steganografische Tagebuch des Kriegsgefangenen Donald Hill
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