Word: enigma
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...watchers. "A widow for the second time," whispered one old woman in a black shawl. A Mona Lisa smile crept briefly across Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' face, or perhaps it was simply an involuntary grimace at a world forever watching. Behind the dark sunglasses, her look was pure enigma...
Even in these face-to-face meetings, though, Jobert remains an enigma. Small in stature (5 ft. 4 in.) and shy in demeanor, Jobert is a world apart from the usual backslapping, smiling politician. Born in Morocco of French parents, he did not come to France to live until he was 18. He graduated from the prestigious National School of Administration, and until Pompidou appointed him Foreign Minister in 1973, he had spent his entire career as a bureaucrat. He is quiet, shakes hands with a stiffness in his right arm from a war wound, and rarely smiles, except...
...such historic posers must now be added questions raised by a retired British group captain named Frederick Winterbotham. What if a Pole working in a German factory had not defected to the Allies in 1938, bringing with him the first construction details of the Nazis' coding machine, called Enigma? And what if British cryptographers had not eventually cracked Enigma's supposedly unbreakable coding system, which throughout World War II was to carry all the German high command's secret wireless traffic? Would Britain have fallen? Would the Allies have lost...
After 35 years of officially imposed silence, Winterbotham reveals in The Ultra Secret that British intelligence did crack the code. From 1939 onward Churchill and later Roosevelt, Eisenhower and other Allied leaders were virtually reading over Hitler's shoulder. The whole system of deciphering Enigma's signals and relaying the intelligence was called the Ultra Operation. It sometimes produced translated copies of Hitler's orders to his generals within an hour of their original transmission. Little wonder that Churchill once called Ultra "my most secret weapon...
Terrible Decision. This is not a book on code breaking. Winterbotham passes over the mechanics of Enigma to deal with the Allied use of its output. Dissemination of Ultra intelligence had to be limited to only a few senior commanders, lest the Germans (and later the Japanese, who also used Enigma machines) should discover the awful truth...