Griffin W.E.B. - The Corps 08 - In Dangers Path

Oh, shit! I don't want to be a crypto officer. I'm overqualified to be a crypto officer, and too senior. That's a job for a captain, not a light colonel. What this sonofabitch is trying to do is cover his ass. Again.

«In this connection,» Adamson went on pontifically, «intelligence has managed to lay their hands on a German cryptographic device. To our good fortune, the Germans believe the device has been destroyed rather than compromised…«

This caught Lieutenant Colonel Albright's attention. He had heard some interesting things about the German device. For starters, it was such a clever design that decrypting material first encrypted on it was virtually impossible without using a device like it and a matching signal-operating instruction. And, if Adamson knew what he was talking about, and the Germans did not suspect thatthe device had fallen into the hands of the Allies, it was a major intelligence/cryptographic coup, with enormous implications.

«Yes, sir?»

«The question has been raised: could we—that is to say, could

you

duplicate this device, if you had your hands on it. It would be used solely for the transmission of the intelligence, code-named magic, which has been generated in Hawaii.»

«They call that reverse engineering, sir,» Albright replied. «Yes, sir. If I can get my hands on one, I can duplicate it.»

Before going on, General Adamson stared at Lieutenant Colonel Albright a long moment— obviously weighing whether or not to believe him.

«I'll have to get the go-ahead from Admiral Leahy, of course, Augie, but what I'm thinking is that we should fly you to London, so that you could physically bring this device to the United States. A destroyer has been made available for this purpose; flying it here is considered too risky.»

Maybe, with a little bit of luck, I can do everything he wants, and stay here, and not find my self working for the sonofabitch.

Three days later, Lieutenant Colonel Albright was on his way to England to bring the device to the United States. By the time the destroyer with the device aboard tied up at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Adamson had arranged for his transfer to the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as Chief, Communications & Communications Security. He had additionally and not without difficulty, he said, arranged his promotion to full colonel and detail to the General Staff Corps. «Don't make me regret it, Augie,» he told him.

Within a month, Colonel Albright learned that he owed his promotion to the suggestion of the chief signal officer, not General Adamson, and that his detail to the General Staff Corps had been directed by Admiral Leahy himself, as a cover for his secret communications role. No one would pay much attention to one more GSC colonel on the Joint Chiefs; but people might wonder what a full bird colonel of the Signal Corps was actually doing.

In three closely guarded rooms at the Army's Signal Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, Albright immediately set up «the factory.» There the first machine was carefully reverse-engineered, and the devices based on it—naturally called magic devices, after the code name of the intelligence data itself—were put into production. The first two of these were installed in Washington and Pearl Harbor. The third went to Brisbane, Australia, for MacArthur's use, where it was placed in the care of Lieutenant Hon Song Do, Signal Corps, USAR. In time, the «factory» was capable of manufacturing two of the devices each month.

During the initial setup of the «Special Channel,» Major General Charles M. Adamson, USA, predictably proved to be a royal pain in the ass; but that was the price Albright knew he had to pay for being involved with an operation as important as magic… an importance confirmed to Colonel Albright on more than one occasion by Admiral Leahy himself. Leahy privately told Albright that the magic information transmitted over the Special Channel was one of the United States' two most important secret operations, the other being the Manhattan Project under Brigadier General Leslie Groves, USA. Under Groves, a team of physicists and mathematicians was engaged in developing a bomb that would release the energy Einstein theorized was contained in all matter. One such bomb, Admiral Leahy told Albright, would have an explosive force equivalent to that of twenty thousand tons of trinitrotoluene, better known as TNT.

It was now clear to Albright that he'd been wrong to worry about becoming an overqualified crypto officer, a colonel doing a captain's job. In fact, he sometimes wondered if he was qualified to protect the magic secret from compromise. The basic problem, as he saw it, was not technical or mechanical, but human. The magic devices worked flawlessly. The problem was that more and more people were being added to the loop.

The Special Channel was originally intended to provide an absolutely secure transmission channel for magic between the headquarters of Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief, Pacific, in Hawaii; General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander, South West Pacific Ocean Area, in Brisbane, Australia; and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States in Washington.

On the surface, one might imagine that no more than half a dozen people would be involved. Such thinking proved to be overoptimistic. For starters, people had to actually operate the devices. That is, somebody had to actually push the typewriter-like keys that would encrypt or decrypt magic material. Originally, the cryptographers at Pearl Harbor did this. But it didn't take their superiors long to realize that their time could be better spent decrypting intercepted Japanese communications than doing work clerk-typists could do just as well. So a few cryptographers who had been handling routine cryptographic material had to be granted magic clearances, and their names were added to the very short list of people, headed by the President, authorized to know that magic existed.

In time other names were added to the magic list, starting with the Secretaries of the Navy (Frank Knox) and the Army (Henry Stimson). The Director of the Office of Strategic Services (William Donovan) obviously had the Need To Know what the Japanese were up to, and he had gone on the list, as had the Chief of Naval Operations, the Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, and the Chief of the USMC Office of Management Analysis. In Brisbane, MacArthur decided that his Chief of Intelligence, Brigadier General Willoughby, had to be on the list, and he was added. Navy Secretary Frank Knox, meanwhile, sent a personal representative to the Pacific, a commissioned civilian named Fleming Pickering. Since he did not wish the Navy brass to know what Pickering was reporting to him, Knox gave him a magic clearance so that his reports could be transmitted over the Special Channel. And Army Secretary Stimson had recently convinced the President that General Dwight D. Eisenhower, soon to command the Allied Invasion of the European Landmass, needed access to magic material; and a magic device had been authorized for his headquarters in England and flown to London. Eisenhower had immediately obtained permission for his Chief of Staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, to be added to the magic list.

The brass had quickly learned that the Special Channel provided them with an absolutely secure means of communicating with each other on matters having nothing to do with magic material. And it had the added bonus of being far speedier than standard Army or Navy communications. Sixty percent of total Special Channel traffic now had nothing to do with magic.

As Special Channel users proliferated, Albright grew increasingly worried that the necessary close control of the Special Channel would be lost. Brass worldwide would inevitably become aware of its existence, and come up with arguments why they, too, should be authorized access to magic material and the Special Channel. Experience had taught him that the more people with access to a secret, the greater its chances of compromise.