msb@sq.com (Mark Brader) (01/21/91)
> The history of intelligence intercepts must go back at least to > the Romans learning to read smoke signals of the Picts in Britain. > In the electrical era, an immediate action was to cut your enemy's > submarine telegraph cable and pull it ashore to a friendly nation. > The U.S. did this to Germany in both WWI and WWII, and the U.S. Army > even had its own cableship into the Korean War era. ... My recollection of reading Barbara Tuchman's "The Zimmermann Telegram" says that the German cables were indeed cut very early in WWI -- by the British. The U.S. was, after all, neutral for the first 3/4 of the war! In fact, this action turned out in the end to lead to the U.S. entering the war. It seems that the Germans sent a telegram to Mexico, saying that in the event of the U.S. entering the war against them, they invited the Mexicans to enter the war on the German side and promised that if they did so then they would get back the territory now in the U.S. that they used to have. Now, because of the cut cables, the Germans were limited in how they could transmit an overseas message like this with security. They chose to route it (illegally) through a neutral country -- the U.S. itself! They thought it was safe because nobody could possible break their code, even if, say, the British had someone in a position to take a copy of it, which they did. But they also *did* know how to break the code, and cheerfully revealed the contents of the telegram, and the rest is history. (I'm working from memory, but I did read the book pretty recently.) Mark Brader, SoftQuad Inc., Toronto, utzoo!sq!msb, msb@sq.com