June 13, 1918 
Land & Water 
German Plots Exposed 
The Bolo Cablegrams 
r renCh Otr other, Managing Editor, "The World's Work,^' New York 
15 
y 
SECRECY was, of course, the most important con- 
sideration in the German plots in America. When 
Bernstorff wished to arrange with BerHn to give 
Bolo Pasha 10 million francs to betray his country, 
he naturally did not write out his messages in plain 
Enghsh for every wireless station on both sides of the Atlantic 
to read them as they went through the air. He did, to be 
sure, write the messages in English, and the}' looked plain 
enough — and innocent enough^ — but thej' meant "something 
very different from what they seemed to mean. And when 
it got down to the actual transfer of the money, another 
German agent in New York signed the messages, which likewise 
were not what they seemed. Those messages were in code. 
Now, code should not be confused with cipher. When some 
Hindus in New York, subsidised by BerHn, wished to write 
their plans to other Hindus in San Francisco, concerning 
their commpn purpose of fomenting revolution against 
British rule in India, they wrote out messages that consisted 
entirely of groups of Arabic numerals. Those messages were 
in cipher. 
Before taking up some of the German code and cipher 
messages that have been translated, with dramatic results, 
it will be well to discuss codes and ciphers in general. A code 
is an arrangement by which two people agree, when ex- 
changing messages, aJways to substitute certain words or 
symbols for the real words of the message. Thus, they 
might agree on these substitutions : 
a =r the 
French ship -- market 
sailed from New York ~ price 
sailed from Boston = quotation 
to-day = is 
for Marseilles = any even number 
for Bordeaux = any number with a fraction 
With such a code, a German spy in New York could cable 
a seemingly harmless message to a friend in Holland, such as : 
"The market price is no." This would mean : "A French 
ship sailed from New York to-day for Marseilles." Whereas 
a very shght change in wording : " The market quotation is 
no}," would mean "A French ship sailed from Boston to- 
day for Bordeaux." 
Messages of that sort could be exchanged daily between a 
broker in Wall Street and i. broker in Amsterdam, and, by 
the addition of a few more words, could be infinitely varied, 
and would look like perfectly legitimate commercial corre- 
spondence. In fact, most international business before the 
war (the Government now requires all messages to appear 
in plain English) was carried on by coded cables which 
turned long messages into short groups of words that of 
themselves made gibberish. Several code books, for business 
use, were on the market, containing hundreds of pages of 
these arbitrary substitutions, which were useful, not for 
secrecy, but for economy. A dozen words could be made 
to say what normally would require five hundred words. 
A cipher is the substitution of some symbol for a letter of 
the alphabet. The substituted symbol may be another letter 
— as writing e when you mean a. Or it may be a figure — as 
using 42 when you mean m. . Or it may be an arbitrary 
sign — as * to mean c. This is called a substitution cipher, 
because some other letter or symbol is arbitrarily substituted 
for every letter. But another kind is called a transposition 
cipher, because in this the letters of the alphabet are simply 
transposed by agreement— the simplest and most obvious 
example being to reverse the alphabet, so that z stands for 
a, and y for b, etc. 
Perhaps the cleverest transposition cipher ever devised 
— it is so good tliat the British Army uses it in the field and 
has published text-books about it — is the very simple "Play- 
fair" cipher. First a square is drawn, divided into fifths 
each way. This arrangement gives twenty-five spaces, to 
contain the letters of the alphabet — / and / being put in 
one square because there would never be &ny plain sentence 
in which it would not be quite obvious which one of them is 
needed to complete a word of which the other letters are 
known. Next a "key word" is chosen — herein is the clever- 
ness and the simplicity of this cipher, because every time the 
key word is changed, the whole pattern of the jdpliabet is 
changed. Suppose the key word is Gardenia. It is spelled 
out in the sqilares, as on Diagrafn I. The second A is left 
out, as there mus^ not, of course, be duplicates on the key- 
board. Now, the rest of the alphabet is written into the 
squares in their regular sequence, as ©n Diagram II. That is 
G 
A 
R 
D 
E 
n 
G 
A 
R 
D 
E 
N 
IJ 
N 
IJ 
B 
C 
F 
H 
K 
L 
M 

P 
Q 
S 
T 
U 
V 
W 
,x 
Y 
Z 
the complete keyboard. The method for using it is this : The 
message is written out in plain text, e.g. : 
DESTROY BRIDGE AT ONCE 
(onlj' capital letters are commonly used in cipher work). 
This message is now divided into groups of two letters, in 
the same order, so that it reads : 
DE ST RO YB RI DG EA TO NC EX 
(the X is added to complete the group, and is called a null). 
These groups of twos are now ciphered from the keyboard 
into other groups of twos, by the following method : 
Where two j oined letters of the original message appear in 
the same horizontal row on the kej'board, the next letter to 
the right is substituted for each. Thus, the first two letters 
of our message are DE. They occur in the same horizontal 
row on our keyboard. Consequently, for D we write E, 
and for E we go "on around the world" to the right, or back 
to the other end of the row, and write G for E. This gives 
us DE enciphered as EG. 
Where two joined letters of the original message appear 
in the same vertical row on the keyboard, the next letter 
below is substituted for each. 
Where two joined letters of the original message appear 
neither in the same horizontal nor the same vertical row on 
the keyboard, we imagine a rectangle with the two letters 
at the opposite corners, and in each case substitute the letter 
found on the keyboard at the other comer of the same 
horizontal row. This sounds complicated, but in reality is 
very simple. For example, take the third two-letter group 
of our message — RO. The rectangle in this case is 
R D E , 
B C F 
L M O 
and for R we substitute E, and for O we substitute L. Sub- 
stituting our whole message by this system, it reads : 
Original DE ST RO YB RI DG EA TO NC EX 
Cipher EG TU EL XC AB EA GR UM IF RZ 
As telegraph operators are accustomed to send these 
gibberish messages in groups of five letters (so that they can 
check errors, knowing tljat when only four appear in a group, 
for example, something has been left out) these enciphered 
groups of twos are now combined into groups of fives, so 
that the finished cipher reads : 
EGTUE LXCAB EAGRU MIFRZ 
The foregoing 
sounds extremely 
comphcated, but the 
truth is that any- 
body, after half an 
hovir's practice, can 
put a message into 
''this kind of cipher 
("Playfair cipher") 
almost as fast as he 
can print the straight 
EngUsh of it in capi- 
tal letters. And unless 
the person who reads 
it knows the key 
word which deter- 
mined the pattern 
■ 
1 
■ 
n 
■ 
D 
■ 
D 
■ 
■ 
■ 
■ 
E 
■ 
E ■ D 
■ E ■ 
C 
■■ EDU 
CB nnnuB 
