KILL FRED

When I listened, briefly, to Joe Biden’s comments following his meeting with Putin I did not expect much. I was shocked to learn it was even worse than expected. Joe Biden said he gave Putin a list of 16 infrastructure items that the U.S. considered to be critical  to national security. He told Putin that if Russia attacked any of those, there would be consequences. Putin was probably laughing so hard it created the mistaken impression that he was shaking in his boots.

This was irredeemably stupid. Perhaps the best option would be if the list were inaccurate. But odds are this is one of the few things the Biden administration got right. I immediately thought, so if Russia attacks anything not on the list, that would be ok? Give me a break. It would be like if someone threatened your family and you said: “Hey, my wife and kids are off limits.” Does that mean it would be ok if someone offs Uncle Fred? In addition, this is exactly the kind of information you do not want to give to anyone with criminal intent. It be like someone winning a huge lottery and then saying: “Don’t anyone hurt anyone on this list, or I will get mad.” That would instantly become a shopping list for kidnappers.

I worked in intelligence, and I never talk about truly secret things. But I can say that the most dangerous intelligence is what we know about our enemy that they do not know we know. This is why when Winston Churchill allegedly heard that a radio intercept revealed German plans to bomb Coventry, he refused to allow anyone to give a warning or evacuation orders. Thousands of people died as the result of that raid. But Churchill felt that it was more important to protect the knowledge that Britain has broken the enigma Code. I would not want to be the person making that decision. But history tells us that Churchill got it right, because breaking the enigma code helped defeat the U-Boats and ultimately helped defeat Germany. Churchill is reported to have said the most unethical decision he could ever make was to let Hitler win the war.

By the way, Alan Turing was a brilliant man who basically invented the computer. There are some movies out there that give the impression that he broke the enigma code all by himself. That was not close to true. It took an entire team to do that. What Turning did was perfect the machine doing the calculations necessary to break the code. It was the foundation of the modern-day computer.

But many people don’t realize that it was the Poles who were instrumental in breaking the enigma code. It was Polish mathematicians who cracked the initial enigma code in the 1930s. They also built the machine that Turing later perfected. Marian Rejewski invented something called the cyclometer and Jerzy Rozycki added a clock to it. It set a catalogue of all the possible setting and by comparison could figure out the initial setting.  By 1938 they were reading 75% of enigma messages. When Germany upgraded the enigma, on September 15, 1938, just before the Munich conference. It represented a real challenge. That is when the Poles invented the “bomba” which was a version of the cyclometer that could use a system of electric revolving rotors that could generate 17,576 different combinations of the code in about two hours. The machines would stop automatically if they got a solution. If you watched the movie Enigma, you see the machine the British called the “bombs.” The machine perfected by Alan Turing. No one mentioned it was a Polish word meaning “splendid.

I learned much of this while working with American code breakers during the Vietnam War. They knew first hand the true history of codes, who broke them and how it was done. If you read Wikipedia or watch any of the movies, none of them mention the Poles. Incredibly, after these people escaped Germany, at horrendous personal risk, they were not allowed to work on enigma anymore because the British didn’t trust them.  The following article from Justic4poland.com does an excellent job of reporting a story greatly underreported elsewhere.

https://justice4poland.com/2014/05/30/how-poles-broke-enigma-code/#:~:text=Poles%20were%20instrumental%20in%20breaking%20the%20famous%20German,of%20the%20war%2C%20especially%20the%20Battle%20of%20

Well, now thanks to Joe, Russia was just handled a road map to our destruction. It is hard to imagine any rational reason for doing this. Previously, we were all too concerned over the fact that Joe Biden is showing such obvious signs of senility. Maybe, just maybe, the real danger comes from people, unknown, who are writing the foolish words he is misreading off of pre-printed note cards.

TDM