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“I hope you will let nothing interfere with your enthusiasm for helping where help is needed, but don't let the slow, snails pace progress upward and onward gets you down. Remember always at the dawn of man's conscience is only three or three and a half thousand years behind us.' he had always found the comforting thought, that the age of barbarism was not long past, that if humans feel to be kind it was because they were still children, historically speaking and the idea ran true to him”

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Book:The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies
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“Before a single regiment of U.S. soldiers set foot on European soil, the war changed American culture. It was a stomach that ingested a large diverse nation and started breaking it down into widgets. Hollywood movies and Disney cartoons were about the war now. Business was about the war. Work was about the war, and school was about the war. It was the only time before or since when Americans became emotionally invested in the idea of self-deprivation and frugality. Third graders roamed their neighbor-hoods in packs, gathering scrap materials, tires, and paper and cooking fat and old sneakers whose soles could be sacrificed for the rubber. The Big Three automakers stopped making cars and started making planes. Factory workers took secrecy oaths. Everybody had a secret now. The government issued ration stamps for eggs, milk, bread, gasoline, contained in ration books, manila-colored pamphlets”

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Book:The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies
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“In the years that followed, William would become obsessed with the question of what went wrong. He analyzed thousands of pages of Pearl Harbor documents and wrote a three-volume report that boiled down to this: MAGIC had strongly indicated an attack on December 7, but the decrypts had gotten bottled up through a series of farcical missteps in the dissemination stage of the process, and U.S. leaders weren't alerted to the danger in time to take action. It was nuanced: The crucial MAGIC decrypts had been slow to arrive in Pearl Harbor partly because the military hadn't given the Pearl Harbor commanders a Purple machine of their own, a direct tap into the MAGIC fire hose. This decision had been made out of a reasonable desire to limit the distribution of Purple machines in order to minimize the chances of the Japanese learning about the MAGIC secret. It was a prime example of the brutal choices that codebreakers must live with. Do you take risks to keep a secret that may save hundreds of thousands of future lives, or do you expose the secret to save a small number of lives right now? William once referred to this broad dilemma as "cryptologic schizophrenia,”

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Book:The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies
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“The codebreakers had known for days, if not weeks, that a large Japanese attack was coming. William and the rest of his team had seen the MAGIC intercepts. It was obvious from MAGIC that Japan had been poised to strike; the only mystery was where. What surprised William on December 7 was not the attack itself but the location. He thought it would happen in Manila, not Pearl Harbor. next few days, more than one codebreaker wrote his In the years that followed, William would become obsessed with the question of what went wrong. He analyzed thousands of pages of Pearl Harbor documents and wrote a three-volume report that boiled down to this: MAGIC had strongly indicated an attack on December 7, but the decrypts had gotten bottled up through a series of farcical missteps in the dissemination stage of the process, and U.S. leaders weren't alerted to the danger in time to take action. It was nuanced: The crucial MAGIC decrypts had been slow to arrive in Pearl Harbor partly because the military hadn't given the Pearl Harbor commanders a Purple machine of their own, a direct tap into the MAGIC fire hose. This decision had been made out of a reasonable desire to limit the distribution of Purple machines in order to minimize the chances of the Japanese learning about the MAGIC secret. It was a prime example of the brutal choices that codebreakers must live with. Do you take risks to keep a secret that may save hundreds of thousands of future lives, or do you expose the secret to save a small number of lives right now? William once referred to this broad dilemma as "cryptologic schizophrenia," adding, "What to do? Thus far, no real psychiatric or psychoanalytic”

IntelligenceWwiiPearl Harbor
Book:The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies
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“Aimed at army units with no prior training, Manual for the Solution of Military Ciphers showed how to set up a quick-and-dirty deciphering office in the field with five or six soldiers, some radio equipment to intercept enemy signals, and a day or two of study. Hitt went over the basics of military cryptography and explained, accurately, that the methods of the world's armies had not changed much in hundreds of years. Just like there are millions of chicken recipes in the world but only several basic methods to cook the bird (roasting, frying, poaching, boiling), there are countless ciphers but only a handful of common types.”

IntelligenceInvestigationSpyMilitary IntelligenceArmiesIce Cube
Book:The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies
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