GERMAN CIPHER SECRET

Southland Times, Issue 18836, 1 June 1920, Page 2

GERMAN CIPHER SECRET

REVELATION AT CAILLAUX TRIAL. How Germany’s secret ciphers were read by the French was described at length at the hearing of the case against M. Caillaux, the ex-Premier, for treason before the Senate High ('unit (states the Paris correspondent of the Daily Mail >.

Before the Dreyfus affair arose there was no urgent need that France should read the countless telegraphed dispatches sent by the German Ambassadors from Paris to Berlin, for France had in the German Embassy itself one of their best and most zealous agents. Curiously enough, she was a woman, and unpaid. She was governess of the Ambassador’s children and, and was allowed an almost complete run of the Embassy. When the Dreyfus case was made public she was discovered, and then the cipher department of the Foreign Office set U) work to find what the Embassy was saying to Berlin.

It was a difficult task. The German Embassy had a whole series, which changed according to set rules. Baron Munster, then German Ambassador, betrayed the secret of the code by sending copious extracts of newspaper reports, and experts were able to establish the whole of the secret code. Thus from 1901 to 1911 every secret telegram sent by successive German Ambassadors was read and recorded. In 1911 M. Caillaux’s secret negotiations with Berlin were also discovered, but from that date the German Embassy, who had suddenly been informed of what was taking place, changed their codes. Everything had to be begun again. The cipher department were sure that the new system was bound to be some kind of regularly recurring ciphers, but, though patient observation was undertaken, it was not until 1914, a few weeks before the war, that they solved .the problem.