The Reverse Engineer

The fact that a gaggle of intellectuals, many of whom were extremely eccentric, cracked the Nazi Enigma codes and cut an estimated two years off World War II, reveals the power of academia when it is constrained by real-world outcomes.

A chapter from the forthcoming Systematic Typology: A Manifesto.

When 18-year-old Gwen Davies was assigned to “Station X” during the Second World War, she was shut into the back of a blacked-out van and taken to Bletchley Park, 50 miles (80 km) northwest of London.

She was dumped with her luggage outside the gates of the park and told by a young guard that she couldn’t come in because she didn’t have a pass. ‘I was by this time hungry, thirsty and very, very annoyed. “Look,” I said, “I don’t know where I am, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” “Come to the right place then,” said the guard, “most of ’em look as if they didn’t know where they was and God knows what them doing.” An elderly guard told him to leave me alone, and said that I was to go to the hut at the left of the gates. “Somebody will come and see to you,” he said, “and if you want to know where you are, you’re at Bletchley Park.” “And if you want to know what that is,” added the younger guard, “it’s the biggest lunatic asylum in Britain.”’¹Michael Smith, <em>The Secrets of Station X: How Bletchley Park Helped Win the War,</em> 47-48.

Clearly, the criteria for an assessment of actual lunacy can be quite subjective. Not all academics are as eccentric as Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), the astronomer who discovered the supernova and described the movements of comets. He wore a gold-silver alloy prosthetic in place of the nose he lost in a duel, employed a dwarf (whom he believed to be clairvoyant) as his court jester, and also kept a pet moose whose taste for Danish beer eventually led to its demise after it tumbled, roaring drunk, down the stairs of a nobleman’s castle during a party. Nikola Tesla (who fell in love with a pigeon), insisted that his hotel room numbers be divisible by three, and Albert Einstein (who refused to wear socks) once ran his boat aground because he was deep in thought. There seems to be a connection between a burning desire to understand the abstract workings of the material world and a lack of desire (or crippling inability) to navigate the complex and unspoken “real-world” protocols of respectable society.

The word “eccentric” itself suggests a method behind the apparent madness. From the Greek ekkentros, it denotes a circle or orbit not having the earth precisely at its center. Passengers in a vehicle whose wheels are mounted “eccentrically” will suffer a bumpy ride, but the cam in an internal combustion engine relies upon exactly the same “error” to transform rotation into a to-and-fro motion. The fact is that those who are intent on discovering the hidden things of the world and harnessing their power understandably have little interest in whatever might be the current center of everyone else’s attention.

Aptly, the mansion on the Bletchley Park estate is a strange hybrid of the Victorian Gothic, Tudor, and Dutch Baroque styles, constructed after 1883 for an English financier and politician. While his choices might have been eccentric, the mansion itself is merely tasteless.

The oddballs who directed “Station X” on the site were not taken seriously by the British military until some crucial intelligence, deciphered by the codebreakers, was ignored, resulting in the British forces sustaining heavy losses. This tragic event forced a paradigm change. Once the value of such intelligence was established, it became clear that even those who were ensconced away in the countryside working on the war rather than in it were to be considered vital to victory. Subsequently, the hurried increase in investment in the burgeoning facility was vindicated again and again.

The British military could receive and record all of the German military intelligence transmitted by radio, and yet could understand none of it. The Germans were using Enigma machines, a device invented in the 1920s for the purpose of transmitting confidential business information by Morse code. Using a series of three rotors, an Enigma machine substituted each letter of the alphabet for another. To “unscramble” the encoded message required the identification of the particular setting of the rotors used to scramble it. Since all of the operators were given the same rotor setting, deciphering the message was simple. Using the “key,” the process was reversed and the text was easily decoded for the intended recipient.

But the Germans knew that a concerted analysis of the messages—for instance, recording the frequency of certain letters and combinations—could identify the setting of the rotors. So, for added security, they made a synchronized change to the encryption setting on all of their Enigma machines every morning. This meant that if the setting on any given day was discovered, that information was useless for deciphering the transmissions on the following day, since a fresh setting would be applied.

The Germans also made modifications to the design of the machines, making them more complex. These included an extra rotor and a wired “plugboard,” both of which added further layers of scrambling and thus multiplied the number of possible combinations.

Although the British were familiar with Enigma machines, they were obviously unable to analyze the modifications without capturing a modified machine. This meant that the codebreakers had to build corresponding modified machines with nothing to go on but the coded messages created by the German machines. This process of “reverse engineering” was akin to recreating a specific printing press from the analysis of a newspaper.

The history of Station X—much of which remained a closely kept secret for many decades after the end of the war—is fascinating, but that is not why we are here. The techniques developed through sheer necessity by the codebreakers serve as a handy analogy for a new development in biblical theology.

There are some helpful correspondences between the method of encryption and decryption used during the war and the study of biblical literary structure as the key to the full meaning of the texts of the Bible. Unfortunately, this is a two-edged sword, since the mention of “codes” rightly alarms any serious exegete. Be assured that the artful use of “systematic typology” is not about discovering codes hidden in the Bible. Instead, it is about discerning the internal logic common to all the authors of the Bible, the “governing principle” of the Scriptures that explains the full meaning of what we see in plain sight. Why be content with looking through a glass darkly when, with a little more effort, we can see “face to face”?

While typology interprets isolated symbols and images, a systematic typology recognizes that the Bible is composed of recapitulated sequences, strings of symbols that are arranged in analogical sentences. It compares these sequences with each other, noting both the similarities and the differences. Certain clues in the contents of the text (for example, a particular symbol is always located at the same point in related sequences) enables us to identify the structure, and the structure of the contents then serves as the key to the full meaning of the passage.

While this might sound complicated, once the biblical pattern is internalized, the practice is a lot like recognizing variations of a familiar melody. And this is precisely what the authors expected of their audience. The original hearers and readers, through careful training in the Scriptures, already had the required “daily setting.”

This process of identification and comparison enables us to “reverse engineer” the texts to see what makes them tick. The “thought system” of the author, once identified, can be diagrammed in a way that makes it a useful hermeneutical tool for the interpretation of other texts which employ the same pattern. This brings us to a discussion of codebreaking “cribs.”

A crib was originally a “cheat sheet,” usually an interlinear translation of a text that students were assigned to translate. In that sense, the Rosetta Stone was a “crib” that led to the breaking of the hieroglyphs. The term was adopted by the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park to describe a word or phrase which they knew to be contained in the incomprehensible ciphertext that would provide a key to the setting of the machine. This strategy, also referred to as a “known-plaintext attack,” relied upon the recognition of routine operational messages, such as the daily weather report. Because some of the content was repeated every morning, it provided clues to the new day’s setting.

While the addition of an extra rotor made decryption of ciphertext more difficult, it was still vulnerable to decryption using hand methods. It was the German Army’s addition of the “plugboards” in 1930 that made the invention of cryptanalytical “computers” necessary. (Until this point in history, the word “computer,” like the word “engineer,” denoted an actual human being.) Based on an earlier Polish machine (a much smaller device known as the bomba kryptologiczna because it ticked like a bomb), mathematician Alan Turing designed the first British machine in 1939, with important refinements made by his colleague Gordon Welchman in 1940. By the end of the war, there were over 200 machines operating, wisely decentralized across various locations.

The work of the bombes was to eliminate the number of possible settings on a given day, reducing it to a more manageable number. This required a prior manual analysis of the ciphertext for the “cribs” that would make this elimination possible. Once the key words and phrases were located and deciphered, the remainder of the work was down to the sort of deductive logic that can be handled by a machine.

This “vestigial” requirement for human intelligence highlights the nature of systematic typology. While the patterns in the biblical texts are in many ways the product of literary “engineering,” interpreting them is not as straightforward as simply swapping one letter for another.

Since the sequences are comprised of symbols that have significances based on allusions to previous texts and are thus are not spelled out explicitly, the connections within each sequence, and also between related sequences, are not digital or alphanumeric but poetic and musical.

The structure of the texts is thus only a “house” that provides familiar locations for contents that require an act of literary recognition by a human gifted with wit and an imagination. In that respect, the method is something like solving a cryptic crossword. Tom Chivers writes:

What people who don’t do them don’t realize about cryptic crosswords is that they’re a battle. They are mental combat between the setter and the solver: there are strict rules of warfare, but within those rules the setter will do anything to mislead and confuse the solver. That’s why a crossword is superior to a sudoku: a computer can set a sudoku, and a computer can solve it, but a crossword is human ingenuity versus human ingenuity, wit versus wit.

That could be why, in the Second World War, so many of British military intelligence’s heroes, the men and women of Bletchley Park who broke the apparently unbreakable Enigma machine code, were crossword fanatics. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that crosswords—and, specifically, The Daily Telegraph crossword—helped win the war…

In January 1942, a series of letters to The Daily Telegraph had claimed that the paper’s crossword wasn’t hard enough. It could be solved in a matter of minutes, they said; so a man called WAJ Gavin, the chairman of the Eccentric Club, suggested this be put to the test. He put up a £100 prize, to be donated to charity in the event that anyone could do it, and Arthur Watson, the paper’s then editor, arranged a competition in the newsroom on Fleet Street.

Five people beat the 12-minute deadline, although one, the fastest, had misspelled a word and was disqualified. The puzzle was printed in the next day’s edition, January 13 1942, so that everyone could try their hand. And there the matter might have rested—but, unknown to the Telegraph and the contestants, the War Office was watching. Stanley Sedgewick, one of those who took part, said: “Several weeks later, I received a letter marked ‘Confidential’ inviting me, as a consequence of taking part in ‘The Daily Telegraph Crossword Time Test,’ to make an appointment to see Col Nichols of the General Staff, who ‘would very much like to see you on a matter of national importance.’” Mr Sedgewick, and several others who took part that day, ended up working at Bletchley Park, breaking German military codes.

“Whether it’s a simple cipher, or something as complex as the codes of the Enigma machine which the Bletchley codebreakers were working on, the trick is making links between letters and words,” says Michael Smith, the author of Station X: The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park (and who interviewed Mr Sedgewick for the Telegraph in 1998). “Crosswords are the same sort of lateral-thinking exercise.”

Just as with crosswords, where working out 15 Down gives you a few letters in the Across clues, you can use the information from cracking part of a code to crack the rest of it; it is, says Smith, a very similar logical procedure.

But more importantly, crosswords are about getting inside the mind of your opponent, and in the same way, codebreaking was about getting inside the mind of your enemy. The codebreakers came to know the people encoding the messages individually, by their styles, as crossword-solvers come to know setters. One, Mavis Batey, worked out that two of the Enigma machine operators had girlfriends called Rosa: “She worked it out, trying different options, like in a crossword. Once it worked once, it was an obvious option elsewhere,” says Smith.

Not all of the Bletchley codebreakers were crossword fans, says Smith, but a large number were. James Grime, a mathematician and an expert on Alan Turing, agrees: “It was problem solvers they needed; unconventional thinkers to solve the problem.” Crossword-solving, like mathematics and code-breaking itself, involves creative, lateral thinking, “not being a robot and following a procedure.”²Tom Chivers, “Could you have been a codebreaker at Bletchley Park?” The Telegraph, October 10, 2014.

A crossword relies upon structure to make connections. Horizontal and vertical arrangement of words means that a letter in one of the intersecting boxes is common to two words. Similarly, the texts in the Word of God are arranged in such a way that the structure bears much more of the burden of transmitting the meaning of the text than modern readers realize.

For the authors of the Bible (inspired by the Spirit of God), literary structure was not merely an ornamental feature. Although structure makes the texts beautiful, it is also a crucial channel of information. Like the extra rotor added to the German Enigma machines, it adds another layer of “decryption” beyond the work of translation from the original languages.

But what is even more fascinating is that once the structure is identified by the symbolic “cribs” which it contains, and serves as a key to the text, the structure itself becomes a crib for the identification of larger patterns.

Fortunately, although this biblical “crib” has a number of variations that serve slightly different purposes, there is a single literary “algorithm” upon which they are all based.

All of this means that identifying the biblical authors’ use of predetermined structures is not an optional pursuit. Instead of accepting the shape and contents of the Scriptures as either totally random or a mysterious “given,” we need the mind of the precocious child to whom everything in the world is new. Things that others accept without thinking must be analyzed and questioned.

In other words, we have enough scholars who ask “What?” What we need are theologians who ask “Why?” Why is the text the way that it is? Our academies need more literary lateral thinkers to work alongside the linguistic “robots.”

Hermeneutics is less a science than it is an art, but since the realm of the artistic is something that can be difficult to quantify and verify, modern scholarship, having long ago fallen prey to the scientistic mindset, shies away from anything deemed arbitrary and speculative. The beauty of systematic typology is that it provides a means of verifying the types, so it requires a mind that thinks like an engineer and like an artist. Like the work of the cryptanalysts of Station X, the job needs technicians and intuitions.

We are in the middle of a war, and we need access to better intelligence than that upon which we have relied in the past. But before we engage in a systematic typology we must first deal with our fear of typology itself.

This is a chapter from the forthcoming Systematic Typology: A Manifesto. See also Our Perilous Task.

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