TAPPING THE WIRES

Greymouth Evening Star, 20 January 1930, Page 7

TAPPING THE WIRES

SECRETS OF BLACK ROOM. Those acquainted with the methods o£ the French Secret Service did not attach much importance to the recent, suggestion that the missing ciphers o£ the Italian Embassy in Berlin had fallen into the hands of French agents. . Almost every important . cipher, it is believed, can be read with facility by the experts of the famous Cabinet Noir in Paris. In the same way, the majority of codes used by foreign countries present no mysteries to the British Secret Service officials. Code messages sent out by various Governments to their representatives abroad are, of course, the most interesting, and the Cabinet Noir—which is said to be a series of rooms at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs — possesses a Russian expert in deciphering whose ability is without equal, writes a “Daily Express” correspondent. He juggles like a human calculating machine with the figured usually employed in ciphers, and is able by tremendous labour and .the study of probabilities in the recurrence of certain words or letters to unravel even the most elaborate reciphered messages. “What, one man can invent,” he says, “another can discover,” Sealed diplomatic “bags” in which despatches are sent by King’s Messengers, are rarely tampered with in peace time. During the war, however, they were frequently captured. On one occasion when a British boat was torpedoed by a German submarine, the highly confidential “bags” were thrown for safety in the sea by the King’s Messenger. To his horror, the bags floated, and were picked iip with a grin by the submarine commander. It is to avoid any possibility of such an accident recurring that Foreign Office bags are now made with a number of perforations so that they would sink immediately. Letters addressed to foreign Embassies and Legations are frequently opened by the French police, and pinholes have . occasionally been found in the corners of documents, revealing the fact that they had been hung up to be photographed. Lastly, telephone messages are “listened-in” to as a matter of course, and expert linguists employed for the task. It is doubtful, however, whether much official information is obtained by this means, as the secretaries at work in the various diplomatic services are warned early of the imprudence of communicating anything secret, on the telephone.