Life for the few agents working undercover can be very exciting indeed. It can also be very short and undercover work is not where the main area of intelligence gathering takes place. Intelligence gathering consists largely of intercepting and interpreting messages. For this reason information is generally transmitted in codes or cyphers, the keys to which are closely guarded secrets. Each side spends enormous amounts of time, money and effort in developing unbreakable codes and trying to break the enemy's unbreakable codes. This work is not carried out by spies, but by mathematicians and scholars. One of the largest groups of code breakers during the Second World War was made up of Classical scholars, people adept at deciphering ancient manuscripts and solving the puzzle of unknown languages.
Nazi Germany came very close to the unbreakable code with the Enigma Machine.
In 1919 Dutch inventor Hugo Koth began marketing his Glow Lamp Ciphering and Deciphering Machine as a postal machine, to keep business transactions secret. The threat of industrial espionage was not an issue, and there was no particular market for it. However, Arthur Scherbuis, a German engineer, saw possibilities in it and developed the Enigma machine in 1923. This time there was interest, on the part of the German, Polish, Japanese and American military. Each nation purchased at least one machine before the German government bought the patent and made the machine a military secret. Germany, Poland and Japan began adapting the Enigma machines, the American model was packed away and forgotten.
The first military application of the Enigma was in February 1926, by the German navy. The Army began using in it in 1928 and in 1933 the Luftwaffe followed suit. During this time the Enigma had been developed and refined, the 'M' model replaced the original 'C' in 1934. It was an enormously complex machine, with interchangeable rotors. Electrically powered, it randomly selected a letter for any key pressed, never selecting the same letter twice. Pressing, for example, "oo" could produce any combination of two letters, selected completely at random by the machine. As the number of rotors increased the possibility of different meanings for each letter or code group increased exponentially. Too, altering the current settings could produce yet another completely random set of letters. To complicate matters for any enemy cryptography department deciphering an Enigma encoded message required the code groups for the day, the current settings, the correct rotor (which could go both backwards and forwards) and a correctly configured Enigma machine. It produced wholly indecipherable messages.
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