And you will find that there was a sgt H H Stott and his crew position is w/op Air Gunner so hence the sjt W Stot.
You will then find that On 27th April 1942, the crew of Halifax W1037 ZA-U from 10 Squadron failed to return hence the need to send a message.
You will also find that on the birds ID NURP.40.TW.194 and NURP.37.OK.76 - NURP” was the National Union of Racing Pigeons so it was british so this back up the fact it was send by the RAF. The number 40 relates to 1940 but you can't read to much into that if you see this website.
You will see pigeons with number 38 was used in 1941 and 1942 and a pigeon with number 39 was used in 1945 and a pigeon with number 41 was used in 1942.
So this backs up the argument that the date would be between 1940 and 1945. So the date of the crash in 1942 wouldn't be far off.
All you have to do is find the codes used by Halifax W1037 ZA-U from 10 Squadron. The RAF would have records once you get that you can decode the message.
I thought the GCHQ had smart people working at it.
sgt H H Stott personal number is 1058698 take the first four numbers 1058 and use that as the ciper.
So the first letter A is plus 1 the second letter is O plus O the four letter is A and it is plus 5 which is G and the four letter K is plus 8 which is W so.
The first row is as follows.
BOG WT NHF LD KVG JB GJD IK
Which so far I have translated as.
BOMBER ON GROUND WITH TROOPS NEED HELF FAST LITTLE DEFENCE k___ v____ G_____ J___ B____ G____ J____ D____ I___ K___
Also, the article mentions that spelling 'sergeant' with a j, as in the abbreviation 'Sjt' was more common practice in the army, whereas the RAF would probably have used a g.
@SuperChihuahua posted a link to http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2012/11/02/dead-pigeon-sparks.... According to the author of that document it may have been Sergeant William Leslie Stott (508080 in the RAF, died in 1945 aged 35, buried in Chester’s Overleigh Cemetery) [1]. The spelling of "Sergeant" matches.
>All you have to do is find the codes used by Halifax W1037 ZA-U from 10 Squadron. The RAF would have records once you get that you can decode the message.
Those records could very well have been destroyed, either through war time action or subsequent fire or flood or other catastrophe, or deliberately.
>I thought the GCHQ had smart people working at it.
It's possible that they've decrypted it but are declining to say so. Don't forget that they've only just this year (60 or so years later) released some of the work of Turing.
Assuming that this is the Stott who wrote the message and looking at the detailed nature of the mission to bomb the Tirpitz, could this information be used to programatically reverse engineer the key in a sensible amount of time? I.e. assuming certain keywords may be in the message, like "Tirpitz" or "down" etc...
Also do you know who 'Mason' is? Maybe the person who sent in the photo? Is this a recruiting sergeant for GCHQ? :-))
Not being a code breaker myself what relevance does AOAKN have? Beginning and end of message.
This pigeon was found in a chimney - what can we learn from that? What was the procedure when a message was sent but not received? This can be solved :-)
One time pads are mathematically provably secure. So, if it's a one time pad then we may not be able to solve this. There are some possibilities. If there's enough information with the pigeon and the message to find the original other half of the pad the message may be decrypted.
This is the occurence of each leter in the message:
K = 10;
N = 9;
A = 9;
H = 8;
R = 8;
F = 7;
P = 7;
O = 7;
D = 6;
Q = 6;
M = 5;
J = 5;
G = 5;
W = 5;
T = 5;
X = 4;
E = 4;
Z = 4;
I = 4;
C = 3;
B = 3;
L = 3;
Y = 3;
V = 2;
S = 2;
U = 1
Doesn't seem like a trully random (white-noise) distribution.
Those counts look fairly typical from a uniform distribution to me. There are fancy tests you could do, but to get a feel for it, I suggest simulation and eyeballing. Add up the counts after drawing 135 characters from a uniform character distribution 20 times, and compare the sorted lists of counts to this set of numbers after sorting.
Somehow the really random distributions look less random than ones biased towards flattening-out. Within 500 truly random points in a square you'll see suspiciously looking clusters of points, choose 5 in each of the 10x10 subsquares and suddenly it looks much more "random".
Edit: A bookmarklet to display some random points in a square, tested in Firefox 10 only:
You might want to look into the "incidence of coincidence", which is the probability that letters from two randomly chosen text's are the same. It can be changed to measure a single message, and gives a distinctive difference for english vs. random texts.
I'd place my money on this comment: "Poem code with AOAKN being the indicator group, 27 representing the block count and 1525/6 being a page or line number."
Interesting point about the indicator-group at the start and end. But I thought poem codes were mainly used for under-cover situations where having a physical copy of the key could be compromising. Why then is this message written on an official-looking message pad with "Pigeon Service" printed at the top? That seems incongruous to me.
The chaos of WWII can easily be enough of an explanation. I guess I would argue that the repeat of AOAKN is a good indication of a poem code, more than the official pad can dissuade me.
AOAKN seems like greetings or best wishes, in some languages we use same initial and ending for greetings.
The template and the font used in the paper does not seems like typewriter print but LaserJet printer. specially the font used in the words on the top "PIGEON SERVICE". does not seems like printed with a typewriter.
The war's secret message are supposed not to use a single english readable words. Here we see some english words like "TO", FORM. Date, Reply, originator, copies, sender, signature. Why these words are not encrypted.
I think Tirpitz,Gough,Gulag are mentioned.Frigates also.
CQ=help(before current SOS signal)
KN=in the King's Name but the Arabic possible.
The flat bottomed U may refer to a 'reed'-read
Also St Nazaire France was a base for carrier pigeons in WWII.
Operation Chariot?
Point: There was a proposed D Day in August 1942 which was called off - hence OK for Operation Chariot March 28th 1942. Also CMPWN - Campbeltown? See Call of Duty Failed D Day. It is a SPOOF - albeit a good one. Not to say it is indecipherable.
I don't thing FNFJW is correct, I think it's a U. There is another very definite W written in the note, and it looks nothing like the square-ish looking U in a couple of other places.
Wow. I have in my possession some really similar looking crypted pages form an Italian partisan of the WWII (prepared and parachuted by the English forces).
It seems to me that the situations might be analog. How can I contact them? I see that they are asking for help but I don't see contact info.
Which would reveal a filesystem with the plausible looking content, while having typed a different password would have revealed the true contents of the message.
1 in 11 million probability of the first and last blocks being the same by pure random chance. I'd guess they must be some sort of pre-agreed message sentinel, but even 1 in 11 million chances happen sometimes!
Right -- as improbable as that sounds, it pales in comparison to the likelihood of renovating your chimney and finding a pigeon with a coded message from WWII!
As suggested in the comments on the Telegraph article, it would would seem likely that this message was encrypted with a one-time pad, making it essentially unbreakable. Unless the key is found in some MoD vault (and released to the public).
Probably correct. Another option is that the message was produced using a cipher machine, which were in use by the allied forces at that time. If a machine and records of the pre-arranged keys still exist then decryption might be possible.
This message was sent by a homeland "Y Station", most likely from the RAF, to a decoding facility downstream, in the SIGINT community. At Bletchley or elsewhere. Y Stations were monitoring German military communications from the UK. It is why what we can now read on paper is the verbatim retranscription of a procedure that was heard on a radio receiver by a radio intelligence operator, --ie the presence of the standard "checksum" and EOM signature comprising the reiteration of the header group followed by the total number of 5-groups sent -- 27 in the instance. The origin time "1522" is the ZULU at which the actual transmission started while the end of transmission time is written after the checksum "1525/6".
Taking pauses into account, this means the morse code operator was transmitting the groups at 10wpm, a credible speed for this type of operation. I hope this helps.
Greetings from rainy Montreal
David Thorne-Alexander
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaumanor_Hall
By the signature, in the video clip, there's a box labelled 'Number of copies sent', filled in with a number 2. So, assuming the other copy went on another pigeon, it could well have already been received and deciphered back in WWII.
Unfortunately the evidence is that decryption might depend on either a unavailable first edition of the Enlgish translation of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubaiyat_of_Omar_Khayyam
and/or information from a person who died in 2007.
This has some good ideas and research, but the author seems fixed on the idea that the message was produced by an SOE agent using a poem cypher. This seems unlikely to me because the cyphertext is written on an official-looking form. Blank message pads and quantities of homing pigeons are presumably not something that an under-cover agent would want to carry around with them.
If you count you will find that there are 26 diferent codes. This tells me that each 5 letter code represents a letter of the alphbet. This is not a message but it is the code itself.
You do a search and you find this.
http://www.archieraf.co.uk/archie/1037zau.html
And you will find that there was a sgt H H Stott and his crew position is w/op Air Gunner so hence the sjt W Stot.
You will then find that On 27th April 1942, the crew of Halifax W1037 ZA-U from 10 Squadron failed to return hence the need to send a message.
You will also find that on the birds ID NURP.40.TW.194 and NURP.37.OK.76 - NURP” was the National Union of Racing Pigeons so it was british so this back up the fact it was send by the RAF. The number 40 relates to 1940 but you can't read to much into that if you see this website.
http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/Others/Others-Doc-Birds&...
You will see pigeons with number 38 was used in 1941 and 1942 and a pigeon with number 39 was used in 1945 and a pigeon with number 41 was used in 1942.
So this backs up the argument that the date would be between 1940 and 1945. So the date of the crash in 1942 wouldn't be far off.
All you have to do is find the codes used by Halifax W1037 ZA-U from 10 Squadron. The RAF would have records once you get that you can decode the message.
I thought the GCHQ had smart people working at it.
sgt H H Stott personal number is 1058698 take the first four numbers 1058 and use that as the ciper.
So the first letter A is plus 1 the second letter is O plus O the four letter is A and it is plus 5 which is G and the four letter K is plus 8 which is W so.
The first row is as follows.
BOG WT NHF LD KVG JB GJD IK
Which so far I have translated as.
BOMBER ON GROUND WITH TROOPS NEED HELF FAST LITTLE DEFENCE k___ v____ G_____ J___ B____ G____ J____ D____ I___ K___
Need help solving the rest.