Almost two months after the declaration of war against Spain in 1898, the following coded dispatch, cabled to the secretary of state from the American minister in Madrid, arrived at the White House in Washington, D.C.:

This coded telegram to the newly installed secretary of state, William R. Day, from General Horace Porter, the American ambassador to France, received in the Executive Mansion at 5:50 P.M. June 13, was decoded, and a plaintext copy promptly sent to an anxious President William McKinley at 7 P.M.² Transmitted from a European nation long famous for intercepting foreign dispatches and breaking secret codes, the cablegram masked the discussions that a tactful Porter, West Point graduate, former military secretary to President Ulysses Grant, and later energetic railroad executive, had held with the French foreign minister, Gabriel Hanotaux. Written less than two months after the beginning of the Spanish-American War, the secret dispatch revealed French willingness and support for arranging an armistice between weakened Spain and the United States as a prelude to a treaty of peace. And between its lines, it also told a worried McKinley and Day that French hostility toward the United States was lessening as an anxious France sought to maintain neutrality in the armed conflict.

The confidential cable also portrays the State Department's cryptological sophistication by the late nineteenth century. The five-digit codenumbers, based on The Cipher of the Department of State, published in 1876, graphically mirror the code clerk's process of masking clandestine messages between the department and American ambassadors overseas. In a special effort to improve communications security, the department modified the codenumbers in the book according to the following pattern: in the five-digit number, the first digit stayed in place; the last two digits were reversed and moved to second and third place; the two digits that had been in second and third place were moved, respectively, to fourth and fifth place.³ This dispatch also illustrates multiple mistakes in either encoding and/or transmitting the cable, and the resulting uncertainties in the important message because of these errors.

Because of the Atlantic cable, opened in 1866, dispatches from Europe reached the White House in minutes rather than the three to four weeks and more that occurred earlier in the century. This stunning revolution in electromagnetic communications reduced transmission time and empowered modern American presidents and secretaries of state to secure timely information, and thus function as better informed and often more effective commanders and diplomats. Decisive for the security process were the secret codes that maintained the communications security absolutely crucial for effective negotiations.

By the end of the nineteenth century, American confidential communications systems for foreign correspondence had advanced well beyond the simple cipher and code systems first employed in 1775. If the telegram above had been veiled in America's very first code, the United Colonies code, the first sentence of that dispatch would have read as follows:

By 1900, American secret systems for veiling messages had become more effective and efficient; moreover, certain attitudes towards secret writing were gradually undergoing a remarkable conversion. John Haswell, the post-Civil War State Department codemaker, described this significant transformation in the late nineteenth century when he wrote with a mixture of naivete and exaggeration: "In former times they [ciphers] were employed for purposes of evil and cruelty, and were consequently looked upon with horror and aversion."⁴ However, Haswell thought optimistically, "Their functions now, however, are chiefly to benefit humanity by facilitating commerce and industry, and hence they merit public interest and favor," Not altogether accurately, Haswell believed that previously ciphers had been mainly a "war factor" and had been incorporated in the military systems throughout the world. Since the invention of the telegraph, however, he thought that cipher operations had followed peaceful pursuits, and they had become essential elements in all financial, commercial, and industrial establishments. And for some anxious observers, the advent of telegraphic communications "baptized" the study and practice of secret writing in peacetime, and lessened the suspicions about those persons engaged in this questionable discipline.

At the time of the American Revolution, the American Founding Fathers did not believe codes and ciphers "were employed for purposes of evil and cruelty." Rather, they viewed secret writing as an essential instrument for protecting critical information in wartime, as well as in peacetime. The newly established American nation, formed from financially distressed and war-ravaged states, was a weak union, struggling in its early decades with daily internal stresses. Revenue taxes, domestic trade agreements, and political dissension threatened the new government as did foreign enemies and intrigues. Because the fledgling nation frequently distrusted the motives of European diplomats, and properly feared the machinations, international political alliances, and traditional European practices such as espionage, the Founding Fathers quickly, though sometimes inexpertly, recognized the dire necessity for more secure communications. Early in the American Revolution, and especially evident during the military struggles in the fog of war, communications security became a decisive objective. The frequent interception of American diplomatic correspondence by "black chamber" agents in European capitals taught prominent American statesmen to create cipher and code systems for confidential written correspondence. Only with this arrangement could the fledgling and beleaguered United States hope to conduct diplomatic negotiations with confidence and success.

Charles W. F. Dumas, James Lovell, William Lee, John Jay, Francis Dana, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, the Marquis de Lafayette, Robert R. Livingston, Major Benjamin Tallmadge, Robert Morris, Charles Thomson, General George Washington, Edmund Randolph, Alexander Hamilton, Oliver Wolcott, Aaron Burr, William Vans Murray, Robert Patterson, Nicholas Trist, General Albert Myer, Anson Stager, and John H. Haswell created and/or encouraged the American use of codes and ciphers for communications security between 1775 and 1900. These distinguished statesmen and talented public figures realized the dire necessity for secret correspondence and urged the Congress and their associates in various federal government offices to develop and employ confidential communiques. And with the development of the telegraph and cable, it became even more evident that the transmission of classified information over these public communication lines demanded encrypted systems.

At least five American names figure prominently in the development of communications intelligence during the century after the Battle of Breed's Hill: Colonel Elbridge Gerry, Elisha Porter, Reverend Samuel West, James Lovell, and Charles A. Keefer. The first three individuals managed to unlock the secret monoalphabetic substitution cipher found in a carefully disguised and detailed report that was intercepted on its way from the director and physician of the first Continental Army hospital, poet and traitor Dr. Benjamin Church, to a British major, Maurice Cane, in Boston. The codebreakers provided General George Washington with the vital evidence that led to Church's imprisonment for spying in the fall of 1775 and a sentence of exile in the West Indies.

James Lovell also had great success in breaking enciphered dispatches from General Henry Clinton to Lord Cornwallis, which were intercepted in 1780 and 1781. And decades later, Charles A. Keefer, a cipher clerk and civilian telegrapher for General Philip Sheridan in New Orleans in 1866, intercepted highly significant French dispatches being transmitted from Mexico City via New Orleans to Paris, and from Paris to Mexico City. Keefer is probably the first person in the service of the United States to use communications intelligence in peacetime. It is also important to note that biographies of Gerry, West, and Lovell are published in the Dictionary of American Biography; however, no mention is made of their codebreaking activities.

By the mid-eighteenth century, European intelligence officers had skillfully developed cryptographic designs that included complicated and efficient cipher and code systems. Moreover, the skills exhibited in Vienna, London, Paris, and Madrid "Black Chambers" for intercepting foreign and domestic dispatches and breaking cryptographic systems had matured after generations of study and practice. The traditions of cryptography established in Western Europe moved slowly to the United States in the period after 1775. In the crucible of war, desperate American leaders struggled to learn the ways and means of secret correspondence. Surprisingly, in contrast to European practices, there were apparently no peacetime professional codebreakers in the United States until after the World War I period.

An embryonic and besieged United States in 1775 lacked the sophistication, skills, and European diplomatic traditions so integral for successful secret communications systems. Also a certain naivete colored American views. Particular American leaders, buoyed by the theories of the French philosophes, called for a rule of reason and openness in American diplomatic practices. Even John Adams echoed this attitude when he lectured the Compte de Vergennes, the astute and probably surprised French foreign minister:

"The dignity of North America does not consist in diplomatic ceremonials or any of the subtleties of etiquette; it consists solely in reason, justice, truth, the rights of mankind and the interests of the nations of Europe."⁵

Revolutions, however, provide fertile soil for intrigue, espionage, and, of course, secret communications. The Continental Congress recognized the need for secrecy when it passed the following resolution: "If an original page is of such a nature as cannot be safely transmitted without cyphers, a copy in cyphers, signed by the Secretary for the department of foreign affairs, shall be considered as authentic, and the ministers of the United States at foreign courts may govern themselves thereby, in the like manner as if originals had been transmitted."⁶ The young American government appreciated the critical need for secrecy in an imperfect world of confidential diplomacy and spying. Gradually, during the Revolution, and sometimes reluctantly, United States leaders acquired some of the cryptographic talents and skills of their European ally France and their powerful enemy Great Britain.

In the early decades, American codemakers, with one major exception, offered nothing innovative for the world of secret communication with their ciphers, book codes, and codesheets. They did eventually, however, establish the system used for State Department secret communications until 1867 through the development of the 1,700-item codesheets, such as the version devised for James Monroe for his negotiations regarding the Louisiana Purchase. The exceptional codemaker was Thomas Jefferson, whose cipher cylinder, which he called his "wheel cypher," offered a brilliant mask, indeed twentieth century security, for secret messages.

The French Revolution, beginning in 1789, increased foreign policy tensions for the United States. Secret messages from American ministers, including those involved in the XYZ Affair, poured into the State Department as American presidents and diplomats sought neutrality and careful isolation from the European conflicts. The first decade of the nineteenth century found the United States as a nervous spectator of the Napoleonic Wars. However, neutral rights at sea and craving for land expansion caused the nation to stumble into what came to be known as the War of 1812. Once again, the United States faced an awesome armed conflict with Great Britain. Diplomatic dispatches before and during the war were veiled with the 1,700-element codesheets devised earlier.

But not all secret messages in America during the decades of the late eighteenth and all of the nineteenth centuries concerned foreign threats of war or ongoing negotiations for opening neutral commerce. In 1764, Thomas Jefferson used a book code to hide the name of a young lady whom he planned to court. And in the years after 1780, Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and a covey of other political leaders in the United States often wrote in code in order to protect their personal views on tense domestic issues confronting the American nation. Employing many codes and a few ciphers, they sought safety for their dispatches: they built security fences to protect their correspondence from political rivals and American postal officials.

Jefferson and Monroe during diplomatic service in France, and John Adams in England, became even more sensitive to the dangers of intercepted dispatches. They carried these experiences and anxieties back to America. Madison, as secretary of state in Jefferson's administration, also acquired valuable insights and further understanding about the necessity to mask messages, domestic and foreign.

Early in the nineteenth century, Aaron Burr, with his plans for expansion and empire, carefully shielded his many designs and instructions in a combination of codes and ciphers for his abortive expedition to the Southwest. His strong desire for acquiring territory from Spanish lands, and perhaps from existing United States territory, brought him to the edge of treason.

In the decades after 1815, probably fewer encrypted domestic messages were carried along the more secure American postal routes. These same decades witnessed a marked decline in encoded American dispatches for the American legations in Europe. Beginning in the mid-1820s, encoded dispatches to and from American diplomats in unstable Mexico City became the most numerous. Most of them were encoded in the same design first used by James Monroe in France. And while many other American diplomats served more as reporters of, rather than actors in, diplomacy, Joel Poinsett and Anthony Butler, American ministers in Mexico, sought to manipulate their host nation's politics and acquire additional Mexican territory for the United States. Their numerous secret encrypted dispatches to Henry Clay, Martin Van Buren, Edward Livingston, and Louis Mcbane reflected the turmoil and numerous clandestine activities of American foreign relations with its southern neighbor.

In the 1840s an American public became fascinated with cryptology because of Edgar Allan Poe's fourth book, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, an imaginative story about South Seas adventures, shipwreck, and the use of cryptograms. His prize-winning story "The Gold Bug," published in 1843, heightened the mystery and magic of secret writing for many readers, young and old. Also, the development of postcards in the 1840s renewed the public's special fascination with confidential writing as correspondents sought to veil personal information from postal carriers.

An American revolution in communication technology began in the 1840s with the introduction of the electromagnetic telegraph, soon to be followed by the development of a transatlantic cable. These exciting and innovative years also witnessed a heavy torrent of secret writing techniques to be used with the magnificent telegraph machine, which reduced communi-cations times from months and weeks to hours and minutes. Thousands of business and diplomatic correspondents soon developed special code and cipher systems, designed for economy and secrecy. And the federal government became increasingly involved in communications security, especially during wartime.

In 1871 William Whiting, the assistant to the attorney general, recognized the crucial importance of die telegraph: "In time of war, the lines of telegraph have now become as indispensable as arms and ammunition. By their agency, the Government becomes omnipresent, and its powers are immeasurably enhanced. The movement of armies and navies are controlled, life and property are protected and the voice of authority uttered at the Capitol is heard almost instantaneously throughout the country."⁷

In the mid-1850s, British military forces in the Crimea used the telegraph for strategic lines; however, operational and mobile use of that instrument began during America's Civil War. Shortly before that war began, a brilliant new communications system, a visual system, designed by assistant army surgeon Albert James Myer, became a crucial military companion to Morse telegraph. As David W. Gaddy evaluates so accurately, "Wiretapping, signal interception and exploitation, authentication systems, the 'war of wits' between 'code-making and code-breaking' for Americans truly stemmed from the American Civil War, and Myer's system, as well as the organizational concept of a corps of trained communicators, that made an impact on other armies of the world."

In the Confederacy, simple ciphers, codenames, and book codes (often called at the time "dictionary ciphers" since dictionaries conveniently provided sufficient vocabulary) prevailed, until the poly-alphabetic Vigenère cipher became the standard for government and military. In the North, a route or word transposition system was used to protect the military telegrams transmitted by the U.S. Military Telegraph under the personal control of the secretary of war.

As America turned outward more energetically in its foreign relations in the generation after the Civil War, its leadership still remained reluctant to recognize foreign espionage activities, especially in communications intelligence. This activity, sometimes initiated, at other times renewed, by European nations expanded greatly as these governments supervised telegraph and cable companies. The State Department finally abandoned the Monroe code in 1867 and replaced it with a disastrous codebook, designed for economy and resulting in confusion. Within a decade, a new codebook, The Cipher of the Department of State, prepared by John Haswell, replaced the poorly designed book. The new volume established a pattern that remained the basic standard for the department's communications for the next two generations.

In the United States, the 1880s witnessed the formation of an energetic new navy, with cruisers of steel and with more powerful guns, developed in the Washington Navy Yard: construction of a fleet of battleships commenced in 1890. Also, the navy and army gradually established intelligence offices: the Office of Naval Intelligence in 1882 and three years later the Army's Military Information Division. In 1885, the navy published The Secret Code, a massive book, with two supplemental volumes, which incorporated the superencipherment of code. At this same time, the War Department published its first telegraph codebook, replacing postwar versions of the route transposition system used in the 1870s. Thus, more secure American military communications systems were in place by the beginning of the Spanish-American War.

Looking back on the first four generations of masking American dispatches, 1775 to 1900, it is very evident that the Founding Fathers were much more anxious than their successors to encrypt their confidential correspondence. With the exception of George Washington, all the presidents before Andrew Jackson had served overseas or had functioned as secretaries of state and thus were exceptionally sensitive to European, and sometimes domestic, interference in written communications. However, for the secretaries of state and presidents after Jackson, key concepts in masking dispatches were thriftiness and tradition, not security. Thus, the State Department practice of using the Monroe Code for over sixty-three years and also the ill-designed 1867 Code are the best examples of this misguided rationale. The relatively lax practices concerning the 1876 Code provide additional evidence of the failure to understand foreign interception and intelligence customs.

The exciting technology of the electromagnetic telegraph and the telegraph cable spurred the surge of secret writing and codebreaking in the Western world. After a short time, the techniques also hastened the creation of more sophisticated codes and ciphers. It is abundantly evident that secret communications played a fundamental role in American foreign relations, in peace and war, from the XYZ Affair to the intercepted Spanish cables in 1898.

Much less is known about U. S. codebreakers during these four generations. Apart from the Civil War efforts of David Homer Bates and his colleagues in the War Department telegraph office, the splendid contributions of Elbridge Gerry, James Lovell, and Charles Keefer in the service of their country, and private efforts by John Hassard, William Grosvenor, and Edward Holden, highlight the history of this challenging and fascinating science. It remained for twentieth-century America, confronting powerful foreign enemies in World War I, and shocked by a devastating enemy attack on Pearl Harbor, to recognize finally the crucial necessity for maintaining secure communications and obtaining foreign intelligence data during war and peace.

While our third president, Thomas Jefferson, wrote about the necessity of masking dispatches, a recent president, Ronald Reagan, reminded us about the crucial role of American history, a role that is especially applicable to cryptologic studies: "If we forget what we were, we won't know who we are." And then he added, "I am warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit."

In preparing this cryptologic study of American history, I was fortunate to receive generous support from many persons who provided me with special assistance, insights, and knowledge about the American cryptologic past. I am especially grateful to David W. Gaddy, whose essays, encouragement, and enthusiasm have enhanced this manuscript. In similar fashion, Henry F. Schorreck offered extremely knowledgeable comments about this pioneering era in American history. I welcomed Barry D. Carleen's editorial advice and David A. Hatch's answers to my numerous queries concerning communications security. Donald M. Gish supplied helpful insights on cryptanalysis; and Robert N. Spore offered valuable computer support and assistance. These splendid persons and the following talented associates and staff members of the Center for Cryptologic History made the complex research and writing of this cryptologic study a special pleasure: Charles W. Baker, Thomas L. Burns, Earl J. Coates, Vera R. Filby, Jules Gallo, Joyce Hamill, Jack E. Ingram, Christina Kikkert, Robert E. Newton, Frederick D. Parker, Jean M. Persinger, Donald K. Snyder, and Guy Vanderpool. In addition, Michael L. Peterson's essay on the Church Cryptogram brought distinctive insights to early American communication security and foreign intelligence.

For their gracious assistance in locating various American manuscript sources, I wish to express my gratitude to John McDonough, Michael Klein, and Nancy Wynn at the Library of Congress; Frank Burch, Jennifer Songster-Burnett, John Butler, Robert Coren, Milton Gustafson, J. Dane Hartgrove, Wilbur Mahoney, Larry McDonald, Michael Musick, Katherine Nicastro, David Pfeiffer, William Sherman, and John Taylor at the National Archives; Louis Fine and Bruce Kennedy at Georgetown University; and Karl Kabelac at the University of Rochester.