The Codebreakers; The Story Of Secret Writing

New York: Scribner, 1996. Revised Edition [Stated]. Later printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Dave Kahn (Author photograph). xviii, 1181, [1] pages. Preface to the Revised Edition. Illustrations. Bibliography. Notes to Text. Notes to Illustrations. Index. Updated with a new chapter on computer cryptography and the Ultra secret. The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet (Revised And Updated). The Codebreakers comprehensively chronicles the history of cryptography from ancient Egypt to the time of its writing. It is widely regarded as the best account of the history of cryptography up to its publication. David Kahn (b. February 7, 1930) is a US historian, journalist and writer. He has written extensively on the history of cryptography and military intelligence. Kahn's first published book, The Codebreakers - The Story of Secret Writing (1967), has been widely considered to be a definitive account of the history of cryptography. The Codebreakers was a finalist for the nonfiction Pulitzer Prize in 1968. Kahn has said he traces his interest in cryptography to reading Fletcher Pratt's Secret and Urgent. Kahn is a founding editor of the Cryptologia journal. He attended Bucknell University. After graduation, he worked as a reporter at Newsday for several years. He also served as an editor at the International Herald Tribune in Paris for two years in the 1960s. It was during this period that he wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine about two defectors from the National Security Agency. This article was the origin of his monumental book, The Codebreakers. Most of the editing, German translating, and insider contributions were from the American World War II cryptographer, Bradford Hardie III. William Crowell, the former deputy director of the National Security Agency, was quoted in Newsday as saying "Before he (Kahn) came along, the best you could do was buy an explanatory book that usually was too technical and terribly dull." Kahn, then a newspaper journalist, was contracted to write a book on cryptology in 1961. He began writing it part-time, at one point quitting his regular job to work on it full-time. The book was to include information on the National Security Agency (NSA), and according to the author James Bamford writing in 1982, the agency attempted to stop its publication, and considered various options, including publishing a negative review of Kahn's work in the press to discredit him. A committee of the United States Intelligence Board concluded that the book was "a possibly valuable support to foreign COMSEC [communications security] authorities" and recommended "further low-key actions as possible, but short of legal action, to discourage Mr. Kahn or his prospective publishers". Kahn's publisher, the Macmillan company, handed over the manuscript to the federal government for review without Kahn's permission on March 4, 1966. Kahn and Macmillan eventually agreed to remove some material from the manuscript, particularly concerning the relationship between the NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ. The magnificent, unrivaled history of codes and ciphers, how they're made, how they're broken, and the many and fascinating roles they've played since the dawn of civilization in war, business, diplomacy, and espionage, updated with a new chapter on computer cryptography and the Ultra secret. Man has created codes to keep secrets and has broken codes to learn those secrets since the time of the Pharaohs. For 4,000 years, fierce battles have been waged between codemakers and codebreakers, and the story of these battles is civilization's secret history, the hidden account of how wars were won and lost, diplomatic intrigues foiled, business secrets stolen, governments ruined, computers hacked. From the XYZ Affair to the Dreyfus Affair, from the Gallic War to the Persian Gulf, from Druidic runes and the kaballah to outer space, from the Zimmermann telegram to Enigma to the Manhattan Project, codebreaking has shaped the course of human events to an extent beyond any easy reckoning. Once a government monopoly, cryptology today touches everybody. It secures the Internet, keeps e-mail private, maintains the integrity of cash machine transactions, and scrambles TV signals on unpaid-for channels. David Kahn's The Codebreakers takes the measure of what codes and codebreaking have meant in human history in a single comprehensive account, astonishing in its scope and enthralling in its execution. Hailed upon first publication as a book likely to become the definitive work of its kind, The Codebreakers has more than lived up to that prediction: it remains unsurpassed. With a brilliant new chapter that makes use of previously classified documents to bring the book thoroughly up to date, and to explore the myriad ways computer codes and their hackers are changing all of our lives, The Codebreakers is the skeleton key to a thousand thrilling true stories of intrigue, mystery, and adventure. It is a masterpiece of the historian's art.