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OK, I'm on I'm on, that's good.
OK.
I hope you're all here because you
like history and you like numbers
because we're going to do a lot of math
later on.
I'm planning to speak approximately
40 minutes, half
of which will be about
the history of my topic.
And the other half will be lots and lots
of numbers, and we're going to do some
calculations.
First of all, let me just tell you
a little bit about myself.
I studied Japanese studies
in Berlin and in Tokyo.
I minored in Russian and in American
studies.
I decided to go into history for my
doctorate.
And that's what I'm doing right now in
Vienna.
I'm.
Yes, when it comes to
history, especially history of Japan, I'm
mainly interested in the 20th century
World War Two working
on Japanese-American, Japanese
Russian Soviet relations
and about history.
There was a
German historian called Leopold
from Ranker, who worked
in the 19th century, who considered
the father of modern history, writing
based on sources.
And he said
the work of a historian should be to
tell history as it actually happened,
which nowadays
is considered a little bit outdated
and has actually been called by
philosopher Walter Benjamin, the
strongest narcotic of the 19th century.
Because when it comes to working
with sources,
you can never I believe you can never be
completely objective
because everybody,
every historian
as objective as he tries to be,
always makes choices when he works
with the sources, and he makes choices
about how to present his findings
knowingly or unknowingly
because everybody has a certain
background, as if he has certain
experiences and beliefs and
treats what he finds in
his historical sources accordingly.
So I'm basically doing
research in this field about
how historians work with their sources,
which you could call meta history
writing about rewriting history.
And I'm using the case
of World War II to spy Richard
Saga as an example
because it lends itself to this kind of
research.
It has been written about in very
different political climates and very
different times.
For example, in the Soviet Union, in
the German Democratic Republic, in West
Germany, in the US, in Japan
to amazingly
different results.
So first of all,
let me tell you a little bit about this
whole saga.
Richard Zagar was born in 1895
in Baku, which is today Azerbaijan,
which was then part of the Russian
Empire.
His father was a German mining
engineer who worked there in the up
and coming oil industry
of Russia.
His mother was Russian.
He grew up in Berlin.
Family moved to Berlin in 1897,
and he was.
He grew up in a very comfortable
environment.
The family had money and
he went to school.
And in 1914,
being a German patriot, he volunteered
to go to war.
He was wounded twice,
and during that time, those four years of
World War One, he came into contact
with communist ideas and
eventually became
a communist.
By the time he got his doctorate in
political science from the University of
Hamburg, he had joined
the Communist Party and was
soon noticed by his superiors
as a very gifted speaker
and agitator.
In 1924, he
was recruited by the Communist
International Organization.
The Comintern was
invited to Moscow
and later some point during the 1920s
joined the Red Army's 4th department,
which was military intelligence.
The Red Army's 4th department
in the 1920s started
to build an international network of
spies and sent
Zagar on his first major assignment to
Shanghai in 1930.
In 1933, he was sent to Tokyo
to build his spy ring, which he became
famous for later on
in Tokyo.
Zager was very successful,
setting himself up under the cover
of a journalist.
He worked for the
distinguished German newspaper
Frankfurter Zeitung, also
several business newspapers,
and he also joined the NSD AP
to gain access to Tokyo's German
community.
The thing about Saga is
he was not what you would consider
your usual spy because
a spy should be
above all inconspicuous.
I guess he should not
draw a lot of attention to himself.
He should not get drunk all the time,
and by
all means, he should not sleep
with other men's wives.
I think which is exactly
what Zogg it did. He had an affair with
the wife of German ambassador.
I not.
Oh, I'm sorry about the picture.
The resolution is not so good,
but he still managed to
stay his good friend.
Somehow, they worked it out.
So Zagar was
was very well known in Tokyo.
Everybody knew him.
Everybody liked him.
He was.
He was extremely charming.
Women liked him.
Men liked him.
And he became a good friend of
ambassador, did not,
who shared with him.
German reports coming in from Berlin
on highly sensitive issues
and in turn got information
on Japanese politics from
Zagreb,
who worked with his main Japanese
source Ozaki, to mix
a Japanese journalist who had excellent
connection into the higher ranks
of the Japanese government and
basically
got information from the prime
minister's adviser and passed
this on to Zager, who in turn
informed his friend, the German
ambassador, a
very workable
quid pro quo situation
they had going on.
All in all, this group saga
built in Japan, which was named
codenamed Ramsey, was
relatively small but is
considered one of the most successful
example of human to human intelligence.
Their main job, which they
got from Moscow, was to find
out in which direction
Japan would eventually
expand to the south,
which would mean
attacking Indo-China Singapore
and getting into conflict with
Britain and the USA or to
the North.
Japan had already.
Established a puppet regime in Manchuria,
and in case Japan
would expand to the North.
This would mean war with the Soviet
Union.
Zarqawi's group was able to
predict and report to
Moscow.
Not just that
in the fall of 1941,
Japan actually was not planning
to attack to the North, but was
going to go to war with the US,
but also the exact date
and time of the German attack on
the Soviet Union in June 1941.
I've called them World War Two hackers.
Exactly because of what they did
by giving this kind of information
to Moscow, XGA and his
group tried to hack
the outcome of World War Two, I think you
can say
some historians consider them to
be to have been incredibly
successful in that.
Some say that their influence was
basically
irrelevant because unfortunately,
Stalin did not believe the August
report, as other
spy groups in Western Europe
told him about the German attack.
He just didn't want to believe that.
And he called Saga
an unbelievable little.
I'm going to censor myself, who
just suspends the Soviet
Union's money in Japan and has a good
life and should not
be believed
for this talk.
I'm not going into detail about
Stalin's reaction to the August's
reports, or even
on the very accidental
discovery
of Saugus Group by the German,
the I'm sorry by the Japanese
secret police, which happened in October
of 1941 because there would be
out of the scale of what I'm intending.
Instead, I'd like to talk about
the technical and crypto logical
aspects of the work
a little bit in more detail,
which is
in part why I submitted this talk
because I've read a lot about this case,
but I've always sort of skimmed
over the cryptologic parts
because there's like pages and pages
of numbers and calculations.
And I always said, OK,
interesting, let's move on.
So to present this to
you, I actually got into detail
and learned how to
encrypt and decode the messages
Larga sent to the Soviet Union.
The
fact is, for example, on
June 1st, 1941,
the Red Army in Moscow
received this telegram
from its Far East branch, which was
probably located in Vladivostok.
Should I read this?
Yes.
Well, the first sentence is
Berlin Infomercial Viceroy of Opus
last year, 40 odd tony
queerness to clean up growth if this is a
much needed salt factory
of Vineyard Junior.
It says in English,
Berlin has informed its
ambassador in Japan
that the German attack against the Soviet
Union will start in the second half
of June.
So this was sent from
the Red Army in Vladivostok
for military intelligence in Vladivostok
to Moscow.
But how did this information get to
Vladivostok?
To show you how this
happened, how this got
to the Red Army's military intelligence
in the Far East of Siberia.
I'd like to introduce you to a
very sympathetic hacker
named Max Clausen.
Again, sorry about the picture, I
couldn't find a really good picture
of him in his younger days.
This is, I think, his passport
picture.
Max Clausen was German born
on the island of Nostrand in North
Frieza.
He grew up in very poor conditions.
His family was poor.
He wanted to be a mechanic but couldn't
afford the apprenticeship,
which cost money, so he had to become a
farmhand.
He joined the army
in 1917, and
through a stroke of luck, he
was taught to be a radio
technician for the Kaiser's army.
Just like XGA, he developed communist
leanings during the war, due
through his experiences
in World War One, turned communist
and used his
knowledge that he got in
the army to become
a radio communication
engineer. And he learned
encryption
for his work in the Communist
Party of Germany and later the Soviet
Union.
So in the 1920s, he also
was invited to work in Moscow and
made a name for himself
through what he could do as a radio
technician and was sent
to Tokyo in 1935.
As you can see, he survived
the war. This is a
picture from his later years.
I can maybe, if we have time, go into
detail about what happened to all these
people at
the end of the war after the war, but
that's not really what I want to talk
about.
In nineteen thirty five, Clausen arrived
in Tokyo and
his job was to build a
radio transmitter and receiver.
He was not allowed to carry any technical
equipment with him.
Nothing. Not one vacuum
tube. Not one coil
that he might need.
His only instructions were
to use
a wavelengths between
thirty seven and three to nine meters for
transmitting between forty
five and forty eight meters for
receiving.
The rest was up to him and his experience
to build a transmitter
and receiver from scratch,
using parts he could find at Tokyo
radio supply shops without
drawing any suspicion to himself.
For example, he could not buy a Morse
key transmitter key because that
would have brought the police to his door
very quickly. So he built
his transmitter key using a wooden
butter form.
The transmitter he built
consisted of a backlit
panel attached to a wooden
box about maybe about the size
of a laptop.
He used to vacuum tubes to
coils, which could be mounted and
dismounted, making this whole
set very
portable.
He could fit it into a suitcase and carry
it around, which he did.
I don't know of anybody in here is
a ham radio enthusiast.
In that case, you could probably explain
to me better than I
could with all these
diagrams mean.
Obviously.
I'm sure it is, if you're not a
historian.
Well.
Anyway.
The receiver he used was basically
a simple ham radio.
He used headphones instead of a speaker
making it's portable to
fit into a suitcase, and he just
modified it for shortwave reception.
I'm Klausen was actually able to set
up his whole set in under
10 minutes.
He avoided using outside antenna,
instead always working
in wooden houses on the second
floor, attaching
an antenna of about seven meters
to the roof.
His receivers antenna was only
about one meter.
This one here,
and he had some rules.
He always used densely populated
areas of Tokyo, which made it harder for
the police to find out where exactly
the signal was coming from.
He always used wooden houses, which at
that time were a lot, and Tokyo
always use two-story houses.
So with this, I
understand very simple set.
He was able to reach the
Soviet Far East two thousand kilometers
away.
According to him, after the war,
he explained how he built this
whole thing and how he worked
it. He said that atmospheric
conditions were always best around
sunrise and sunset, and I
guess he didn't like to get up early.
So he often worked around
sunset, often for for
hours on end, sometimes
changing locations in between, twice
driving to another friend's house,
setting up again in under 10 minutes and
going at it again.
The Japanese secret police was
actually on his case
for a couple of years.
They noticed that somebody was sending
something and receiving something
somewhere, but they had no idea where
exactly.
They couldn't pinpoint him, and
they had no idea what the gibberish
he was sending and receiving meant,
because
the things they could intercept
looked basically like this.
This was sent back and forth
between Tokyo and as the
Japanese police believe, may be somewhere
in Korea because who could
get any farther than Korea?
It's impossible.
So these columns of no
is the police wrote them down.
Intelligence tried to figure
out what they meant, but they had no
idea.
What this message actually says
is this
first details,
which stands for any of us
talk. Far East and Russian.
Then the message, which was sent
in September of 1941,
the Soviet Far East can be considered
safe from a Japanese attack
RAMSI, which was
the codename of the August group.
And now, yes, we have good timing.
I'd like to look
a little bit and walk you through how
this becomes that
in the end, it's
very easy.
And it was
uncrackable.
The secret police of Japan
only found out
how these messages were encoded after
they had by accident,
stumbled upon this group,
arrested them and asked
them what they were.
So first of all, these messages
were always written in German.
Why is that funny?
First was always DHL, which was
the code for Far East.
Then the message which sometimes was
longer, sometimes like I said,
Klausen send for like four hours
and he sent about
twenty three thousand twenty nine
thousand words per year.
Sometimes these messages were much
longer, but we don't have
that much time today.
So that was
what's what Klausen started with.
First of all, he gave
every letter in the English alphabet one
number.
The most common letters got single digit
numbers.
The others got numbers between 80
and 99.
And then he went to
give every word its numbers.
So DHL is eighty three five, ninety
three, DEA is
eighty three, three, four and so on
and so forth.
And he put all these numbers
into blocks of five.
And I think we can agree that that
is not very safe.
I'm sure everybody here could crack that
code with a little bit of time because
those very common letters
have always the same numbers
and you can basically derive
where the are and where the these
are.
So what we need is
a second code.
We need a book cipher
and to use a book cipher.
We need a book which
the person who encodes
the messages and the person who decodes
the messages knows about and nobody
else knows about.
That's important.
And it has to be a very common,
inconspicuous book.
This is the statistical yearbook
for the German guys in
nineteen forty one.
Clausen used
the year of nineteen thirty five
and it was very inconspicuous
to have this because Clausen was
a businessman in Tokyo.
Zarda was a journalist writing for
business newspapers.
He needed these statistics.
This this book basically consists
of pages and pages of
tables and charts full of numbers.
So what we do now is
we pick a page, any page
which has a nice table with lots of
numbers, let's say Page
193.
It's something about travel
in the most important German harbors,
whatever.
Then we
pick a line one
two three four five six seven
nine seven from the top.
And we pick column.
We don't care about the
year. We just pick column one, two, three
four or five line seven.
It's one 13.
And to confuse
us even more, we start with the last
number three.
Then we just go round.
Next line, next line and so on.
And we
write the first five numbers
under the five numbers
of
the alphabet code.
What now?
We add this up,
so we add up eight and three, it's 11,
we omit the first one.
We have one, three and five is eight
five and six is 11 again nine and three
is 12 three and five is eight
and so on and so forth.
The finished code is basically this
again, we have columns of
five.
OK, that's too far.
This is our result.
This is what we send to Vladivostok.
But now our recipient
needs to know which page we have been
using, of course, because otherwise
they would be searched forever.
So we take
the page number 193,
the line and the column.
We add this to the fourth block
of five numbers from the top.
And the third block of five numbers from
the bottom.
And we get five one eight three three
and we put this
on top of our message.
So that's what we just
Morse code to Vladivostok
and Vladivostok goes, OK, five
one eight three three is
the result of this plus
this somehow?
Well, you get four plus zero
is for we need five.
So one, six plus six is 12.
We need one.
The next one would be twenty one
nine.
One plus four is five.
We need eight. So three
one plus five is six.
We need to get to 13.
Seven eight plus zero
is eight. We need to get to 13 again.
Five. So it's Page 193,
Line seven, column five.
And we do all this in reverse and
we get to know
we get to
the Soviet Far East can be considered
safe from a Japanese attack.
But.
And of course, we do this without
a computer. We use paper and pen
and and said he was able to
encode 500 blocks
of these five numbers in one hour.
He was that good.
And then what we also need
is to make an appointment
for the next contact, which was
always put at the end of every
message.
Relatively simple.
Every day of the week
was encoded.
I don't know if anybody can guess
what this is,
how you get to these
letters, if you read them from the
top.
It's actually.
It's the first 21 letters
of a common German
saying modern standard
got it in wonder, which is
basically German for the early
bird catches the warm.
Because, you know, atmospheric conditions
during sunrise, which clouds did not
depreciate so much, but
so we take these first 21
letters every day gets
three Mondays empty
Tuesdays. Oh Doug.
And then let's say the next contact is
on Tuesday, the 31st next week,
because usually contacts were made once
a week. Clouds transmitted
about 60 times in 1939,
about 60 times in 1940,
so everybody always knew it's the next
Tuesday. That was clear.
So it's Tuesday,
the thirty first at
1500 Greenwich mean time.
There would be 30 first 30 one
plus 15 is forty six.
So Tuesday forty six,
that's well.
That's it, basically.
Well, I'm very fast.
I thought I would take too long
anyway.
You're lucky today because I tried
to upload this alphabet
with the corresponding numbers and
give you a little homework
to do.
I tried to upload this, which is
basically all you need to do this
kind of encryption.
You need this alphabet.
You need to know the book.
You need to just pick any page, line
and column, and then you need to
at the end and code the
page, line and column using
the fourth group of five from the top and
the third group of five from the bottom.
And I wanted to upload that so you could
look at it. But the page didn't
really work today.
I couldn't upload it,
and I wanted to just ask you to encode
this.
You can find the statistical yearbook
on WW dot digits chose
and.
And you could email me.
You can also email me if you have any
questions later on.
And now I think we still have good time.
So.
Anything else?
Thank you.
OK. So sorry, are have no microphone,
so no moderation.
If you have questions, just please line
up at the microphones here in the room.
There's one over there and one here where
I'm standing.
And we also have questions from the
internets that are from our lovely signal
angel in the back.
So because there is no one standing here,
the microphone, we'll just start with one
question from our senior
OK. The question for mercy
is how did they know when
the transmitter starts?
Did they just send the message
once at the specific time?
Or was there some scheme to say
when the transmission starts?
Well, basically yes.
They they just had at
the end of each message, they
had this this simple code
when they would transmit again,
like next Tuesday at 5500.
And the person, on the other hand, would
on the other end would just stand by and
listen.
And if conditions were good and
they came through, then they just did it
at it.
I think that was.
Yeah.
And to make sure that
it was actually the right person
transmitting the you had this this
cordial Wasaga
was the Far East.
So Vladivostok knew
that it was Zada and not somebody else.
By starting the message, always with
details, I
hope that answers the question.
I have a question that's probably more
for the audience.
And that's
I was wondering how long it would take
with Google scanning all those books.
If you picked one random book, you have
a favorite with a friend
how long it would actually take if you
would use a very similar principle, but
not maybe the same row in the same column
to actually correct that and to get
to know which book is needed to decipher
the.
Anybody.
Anyone.
An educated guess
the only learned in Congress.
Um, I have an idea, and
it's a statistical sentiment that numbers
occur in different amounts,
in every paper and in every
step of the task,
which is unfolding now.
OK. For the first digit and
I don't know
how it called, and maybe this is a
site where you can attack
this code, but
I don't know. I'm not very good
at encoding the last picture.
OK. I mean, it should be.
Here's something someone say is under
attack the last digit and not
the first. And
this phenomenon
is related to the first digit and
one is the most common
number and that.
And so
if they attack last digit,
it's not a solution.
And I just wanted to thank the speaker
for that very interesting talk about
analog crypto.
You're welcome. Still.
Yeah, hello. Thanks for the talk.
Also, it's very interesting.
I was wondering who came up with that
kind of code, was it sorghum himself or
close and what his name was or the
German? No, Jim and the Russian military
or whoever?
Yes, basically,
the Russian military intelligence
instructed XGA
not on which book to pick,
but they came up with this kind of
encryption, of course, and first
XGA did the encryption himself
up to nineteen thirty seven because
actually it was a rule that the one
that the person transmitting should not
do the encoding for safety
reasons.
So first of all, Zogg did the encryption
and gave it gave the sheets of numbers
to Klausen, who then sent them.
But in nineteen thirty eight, XGA
had a pretty,
pretty serious motorcycle
accident while driving drunk,
and
he he then tied
in the how to encode the messages, and
Clausen was actually better at it.
He was faster.
OK, so.
Hello. I just wanted to
state that between safe
and unsafe coops, there's just
one bit there's another speech
later in the days.
Is this this case?
If the first letters DHL were always
the same?
Is this something like this was
taken to crack enigma messages?
Yes.
And of course,
adding something not multiplying
is a weak, quite weak
encryption.
So if you if the chance to multiply
something with such a terrible article
and adding is must
not be the best?
Yes.
And I don't think that this is
this would be done today.
So.
Well, I'd just like
to say the question always.
When you do this kind of hand encryption
is convenience and
safety.
I mean, if you have a very, very,
very safe encryption, it just gets too
complicated and too hard to encrypt is
by hand. So you have to find like a
middle way between convenience what you
can do
without, you know, working round the
clock on it and safety,
I guess.
The
is it known how he first exchanged
the ciphers with the Russians,
with you, said he wasn't
told which book to use which cipher.
When did he first tell them
how he turned and called us?
Well, in the early years
he spent in Japan.
There were also other contacts.
He had microfilm smuggled
to the Soviet Union, and
in some cases
there were actually people contacting
the Soviet embassy, which was
an absolute no go.
Which was too dangerous.
But at first they
had other means of communication,
like the classic spy,
which you see in spy movies that
they meet somewhere and they just
exchange stuff and exchanged suitcases
and things.
Another question from the internet.
So, yeah, the internet would like to know
if if this was the
this kind of book super was already news
before, or this was the first time and
there is it still
actually in use?
Well, it was.
It was certainly used before
it was used.
I'm not sure if before the Soviet Union,
but it was used in other cases,
especially in Russian
history.
I can't really come up with a spoon
with a special group right now who use
this, but Zynga was not
the first.
This was invented for.
And the second part of the question was,
yeah, I'm actually
the second part of the question was, is
this still being used?
Yes. Yes.
Well, who still
uses analog encryption,
secret code us, too.
I'm sorry.
There was there
was a
column in a block from
a cryptology list, and there are some
cases like the soda could.
I did this? He was.
Yes.
Yeah. I was going to say, not exactly.
Maybe not in the sense of, you know, big
politics, but of
course.
Yeah, crazy people like the Zodiac Killer
use encryption by hand, and
it's a good example and
I mean, children do this, of course,
because it's fun.
And another question
if it becomes, you know,
one short note, I think at least
up until the 80s, similar stuff
as we're used to decrypt messages
from no stations.
I think it's a bit more complicated
than not with with the ending and with
one time pets.
But it's quite similar.
Thank you.
Another question is sorry,
there's this system is small.
It's just a substitution, a letter.
So you just have
a sing.
You have to quote in linear form and
you don't change it.
You just add or subtract
values, especially
in second. Virtual tours are also he was
still some transposition
codes, so I didn't say where you
put it into a square and then you change
columns and things like this.
Why didn't they use this one in this
case?
Well, why they didn't use
it? I'm sure they were able to use it.
But actually, I'm
I'm not sure if there are any
sources out there on
this early time of the XGA
group, his instructions he got.
There are some sources
have been published in the 1990s
after the Russian archives
were opened for a while and books
have been published.
For example, these messages
with the exact dates and these telegrams
were published.
And then after two thousand
in the era of Putin, a lot
of archives have been closed again,
and I haven't come
across anything about this early
instructive era
of the time in Moscow, where
he actually got his instructions,
why they picked that code over another
one.
I'm hearing we might have
an answer from a very intelligent crowd.
So OK.
OK. Other
encryption that was used has two
parts. One is this static substitution,
which is quite unsecure.
But the book code is
quite secure unless the book is known,
which is used for it.
So you have no way to
find out which way to
which which book you use and uses.
So you also have no way to
crack this code, so it's
quite secure a method to encrypt,
and it's even more
secure than the method user suggested.
And there was another question in
question because why they didn't
use multiplication instead of
addition? Mm hmm.
The trick is that they used
a different model or 10,
which wouldn't work if they used
multiplication.
Yeah.
Mm hmm. OK.
It wouldn't have worked out.
Yeah. And I see what you
mean exactly if you just
multiply.
Yes.
Because as long as you have an addition
of two single
digit values, you'll stay
somewhere between zero
and
eighteen.
So you know where you come out?
Yes. And if you multiply them, you
can go up to eighty one.
Yes, exactly.
And then you have no idea
what the last number will be.
Yeah, that's right.
Thank you.
I was wondering how they came up with
this substitution cipher.
These numbers, you said the most common
letters were a single digit and the other
ones were in the range of 80 and 90.
Is there any mathematical property to
that that they choose these numbers or
just for fun?
Does anybody think there's any
mathematical reason
or was Saga just drunk and
came up with that?
I think both could be.
It's a valid reason, valid,
but I think somebody knows important
is
that you have to be without prefix.
So if you have one and 88,
you have to be sure that you have no
letterhead and called it with 18
because you have to distinguish those.
Yeah, it's a Huffman and cutting,
and you just ensure
that you don't have any prefix in
another code, right?
So one is a sort of no other
battle started with one and then
you end up with 88 for Q or
something.
Yes. OK, so it was not just
a drunk idea.
Good.
It's good to know. The important part of
that's a good point is that you don't
use the numbers eight
and nine with this encryption of
all of the single digit codes.
Somebody is.
Yeah.
In terms of historical usage
of book codes, I know that
the British Special Operations Executive
was using book ciphers
during the Second World War.
In fact, Leo Marks, who was
associate code master, added
an additional layer of security
by scrapping the idea of using books,
he simply wrote a poem
for each member of.
So we handed them the piece of paper
and said, This is your cipher
so that he and
the actual spy were the only people
who had it.
But you did say if you had time,
you'd finish the story.
What happened to everyone?
Yes. Let's.
Yeah, I'm glad
there's one more question, maybe
and and I can tell what happened
or
the internet would like to know the
internet.
The internet would like to know what
source said it was through
and and they've been punished for
this kind of behavior.
I'm sorry again
what the internet would like to know
what which source says it was
drunk all the time and whether he
was being punished for this?
Yes.
The sources on Xigaze
colorful life
basically.
Yeah, his his
people who knew him.
He was just
known in this community.
He was.
He was just he was a playboy
and he had some trouble with alcohol.
And so many people
reported on that after the war
that we can just assume that this is
true. This has been dramatized
in, especially
in West German writing on
XGA.
There even have been movies
about him.
I can recommend if you'd like some
some
entertainment on this case, I'd
recommend the German Japanese
co-production called Spy Saga.
It was published in 2003.
It's very long and
it's a very good actor playing XGA,
and there's a lot on this reckless
behavior, he showed.
And it's it's actually quite interesting
that this has been his
being drunk all the time.
His affairs with women
has been pointed
out in West
German publications
on his case.
Obviously, the Soviet Union and the
German Democratic Republic, who tried
to make him a hero, did not talk about
this.
Does that answer the internet's question?
I suppose so.
Thank you. Good.
I actually happen to have a book here
that explains how we came up with the
substitution cipher, which was
which one is it?
And it's it's just a bit
difficult to explain which
book just inverts here, but it's OK.
It's based on a arbitrary
password, which was a subway
and also a memorable
phrase for the eight most frequent
frequent letters in the in the language.
OK? Which
were, interestingly enough, the sentence
assumed to error,
which is, as the book puts it,
good advice for a spy.
OK, which book is that
I can't?
Secrets by?
OK.
It's so it's a book about, you know,
encryption in general.
Yes. But it has a lot of stuff
about historic encryption
and about saga.
Not a lot of stuff about.
So I guess.
Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, he's he's
mentioned in a lot of books on
intelligence, history of intelligence in
general.
So what happened to everybody?
The Japanese secret police
by accident discovered
this group in nineteen forty
one, they were looking for something
completely different.
They were looking for Japanese communists
and zarqawi's group was
he had this his main Japanese
man, who in turn had
Japanese informants
and some of them had connections
to Japanese American communists.
And this
somehow it's not quite clear
who actually talked in the end,
who actually pointed out
this whole connection
going from Japanese-American
communists to Japanese Communists
to Zarqawi to Zagar, and which
set up this chain reaction leading
to the arrest of Zogg and his
compatriots.
But the fact is,
in October of 1941,
Zager was Archie Klausen.
Everybody else in his group was arrested,
and the Japanese actually thought that
saga was a German spy,
which was an uncomfortable situation
because Japan and Germany had a pact.
They were allies, and that was very
sensitive to have someone to believe
he's been spying for Germany in Japan,
and even the German ambassador
couldn't believe that XGA had betrayed
him.
And at some point, everybody just
talked because
I think in October 1941,
Zagar was very sick.
He was disillusioned
because nobody had believed him.
He got negative
messages from Moscow, basically
saying that he was a liar and his
information was wrong.
He had personal trouble and he just
he thought, OK, his mission is over.
He has informed the Soviet Union about
everything. So at some point, I
believe he just gave up and he talked
and Klausen talked.
And the Japanese secret police finally
found out what these numbers meant
because Klausen explained it all.
And then Zagar
and Ozaki were sentenced
to death under
the Japanese peace preservation law,
which did not actually apply to what
they did. But it was not a fair
trial. It was war, and they fabricated
something.
And after Zygier was sentenced
to death, Japan
tried to exchange him.
They contacted Moscow trying
to exchange Saga for a Japanese
spy, and Moscow said,
We have no idea who you are talking
about. We don't know this person.
And in the end, in
November of 1944, Zog and
Ozaki were executed.
Klausen was sentenced to
life in prison, was released
in 1945, when
the Japanese peace preservation law
was rescinded and political prisoners
were let go.
And before
the American authorities
even realized two, they had
just led out of prison there.
The Soviet Union came and
whisked Clausen and his wife out of the
country, and
they were allowed to move
to Berlin at first
until nineteen sixty four during
the still Stalinist era.
There was no talk at all about the Zygier
case in the Soviet Union and in
eastern Germany, and after
nineteen sixty four xGA was
made to be a hero of the Soviet Union.
It was actually the first time that the
Soviet Union officially acknowledged
that they had spies
elsewhere.
And then, after nineteen sixty
four, Clausen and his wife became minor
celebrities in the GDR,
going on talking tours
in schools telling about their heroic
duties during the war.
Who else will saga was executed
exactly as well.
One other member of his group,
one European, who worked for a
French newspaper, died in prison
in the beginning of 1945
as August's Russian wife
was deported to Siberia
to shut her up
and died.
Also of the harsh conditions
before the war was over.
OK, that's not a very happy,
no end point and
not a happy ending.
I'm sorry.
Sorry for the mood kills.
But yeah, were you finished perfectly on
time? No. Perfect.
Yeah. Very nice.
Thank you again very, very much.
That was really interesting.