Bletchley Park is an English country house and estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes (Buckinghamshire), that became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. The mansion was constructed during the years following 1883 for the financier and politician Herbert Leon in the Victorian Gothic, Tudor and Dutch Baroque styles, on the site of older buildings of the same name.
Ultra was the designation adopted by British military intelligence in June 1941 for wartime signals intelligence obtained by breaking high-level encrypted enemy radio and teleprinter communications at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park. Ultra eventually became the standard designation among the western Allies for all such intelligence. The name arose because the intelligence obtained was considered more important than that designated by the highest British security classification then used and so was regarded as being Ultra Secret. Several other cryptonyms had been used for such intelligence.
John Cairncross was a British civil servant who became an intelligence officer and spy during the Second World War. As a Soviet double agent, he passed to the Soviet Union the raw Tunny decryptions that influenced the Battle of Kursk. He was alleged to be the fifth member of the Cambridge Five. He was also notable as a translator, literary scholar and writer of non-fiction.
The Lorenz SZ40, SZ42a and SZ42b were German rotor stream cipher machines used by the German Army during World War II. They were developed by C. Lorenz AG in Berlin. The model name SZ was derived from Schlüssel-Zusatz, meaning cipher attachment. The instruments implemented a Vernam stream cipher.
Brigadier John Hessell Tiltman, was a British Army officer who worked in intelligence, often at or with the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) starting in the 1920s. His intelligence work was largely connected with cryptography, and he showed exceptional skill at cryptanalysis. His work in association with Bill Tutte on the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher, the German teleprinter cipher, called "Tunny" at Bletchley Park, led to breakthroughs in attack methods on the code, without a computer. It was to exploit those methods, at extremely high speed with great reliability, that Colossus, the first digital programmable electronic computer, was designed and built.
The bombe was an electro-mechanical device used by British cryptologists to help decipher German Enigma-machine-encrypted secret messages during World War II. The US Navy and US Army later produced their own machines to the same functional specification, albeit engineered differently both from each other and from Polish and British bombes.
Cryptanalysis of the Enigma ciphering system enabled the western Allies in World War II to read substantial amounts of Morse-coded radio communications of the Axis powers that had been enciphered using Enigma machines. This yielded military intelligence which, along with that from other decrypted Axis radio and teleprinter transmissions, was given the codename Ultra.
Alfred Dillwyn "Dilly" Knox, CMG was a British classics scholar and papyrologist at King's College, Cambridge and a codebreaker. As a member of the Room 40 codebreaking unit he helped decrypt the Zimmermann Telegram which brought the USA into the First World War. He then joined the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS).
Peter Frank George Twinn was a British mathematician, Second World War codebreaker and entomologist. The first professional mathematician to be recruited to GC&CS. Head of ISK from 1943, the unit responsible for decrypting over 100,000 Abwehr communications.
Enigma is a 2001 espionage thriller film directed by Michael Apted from a screenplay by Tom Stoppard. The script was adapted from the 1995 novel Enigma by Robert Harris, about the Enigma codebreakers of Bletchley Park in the Second World War.
Commander Alexander "Alastair" Guthrie Denniston was a Scottish codebreaker in Room 40, deputy head of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) and hockey player. Denniston was appointed operational head of GC&CS in 1919 and remained so until February 1942.
Conel Hugh O'Donel Alexander, known as Hugh Alexander and C. H. O'D. Alexander, was an Irish-born British cryptanalyst, chess player, and chess writer. He worked on the German Enigma machine at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, and was later the head of the cryptanalysis division at GCHQ for 25 years. He was twice British chess champion and earned the title of International Master.
Captain Raymond C. "Jerry" Roberts MBE was a British wartime codebreaker and businessman. During the Second World War, Roberts worked at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park from 1941 to 1945. He was a leading codebreaker and linguist, who worked on the Lorenz cipher system – Hitler's most top-level code.
The Testery was a section at Bletchley Park, the British codebreaking station during World War II. It was set up in July 1942 as the "FISH Subsection" under Major Ralph Tester, hence its alternative name. Four founder members were Tester himself and three senior cryptanalysts were Captain Jerry Roberts, Captain Peter Ericsson and Major Denis Oswald. All four were fluent in German. From 1 July 1942 on, this team switched and was tasked with breaking the German High Command's most top-level code Tunny after Bill Tutte successfully broke Tunny system in Spring 1942.
Hugh Rose Foss was a British cryptanalyst. At Bletchley Park during World War II he made significant contributions both to the breaking of the German Enigma code and headed the section tasked with breaking Japanese Naval codes.
A Fórmula de Deus, in English The Einstein Enigma, is the fourth novel written by the Portuguese journalist and writer José Rodrigues dos Santos, published in 2006 in Portugal. It was the best-selling novel in Portugal in 2006, selling 100,000 copies.
The Imitation Game is a 2014 American period biographical thriller film directed by Morten Tyldum and written by Graham Moore, based on the 1983 biography Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges.
Joan Elisabeth Lowther Murray, MBE was an English cryptanalyst and numismatist who worked as a code-breaker at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. Although she did not personally seek the spotlight, her role in the Enigma project that decrypted the German secret communications earned her awards and citations, such as appointment as a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), in 1946.
