Cryptologist Cracks a Presidential Code

Robert Patterson

For more than 200 years, buried deep within Thomas Jefferson's correspondence and papers, there lay a mysterious cipher -- a coded message that appears to have remained unsolved. Until now.

The cryptic message was sent to President Jefferson in December 1801 by his friend and frequent correspondent, Robert Patterson, a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. President Jefferson and Mr. Patterson were both officials at the American Philosophical Society -- a group that promoted scholarly research in the sciences and humanities -- and were enthusiasts of ciphers and other codes, regularly exchanging letters about them.

The 1801 letter from Robert Patterson to Thomas Jefferson

To Mr. Patterson's view, a perfect code had four properties: It should be adaptable to all languages; it should be simple to learn and memorize; it should be easy to write and to read; and most important of all, "it should be absolutely inscrutable to all unacquainted with the particular key or secret for decyphering."

Mr. Patterson then included in the letter an example of a message in his cipher, one that would be so difficult to decode that it would "defy the united ingenuity of the whole human race," he wrote.



The cipher finally met its match in Lawren Smithline, a 36-year-old mathematician. Dr. Smithline has a Ph.D. in mathematics and now works professionally with cryptology, or code-breaking, at the Center for Communications Research in Princeton, N.J., a division of the Institute for Defense Analyses.



The code, Mr. Patterson made clear in his letter, was not a simple substitution cipher. That's when you replace one letter of the alphabet with another. The problem with substitution ciphers is that they can be cracked by using what's termed frequency analysis, or studying the number of times that a particular letter occurs in a message. For instance, the letter "e" is the most common letter in English, so if a code is sufficiently long, whatever letter appears most often is likely a substitute for "e." Because frequency analysis was already well known in the 19th century, cryptographers of the time turned to other techniques. One was called the nomenclator: a catalog of numbers, each standing for a word, syllable, phrase or letter.

But Mr. Patterson had a few more tricks up his sleeve. He wrote the message text vertically, in columns from left to right, using no capital letters or spaces. The writing formed a grid, in this case of about 40 lines of some 60 letters each.

Then, Mr. Patterson broke the grid into sections of up to nine lines, numbering each line in the section from one to nine. In the next step, Mr. Patterson transcribed each numbered line to form a new grid, scrambling the order of the numbered lines within each section. Every section, however, repeated the same jumbled order of lines.

The trick to solving the puzzle, as Mr. Patterson explained in his letter, meant knowing the following: the number of lines in each section, the order in which those lines were transcribed and the number of random letters added to each line.

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The key to the code consisted of a series of two-digit pairs. The first digit indicated the line number within a section, while the second was the number of letters added to the beginning of that row. For instance, if the key was 58, 71, 33, that meant that Mr. Patterson moved row five to the first line of a section and added eight random letters; then moved row seven to the second line and added one letter, and then moved row three to the third line and added three random letters. Mr. Patterson estimated that the potential combinations to solve the puzzle was "upwards of ninety millions of millions."

Undaunted, Dr. Smithline decided to tackle the cipher by analyzing the probability of digraphs, or pairs of letters. Certain pairs of letters, such as "dx," don't exist in English, while some letters almost always appear next to a certain other letter, such as "u" after "q".

To get a sense of language patterns of the era, Dr. Smithline studied the 80,000 letter-characters contained in Jefferson's State of the Union addresses, and counted the frequency of occurrences of "aa," "ab," "ac," through "zz."

Dr. Smithline then made a series of educated guesses, such as the number of rows per section, which two rows belong next to each other, and the number of random letters inserted into a line.

To help vet his guesses, he turned to a tool not available during the 19th century: a computer algorithm. He used what's called "dynamic programming," which solves large problems by breaking puzzles down into smaller pieces and linking together the solutions.

The overall calculations necessary to solve the puzzle were fewer than 100,000, which Dr. Smithline says would be "tedious in the 19th century, but doable."

After about a week of working on the puzzle, the numerical key to Mr. Patterson's cipher emerged -- 13, 34, 57, 65, 22, 78, 49. Using that digital key, he was able to unfurl the cipher's text:

"In Congress, July Fourth, one thousand seven hundred and seventy six. A declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled. When in the course of human events..."

That, of course, is the beginning -- with a few liberties taken -- to the Declaration of Independence, written at least in part by Jefferson himself. "Patterson played this little joke on Thomas Jefferson," says Dr. Smithline. "And nobody knew until now."

Google's wonder wheel

A new feature, one of several, in Google's results page is a Wonder Wheel. I came across the name Hype Igoe, a boxing writer on the pages of the book I'm currently reading, Tunney: boxing's brainiest champ and his upset of the great Jack Dempsey, by Jack Cavanaugh. Googling him led me to an entry on the blog of a Canadian cartoonist, Yesterday's Papers.

Clicking on the Wonder Wheel hyperlink shows a wheel with spokes: hype igoe in the center, with names on spokes: Joe Louis, San Francisco Examiner, Cyber boxing zone, Jack Dempsey, Jim Corbett, Gene Tunney, elevator operator, hypodermic needle.

The last two are, seemingly, erroneous. Nonetheless, in the entry in Yesterday's Papers on Hype Igoe, there is this: “It was Dorgan who helped popularize the label “Hype”, which Igoe had hung on him by a 300 pound Negro elevator operator. The operator took one look at the slender 15 year old copy-boy back in the days when he was working for the San Francisco Examiner and observed: “Mr. Igoe, yo ain’t no bigger than a hypodermic needle.””

Hype himself originated the phrase "to hype," as in standing behind his fighters "hyping" them up for the slugout.

So, there are the connections, but they make little logical sense.

Mixed metaphors, er ...

In today's Wall Street Journal, there is a story about a meat-processing company. The language gets just a mite mangled. To wit:

A recent decision by Smithfield Foods Inc. to use only American pork in its products could boost its bottom line. But what the company really needs are higher prices for its live hogs and lower costs for raising cash.

Last month, Smithfield completed the sale of its beef-processing and cattle-feeding operation to JBS SA of Brazil. Now that beef is off its balance sheet, analysts are expressing a fair amount of bullishness about the Smithfield, Va., company's shares.

Let's see: Smithfield decided to concentrate on pork, so it sold its beef and cattle operations; now that it has no beef, some analysts are bullish on the company.

Say what?

WSJ finds the cause!

In an article entitled Reserve Fund Will Return $20 Billion to Investors the Wall STreet Journal states that by "breaking the buck" (allowing the Net Asset Value of a money market fund to fall below $1), Money-market fund Reserve Primary Fund ... helped set off the financial crisis."

Say what? Helped set off the crisis? Were not the causes greed and unrestrained lending? Oy, for good copyediting.

Metaphors Fly Like Bad Analogies

Washington and Wall Street are trying to sell a $700 billion financial-markets rescue package to a skeptical public, and, amid popping bubbles and golden parachutes, the metaphors and similes are taking wing.

Politics and finance always favor cliches and stock phrases to straight talk, but this crisis has opened up the flood gates.

"Unfortunately, the economy, it's a little like a bathtub," billionaire investor Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, told CNBC this week, explaining why the average American suffers when investment banks collapse. "You can't have cold water in the front and hot water in the back."

That makes it pretty clear. Buffett speaks plainly.

On the Senate floor Friday, Mr. Schumer took the image from prognosis to prescription. "We must come together and work in a bipartisan way to unclog those arteries...and we must do it soon," he said. But the medicine was tainted, he said, by Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, who suspended his campaign briefly, rushed to Washington, "put another fly in the ointment and created more trouble."

He urged the Arizona senator to "leave town and not throw fire on these flames."

Throw fire on these flames? Say what, Chuck? Put a fly in the ointment? My Lord!

Why the rush to deploy metaphor to describe the Wall Street crisis? "Because nobody can understand it," says John D. Casnig, founder of the Metaphor Observatory, a Web site for fans of figurative language.

Those who understand can't speak plainly; most people seem to yearn for simple images.

With the experts talking credit-default swaps, rate resets, cram-down bankruptcies and exchange-stabilization funds, who wouldn't swoon with visions of derivatives dancing in their heads? "Metaphor is used when we can't understand something in its own context," says Mr. Casnig, who last year declared "mortgage meltdown" the third-most-popular metaphor of 2007, two spots behind the "troop surge" and just shy of "perfect storm."

One of Mr. Casnig's financial favorites comes from John Oliver, on the TV news parody "The Daily Show," who says that searching for another way for leaders to mess up the economy is "like finding a vein on a failure junkie."

After all, "credit is the lifeblood of the economy," Mr. Bernanke noted.

Mixed metaphors

In a story in today's Journal about Obama meeting with Bernanke, the following atrocity appeared:

The continued focus on economic issues underscores their importance with voters this election cycle. "We're moving into unchartered [economic] ground. How you show you'll go about navigating that is going to be very important," said John Irons of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington.

Navigate uncharted ground? Dang.

Afghanistan: from war to insurgency

The Afghanistan conflict, the original effort to extract revenge against those who perpetrated 9/11 (the Taliban, who made Afghanistan a haven and base for terrorists), seven years on continues unabated. In fact, it might be worse now than any other time since the American invasion.

A Wall Street Journal story discusses that, as part of the background of a story about US soldiers who develop relationships with native Afghanis. It is an interesting piece of reporting.

However, along the way, some mangling of the English language detracts from the story's narrative. Witness this clunky sentence construction: The Afghan war, begun as an effort to oust the Taliban regime and destroy its al Qaeda allies, has become a lengthy insurgency that senior coalition commanders say has taken a turn for the worse in many parts of the country.

The beginning effort was made by the US; the dependent clause (begun as an effort...) does not make it clear. Take that dependent clause out, and the sentence makes more sense.

Anyway, the important point is the war, both as it impacts Afghanistan and the US: In recent months, more U.S. forces have been killed in Afghanistan than in Iraq, where the overall level of violence has slowed. On Sunday, insurgents killed nine U.S. soldiers and injured 15 more at a U.S. base in Kunar, one of the provinces where Lt. Col. Kolenda's men are fighting. A few days later, U.S. troops pulled out of the base.

The war continues. The US is bogged down. When the US took a big hit, it pulled back. A very sorry state of affairs. Afghanistan is where the US should be pounding, and pounding hard, to fight terrorism. Fighting in Iraq takes away from that, and compounds things.

Senior Pentagon officers are pushing for more troop reductions in Iraq to free up forces for Afghanistan, potentially bringing more novices into the field.

The fascinating part of this article is how a particular US soldier approaches it.

Well ahead of the transition from Lt. Col. Kolenda's squadron to the Sixth Squadron, Fourth Cavalry Regiment, out of Fort Hood, Texas, the outgoing team emailed all of their records and papers to the new unit. Lt. Col. Kolenda and his men plan to squire the new commanders about the battlefield, introducing them to the people who will help them and to those who will get in their way.

Hearts and minds need to be won, if the insurgency is ever to be defeated. Now, technology adds a new dimension.

The Army also offers the troops an online reference source, Wiki-Afghan. It looks just like Wikipedia, except it's all about Afghanistan and much of it is classified. There are upwards of 10,000 articles, and any authorized soldier can click on an entry and add new information.