Keeper of the Codes

A UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND researcher and his collaborators huddled last summer over a captured, top-secret military device, racing to decode a message that might have had the potential to change history. But materials science and engineering Assistant Professor’s Tim Koeth’s mother-in-law was getting impatient: “Come on, guys—war’s over.” For 80 years, in fact.

With his wife and father-in-law, Koeth was using an original Enigma machine as part of an annual contest to read never-decrypted German World War II communiques. A scientist who studies materials in extreme radiation environments, Koeth became fascinated by the code machines as a child when they were first declassified in the ’80s; the Enigma’s notoriety later spread via “The Imitation Game,” a Benedict Cumberbatch movie chronicling scientist Alan Turing’s effort to crack the device and win the war.

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Decades later, when a collector friend revealed he’d purchased one and asked Koeth to get it working again, it sparked a unique hobby. Today Koeth restores—and uses—a range of cipher machines for the National Cryptologic Museum at Fort Meade, Md.

Technologically, he says, they’re dead simple, with adjustable rotors setting the code for the day and “an electrical current passing through a maze of wires.” But the history they represent—and that they enabled—is the height of human drama and tragedy. “Sometimes I can’t believe I’m holding one of these,” he says.

Developed for both military and business use, Enigma was solved by Polish mathematicians several years after its introduction. More advanced versions created for the Nazi war machine were cracked at Britain’s famed Bletchley Park codebreaking facility.

Also called the ECM-Mk II, the American device featured a tape printout rather than more-common light-up display. Using 15 rotors compared to the original Enigma’s three, it was the only cipher machine never broken during the war. (Koeth made the device on the left operational for display at the museum and is currently restoring the other.)

Tiny compared to the 90-pound SIGABA, this six-rotor, fully mechanical device was far less secure, but deemed adequate for battlefield communications in World War II and the Korean War.

Introduced by the National Security Agency and distributed throughout NATO member nations, it was compromised by a U.S. mole in the late ’60s who walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington and supplied information about the device.

The Swiss government developed this sleek, 10-rotor machine based on the Enigma. Starting in the 1990s, the declassified devices were sold as surplus. For anyone interested in getting into the retro-spy game, Koeth says, “Keep an eye out, because they pop up on eBay all the time.”