The magic of manipulating numbers is only part of the attraction of The Code Book. It is also full of potted personal histories, from the 15th-century polymath Leon Battista Alberti to Mary, Queen of Scots, who was beheaded after her cipher sanctioning a plot to kill her cousin Queen Elizabeth was broken. Simon Singh's discourse on code-making and breaking is a tale of intrigues and strategy - military, political and academic. When Winston Churchill visited Bletchley Park, the headquarters of the British codebreakers in 1941, he was surprised by the bizarre mixture of people providing him with such valuable information: a chess champion, an authority on porcelain, a curator from the Prague museum and bridge experts were among the ranks. The Cipher Challenge at the back of the hardback is repeated in the paperback. The first person to crack all 10 elements will win £10,000. At the time of writing, this was still up for grabs.
"One of the most intrepid plans for stealing keys to the German Naval Enigma code was concocted by Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond and a member of Naval Intelligence during the war. He suggested crashing a captured German bomber in the English Channel, close to a German ship. The German sailors would then approach the plane to rescue their comrades, whereupon the aircrew, British pilots pretending to be German, would board the ship and capture its codebooks. These German codebooks contained the information that was required for establishing the encryption key . . . "After approving Fleming's plan, known as Operation Ruthless, British Intelligence began preparing a Heinkel bomber for the crash-landing, and assembled an aircrew of German-speaking Englishmen. The plan was scheduled for a date early in the month, so as to capture a fresh codebook. Fleming went to Dover to oversee the operation, but unfortunately there was no German shipping in the area so the plan was postponed indefinitely. Four days later, Frank Birch, who headed the naval section at Bletchley, recorded the reaction of Alan Turing and his colleague Peter Twinn: `Turing and Twinn came to me like under- takers cheated of a nice corpse two days ago, all in a stew about the cancellation of Operation Ruthless'."
From The Code Book, by Simon Singh