TICOM (nonfiction)
TICOM (Target Intelligence Committee) was a project formed in World War II by the United States to find and seize German intelligence assets, particularly signals intelligence and cryptographic assets.
It operated alongside other Western Allied efforts to extract German scientific and technological information and personnel during and after the war, including Operation Paperclip (for rocketry), Operation Alsos (for nuclear information) and Operation Surgeon (for avionics).
Competition with the Soviet Union for these same spoils of war was intense.
History
The project was initiated by the British, but when the US Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall learnt of it, it soon became Anglo-American. The aim was to seek out and capture the cryptologic secrets of Germany. The concept was for teams of cryptologic experts, mainly drawn from the code-breaking center at Bletchley Park, to enter Germany with the front-line troops and capture the documents, technology and personnel of the various German signal intelligence organizations before these precious secrets could be destroyed, looted, or captured by the Soviets. There were six such teams:
- Team 1 was tasked to capture German Geheimschreiber (secret writer) machines whose enciphered traffic was code named Fish
- Team 2 was to assist Team 1 with transporting Field Marshal Kesselring's communications train to Britain (the so-called "Jellyfish Convoy")
- Team 3 was to investigate an intact German Signals intelligence unit Pers Z S
- Team 4 was to investigate in more detail the places in southern Germany that the Team 1 search had passed over quickly
- Team 5: Following the serendipitous discovery of a waterproof box containing some of the archives of the Cipher Department of the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW/Chi) on the bed of Lake Schliersee, this team was tasked with recovering anything else of value from that lake
Team 6 aimed to capture and exploit material from the German Naval Intelligence Center and the German SIGINT headquarters OKW/Chi (High Command)
The Allied supposition that the Supreme Command of the German Armed Forces, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht Chiffrierabteilung (abbreviated OKW/Chi) was the German equivalent of Bletchley Park, was found to be incorrect. Despite it being the top SIGINT agency in the German military, it did not set policy and did not co-ordinate or direct the signal intelligence work of the different services. It concentrated instead on employing the best cryptanalysts to design Germany's own secure communications systems, and to assist the individual services organisations. These were:
- The Army (Heer) OKH/GdNA, the Oberkommando ders Heeres/General der Nachrichten Autklaerung
- Air Force (Luftwaffe) Chi Stelle
- Navy (Kriegsmarine) Beobachtungsdienst or B-Dienst
- Foreign Office Pers Z S
- Nazi Party Forschungsamt or FA (see Research Office of the Reich Air Ministry)
Drs Huttenhain and Fricke of OKW/Chi were requested to write about the methods of solution of the German machines.[12] This covered the un-steckered Enigma, the steckered Enigmas; Hagelin B-36 and BC-38; the cipher teleprinters Siemens and Halske T52 a/b, T52/c; the Siemens SFM T43; and the Lorenz SZ 40, SZ42 a/b. They assumed Kerckhoffs's principle that how the machines worked would be known, and addressed only the solving of keys, not the breaking of the machines in the first place. This showed that, at least amongst the cryptographers, the un-steckered Enigma was clearly recognized as solvable. The Enigmas with the plugboard (Steckerbrett) were considered secure if used according to the instructions, but were less secure if stereotyped beginnings or routine phrases were used, or during the period of what they described as the "faulty indicator technique" - used up until May 1940. It was their opinion, however, that the steckered Enigma had never been solved.
FA Discovery
The discovery in May 1945 of the Nazi Party's top secret FA signals intelligence and cryptanalytic agency at the Kaufbeuren Air Base in southern Bavaria came as a total surprise.[11] The province of Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring, it has been described as "the richest, most secret, the most Nazi, and the most influential" of all the German cryptanalytic intelligence agencies.
Russian "FISH" Discovery
The greatest success for TICOM was the capture of the "Russian Fish", a set of German wide-band receivers used to intercept Soviet high-level radio teletype signals. In May 21, 1945, a party of TICOM Team 1 received tip that a German POW had knowledge of certain signals intelligence equipment and documentation relating Russian traffic. After identifying the remaining members of the unit, they were all taken back to their previous base at Rosenheim. The prisoners recovered about 7 ½ tons of equipment. One of the machines was re-assembled and demonstrated. TICOM officer 1st Lt. Paul Whitaker later reported. "They were intercepting Russian traffic right while we were there…pretty soon they had shown us all we needed to see."
http://www.ticomarchive.com/iv-case-studies/russian-fish
German organizational structure
German personnel report
Report by TICOM team 1 on German signals intelligence equipment recovered at Baudot.
On the German prisoners who revealed and demonstrated the equipment:
(1) Uffz. Karrenberg before the war was a lecturer at Berlin University in the History of Art and Music. He is also a concert pianist, and has an obvious leaning to mathematics. He joined the army in 1939. As he speaks fluent Russian, he was employed in a wire-tapping detachment when the Russian campaign broke out. At Smolensk he was attached to the intercept service of H cures gruppe Mitte, and did decoding, T/A and translation. Later he was posted to L.N.A. and employed as a decoder of Russian non-morse transmissions. His main job was to work out daily the letter-scramble which the Russians used, particularly for the P/L commercial traffic. He is quite sure that the Russians considered this, together with their channel scramble completely secure, but he could decipher it given 2000 letters.
Karrenberg is very intelligent, extremely cooperative, and has a multiplicity of interests. He liked his work, and "believed in working as hard as possible at any job he did."
(2) Uffz. Susohowk, unquestionably the natural leader of the little group of six German prisoners, is an intelligent man. He has a sound knowledge of the apparatus and is familiar with both the intercept operating and evaluation (though in the latter subject on rather general lines). It was Suschowk's initiative end persistence which put the American authorities and then TICOM on the trail of the apparatus. He is anxious that it should be used, and will not conceal information which is requested of him or withhold information which he considers of value.
(3) Uffz. Hempel is an engineer by profession. He was not only responsible for maintaining the apparatus, but actually helped to build it. This was occasioned by the manpower shortage at Lorenz, Hempel being loaned to Lorenz, Consequently Hempel knows his machinery inside out, n».d, should the construction of additional models be deemed desirable, would undoubtedly be of great help. He is not a leader like Susohowk, preferring as he does to get on with his job in a quiet and apparently efficient way.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7sNVKDp-yiJMWM1ZTFmMjEtMmVhMC00MmI5LTg1NTYtNDIzZmFiZTYyNGM4/view
https://archive.org/stream/ticom/Team1Appendix14_djvu.txt
Related efforts
In Operation Stella Polaris the Finnish signals intelligence unit was evacuated to Sweden following the end of the Finland/Soviet cease-fire in September 1944. The records, including cryptographic material, ended up in the hands of Americans.
In the News
Fiction cross-reference
Nonfiction cross-reference
- Cipher Department of the High Command of the Wehrmacht (nonfiction) (German: Amtsgruppe Wehrmachtnachrichtenverbindungen, Abteilung Chiffrierwesen) (also Oberkommando der Wehrmacht Chiffrierabteilung or Chiffrierabteilung of the High Command of the Wehrmacht or Chiffrierabteilung of the OKW or OKW/Chi or Chi) was the Signal Intelligence Agency of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces of the German Armed Forces before and during World War II. OKW/Chi, within the formal order of battle hierarchy OKW/WFsT/Ag WNV/Chi, dealt with the cryptanalysis and deciphering of enemy and neutral states' message traffic and security control of its own key processes and machinery, such as the rotor cipher machine Enigma machine.
- Cryptography (nonfiction)
- Enigma machine (nonfiction) is an encryption device developed and used in the early- to mid-20th century to protect commercial, diplomatic and military communication. It was employed extensively by Nazi Germany during World War II, in all branches of the German military. The Enigma encryption proved vulnerable to cryptanalytic attacks by Germany’s adversaries, at first Polish and French intelligence and, later, a massive effort mounted by the United Kingdom at Bletchley Park. While Germany introduced a series of improvements to Enigma, and these hampered decryption efforts to varying degrees, they did not ultimately prevent Britain and its allies from exploiting Enigma-encoded messages as a major source of intelligence during the war. Many commentators say this flow of communications intelligence shortened the war significantly and may even have altered its outcome.
- Mathematics (nonfiction)
- Operation Paperclip was a secret program of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) largely carried out by Special Agents of Army CIC, in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians, such as Wernher von Braun and his V-2 rocket team, were taken from Germany to America for U.S. government employment, primarily between 1945 and 1959. Many were former members, and some were former leaders, of the Nazi Party. The primary purpose for Operation Paperclip was U.S. military advantage in the Soviet–American Cold War, and the Space Race.
- Pers Z S (nonfiction) was the Signal Intelligence Agency of the German Foreign Office (German: Auswärtiges Amt) before and during World War II. Pers Z S was a civilian operation and focused primarily on diplomatic communications. According to TICOM interrogators Pers Z S evinced an extraordinary degree of competence, primarily driven by a consistency of development not found in any other German signals bureau of the period.
- Research Office of the Reich Air Ministry (nonfiction) (German: RLM/Forschungsamt, or FA) was the signals intelligence and cryptanalytic agency of the German Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945. Run since its inception by Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring, the Research Bureau was a Nazi Party institution rather than an official Wehrmacht-run military signals intelligence and cryptographic agency (headed up by the German High Command's OKW/Chi) ... "the richest, most secret, the most Nazi, and the most influential" of all the German cryptoanalytic intelligence agencies.
- Ralph Tester (nonfiction), senior British codebreaker who worked on the TICOM project.
External links:
- TICOM @ Wikipedia