Paperback, 613 pages
English language
Published by Free Press.
5 stars
(1 review)
The Special Operations Executive (SOE), a British WW2 group infiltrating Reich-dominated Europe, had during the War's early and middle years a continuing problem in certain parts of France. They would train new agents, drop them into French territory, note their contact with a local agent... and they were lost, presumed captured or killed. Two things needed to happen fast: first, a new network had to be built so fresh agents would not be compromised by the older, discovered network. And second, a code generation method must be implemented that did not give a field agent knowledge of how other field agents generated similar messages into encrypted form (knowledge that could be extracted by torture). The answer to the second problem was called a "one time pad", a method still in use today and which had life-saving results almost immediately in the Allied war effort.
Subjects
- Biography: general
- Warfare & Defence
- Military
- Cryptography
- Biography & Autobiography
- Biography / Autobiography
- World War, 1939-1945
- Biography/Autobiography
- Secret service
- Military - World War II
- Literary
- History / Military / World War II
- Great Britain
- Personal narratives, British