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Reading The Enemy's Mail
- 134 statements
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- 27 referencing feature instances
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When fighting a war, cold or hot, you try to anticipate what the enemy is going to do. What, however, if you already knew what they were doing? What if you were able to decipher their messages and know their plans in advance? This of course leads to problems — what if they know you know? They'll change their codes, or perhaps send misleading messages they want you to intercept. Therefore, you must be very careful- you can't, for example, just attack a ship because you know it's going somewhere- the other side might work out that the only way you would know is if you are... Of course, stuff is still subject to interpretation. Cipher machine theft is also a common plot in espionage, provided you are able to cover up said theft. Examples |
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| Reading The Enemy's Mail / int_1bb049f | type |
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The A.I. Gang: In Robot Trouble, Ramone Korbuscek infiltrates the island disguised as a security guard, and after a while starts reading security chief Brody's mail, among other things intercepting and destroying a letter advising Brody to investigate the guard Korbuscek is disguised as. | |
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| Reading The Enemy's Mail / int_230b3240 | type |
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Jack Ryan: In The Sum of All Fears, a significant subplot involves whether or not NSA and State Department encoding methods have been cracked by the Soviets. In fact, they have, and at the end, when the US doesn't believe they've been cracked, it makes things in the climax significantly worse. Tom Clancy also likes looking into the specifics of certain cryptographic methods. Clear and Present Danger has a relatively long-winded passage on one-time pads (see below), and even The Hunt for Red October goes into some length about it. |
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A sketch on Horrible Histories has Sir Francis Walsingham advertising his new postal service where your mail will be picked up, sorted, read by a spy... | |
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A Diplomatic Visit: Played with. The wolves of the Packlands check incoming and outgoing mail at the borders, but it's less to read the contents and more to check for potential hazards, such as explosive or poisoned letters. In chapter 25, Twilight does get one past this security measure, but that's because Wise-Mind marked it with his seal to let it go past. | |
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| Reading The Enemy's Mail / int_33bae31c | type |
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The second act of Star Wars: Annihilation involves Republic SIS agent Theron Shan and Jedi Master Gnost-Dural infiltrating Ziost in order to steal an Imperial black cipher, the mechanism by which the Empire encrypts its sensitive communications. Stealing the cipher is the first step in the Republic's plans to take out the massively powerful Imperial battle cruiser Ascendant Spear, and - similar to stories regarding the real-life Enigma and Lorenz ciphers in WWII - this leads to a situation in which the Republic military opts not to act on foreknowledge of Imperial plans to bombard Republic planets because doing so would alert the Empire to the fact that their cipher has been compromised before the Ascendant Spear can be neutralized. | |
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Discworld: Vetinari not only does this regularly in everyday life, but he expects others to do the same to him, and prepares accordingly. After all, In Monstrous Regiment, the Ankh-Morporkian representatives have the advantage of the City Watch Airborne Section, namely gnome Constable Buggy Swires and his buzzard, which lets them intercept messenger pigeons. Although not from the Borogravians, who disapprove of advanced communication technology, but from their own side's press. |
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Y: The Last Man. In Paris, Alter is seen going through the mail to find the last "male". | |
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| Reading The Enemy's Mail / int_4771fb78 | type |
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One plot point in Tora! Tora! Tora! is that the US Military can decrypt the Japanese diplomatic codes. However, it is time-consuming, and very very secret. So secret, that at one point the President of the United States is removed from the list of people authorized to read the decoded messages because someone in his office improperly disposed of a decoded message. This of course only serves to add to the information delay that contributes to the Americans' failure to prepare for the impending attack. | |
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From Russia with Love, James Bond must collect a Soviet defector from Turkey, who is bringing a cipher machine with her. He has to start a fire in the embassy to cover up the theft. | |
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| Reading The Enemy's Mail / int_769da46e | type |
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| Reading The Enemy's Mail / int_769da46e | comment |
In Monstrous Regiment, the Ankh-Morporkian representatives have the advantage of the City Watch Airborne Section, namely gnome Constable Buggy Swires and his buzzard, which lets them intercept messenger pigeons. Although not from the Borogravians, who disapprove of advanced communication technology, but from their own side's press. | |
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| Reading The Enemy's Mail / int_76c01b30 | comment |
In V for Vendetta, V hacks Fate, the government's central supercomputer (and, incidentally, the love of the villain's life). He uses it to access both their surveillance systems and the freaking postal system in order to bring down the corrupt regime. Unlike the film, the postal system stuff was just to flip the bird at the establishment by showing them he was not only in their systems, but able to control them. | |
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| Reading The Enemy's Mail / int_85b855e2 | type |
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In The Thrawn Trilogy, eventually the New Republic figures out that Thrawn is aware of all the plans they made in the Imperial Palace on Coruscant, courtesy of a source known only as "Delta Source." They spend a lot of effort trying to figure out who the spy is. Only after a slicer cracks Delta Source's transmission encryption on his own time for fun do they figure out that it was a sophisticated listening system Hidden in Plain Sight. | |
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The Underland Chronicles: Underlanders of all species have a system similar to Morse code to send messages. The plot of Gregor and the Code of Claw revolves around breaking the titular code in which the gnawers write theirs. | |
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The Wheel of Time: Something Egwene and the other rebel Aes Sedai try to do while Dreaming with regards to Elaida's mail. | |
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| Reading The Enemy's Mail / int_9b1636a1 | comment |
The Imitation Game is about the British efforts to crack the German ENIGMA system. Even though they had captured machines and knew how they worked, the British still needed to determine the daily settings, and used mathematics and early computers to find solutions. | |
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| Reading The Enemy's Mail / int_b30ae4db | comment |
Game of Thrones: Roose reads the exchange of messages between Cersei and Littlefinger. A wise move, considering that those two might be the most incredibly untrustworthy people to have ever existed. | |
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| Reading The Enemy's Mail / int_b3708bb4 | type |
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| Reading The Enemy's Mail / int_b3708bb4 | comment |
The main reason for wanting to attack the titular submarine in U571 is to capture the submarine's Enigma machine and the associated code documents. This is Very Loosely Based on a True Story: the capture of U-110 in May 1941 with her Enigma machine and all her code documents by a British destroyer was a critical breakthrough in British penetration of the German Navy's ciphers. | |
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| Reading The Enemy's Mail / int_b389ac77 | comment |
Most of Cryptonomicon (the 1940s bits, at least) is based around this. As with the real life section below, the Allies go to incredible amounts of effort to engineer plausible explanations for them having the information gained from intercepting enemy signals. | |
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| Reading The Enemy's Mail / int_b3e0e2e0 | comment |
In The Sum of All Fears, a significant subplot involves whether or not NSA and State Department encoding methods have been cracked by the Soviets. In fact, they have, and at the end, when the US doesn't believe they've been cracked, it makes things in the climax significantly worse. | |
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| Reading The Enemy's Mail / int_c0add399 | type |
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| Reading The Enemy's Mail / int_c0add399 | comment |
In The Third World War, the US had cracked the Atrophos cipher being used by Cuba. In the early stages of the war, the Cubans send a long message stating that they cannot attack the US directly, but they might be able to do some small sabotage operations. While the Soviet cipher clerk is manually decrypting the message and wishing that the long-winded platitudes that begin it are done with, the Americans have broken the whole message. The Soviets interpret the message correctly (You cowards! You're wimping out like Italy in 1939), the Americans don't (They're going to attack us!) and launch air strikes on Cuba. It takes the rest of Latin America to stop a full-scale invasion. | |
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Blake's 7. Episodes like "Seek-Locate-Destroy" and "Killer" involved the theft of a component that would allow Blake to crack Federation codes, no doubt inspired by the revelation just a few years previously about the war-winning importance of ULTRA (see Real Life). Later the rebels would get hold of a Magical Computer called Orac who could do this as a matter of course. | |
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Charité at War: Professor Jung, a French medic who's conscripted to serve in a Berlin hospital in Nazi Germany, is not happy that his letters to and from home are controlled by censorship. It's not just enemy's mail, though — Otto is a German soldier, but he has to be careful with what he writes, too. | |
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| Reading The Enemy's Mail / int_d581d078 | type |
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| Reading The Enemy's Mail / int_d581d078 | comment |
The Americans used a low-tech solution in World War II by using Navajo code-talkers, nicknamed wind-talkers, not to be confused with the fictional account in the movie Windtalkers. They didn't just speak in the Navajo language (which the Japanese were completely clueless to figure out anyway), but also spoke in code in the language. It was basically double encryption. The British apparently made similar use of Welsh. Older Than They Think: in the previous war, Italian communications were handled in Sardinian Language (Sardu): regarded by many scholars to be the living language closest to Classical Latin, it is not an Italian dialect nor by any means related to Italian. In Italy, it is notoriously known for its difficulty to be actually understood by anyone not speaking it (that is, Italians and many Sardinians themselves, being an endangered language), unless spoken very slowly. And to be sure it couldn't be understood, the code-talkers weren't Italians speaking the literary version of Sardinian (that may have been understood), but actual Sardinians speaking their native dialects (which, even though they are all pretty much mutually intelligible, vary greatly the pronunciation of words). |
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Stephen Maturin of the Aubrey-Maturin series does this frequently. He even carefully edits the messages before passing them along to spread misinformation in enemy lines. While his friend Jack Aubrey found the operation very dishonorable, Stephen once mentioned that he has no qualms about violating an entire mail coach if it wins them the war. | |
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