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Informational essay about the navajo code talkers
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Espionage was vital in the war effort of both the allied and axis powers during World War II. Espionage can take many different forms. Deception, leaking of false information, coding and encryption of information, sabotage, and sending spies in to gather intelligence are all were all used during the war and were all effective. Many of the turning points for the allied forces occurred due to various forms of espionage and deception. Depending on which side of the fence you're sitting on, espionage was either a blessing or a curse. Coding and encryption were two very important elements in the use of espionage. Enigmas were cipher machines that were based mainly on a wired code wheel. The wired code wheel, known more commonly as a rotor, would be shaped similar to a hockey puck made of non-conductive material, such as rubber, and have two sides, an input plate and an output plate and around the circumference are 26 evenly spaced electrical contacts. The 26 contacts on the input plate would be connected by wired through the body of the rotor to the 26 contacts on the output plate. An alphabet ring would then be placed around the rotors 26 contacts therefore creating a cipher alphabet. The sender would type the message in plaintext (not encrypted) and the letters would be illuminated on a glass screen. With the press of each typewriter key the rotor would shift 1/26 of a revolution giving each letter a different encryption each time, which made the code so difficult to crack. Due to the complexity of the code the enigma became very useful for the Germans for radioing messages to u-boats. The cipher was finally broken when the British were able to capture some key documents from a German warship. Navajo code talking became an extremely useful tool in the Marines war effort. In the beginning of the war Philip Johnston came forth and suggested an unbreakable code to the marines; that code was Navajo. Philip Johnston, WWI veteran, son of a missionary to the Navajos, who spoke the language fluently, suggested that it met all of the requirements. It was useful because it was an extremely complex unwritten language mostly spoken by the Navajos of the southwest and very few others. The marines enlisted 540 Navajos, of which an estimated 375-420 became code talkers, and the rest in other capacities. Navajo code talking took part in all of the marine's assaults from 1942-45.
The reason why these codes were unable to be cracked was the language was never used before in war. Readers can tell that the japanese tried to crack it with a prisoner who was Navajo but even he could not crack it. In the text, it states that each message the Code Talkers write
of young Navajo men were enlisted under a TOP SECRET project to train them as Marine
Although this idea had been successfully implemented during World War I using the Choctaw Indian's language, history generally credits Philip Johnston for the idea to use Navajos to transmit code across enemy lines. Philip recognized that people brought up without hearing Navajo spoken had no chance at all to decipher this unwritten, strangely syntactical, and guttural language (Navajo). Fortunately, Johnston was capable of developing this idea because his missionary father had raised him on the Navajo reservation. As a child, Johnston learned the Navajo language as he grew up along side his many Navajo friends (Lagerquist 19). With this knowledge of the language, Johnston was able to expand upon the idea of Native Americans transmitting messages in their own language in order to fool enemies who were monitoring transmissions. Not only did the Code Talkers transmit messages in Navajo, but the messages were also spoken in a code that Navajos themselves could not understand (Paul 7).
Back then, spying was hardly the same as it is today, with all of our high-tech gadgets and well-organised secret agent groups. However, most of the things that spies do today were done in the nineteenth century just as effectively. On thing that spies did was send messages, which were usually about the enemy's plans and movements, their troop size, their supplies, and the placement or strength of their forts. Many used coded messages with words that stood for different words. Some had different symbols for letters and numbers. Some spies even used inivisible ink. The spies also had ways of concealing the messages that they had to deliver. Messages were often hidden in articles of clothing. People had to write on silk, that was then sewn into clothing, and spies could also hide information in large metal buttons. Women's clothing was ideal for hiding things in. Sometimes, they would even hide people under their hoop skirts!
After World War II American intelligence had the need to be transformed. The inexperience along with bureaucracy and poor coordination among American intelligence officers obligated the United States intelligence community to change dramatically in order to confront the new challenges that emerged after the end of WWII. From Early America through WWI the intelligence system of the United States of America was involved in operations in which they had to construct intelligence systems virtually from scratch (Andrew 1995). Human intelligence was already developed, but with certain limitations and other intelligence disciplines were underdeveloped and very seldom sophisticated. After WWI America recessed and settled in a period of peace. The United States faced no threat to its security from its neighbors, from powers outside of the Western Hemisphere (Lowenthal 2006). That caused a visible absence of intelligence activities, leaving America out of sight for any international conflicts; the United States of America focused and limited its activities beyond its own borders. In later years the Japanese attack to Pearl Harbor, America rushed to reactivate their military forces, moving from a passive country to full participation into a another international conflict; WWII. As a consequence, the United States engaged in activities that improved its intelligence system increasing its capabilities needed to address seriously the future threats of the Cold War.
During the first World War, the US military saw great benefits in relying on the Choctaw and Comanche languages to relay important messages in the battlefield (Bixler 37). When World War II began, it was the idea of an anglo-american called Philip Johnston who suggested to once again use Native American languages to send important messages during the war (Bixler 39). Philip Johnston was a World War I veteran who was born in 1892 to a missionary who lived in the Navajo Reservation. Growing up, Johnston was able to become a fluent speaker in the Navajo language and during World War II, he alongside 4 other Navajo Indians were the first to help develop the Navajo language as code for the war (Bixler 39). This turned out to be a great idea because according to a book title “Navajo Code Talkers” by Nathan Aaseng, in the year of 1940, there were “fewer than 30 people outside the Navajo tribe that knew their language (19). In addition, during the years prior to the start of WWII, Germany had sent out German students to study various Native American tribes, but they failed to connect and penetrate the Navajo tribe during those years(Aaseng 19). Thanks to this, the Navajo code talkers became one of the most well known and effective code units during and beyond the end of WWII. It is estimated that as many as 3,600 Navajo tribe members served overall during the years of WWII (Aaseng 10). Out of those 3,600 members, about 540 of them enlisted in the marine corps and about 420 became qualified as Navajo Code Talkers (Paul 117). These Code Talkers played a huge role in many of the biggest battles against Japan in the Pacific arena. A quote from communications officer Major Howard M. Conner of the fifth Marine Division states that if “Were it not for the Navajo, the Marines would have never taken Iwo Jima”(Davis
“There is one evil I dread, and that is, their spies. I could wish therefore the most attentive watch be kept… I wish a dozen or more honest sensible and diligent men, were employed… in order to question, cross-question, etc., all such persons as are unknown, and cannot give an account of themselves in a straight and satisfactory manner… I think it a matter of importance to prevent these [Tory spies] from obtaining intelligence of our situation. ” – George Washington
Over the year and a half between Pearl Harbor and Midway the United States made headway with various technological and military advantages. One of the most important of which was the code breaking efforts of Commander Joseph J. Rochefort Jr. “Most of the U.S’s information [on Japan] came from Rochefort. R...
The RSA encryption is related to the cipher of Julius Caesar (1300s) that shifts three letters to encode messages. The cipher of Julius Caesar was used in war to send messages securely. Here is how Caesar encodes his message using the cipher. First Caesar assigned A through Z to 0 through 25. For instance A is zero. Second, add three to each numbers.
Aldrich Ames was one of the most notorious spys in United States history, single handily crippling the United States spy network in the Soviet Union, and compromising hundreds of Intelligence Operations around the world. Ames’ impact on the national security of the United States was devastating and the ramifications of his actions can still be felt today in the Intelligence Community. This paper will provide details into the background and the events surrounding Ames’ espionage and subsequent arrest for treason.
...op a Navajo code. The Navajo language seemed to be the perfect option as a code because it is not written and very few people who aren’t of Navajo origin can speak it. However, the Marine Corps took the code to the next level and made it virtually unbreakable by further encoding the language with word substitution. During the course of the war, about 400 Navajos participated in the code talker program. The navajo helped end the second world war.
...that had helped the United States to be one of the greatest counties that it is today. Within the agency, there was no communications where they kept information from each other. The CIA agency had no idea what they were doing in regards to central intelligence and they were compromised where the enemies knew about the attack before the attack was fully implemented. These examples prove that some leaders had some positive outcomes for the United States, but the agency from within could not stay united as well as keeping communications about what was going on in the world. I agree with Tim Weiner’s thesis that the United States is one of the greatest countries in the world, but we cannot seem to create a great and efficient spy service to benefit the United States.
The Central Intelligence Agency is an agency of federal government that gathers information on foreign military, economic and political activities. It also conducts covert political operations against governments to promote national security. The Central Intelligence Agency became incredibly active during the Cold War, which was mostly an intelligence war. During the years 1961 and 1963, the Central Intelligence Agency took many actions in attempt to fight communism and resolve the Cold War under Kennedy’s presidency.
Espionage has always been a subject that has captured the thoughts and imaginations of many people. The idea of the glamorous life of espionage agents and spies with grand parties, high tech gadgets, and world destroying villains have led to the belief that spies live a life of adventure and almost science fiction. Real agents live far from that life in reality. Many live in constant fear of imprisonment or execution. The facts and fiction of espionage have become distorted overtime.
Cryptography has been used for thousands of years for storing hidden messages in writing (Davies, 1997). Cryptography itself is part of cryptology, which also includes cryptanalysis. Cryptanalysis involves the attempt to obtain the original message from an encrypted message, but without determining the algorithms or knowing the keys that created the original encrypted message. Cryptography, which is the topic of this paper, is the actual development of the encrypted messages, and using codes to create secure communication of information (Whitman & Mattord, 2011).