Why the name “Enigma Bureau”?
“Bombe” machine recreation at Bletchley Park, UK
It’s a question I often get: What’s the meaning behind the name Enigma Bureau?
Given that what I do is help companies piece together disparate pieces of data to form a coherent picture and plan, I liked the idea that Enigma Bureau implies “Office of solving difficult problems”. Shouldn’t all companies have an office focused on that?
Cracking the Enigma code
Enigma machine on display at Bletchley Park, UK
Beyond its generic meaning, “Enigma” has a more personal background for me. When I was a child growing up in England, I was captivated by the cracking of the Enigma machine codes used by the Germans (and other Axis countries) to communicate during World War II.
When I first became aware of the topic, very little was known about how this code-breaking was actually accomplished. But much more has come to light in recent decades as files were gradually declassified and people who worked on it became more open to talk about their efforts.
I’m not sure what fired my imagination so much about it at the time, but it’s not an exaggeration to say that this effort was crucial to the Allies winning the war, and dramatically shortening the conflict, saving untold thousands of lives.
There’s a myth* that it wasn’t until mechanization or the world’s first proto-computer (code-named Colossus) sped up the process that Enigma codes were broken. That’s not true. In fact, Enigma machines had been in use years before the war and were already being broken then, albeit to a limited degree.
Cracking Enigma codes was first done by hand, building on pioneering and brilliant work by Polish cryptographers prior to the war. It was only later on that the development of “bombe” machines by Alan Turing and others vastly sped up the iterative key-testing process (see the video at the top for what one looks like in action).
A top secret operation based at Bletchley Park outside London starting in 1938 was tasked with cracking the Enigma codes. Only a few people in government and military circles knew the true source of the “Ultra” intelligence that emerged daily. Bletchley is now a museum and I visited there in 2022. It’s a fascinating place, well worth it if you’re in the area, and I recommend getting one of the guided tours. They also have an excellent podcast if you want to deep-dive on details.
The code-breaking took a long time to do by hand. Which is not surprising when you consider that there were 158 quintillion permutations (158 followed by 30 zeros) to the Enigma machine — which is far more than the number of seconds since the Big Bang. And the codes changed every day, so you had to do it all over again. But things moved faster over time through the use of various clever tricks, a lot of tedious effort (mostly by young women at Bletchley), the development of bombes and similar machines, and people sacrificing their lives to steal code books.
By the time D-Day rolled around in 1944, it’s fair to say that the Allies knew more about where all the German forces were in Europe than the German commanders themselves did, so effectively were Enigma communications being broken, almost in real time.
I haven’t even scratched the surface of all that went on at Bletchley — it’s a rich topic with many layers, and I’ve been reading a lot about it in recent years.
But that’s the back-story of “Enigma”. Plus, “Enigma” is just a cool word 😄.
* Such as propagated in the movie The Imitation Game, which manages to get virtually everything wrong about the code breaking at Bletchley Park.
Paper-based Enigma code-breaking
Bletchley Park today
