Monday, January 9, 2012

Another clue of German success with Purple ?

Looking around in my reports I noticed something interesting :
From TICOM I-64  "Answers by Wm. Buggisch of OKH/Chi to Questions sent by TICOM’’ , p3

3. Liaison with the Japanese 

Use of the "Verbindung" led B. promptly into along discussion of Jap systems in particular and diplomatic systems in general, but when we finally pinned him down to crypt relations he said he did not know about OKW--but had never heard of any-- and as for OKH he was sure that there had never been any Japs around in the flesh or any liaison he knew of. The previous discussion of systems got onto some interesting ground.
B. thinks Steinberg (of 209 fame) solved some Jap machine traffic which was difficult but not so hard as Enigma. B. thinks it was traffic of the Jap Military Attache. HUETTENHAIN told B. that the Japs were using Enigma in their traffic to TOKYO--or so B. remembers. Later he said Enigma was used almost 100% on all diplomatic links at the end of the war, and we checked him back and asked if he did not mean that the Germans used Enigma to TOKYO, not the Japs. He said he thought it was both, again from hearsay. HUETTENHAIN had al told B that the diplomatic traffic was Enigma with some element of the key, Stecker he thought, changed from message to message.

The Japanese may have been using the Enigma T but certainly not on all of their links. This version also lacked a steckerboard so Huettenhain’s alleged comment seems odd.

Is Buggisch’s testimony another clue of possible German success with the Purple cipher machine? Was that the machine that Steinberg solved? 

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