In the dark, p.15
In the Dark, page 15
‘What do you want? Do you expect me to call them all in and let you pick them by interview?’
‘Not at all.’ She walked over to Chen’s desk and started inspecting one of the photographs placed under the glass top, asking, ‘Are these all your colleagues?’
‘Pretty much.’
Huang Yiyi continued her inspection for a moment, then she pointed to an old comrade wearing glasses. ‘Who’s he? A cryptographer?’
‘You can’t have him,’ Chen said.
‘Why not?’
Chen gestured to me to answer, and I explained that the old comrade was not at all well, and that he could not possibly do this kind of work. In actual fact, he was schizophrenic and completely insane.
What I wasn’t expecting was that with her next question Huang Yiyi would get right to the point. ‘Is he mad?’
‘How did you know?’ I asked.
‘I guessed as much. I looked at his eyes – terribly neurotic, just one step away from madness.’
‘He used to be the very best cryptographer we had,’ I said.
‘People like that are often only one step away from genius.’
‘He was driven mad by cryptography. He was under too much stress and his mind just snapped like an over-tight violin string.’
‘Like Nash,’ she said.
‘Who?’
‘John Nash, one of the mathematicians behind game theory. He was driven mad by cryptography too.’
Chen suddenly interrupted. ‘You’re also mad.’ He paused. ‘We’re all mad.’
His words left Huang Yiyi flabbergasted.
I understood what Comrade Chen was trying to say. From start to finish he had his own perspective on the problem of having to decrypt RECOVERY. He thought that our decision to crack it was arbitrary and had not been properly thought through; that it was absolutely absurd; that we were crying for the moon; that this was mad. The previous night he had come to my room to explain his reasoning. Now he repeated it for Huang Yiyi.
‘First,’ he said, ‘as we all know, RECOVERY is one of the world’s most difficult ciphers, and it must be reckoned to be secure for at least a decade. That means that under normal circumstances no one can crack it in anything less than ten years. Why have we decided to break it? Because we’ve decided to take the initiative in the current cross-Straits tension with Taiwan. How long is this tension going to last? A year? Two years? Or will it be ten? Or twenty? I’m thinking a year or two at the most. That means that in order to be of any use, we have to crack this cipher within the shortest possible time – within the next year or two. But the thing is that we might well not even begin to make headway for years. There you are, looking all solemn. You’re mad, I tell you, completely insane; and if you don’t believe me, just wait and see …’
Comrade Chen was that kind of person – mostly he wouldn’t say much, but if he did speak it was impossible to argue with him. He didn’t beat about the bush, he didn’t try and avoid the issue, and he didn’t try to be accommodating – he would just tell it to you straight and leave everyone feeling awkward. In fact we understood his point of view perfectly, but this was a decision by our superiors and what could we do other than obey? I said that, but Comrade Chen immediately set on me again.
‘I understand that this decision came from our superiors, but we all know it’s completely stupid. There’s no need to take it so seriously, getting everybody involved and now also bringing in a mathematician specially from outside. Of course, now she’s here she’s very welcome, but if you ask my opinion, good steel should be left for use in knives, and so we ought to set her to cracking other ciphers, and just put a couple of people to work on RECOVERY, so that it looks OK to our superiors.’
Was this a suitable thing for a Bureau Chief to say? If any of our superiors had heard him, he would have been fired! I knew though that he didn’t like being in administration. The cryptography division was a vocational work unit, but even so the better you were at your job the more likely you were to be promoted into administration. He was an uncrowned king.
I had heard Chen speak like this many times, and I couldn’t be bothered to argue with him. I wasn’t expecting though that Huang Yiyi would take it seriously. She said, ‘If I understand you correctly, there is no way that we can crack RECOVERY.’
‘Not in the short term.’
‘Not necessarily.’ Huang Yiyi stepped right into the firing line as she said firmly, ‘What is a cipher other than an unusually abstruse mathematical problem? There’s nothing to be afraid of there.’
Her words transfixed both Comrade Chen and me. After a long pause, Chen replied respectfully, ‘OK. Let’s see what you can do.’
‘No, you have a part to play too.’ She turned her head to speak to me. ‘Deputy Director An, I hope that Bureau Chief Chen will join our little cryptographic working party!’ Then she walked out and did not stop no matter how much I yelled after her.
Comrade Chen was one of the founders of the cryptography division, and he had now been a Bureau Chief for more than ten years, in addition to which he was one of the deputy directors of Unit 701, though that was in fact largely honorific given that he was also the cryptography Bureau Chief. How could she expect Comrade Chen to go and work as her assistant! But when I went to discuss the matter with her she refused to back down, and insisted that she wanted Chen to take part. ‘I don’t need an assistant; I need someone to quarrel with!’ She was resolute, and spoke persuasively about the reasons why she wanted Comrade Chen to join us. ‘Neither you nor I know the first thing about how cryptography is done here, in addition to which they have never cracked a real high-level cipher, so fundamentally they don’t have a hope in hell of breaking RECOVERY. That means that if we see the way that they go about trying to crack it, we will know what to avoid.’ This put me in mind of something that Anderov used to say: that cracking codes isn’t like a duel – you need scapegoats! You let other people fall into the traps, so that you can walk round them.
I looked at her in alarm, horrified by this nasty idea. But I had no right to refuse her, given that her request was actually perfectly logical. At that moment cracking RECOVERY was our most urgent and high-priority assignment, and this was not the time to worry about what methods we used, whether against the enemy or against ourselves. That’s what cracking a cipher is like; it’s an unpleasant profession, full of darkness and danger.
Although I wasn’t entirely happy with what Huang Yiyi wanted to do, I still went to report it to Unit Director Luo. Unit Director Luo was happy to agree, and she immediately rang Comrade Chen and told him to come round. Right in front of me she ordered him to report to my office. I was expecting him to refuse, but after he had heard her out, he was silent for a bit and then made his position clear: ‘Since both you and Unit Director Luo want me to join, I must agree. Even if I didn’t want to, I would have to. But I want you to know that I don’t believe that we can crack RECOVERY. I can’t do it, and I don’t think that this expert you have brought in can do it either. She doesn’t have any respect for the way that things are done, and in my experience, people like that aren’t good cryptographers.’
I said that when she was in the United States she had cracked Soviet ciphers.
Comrade Chen said, ‘That’s just rumour. I never believe that sort of thing. Do you know why? First and foremost because people who really do decrypt ciphers are very secretive about what they do, and also because anyone who actually has cracked a cipher would never speak as light-heartedly as she does, as if a cipher is just a difficult maths problem. What is cryptography? Didn’t your supervisor Anderov say that it was like listening to the heartbeats of the dead and that therefore we have to be as emotionless and untroubled as corpses ourselves? But look at her … even though I’ve only just met her and don’t really know her at all, I can see from her eyes that she is full of hope, that she is an impulsive person. I don’t know whether all the time you spent with Anderov means you really have learnt the business, but in my opinion whether or not we crack RECOVERY is going to be down to you. That’s why I’m happy to work as your assistant and help you out.’
I could only tell him the truth. ‘I wasn’t actually studying cryptography with him – I was there for other reasons. I was just discussing the matter with Unit Director Luo and we decided to put you in charge of the cryptanalysis work.’
Comrade Chen was obviously suffering when he said, ‘Deputy Director An, this is torture! I am past fifty, don’t do this to me!’
I smiled. ‘Comrade Chen, what do you mean by torture? If we crack RECOVERY, this will be the greatest possible glory. Think of it as adding further lustre to your crown …’
Comrade Chen laughed hollowly. It was a very bitter laugh.
13
That evening while I was tidying up, Huang Yiyi knocked on the door and came in. In amongst the heaps of stuff that I had brought back from the Soviet Union, she quickly rooted out a picture of Anderov and myself. She recognized him immediately, and so the conversation naturally turned to Anderov and Sivincy. She said, ‘Anderov is an expert at cracking American ciphers, but RECOVERY was written by Sivincy so it’s going to be in the Russian style, which means that your skills are pretty useless.’
I nodded. ‘You know that Sivincy wrote a cipher called DIFFICULT CENTURY?’
‘Yes. She wrote it specially for the American military.’
‘The Americans gave Sivincy a job devising ciphers because they wanted to make it difficult for Anderov.’
‘Well, Anderov has cracked a lot of American ciphers, and they are really afraid of him. But Sivincy went to university with Anderov, and they were good friends who knew each other very well. Any cipher written by Sivincy will be designed to confuse Anderov.’
‘Right, so we can say that when the Americans first decided to employ Sivincy to write DIFFICULT CENTURY, their intention was to deliberately confuse Anderov. And only Sivincy could do that, because she is about the only person who knows his shortcomings.’
‘So we can assume that Sivincy will have hidden a lot of traps within DIFFICULT CENTURY that were specifically designed to get Anderov. So if you asked Anderov to break DIFFICULT CENTURY, he would be at a serious disadvantage, being fundamentally unable to crack the cipher.’ She glanced at me and smiled. ‘And if we asked Anderov’s student to work on it, he would fail.’
I knew that she meant me, but I was thinking about something completely different. I was silent for a moment, then I said, ‘RECOVERY is DIFFICULT CENTURY.’
She opened her eyes wide. ‘What did you just say?’
I repeated it, and then she said seriously, ‘How is that possible?’
‘It’s a fact. The American top brass were worried about the fact that Sivincy is Russian, and in the end they decided they did not dare use DIFFICULT CENTURY, so they sold it to Taiwan. The Taiwanese renamed it RECOVERY.’
She stood up. ‘Is this some kind of joke?’
I shook my head. ‘This is important. Is it likely that I would make a joke of it?’
She suddenly started shouting at me. ‘If you knew that, why on earth did you take the job? You really do have a fantastic opinion of yourself, to carry on when clearly you don’t have a hope in hell. Who do you think you are? Do you really imagine that you can just waltz in and everything will sort itself out?’
I explained to her patiently: one, I didn’t know anything about it until I got back to China. Two, the people who did know about it didn’t know the first thing about cryptography. She paced up and down the room, muttering, ‘Stupid, stupid, calling you in to help us break DIFFICULT CENTURY. They obviously don’t have a clue what they’re doing.’
I said calmly, ‘They didn’t call me in, they called you.’
‘But I’m going to need assistance, and you can’t possibly help me! This cipher is a grave dug specially for your supervisor, and if you try and help me, it’s going to be a disaster! If you’d told me this before, there’s no way I would have come with you!’
I smiled. ‘That’s why I waited until we got here before I told you. The fact is that I wasn’t really learning cryptography from Anderov. I didn’t even study maths to high-school level, so how could I even begin to?’
‘What were you doing there?’
‘Making use of my position to get information needed by cryptographers here.’
She opened her eyes wide. ‘That’s spying.’
I didn’t say anything.
She shrieked, ‘You’re a devil!’
‘And you’re an angel.’
‘You’re going to drive me to an early death.’
‘No way. I may be a devil, but I’m a devil who really appreciates you. When I’d just got back and they landed me with this, I thought the Party had made a mistake. But when I found you, I came to believe that you were the right person for the job. If they’d sent someone else, and he’d met you, he wouldn’t necessarily have given you the job, because no one else appreciates you the way I do. Perhaps that’s all thanks to Anderov. To appreciate you one needs intelligence and courage, and one needs … the experience of having lived abroad, and I have all of those …’
That evening, I couldn’t stop myself from talking a great deal to Huang Yiyi, as one intelligent person to another, as one fellow sufferer to another. I told her many of my secrets, but I think that she also understood that she was confronted with a difficult task. I hoped that the heavy burden that had been placed upon her would make her more serious, would worry her, would make her concentrate her energies on her cryptography work. But the following morning at the first meeting of the cryptanalysis group, she wasn’t there. We waited a while, and then since she didn’t turn up, in the end we just had to have the meeting without her.
The most important aim of this meeting was to sort out lines of communication between our personnel and apportion responsibility: Chen Erhu became the deputy head of our working group and head of the cryptanalysis section, with Comrade Yang to assist him; Huang Yiyi was also allocated an assistant, a young woman called Comrade Zha. Apart from that we all got to share a secretary, Comrade Fei, who would also play the role of office manager, making sure that the bosses’ decisions were reported to the workforce and the workforce’s results got passed up: he would have responsibility for the day-to-day running of our working group. These were all people I had hand-picked from different government organizations, and they shared a high level of revolutionary consciousness, a strong professional attitude to their work, and an uncomplicated family background. This was particularly true of Comrade Zha, who was, like me, a revolutionary orphan, who had grown up in Unit 701. She was a very simple and naïve young woman but also very committed. She seemed to me to be the very best person to act as Huang Yiyi’s assistant.
After the meeting was over, since Huang Yiyi still hadn’t come to work, I sent Comrade Zha to look for her and find out what she was up to. Well, Comrade Zha found that she had become enamoured of a squirrel and had run off into the forest to play with it! When Comrade Zha dragged her back, I caught sight of her through the window carrying a large red Russian-style backpack, looking from left to right as she walked along the road, for all the world as if she were a tourist admiring the scenery. I couldn’t stop myself from getting angry. When she came in I started to criticize her. ‘You’re coming to work just as everyone else is getting ready to leave. This really is too late!’
She said that she was busy and that she had asked me for the day off, having slipped the note under my door.
I said, ‘In future if you want the day off, let Comrade Zha know: she is your assistant.’
When she heard that little Comrade Zha was a revolutionary orphan, she said crossly, ‘Why is it that everyone I meet nowadays is a revolutionary orphan – is it because you think I am not revolutionary enough? So you send these people to instruct and reform me. But I am not going to change – do you understand that?’
‘No one is going to reform anyone else,’ I said, ‘but you shouldn’t go out of your way to make other people unhappy. Today was the first meeting of our working group and you didn’t turn up. Don’t do that again.’
‘The same applies to you. When you get home, have a look on the doorstep – you never know, there might be a letter from me requesting the day off …’
I glared at her. ‘Clearly, I’m going to have to take you through the whole thing step by step again, so that you understand exactly who I am and what you are here to do.’
She laughed. ‘Don’t be cross. I’m sorry. I know. I really wasn’t able to attend this morning because I didn’t get to sleep until after four in the morning, because I was working on this.’ She took out a couple of pages and gave them to me.
I took them and asked, ‘What is this?’
‘It’s a letter I’ve written to Anderov in your name. Of course there are many things that I haven’t got right – you need to rewrite it so that it sounds like you – but the important things are there. I’m hoping you can get some personal information about Sivincy from Anderov – for example, the mathematician that she most admires, her habits, her family background, her marriage, and so on. None of that information is going to hurt our efforts to crack RECOVERY.’
‘Isn’t sending a letter a bit rash?’
‘Well, can you think of a better way? If you can, we’ll go for that.’
I put the letter in a drawer, and said coldly, ‘I’ll think about it. Right now, you’re coming with me.’ I got up to go, and deliberately did not tell her where we were going.
She ran after me and asked, ‘Where are you taking me?’
‘You’ll find out when we get there.’
I took her to Comrade Jin’s domain, the analysis room. The job of an analyst is to look for the cribs in every secret message, to see whether they can pick out any words or phrases. Some people called their work ‘autopsying a corpse’, because a radio intercept that has not yet been analysed is no different from a corpse, and what they were trying to do was in fact just the same as an autopsy – carrying out dissection and analysis of the body. To use Anderov’s words: the connection between analysis and cryptography is the same as that between the words and the text. If you want to write a text the first thing is that you need to know enough words. The analysts teach you the words, the cryptographers instruct you in the meaning. So you can understand how important analysis is to the work of cryptography.
