Word: coding
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...Dewey locked the letter in his files, went back to his electioneering. Though he had known before that the U.S. had cracked the Jap code, had suspected that this information cast grave doubts on Franklin Roosevelt's role before Pearl Harbor, he held his tongue. The War Department's most valuable secret was kept out of the campaign...
With this machine, built after years of trial & error, of inference and deduction, cryptographers had duplicated the decoding devices used in Tokyo. Testimony before the Pearl Harbor Committee had already shown that the machine-known in Army code as "Magic"-was in use long before Dec. 7, 1941, had given ample warning of the Jap's sneak attack-if only U.S. brass hats had been smart enough to realize it (TIME, Dec. 10). Now General Marshall continued the story of "Magic's" magic...
Uneasy Secret. So priceless a possession was Magic that the U.S. high command lived in constant fear that the Japs would discover the secret, change their code machinery, force U.S. cryptographers to start all over again...
...could be made an example of." (The FBI, fearful of looking like a Gestapo, refused.) Once a decoder was caught in Boston trying to sell the secret. Once, well-meaning agents of the Office of Strategic Services ransacked the Japanese Embassy in Lisbon, whereupon the Japs adopted a new code for military attaches. This code remained unbroken more than a year later. The worst scare of all came during the 1944 presidential campaign, when George Marshall heard that Thomas E. Dewey knew the secret and might refer to it in speeches (see below...
Publication of the letters thus gave the Germans their first knowledge that their code had been broken. It was also a breach of diplomatic confidence with the British, who had let the U.S. in on the secret on the understanding that it would be kept...