The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing

Kahn, David

ISBN 10: 0025604600 / ISBN 13: 9780025604605

Published by The Macmillan Co., 1967

About this Item

[One of the Best Books on Cryptology, which the US Government attempted to suppress] Hardcover and dust jacket. Good binding and cover. Clean, unmarked pages. Minor shelf wear. Kahn's groundbreaking work in crytology was met with significant resistance from the national security community and NSA. A committee of the United States Intelligence Board concluded that the book was "a possibly valuable support to foreign COMSEC authorities" and recommended "further low-key actions as possible, but short of legal action, to discourage Mr. Kahn or his prospective publishers". Macmillan handed over the Kahn's manuscript to the government for review without Kahn's permission in 1966. Kahn and Macmillan eventually agreed to remove some material from the manuscript, particularly concerning the relationship between the NSA and its counterpart in the United Kingdom, GCHQ. Seller Inventory # 2504070126

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing

Publisher: The Macmillan Co.

Publication Date: 1967

Binding: hardcover

Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis:

The magnificent, unrivaled history of codes and ciphers -- how they're made, how they're broken, and the many and fascinating roles they've played since the dawn of civilization in war, business, diplomacy, and espionage -- updated with a new chapter on computer cryptography and the Ultra secret.
Man has created codes to keep secrets and has broken codes to learn those secrets since the time of the Pharaohs. For 4,000 years, fierce battles have been waged between codemakers and codebreakers, and the story of these battles is civilization's secret history, the hidden account of how wars were won and lost, diplomatic intrigues foiled, business secrets stolen, governments ruined, computers hacked. From the XYZ Affair to the Dreyfus Affair, from the Gallic War to the Persian Gulf, from Druidic runes and the kaballah to outer space, from the Zimmermann telegram to Enigma to the Manhattan Project, codebreaking has shaped the course of human events to an extent beyond any easy reckoning. Once a government monopoly, cryptology today touches everybody. It secures the Internet, keeps e-mail private, maintains the integrity of cash machine transactions, and scrambles TV signals on unpaid-for channels. David Kahn's "The Codebreakers" takes the measure of what codes and codebreaking have meant in human history in a single comprehensive account, astonishing in its scope and enthralling in its execution. Hailed upon first publication as a book likely to become the definitive work of its kind, "The Codebreakers" has more than lived up to that prediction: it remains unsurpassed. With a brilliant new chapter that makes use of previously classified documents to bring the book thoroughly up to date, and to explore the myriad ways computer codes and their hackers are changing all of our lives, "The Codebreakers" is the skeleton key to a thousand thrilling true stories of intrigue, mystery, and adventure. It is a masterpiece of the historian's art.

About the Author:

David Kahn, a recently visiting historian at the National Security Agency, is the world's leading expert on the history of cryptology, and the author of "Hitler's Spies, Seizing the Enigma, " and "Kahn on Codes, " as well as articles in numerous popular and technical journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Modern History from Oxford. An editor at "Newsday, " he lives in Great Neck, New York.