A glimpse at war in a pre-digital age

I think this is a pretty cool story about codes and code breaking:

German spies hid secret messages in drawings of models wearing the latest fashions in an attempt to outwit Allied censors during World War Two, according to British security service files released on Monday.

Nazi agents relayed sensitive military information using the dots and dashes of Morse code incorporated in the drawings.

They posted the letters to their handlers, hoping that counter-espionage experts would be fooled by the seemingly innocent pictures.

But British secret service officials were aware of the ruse and issued censors with a code-breaking guide to intercept them.

The book — part of a batch of British secret service files made public for the first time — included an example of a code hidden in a drawing of three young models.

“Heavy reinforcements for the enemy expected hourly,” reads a message disguised as a decorative pattern in the stitching of their gowns, hats and blouses.

The files reveal other ingenious ways spies tried to send coded notes through the post.

***

The capture of two German agents in 1942 uncovered two such codes which British intelligence had repeatedly failed to crack, the declassified files reveal.

Britain’s wartime spy chief David Petrie described the failure as “somewhat disturbing.”

The code was used in a letter from “Hubert” to “Aunt Janet” to conceal the message: “14 Boeing Fortresses arrived yesterday in Hendon (London). Pilots expect to raid Kiel (Germany).”

As the war went on, counter-espionage officials developed ways of spotting suspicious letters.

You do realize that, nowadays, the Times, upon learning that our allies had broken a code, would immediately have spread the story over the front page, no doubt with stories of how the Allies had tortured the captured German agents by making them watch Three Stooges movies over and over again in an utterly inhumane way; how the Germans were forced to wage war against us as a result of their victimization under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles; how our soldiers were killing too many Japanese, the German’s fellow Axis members, which further reinforced German hatred; and about the fact that none of this would have happened if we’d just talked to the Germans and reached a cease fire (sort of like in the Sudetenland.)

I should note one bizarre thing about the online report on this story:  it’s illustrated by a fashion page from WWI, not WWII.  I assume that the picture, not the story, is in error.