Chapter Fifteen: Mountain City Spy Shadow (Minor Revision)
Here is the translation:
In front of Herbert Yardley's desk were several sheets of telegram paper, with some numbers and symbols scribbled on them, all drawn by Yardley himself. The founder of the American military intelligence agency (the predecessor to today's National Security Agency) and the "American Black Chamber" (responsible for deciphering encrypted information obtained by the intelligence department), who had been in China for two years, worked diligently every day until very late. After arriving in China, Yardley felt even more deeply the suffering under the Japanese military's iron heel, a feeling that was far from being able to be understood just by reading intelligence reports and newspapers. This made him feel that his original decision was absolutely correct. Obviously, the Chinese people urgently needed to establish their own code-breaking team, and he had been studying Japanese codes for over a decade, successfully cracking key Japanese codes multiple times. After the conservative American politician ** took office as Secretary of State, he severely criticized the "American Black Chamber" plan, and in this situation, Yardley expressed his willingness to "lend a helping hand" to the Chinese people to Military Attaché Xiao Bo at the Chinese Embassy in Washington, which was happily accepted by the Chinese government.
The more than 30 students studying in Japan who were originally arranged by the Military Commission have already been able to take on their own assistant work very well. Especially one of them, a young man named Lu Ya, is particularly talented in code-breaking and has made extremely rapid progress, already possessing the ability to stand alone. Even recently deciphered codes, some of which were independently completed by him.
Since 1939, the Japanese army has been bombing Chongqing multiple times. Before each bombing, their cryptanalysis group would always intercept some strange telegram messages. From January 12th to 15th, the Adley group intercepted eight encrypted telegrams at 6 am, noon, and 6 pm respectively. The first two groups of numbers followed the same pattern as before, but most of the third group of codes were "459", except for the sixth telegram which had a third group code of "401". What did this mean? Suddenly, the date of interception below "401" flashed into Adley's eyes. This code was intercepted at noon that day, when the foggy Chongqing city suddenly cleared up. In the afternoon, 27 Japanese bombers were dispatched, killing and injuring over 200 civilians. Adley had an epiphany - yes, "459" must represent bad weather, while "401" notifies the other side: it's clear to bomb. The code was finally cracked!
The password was deciphered, but Adley didn't feel relieved. If the Japanese spy wasn't caught, the Japanese military might change the password again, and the time spent deciphering it would cause more casualties. In the next two months, Adley's team intercepted three encrypted telegrams and used a direction finder to locate the source of the transmissions. Soon, searchers captured a Japanese spy disguised as a local in the southern suburbs of Chongqing. This person had recently been smuggled into the area by a reconnaissance plane and was responsible for sending weather password telegrams to the Japanese naval airbase in Hankou. Adley wanted to let the spy continue sending telegrams at fixed times every day to avoid the Japanese discovering that their spy had been captured and changing their password. However, the Japanese spy was secretly executed by the Nationalist intelligence department. In this situation, Adley and his team had to send fake telegrams to the Japanese military themselves, using false information to delay their bombing campaign.
However, it was later discovered that the weather intelligence was only one of the bases for the Japanese bombing, and the bombing continued. The decryption group intercepted telegrams written in a new, more complex and difficult-to-decipher password. Based on this, Adley determined that "the big fish has not been caught yet", and the Japanese army may launch a new round of air raids. But before he could report this intelligence, at 9:00 am on May 3, 1939, 45 Type 96 land-based attack aircraft of the Japanese Navy Aviation Corps took off from Hankou Airport and flew straight to Chongqing. According to investigations and statistics, on May 3, Japanese planes dropped over 100 bombs, killing and injuring more than 1,000 civilians. What Adley did not expect was that the next day, more than 20 Japanese bombers attacked the urban area of Chongqing again, with this bombing killing and injuring more than 5,000 people. This is the famous "May 3" and "May 4" bombing in Chongqing's history. The "May 3" and "May 4" bombing cases swallowed up the lives of 6,000 civilians in Chongqing. Japanese planes continuously carpet-bombed Chongqing for two days, with dead bodies piled up in the rubble, many people died together with their families, and the entire city of Chongqing instantly became a hell on earth.
The cryptanalysis team had already grasped some basic coding rules of the Japanese military. Through analysis of intercepted Japanese military encrypted telegrams, Yardley discovered that to increase transmission speed, the Japanese replaced 10 digits with 10 letters from the 48-letter Japanese alphabet for telegram encoding. After repeated deliberation and argument, Yardley deciphered the meanings of identical numbers appearing at very high frequencies in the telegrams, such as "027" representing Chongqing, "248" representing noon, and "231" being 6 am.
However, these rules seem to be ineffective in the new cipher, which puts the decoding work in a dilemma. The intercepted ciphers are all 4-digit groups, such as: 1349, 5727, 7234, and there is no significant change. Not only that, but the intercepted cipher telegrams also have another characteristic: each telegram starts with a group of 5 English letters: miftolofed, followed by numbers. What do these 5 different letters represent? Adley believes that if he can decipher these letters, he will be able to find a way to decipher the main text. Adley wrote down the deciphered letters in sequence and rearranged them, which surprised him, and three words appeared: her, light, grain. But where did these words come from, and what do they mean? A cipher with the phrase "hesaid (he said)" triggered Adley's thinking: such phrases that trigger dialogue are most commonly found in novels. Under Luyang's reminder, Adley believed that the underlying text of the cipher might be an English novel, and within its first 100 pages, there must be three consecutive pages whose first word is her, light, and grain respectively. But how can he find this book? If he can find it, perhaps he can follow the trail to find the spy hiding behind the scenes.
At this time, the Intelligence Division of the Air Force Headquarters provided an important clue. The spy was a battalion commander of a certain anti-aircraft artillery regiment, nicknamed "One-armed Bandit". And the codebook was the famous novel "The Good Earth" by American writer Pearl S. Buck. What the hell! How did the Air Force Intelligence Division know that we were deciphering the telegram? And how did they know it was the "One-armed Bandit"? The key is that this "One-armed Bandit" was quite familiar with Adley, and the two had just become good friends at a foreign-owned teahouse not long ago. One-armed Bandit could speak fluent English, and he and Adley were close friends, sometimes even taking Adley to his artillery unit for visits during air raids. No wonder when Adley asked why the anti-aircraft guns never hit their targets, "One-armed Bandit" just smiled mysteriously.
Yadeli didn't let go of this clue, and it seemed easy to verify. He quickly found a copy of "The Good Earth" and soon verified that this book was indeed the basis for the password, as the first word on pages 17, 18, and 19 were "her", "light", and "grain". Pearl S. Buck wrote "The Good Earth" with Chinese social life as its background, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature for it, earning her global fame. However, she would never have imagined that someone would use this book to create a bizarre password for bombing Chongqing.
According to this password, Yadeli quickly deciphered some of the previously intercepted information, and the decryption team was shocked. Through analysis of the telegram, "One-armed Great Thief" was a mole planted by Wang Jingwei in Chongqing, who reported to Wang Jingwei every day through a liaison officer hiding in Shanghai. What shocked the decoders even more was that some encrypted telegrams were sent to Chiang Kai-shek's artillery advisor, Weibei, and this artillery advisor had been bought out as a spy by the Japanese army several years ago. After receiving the encrypted telegram from "One-armed Great Thief", Weibei would forward it to the Japanese air raid unit, and the main content of the encrypted telegram was that the Japanese bombers should maintain an altitude above 12,000 feet, because the maximum range of the Nationalist Party's anti-aircraft guns was only 10,000 feet. This is the main reason why the anti-aircraft guns could not hit the Japanese planes during the bombing.
The subsequent events did not require the participation of the decoding group. The action team of the Military Bureau persuaded Xu Zhen, the girlfriend of "One-Armed Great Thief", to secretly capture "One-Armed Great Thief" with her help, and also captured Heeran Weyna, Chiang Kai-shek's German advisor. Under the torture of the Military Bureau, the two successively confessed other members of the spy network, which dealt a heavy blow to the Japanese spy network in Chongqing.
While the cryptanalysis team in Yardley was celebrating their victory, Wei Daming, the head of the Military Bureau's cryptography unit, conveyed Dai Li's order to establish a joint "Chinese Cryptography Room" with the Air Force General Headquarters Intelligence Department. As for himself, Yardley felt that it didn't matter where he worked as long as he could do what he liked; if he wasn't happy, he would return home - after all, he was already 50 years old and had saved enough money to spend his remaining years in comfort.
But He Juncai would not let go of this talent in the password world. When he learned about Adley's situation, he quickly linked him to the book "Chinese Cryptography: Spy Sea Adventure" and personally brought the old man and his proud student Lu Ya to the floating base. The two were appointed as the main and deputy heads of Chinese cryptography.
When Adley saw the amazing exterior of the floating base and the rapid decoding ability of the central computer, he immediately made a decision and agreed to stay on the floating base for five years, officially becoming a member of the floating base. He Juncai gave them two tasks: one was to decipher the captured passwords, currently mainly targeting the Japanese military's passwords, and later including those of the Soviet Union, Germany and other countries; the second was to develop their own air force password, requiring strong confidentiality, preferably using mechanical calculation methods to speed up encoding and decoding.
Thus, the most mysterious department in Chinese history - "Chinese Crypt" was established. Many classic battles in later generations were won with its assistance, and the password system it established has never been deciphered. The "Chinese Crypt" became the world's top password cracking and design team.
There is a task in front of them, "Lone Armed Thief" and other Japanese spies will get the punishment they deserve, but in addition to this, He Juncai hopes to make full use of the coding rules that have been mastered at present, send a set of fake secret telegrams to the Japanese army, lure the Japanese army to attack, and annihilate them with superior forces.
Yadeli successfully completed the first task of the Chinese secret room, simulating a Japanese spy sending out a telegram saying "On the night of the 17th, the Chinese air force suffered heavy losses, with only 5 planes able to take off again, lacking ammunition, fuel and personnel, suggesting focused bombing." In the following days, the Japanese army indeed sent reconnaissance planes to investigate various airports in Chongqing. He Juncai ordered the Fourth Squadron and the Soviet Volunteer Air Force to hide their planes and urgently create some mock damaged plane models as well as parts of real plane wreckage on the airport grounds. With the radar detection advantage of the floating air base, they now had enough warning time and didn't have to worry about a surprise attack by the Japanese army.
The Japanese reconnaissance plane made several high-altitude reconnaissance flights before cautiously entering low-altitude reconnaissance, and found that none of the airports had fighter planes taking off to drive them away. The intelligence was then reported to Lieutenant General Yamaguchi in Hankou.
"Yo, it seems that the air commander of the 96th Attack Squadron, which took off on the 17th, didn't lie. Although we lost more than 30 bombers, the Chinese Air Force's fighters were almost completely destroyed, and China's skies no longer have the ability to defend themselves. This is a great opportunity to heavily damage Chongqing, and we may be able to complete the '101st Operation' ahead of schedule." The intelligence from spies, reconnaissance results from scout planes, and exaggerated claims of success by bomber commanders who were trying to cover up their own failures all combined to completely mislead Lieutenant General Yamaguchi's judgment. Yamaguchi immediately ordered all attack aircraft from the 1st and 2nd Combined Air Fleets to prepare for battle, and through General Kinoshita, strictly ordered the Army Aviation in Yun Cheng to prepare for battle, and they must take off together tomorrow.
