Read the excerpt from The Dark Game by Paul Janeczko.
Janeczko included a quotation in the passage to
be
show the public support for government efforts.
illustrate the enthusiasm of German spies.
O establish the competency of British code breakers.
o prove the historical significance of an event.
The first mistake of German intelligence was the error
of arrogance, believing that the British were not up to
the challenge of deciphering their messages. Another
mistake they made was sending duplicates and even
triplicates of some of their messages, with each one
using a different cipher key. This ill-advised practice
meant that the code breakers had a couple of different
versions of the same message, giving them a much
better chance of cracking the cipher. The men of Room
40 were, in the words of one historian, "reading
Berlin's messages more quickly and correctly than the
German recipients." This group of cryptography
amateurs, who were generally recruited from college
faculties, was able to achieve its success with
"ingenuity, endless patience, and sparks of inspired
guessing."