<
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/02/01/david-kahn-codebreakers-nsa-dead/>
"David Kahn, a journalist and historian who unlocked the hidden world of
cryptology in his best-selling 1967 book “The Codebreakers” and became a
preeminent scholar of signals intelligence, revered even among the keepers of
the secrets he revealed, died Jan. 23 at his home in the Bronx. He was 93.
The cause was complications from a stroke in 2015, according to his family.
Dr. Kahn was 13 and was passing by his local library in Great Neck, N.Y., when
he noticed a book called “Secret and Urgent: The Story of Codes and Ciphers” by
military historian Fletcher Pratt. The title alone “stopped me in my tracks,”
Dr. Kahn told
The Washington Post years later.
Fascinated by the intrigue contained in the book’s pages, he became an amateur
cryptologist — a person concerned with cryptography, or the making of codes,
and cryptanalysis, or the breaking of them — and maintained the interest beyond
boyhood into his career as a newspaperman.
Dr. Kahn was working for
Newsday on Long Island in 1960 when two
mathematicians employed by the National Security Agency, William H. Martin and
Bernon F. Mitchell, defected to the Soviet Union and laid bare the
communications-gathering activities of the NSA. Among other charges, they
claimed the United States had cracked the codes of 40 other countries,
including numerous allies.
Located at Fort Meade, Md., the NSA was and remains so secretive that its
acronym has long been joked to stand for “No Such Agency.” Amid the clamor
surrounding the defection, Dr. Kahn pitched a freelance magazine story to the
New York Times explaining the history of cryptology. The article became the
germ of his first and best known book.
“The Codebreakers,” billed as “the first comprehensive history of secret
communication from ancient times to the threshold of outer space,” was an
immediate sensation.
In more than 1,000 pages of prose that was both authoritative and readable, and
with no security clearance to ease his research, Dr. Kahn carried the reader
through thousands of years of history — from the age of cuneiform writing to
the Napoleonic era, through the deciphered Zimmermann telegram of World War I
and code breaking in World War II to the modern-day activities of the NSA."
Via John Young and David Farber.
RIP,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
