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The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet Hardcover – December 5, 1996

by David Kahn (Author)

84 customer reviews

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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.

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"Few false ideas have more firmly gripped the minds of so many intelligent men than the one that, if they just tried, they could invent a cipher that no one could break," writes David Kahn in this massive (almost 1,200 pages) volume. Most of The Codebreakers focuses on the 20th century, especially World War II. But its reach is long. Kahn traces cryptology's origins to the advent of writing. It seems that as soon as people learned how to record their thoughts, they tried to figure out ways of keeping them hidden. Kahn covers everything from the theory of ciphering to the search for "messages" from outer space. He concludes with a few thoughts about encryption on the Internet.

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The Washington Post Kahn has produced a tour de force...The volume is an anthology of a hundred detective stories, one more ingenious than the last, and all real, central to the fate of armies and kingdoms....Magnificent.

The Christian Science Monitor A literary blockbuster...for many evening of gripping reading, no better choice can be made than this book.

Time Perhaps the best and most complete account of cryptography yet published.

The New York Times Book Review A notable achievement...Mr. Kahn has presented the specialist and the general public with a lavishly comprehensive introduction to a subject of basic significance for both.

Prepublication National Security Agency Evaluation, now declassified The book in its entirelty constitutes the most publicly revealing picture that has ever been presented of U.S. Sigint activities and the agencies engaged in this field.

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Product details

Hardcover: 1200 pages
Publisher: Scribner; Rev Sub edition (December 5, 1996)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0684831309
ISBN-13: 978-0684831305
Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 2.6 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 3.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 84 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #201,454 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #29 in Books > Business & Money > Skills > Secretarial Aids & Training
- #330 in Books > History > Military > Intelligence & Espionage
- #849 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Linguistics

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Vagabond of Letters

987) this would better be entitled 'A History of Cryptographers and Codebreakers to ...

April 23, 2018

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A definitive history of pre-computer cryptography (nothing newer than the Enigma is covered, but the 'deciphering' of lost languages is) which has no theory or practice - it is history of the people and events alone. Writing very dry, very out of date, and very overpriced (which might have been justified when the existence of anything more advanced than a book code was classified and there was a dearth of information, but is unjustifiable today). It's only the history of codebreaking organisations: no actual cryptography more advanced than the Caesar cipher is discussed, and the work is only through 1945 - pre-digital, pre-Feistel, and mostly pre-information theory. 'The Code Book' has twice the information in half the space for a fifth of the price.

The most interesting part of this book was the discussion of the endlessly fascinating Voynich manuscript: this book has the most information on it I've ever seen in one place, including histories of early attempts at deciphering or decryption through the 1940s. If the VM is an interest to you, the book is a good source for the data aforementioned. The recent book 'The Voynich Manuscript' ($50, Yale: photostat of the VM and accompanying essays) edited by Clemens brings it up to date and duplicates some, but not all, of the information in the Codebreakers.

If you're looking for something about (1) actual cryptography and not just the history of people who did it and/or (2) anything after 1945, this is not the source you're looking for.

Tarnished additionally by entire paragraphs being sprinkled through the work for no other purpose than to impugn the Bible as 'com[ing] from the merely human minds of a pagan civilization' (p. 914) which 'held the world in bondage to superstition' (p. 913) as long as people believed it, a view which was 'disproved by the discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh' (p. 914), followed by a list of half a dozen 'plagiarisms' from that work in the Bible, to innumerable other, similar digs, including a discourse on communication with space aliens (according to the author, unfamiliar with Fermi, they're DEFINITELY out there) which have no place in an ostensibly scholarly work on a completely unrelated subject.

Minus one star for both of the above, and dated and becoming more so (nothing on modern ciphers or their inventors, except for a brief mention of Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman in one sentence on p. 987) this would better be entitled 'A History of Cryptographers and Codebreakers to 1959'.

Three stars. Two if you're interested in the cryptography or modern ciphers. Read Schneier, 'Applied Cryptography', Ferguson, 'Cryptographic Engineering', or Anderson, 'Security Engineering' instead.

Singh's 'The Code Book' is much more recent history which gives computers more than a four-page appendix if you can do without the tedious, 70 pages of detail regarding the precise organizations and reorganizations of the eleven German intelligence divisions from 1933-1945. But due to that detail, this book is the exhaustive history of codebreaking organizations (I repeat there is /nothing/ on cryptography proper in this book) from the dawn of history to the end of WWII, and thus I can't award it 1 star.

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Metallurgist

The bible for those interested in the history of codebreaking

May 10, 2016

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Note - The version I am reviewing is the 1996 revised and updated version. There is a 1967 edition and an abridged paperback version.

This book is the bible for those interested in the history of codebreaking. It is comprehensive going back 3000 years. The book is comprised of essays covering the subject of codes and codebreaking in chronological order, with an emphasis on WWI and WWII. It also contains sections on “The Pathology of Cryptology” (the search for ciphers that do not exist), hunting for messages from outer space and a little about public cryptology, although having been written over 20 years ago makes this section quite out of date.

I heartily recommend this book to anyone interested in history as well as codes and codebreaking.

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Thomas Ball

The canonical reference on encryption

August 25, 2015

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Incredible, exhaustive, encyclopedic history of encryption and a tremendous work of scholarship. This book is likely to remain the canonical reference on code writing and breaking up to but not including the current era of cybersecurity for years to come. That said, it probably could have used some editing, for instance, the first chapter on the code breaking events surrounding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor goes on for dozens and dozens of pages, providing details, names, places, governmental agencies, that aren't all relevant to the story which almost gets lost in the welter of detail. Regardless, it's a tour de force.

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Ray Huf Sr

DiDaDit

August 10, 2017

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Good...BUT.....very,very heavy on cryptology technology....as a Korean War era army radio operator I used cryptology , the book was overkill I think. Some great passages, Battle of Midway, German intercepts, etc. , a tough read at times.

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John Fahey

CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT THISBOOK

March 9, 2017

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Well written, highly readable and very important work on cryptanalysis. This book exceeds the category of must have for historians of cryptography and is rated by this reviewer as 'Can't Live Without'. Highly recommended to anyone interested in the subject.

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NWJ

The Best Book on the Subject.

August 20, 2018

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The classic and still the best book on the subject. Broke a lot of new ground. This edition was updated in the 1990s. Kahn was a reporter for Newday and knows how to write interesting stories. NSA tried to prevent its publication back in the day.

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Ron D.

but up to that point I have never seen anything better.

July 16, 2016

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This is THE comprehensive account of the history of cryptography. It was written before widely available computers enabled kinds of cryptography that probably defy cryptanalysis, but up to that point I have never seen anything better.

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Grady O'Rourke

Comprehensive but Incomplete

March 15, 2010

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As someone who has worked in the COMINT field, I can attest to the accuracy of Kahn's statement that "this kind of work is perhaps the most excruciating, exasperating, agonizing mental process known. . ." I can also attest to the incompleteness of his book, but to describe what went on in the Cold War and Bletchley Park would require another book. The first chapter, "One Day of Magic" is among the most riveting, a vivid, suspenseful description of U.S. cryptanalytic operations in late 1941. In some respects, nothing has changed. The Japanese military strategy in the days leading up to Pearl Harbor - total radio silence on the part of Yamamoto's strike force - was brilliant enough. It is forever impossible to extract intelligence from silence. Kahn also gives the reader step-by-step accounts of the thought processes of brilliant cryptanalysts such as the Frenchman Georges Painvin as he single-handedly solves the diabolical German ADFGX system in the First World War.His efforts arguably shortened the war on the Western Front as by the same token the Russian Army lost the crucial Battle of Tannenberg in the East through poor communications security. Kahn's book is an indispensable account of the role cryptanalysis has played and still plays in world history.

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