Codebreaking: A Practical Guide

"Yes, exactly. I discovered this because one of my favorite characters that I interviewed for my book is a woman named Elonka Dunin. She is obsessed with secret codes and ciphers and cryptics. So obsessed, in fact, that she moved states to be closer to one of her favorite puzzles. It’s called Kryptos and it’s at the headquarters of the CIA. It’s a sculpture that was created 32 years ago that is a cipher. It’s a big metal wall, carved with hundreds of letters. No one, not even the CIA, has been able to solve the cipher completely. They’ve solved parts of it, but no one has completely figured it all out. It’s one of the most famously unsolved puzzles in the world. People are obsessed and she is one of the leaders of the movement of obsessives who are online every day coming up with new theories. ‘Oh, I think the secret to the cipher is Dante’s Inferno ’ or ‘No, it’s the Navajo code talkers.’ Every day, there are new theories of how to crack this code, but no one’s been able to do it. I love the grit of these people who have been at it for 32 years and seem not ready to give up. I tell my kids, ‘Look at that grit ! You shouldn’t give up on your math homework after three minutes.’ Elonka Dunin teamed up with a German writer, Klaus Schmeh, who has a blog about cryptics and ciphers throughout history, and they wrote this book together. It’s a guide of how to break ciphers but you also get a lot of history, everything from World War Two to Roman ciphers. I just love it. Codes and ciphers are technically different. A cipher is when you have letters that represent other letters. A code doesn’t have to be letters. A code could be, ‘the snake is in the chicken coop’—meaning the enemy has got into the headquarters. It’s not about letters as much as it’s about disguising meaning. The most famous cipher is the Caesar Cipher, which you might have heard of because it was supposedly used by Julius Caesar in Roman times. It’s just a substitution where you substitute one letter for another. So you might move the letter over four spaces, so A might become D, B would become E and C would become F. That’s the one that we used as kids and you see on the back of cereal boxes. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. From there, things get so much more complicated and delightful and weird. You can have Caesar ciphers that change with every word. There are zigzag ciphers where you have to arrange the letters in a certain way to be able to see them. There are just hundreds of ways to encode information and it’s not just for fun. Encoding information has been crucial throughout human history for everything from national security, and war—like the enigma code in World War Two—to love letters. In the 19th century, people would conduct love affairs by sending secret ciphers to each other via the classified ads. It was sort of like sexting in Victorian times. I know. You can see all the tragedy but also the triumphs. You can see it all in the history of ciphers. So I’m a big fan. It’s a fun book. Yes. I cast a very wide net of types of puzzles. My first love is crosswords and word puzzles. But there are also logic puzzles, Sudoku, and puzzle types I never even knew about but that are huge, like Japanese puzzle boxes. I was able to find these subcultures where people are obsessed with them, where it’s like a religion. They are as devoted to it as religious people are to their various denominations. What I loved was meeting people like Elonka, or the guy who solves the Rubik’s cube with his feet in less than 20 seconds. There are just so many characters who are delightfully weird and eccentric. It was so fun to explore not only the history of puzzles, but who these people are and why they love puzzles so much. Yes, the record is 3.5 seconds. It’s just mind-boggling. I can’t even twist it twice in 3.5 seconds. I definitely got into puzzles through the words. I am a word nerd. Crosswords were my first love. I don’t know if you read the intro to my book, but a few years ago, I was the answer to a clue in the New York Times crossword puzzle. It was the highlight of my life. My wedding was pretty good, but this was the holy grail. Then my brother-in-law, who did congratulate me, pointed out that I was in the Saturday puzzle. If you know the New York Times crossword, it’s the hardest puzzle of the week, and all the answers are really obscure. So his point was that this is not a compliment, it’s proof in black and white that no one knows who you are. So that was the emotional roller coaster that set me off doing the crossword religiously. I used to do it somewhat, but then I’d do it religiously hoping I would show up in an earlier part of the week, like a Monday or Tuesday. Which, as I mention in the book, I eventually did. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So words are my true love. But I grew to love all these other genres, including jigsaws, which I was very snobby about and looked down on. I was, ‘They’re not real puzzles.’ But I am a reformed jigsaw skeptic. I can officially say I am now a jigsaw lover. They’re very literary. So Tolkien, Harry Potter . Jane Austen had a lot of riddles. They are perhaps the oldest type of puzzle, and they are incredibly cross-cultural. Any culture from any time period has riddles. I do think they do get a bit of a bad rap, especially compared to their cousin, the joke. Jokes are considered much cooler than riddles. Even if you look at Batman , Heath Ledger won the Oscar for playing the Joker, but the Riddler is not as exciting a character. But I will say I gained respect for riddles because they can be poetry. It’s not just about solving the puzzle. They can be these extended metaphors that make you see life in a different way. Let me just read you one of my favorites. It’s from The Hobbit by Tolkien and I think it’s a lovely little bit of poetry. “This thing all things devours: Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; Gnaws iron; bites steel; Grinds hard stones to meal; Slays king, ruins town, And beats high mountain down.” The answer is time. I think it’s just a lovely, poetic way to think about the transience of things, that nothing is permanent."