The above was an extract from a book about the early stages of the development of
blah blah blah..
""It's just a brute force statistics problem," Waterhouse says.
"Suppose that Tokyo sent the Azure message to Rabaul on October 15th,
1943.
Now, suppose I take all of the messages that were sent out from Rabaul
on October 14th and I index them in various ways: what destinations
they were transmitted to, how long they were, and, if we were able to
decrypt them, what their subject matter was.
Were they orders for troop movements? Supply shipments? Changes in
tactics or procedures?
Then, I take all of the messages that were sent out from Rabaul on
October 16th-the day after the Azure message came in from Tokyo-and
I run exactly the same statistical analysis on them."
Waterhouse steps back from the chalkboard and turns into a blinding
fusillade of strobe lights. "You see, it is all about information flow.
Information flows from Tokyo to Rabaul.
We don't know what the information was. But it will, in some way,
influence what Rabaul does afterwards. Rabaul is changed, irrevocably,
by the arrival of that information, and by comparing Rabaul's
observed behavior before and after that change, we can make
inferences."
"Such as?" Comstock says warily.
Waterhouse shrugs. "The differences are very slight. They hardly stand
out from the noise.
Over the course of the war, thirty-one Azure messages have gone out
from Tokyo, so I have that many data sets to work with. Any one data
set by itself might not tell me anything. But when I combine all of the
data sets together-giving me greater depth-then I can see some
patterns.
And one of the patterns that I most definitely see is that, on the day
after an Azure message went out to, say, Rabaul, Rabaul was much more
likely to transmit messages having to do with mining engineers. This
has ramifications that can be traced all the way back until the loop is
closed."
"Okay. Let's take it from the top. Azure message goes from Tokyo to
Rabaul," Waterhouse says, drawing a heavy line down the chalkboard
joining those two cities.
"The next day, a message in some other crypto system-one that we have
broken-goes from Rabaul to a submarine operating out of a base here,
in the Moluccas.
The message states that the submarine is to proceed to an outpost on
the north coast of New Guinea and pick up four passengers, who are
identified by name. From our archives, we know who these men are: three
aircraft mechanics and one mining engineer.
A few days later, the submarine transmits from the Bismarck Sea stating
that it has picked those men up. A few days after that, our waterfront
spies in Manila inform us that the same submarine has showed up there.
On the same day, another Azure message is transmitted from Manila back
up to Tokyo," Waterhouse concludes, adding a final line to the polygon,
"closing the loop."
"But that could all be a series of random, unconnected events," says
one of Comstock's math whizzes, before Comstock can say it. "The Nips
are desperate for aircraft mechanics. There's nothing unusual about
this kind of message traffic."
"But there is something unusual about the patterns," Waterhouse says.
"If, a few months later, another submarine is sent, in the same way, to
pick up some mining engineers and some surveyors who have been trapped
in Rabaul, and, upon its arrival in Manila, another Azure message is
sent from Manila up to Tokyo, it begins to look very suspicious.""
And now to the moral of the story:
There is a connection in the way that the weather has behaved over the
last day or two that contradicts what it should have been doing.
Perhaps someone with insight greater than mine can develop it further.
It won't be anyone from here of course so I am not asking; just
postulating.
