Stolen German Code Machine Turns Up - in BBC Mailroom

[William Knowles <wk () C4I ORG>]

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGA5JU6YFEC.html

Oct 17, 2000 - 03:02 PM

LONDON (AP) - The mystery of the Enigma continues.

After disappearing from a museum on April Fool's Day, a World War
II-era encryption machine turned up Tuesday - in the mailroom of the
British Broadcasting Corp.

The German Enigma machine was in a package addressed to Jeremy Paxman,
who anchors the nightly "Newsnight" program, the BBC said.

Paxman said the parcel, sent from the central England city of
Birmingham, apparently had been in the "Newsnight" office for several
days.

"As soon as I opened it, I realized what it was. I haven't a clue why
they sent it to me," Paxman said.

An Enigma machine, the device the Nazis used to encrypt top-secret
messages during World War II, was stolen from the Bletchley Park
Museum, 50 miles northwest of London, on April Fool's Day.

"We've been talking to Bletchley Park and it seems to be authentic. It
has the G312 serial mark that the stolen one has," said "Newsnight"
spokesman Mark Ogle.

The museum is in the building occupied by a top-secret wartime team of
code-breakers who cracked the Enigma cipher.

Last month, the museum received a letter demanding $36,000 by Oct. 6
for the safe return of the machine. The writer, who threatened to
destroy the WWII relic otherwise, claimed to be acting for a third
party who bought the Enigma unwittingly.

There was no immediate word whether the museum had paid the ransom
demanded by the letter writer, who signed himself "The Master."

Museum director Christine Large received an early-morning phone call
earlier this month from a person claiming to be the writer. She
reported that they "had reached a businesslike agreement."

More than 70 Enigma machines are known to exist, according to a list
compiled by data-security researcher David Hamer.

Bletchley Park's Enigma is a rare and especially complex model used by
Abwehr, German military intelligence. The only other one on public
display is at the National Security Agency's National Cryptologic
Museum in Fort Meade, Md.


*==============================================================*
"Communications without intelligence is noise;  Intelligence
without communications is irrelevant." Gen Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
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