Target Intelligence Committee

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The Target Intelligence Committee ( TICOM ) was an organization formed by the Americans and the British that looked for German code breakers and key machines towards the end of the Second World War . Among other things, it secured several Enigma machines and at least one copy of the until then still shrouded in secret Lorenz Key accessory (SZ) discovered. The SZ had been broken by the Allies , but they had not been able to capture a single one by then. The aim of TICOM was to find out as much as possible about the state of German cryptology . This included the knowledge of all German cryptographic procedures and the German methods and successes in deciphering Allied messages.

Paul K. Whitaker, Selmer S. Norland, Arthur Levenson and Howard Campaigne worked for TICOM, interrogating German cryptanalysts such as Erich Hüttenhain and Wilhelm Tranow .

history

TICOM was founded in 1944 by the Director of the Signal Intelligence Division in Europe, George A. Bicher . George C. Marshall ordered General Dwight D. Eisenhower to give TICOM the highest priority.

After TICOM's operation initially went according to plan, the chaos in Germany around 1945 made the search for German code breakers difficult. Six teams then set out from the TICOM headquarters in Bletchley Park in March 1945 to take over known or newly discovered targets that were of interest for telecommunications reconnaissance. ( Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire was officially called Government Code and Cipher School and later Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).) A group under Major Paul E. Neff found a gold mine in an area assigned to the Soviets: At a headquarters During the German Enlightenment , Russian code and encryption material was found in a "castle in Saxony-Anhalt ". After clarification with the British Ministry of Justice, the material and the Germans were escorted to England at the suggestion of Colonel Bicher. Two days later the Soviets took over the castle as part of their zone of occupation.

After analyzing German cryptology, it was found that the Germans could not break the most important British ciphers. The American key machine SIGABA never fell into the hands of the Germans either .

TICOM was still active after 1950; After the founding of the National Security Agency (NSA) from 1952 many of the existing documents were transferred to it and remained subject to secrecy. Parts of the documents were approved and published by the NSA in 2011.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ FDP wants to clear up the founding history of the Federal Intelligence Service. James Bamford , cited by Heise online , November 23, 2007, accessed March 13, 2012 .
  2. ^ A b American Cryptology during the Cold War; 1945-1989. (PDF, 15 MB) (No longer available online.) National Security Agency, archived from the original on September 18, 2013 ; accessed on March 13, 2012 (English).
  3. ^ Chronology - Central Intelligence Agency. www.cia.gov, July 7, 2008, accessed March 13, 2012 .
  4. ^ TICOM final. (PDF, 2 MB) National Security Agency , archived from the original on October 12, 2013 ; accessed on March 13, 2012 (English).
  5. ^ The National Security Agency Releases Over 50,000 Pages of Declassified Documents. National Security Agency, June 8, 2011, accessed March 13, 2012 .