[HN Gopher] A WWII spy who hid codes in her knitting
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A WWII spy who hid codes in her knitting
Author : marymkearney
Score : 269 points
Date : 2023-04-18 12:45 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.amightygirl.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.amightygirl.com)
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Another spy, Lord Baden Powell, hid maps of enemy installations
| in a drawing book while pretending to be a naturalist (which he
| was).
|
| https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-founder-of-the-boy...
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Meanwhile the UK is now arresting French people who refuse to
| share information about striking protesters in France.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/apr/18/french-publi...
| tim_hutton wrote:
| Not hidden in the knitting in the sense of the specific stitches
| (which is also very cool:
| https://www.popsci.com/story/diy/secret-code-messages-knitti...)
| but it seems she needed the knitting needle to insert the one-
| time codes (on a piece of silk) into a shoelace. Amazing story.
| velavar wrote:
| That was my first thought too. Different stitches such as knits
| and purls could serve very well as dots and dashes. Maybe that
| could've been too easily spotted.
| i_am_jl wrote:
| She transmitted her messages via radio, which allowed her to
| skip the messy business of smuggling knitted intelligence out
| of occupied France.
|
| That being said, I'm 100% stealing the knitting-as-writing
| concept for a TTRPG campaign. It's just too cool of an idea
| to go to waste.
| joycian wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu
| i_am_jl wrote:
| Thank you! I remember learning about this in an art
| history class decades ago, but I'd completely forgotten
| and I never would've remembered the name.
| robga wrote:
| The spy who didn't need to come in from the cold.
| elzbardico wrote:
| The wikipedia article mentioned by another commenter is a bit
| drier but more informative. The knitting kit stuff is just
| flourishing and actually was not that important. What should have
| been emphasized is the sheer courage of a teenager being dropped
| behind the enemy lines as a spy. Spies, moreso in a war, are
| almost always executed, usually after a gruesome session of
| torture to extract information.
| tetris11 wrote:
| Unrelated, but it mentions she was part of the "Scientist"
| circuit, which was run by Andre Grandclement [0] who turned out
| to be a double agent. Most of Latour's circuit were wiped out.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Grandcl%C3%A9ment
| packersville wrote:
| What she endured is hard for me to comprehend. Humans like
| Phyllis are treasures of the human capacity.
| robear wrote:
| My dad is a ham and also a weaver. He puts "May you be happy" in
| Morse Code in the dish towels he makes.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Steganography is hiding information in plain sight. This is
| knitting steganography.
| kitd wrote:
| In a similar vein, nobody would notice the old woman sitting at
| the railway station, knitting away, waiting for a train. In fact,
| what she was doing was including coded details into her knitting
| of train & troop movements, to be passed onto the Resistance at
| the end of the day.
|
| Lots of brave people contributed to the war effort in
| surreptitious ways.
| nomagicbullet wrote:
| Is this a true story? If so, do you have more details or source
| to read about?
| elzbardico wrote:
| She was not old at that time, but a teenager, and her cover to
| observe german positions was, according to article being an
| itinerant seller of SOAP in a bicycle.
|
| Being a young woman, according to the wikipedia, she was also
| able to entertain conversations with the young german soldiers
| to gather more information.
|
| It looks like the knitting kit was just a clever way of having
| a place to hide the OTP codes she used and keeping track of the
| ones already used. Also, according to the wikipedia she was
| once detained by the germans for interrogation, but they didn't
| think of checking her hair tie.
|
| Pretty clever IMHO, not to mention the mind-boggling level of
| courage.
| dhosek wrote:
| Wasn't this also a plot point in _The Cryptonomicon_?
| ChickeNES wrote:
| It was in The Baroque Cycle
| dhosek wrote:
| Ah, it's been almost a couple decades since I read the books,
| I imagine that time has smeared a lot of plot points from one
| book to the other and back again.
| hinkley wrote:
| It was kinda cool that he recycled some family names between
| the stories but fifteen years on I can't keep the two
| straight now.
| dhosek wrote:
| It was more than just recycling--those were meant to be
| ancestors of _Cryptonomicon_ characters (except, obviously,
| for Enoch Root).
| dylan604 wrote:
| Through all of this, I'm still confused on how the knitting was
| pertinent. Was she actually knitting with a morse code style
| pattern? It sounds more like she just used the knitting as a
| cover. If there was actual knitting, what was she knitting?
| Scarves, hats, blankets? How did the knitted item get into hands
| of those that needed it? Either my reading comprehension has
| gotten so bad that this makes no sense, or some details are sadly
| left out of the story and from links within the comments here.
| i_am_jl wrote:
| It wasn't "hidden in knitting", and it's not just you, the
| title is terrible.
|
| She used a knitting needle to insert a silk cypher sheet into a
| shoelace, which she used to tie her hair. Since the knitting
| needle was necessary to stash the rolled up sheet of silk in
| the shoelace, she'd carry her knitting as cover.
| aaron695 wrote:
| Better article, scroll down to the "From the Archives - Interview
| with Pippa from 2009" -
|
| https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/63516307/pippas-astonishing...
|
| "Germany was far more advanced with their DF (direction finding
| or radio detecting apparatus) than the Allies. They were about an
| hour and a half behind me each time I transmitted. Each message
| might take me about half an hour so I didn't have much time. It
| was an awful problem for me so I had to ask for one of the three
| DF near me to be taken out. They threw a grenade at it.
|
| A German woman and two small children died. I knew I was
| responsible for their deaths. It was a horrible feeling."
|
| Leo Marks - "Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War,
| 1941-1945" -
|
| "Clearly disappointed that he couldn't see a problem, he said
| that silk codes could easily be camouflaged in toothpaste tubes
| with special compartments, in shoelaces with soft tubes inside,
| and in an infinite number of conventional objects which would
| certainly stand up to random street searches, and might even be
| safe under close examination"
| robocat wrote:
| The article does contain good details: With
| just one blue cotton dress to her name she pedalled around the
| countryside selling soap to mostly German soldiers, crossing
| fields on foot to where she had hidden another bicycle. The
| Gestapo and SS were everywhere. And to add to the confusion and
| danger a double agent was working in the area. The SOE
| operative was friendly and talkative whenever she met German
| soldiers - "I'd talk so much about anything and everything,
| trying to be 'helpful' and they'd get sick of me" - and was
| constantly moving through the countryside where she was
| transmitting the information so urgently needed by the Allied
| Command. "I always carried knitting because my codes
| were on a piece of silk - I had about 2000 I could use. When I
| used a code I would just pinprick it to indicate it had gone. I
| wrapped the piece of silk around a knitting needle and put it
| in a flat shoe lace which I used to tie my hair up."
| Once she was loaded into a truck along with other locals and
| taken to the police station for questioning. "I can remember
| being taken to the station and a female soldier made us take
| our clothes off to see if we were hiding anything. She was
| looking suspiciously at my hair so I just pulled my lace off
| and shook my head. That seemed to satisfy her. I tied my hair
| back up with the lace- it was a nerve-wracking moment."
| intrasight wrote:
| Last week's episode of "Patented" discussed the use of sink for
| escape maps given to British soldiers in WWII. Check out the
| detail of those maps!
|
| https://macclesfieldmuseums.co.uk/wwii-silk-escape-maps
|
| And of course this HN post needs a reference to Neal Stephenson's
| "The Confusion" (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2) where Eliza codes her
| letters into her knitting.
| t3estabc wrote:
| [dead]
| troupe wrote:
| This article makes it sound like Doyle's knitting provided the
| codes to encrypt her messages that she was sending--not that she
| was encoding her actual messages in knitting.
|
| In The Tale of Two Cities, Dickens has a character named Madame
| Defarge who knits the list of names that the revolutionaries want
| to execute.
| kergonath wrote:
| > This article makes it sound like Doyle's knitting provided
| the codes to encrypt her messages that she was sending
|
| To be fair, the title makes it sound like this. The article
| does mentions the silk code and how it was hidden.
| bblpeter wrote:
| Apparently this was an urban legend. Good movie idea but not
| accurate
| thatwasunusual wrote:
| Every now and then, QI-stories I learned 10+ years ago pops up. I
| don't think this fact (...) is that old, but I love it.
| iamerroragent wrote:
| > For seventy years, Doyle's contributions to the war effort
| were largely unheralded, but she was finally given her due in
| 2014 when she was awarded France's highest honor, the Chevalier
| of the Legion of Honour.
|
| Funny enough it's been publicly known for about that long.
| thatwasunusual wrote:
| I guess that's what makes it really Quite Interesting. :)
| totetsu wrote:
| I was noticing if you use the same seed with some of the image
| generating transformers, that one image of some waves and the
| next of some clouds or something, will have the peeks and troughs
| of the waves and the cloud pattern in equivalent places. It made
| me think is there a way of hiding data in generated images by
| using specific seeds that leave symbols that can be recovered
| with the right transformation.
| enduser wrote:
| Classic steganography may be of interest to you.
| hinkley wrote:
| Also Johnny Mnemonic
| a_bonobo wrote:
| I recently read Between Silk and Cyanide, the autobiography of
| the guy who made the codes for the OP's SOE.
|
| https://www.amazon.com.au/Between-Silk-Cyanide-Codemakers-19...
|
| He's the guy who came up with the idea of using silk for codes,
| as silk won't be felt during pat-downs (paper will be felt).
| There's lots in the book of trying to work with local business
| who were obviously not willing to part with their valuable silk.
|
| The book goes much more into details of transmitting these codes,
| the hassle of bruteforcing when somebody misremembered their code
| or mistranposed (there was an army of women working 24/7 trying
| out all possible codes). Highly suggested if the OP piqued your
| interest!
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Here to second that recommendation.
|
| Steve Bellovin wrote a review of "Between Silk and Cyanide"
| back on the old cryptography@c2.net mailing list that prompted
| me to buy the book: https://www.mail-
| archive.com/cryptography@c2.net/msg04572.ht... (The whole
| thread is good, BTW.)
|
| The seriousness of the topic really left a mark with me
| (thinking about agents being tortured and killed as a result of
| poor opsec or cryptographic vulnerabilities). I'm glad that the
| work I do doesn't have those consequences.
| trollerator23 wrote:
| Neal Stephenson did it first!
| leblancfg wrote:
| I read somewhere some Qwghlmian duchess was doing that centuries
| ago.
| hedora wrote:
| Presumably, that last name is ciphertext, and the family keys
| were lost to history.
| GalenErso wrote:
| Something I've been thinking about lately is how World War Two is
| receding from our collective memory and how "archaic" it will
| eventually come to be seen? The last veterans will pass away
| within the next few years. In less than twenty years, WWII will
| have happened a century ago. It will be as ancient as the Franco-
| Prussan War of 1871 to someone who was alive in 1971, or to World
| War One to people today. Humanity will move into the 22nd century
| and WWII will be two centuries old. Two centuries ago, you had
| the Napoleonic Wars. In the 23rd century, it will be 300 years
| old. 300 years ago, you had the War of the Spanish Succession (a
| war only nerds know about at this point) and the Seven Years War.
|
| Will Hitler continue to be the go-to example of prime evil in
| people's minds then? I'm not so certain.
|
| Pupils in the 22nd century will read about the Enigma machine and
| the codebreakers of Bletchley Park, think to themselves "how
| primitive they were then", then send their friend a text using an
| unbreakable post-quantum encryption algorithm.
|
| West Point cadets will read about how German and Soviet
| commanders got creative with Panzers and T-34s, then go into a
| virtual simulation where they press a few buttons to coordinate a
| multi-domain kill chain to direct a smart cruise missile from a
| destroyer in the South Atlantic to a tank force in Pakistan,
| thousands of miles away.
|
| Aerospace engineering students will read about the V2 rockets,
| then start their summer internships on Lunar Base 3 (on the
| actual Moon).
|
| And eventually, will they even stop learning about it?
|
| Are there any lessons to draw here about our view of the past and
| the lessons we can learn from them? Our ancestors were just as
| creative and smart as we, they just had more limited means.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I think World wars won't be easily forgotten because they have
| amazing branding through the use of the word "world" that is
| timeless. Unless we seriously screw up something about naming
| World War III I think we can keep the franchise fresh for ages.
|
| > Will Hitler continue to be the go-to example of prime evil in
| people's minds then?
|
| I think so, as long as people believe in holocaust and no one
| else tops him.
|
| > And eventually, will they even stop learning about it?
|
| We do still learn about pharaohs ... and cowboys for some
| reason. Some history just gets immortalized in tropes.
| euroderf wrote:
| I suspect that in the year 4000, Madonna will still be a
| known quantity. Michael Jackson, not so much.
| saalweachter wrote:
| In another context, I gave a back of the envelope calculation
| that WWII comprised approximately 1% of human history --
| roughly 20 billion person-years were lived during that time,
| and heavily influenced by it, compared to around 2.3 trillion
| person-years lived since anatomically modern humans first arose
| a couple-three hundred thousand years ago.
|
| Vietnam lasted longer, but only was a salient issue for a much
| smaller fraction of the world's population at the time, so
| probably less than a tenth of the person-years lived in the
| shadow of WWII were similarly affected by the Vietnam War.
|
| Unless there is a WWIII, the second World War will probably be
| _the_ war of the human species, and a significant part of our
| history for centuries to come.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| >then send their friend a text using an unbreakable post-
| quantum encryption algorithm.
|
| You're wrong there. They won't because governments will move to
| ban them so that they can carry on snooping. It's more likely
| that the texts will be simutaneously uploaded onto a publicly
| accessible database, which will be encouraged because "only
| criminals have something they want to hide".
| pjc50 wrote:
| The interesting thing to me is how much less subsequent wars
| have made it into popular culture. Vietnam is still pivotal in
| the US, but the Iraq war and twenty-year occupation of
| Afghanistan have kind of vanished? There's a sort of layer of
| "generic middle Eastern war" in popular culture, via Call Of
| Duty and action movies, but not anything more realistic?
|
| > Will Hitler continue to be the go-to example of prime evil in
| people's minds then? I'm not so certain.
|
| Prior to this it seems to have been
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Magdeburg (someone once
| asked the question on Reddit "what the go-to example of war
| horror was before WW2")
|
| Once the TV cameras re-enter eastern Ukraine perhaps we will
| see. Or perhaps not, given that it will be too horrific to show
| on social media or TV anywhere.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Something I've been thinking about lately is how World War
| Two is receding from our collective memory and how "archaic" it
| will eventually come to be seen?
|
| Yeah, we're already seeing this with Holocaust denialism - as
| ever more and more witnesses die, revisionists have an ever
| easier game denying or downplaying what happened, and with no
| small "thanks" to the US who never bothered to follow the
| European example and criminalize Holocaust denial.
|
| At least for the Holocaust, we have the physical evidence kept
| alive in the former death camp sites... but what about those
| atrocities that _didn 't_ leave much physical evidence?
| hgsgm wrote:
| Criminalizing lies is dangerous, because the government can
| decide what it thinks are lies. If government wants to fight
| lies, money is better spent funding the spread of good
| information.
| hedora wrote:
| The US used to get this right by outlawing media
| consolidation and foreign ownership, then simply not having
| a domestic government-run propaganda outlet.
|
| Of course, those rules were all repealed, and now we have
| things like Fox News which simultaneously violates all
| three of those rules (it isn't government funded, but it is
| a de facto mouthpiece for the federal GOP). The left wing
| media has been playing catch up ever since.
| Xeoncross wrote:
| At least there is one conservative conservative TV source
| left. I would feel very uncomfortable in a one-sided
| situation with no liberal or conservative news sources.
|
| It's bad enough that only a few companies own basically
| every source already. One evening party's worth of people
| control what is basically the 'truth' in our nation.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| _One_? Lol. OANN and Newsmax still exist.
| forkerenok wrote:
| The details of the technique in the article seem to be lacking.
| There's a bit more on the Wikipedia:
|
| > When she obtained any military intelligence, she encoded it for
| transmitting by knitting using one-time codes hidden on a piece
| of silk that she used to tie up her hair; she would translate
| them using Morse code equipment.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_Latour
| bblpeter wrote:
| The whole story is fake
| moremetadata wrote:
| [dead]
| hgsgm wrote:
| I think that's misworded.
|
| The actual quote from Phyllis was " I always carried knitting
| because my codes were on a piece of silk".
|
| There's no need for knitting to be involved in the encoding.
| She had a message (unclear if it was a message she received or
| her own personal knowledge; likely her own knowledge from
| observing Nazi/German soldiers), and she had a silk with the
| code keys, and she had a transmission station.
| corbulo wrote:
| Just let me believe she was knitting key patterns doing the
| encryption in her head
| bazzargh wrote:
| oddly I was reading this story yesterday because someone linked
| to an item of clothes from a shop which also contained a silk
| code scarf: https://adversarialfashion.com/products/wwii-code-
| cipher-sca...
|
| it's unclear from the images in the shop but the code isn't the
| circuit diagram-ish things but a table in the middle, which
| reproduces this, an actual SOE silk code:
| http://www.jproc.ca/crypto/silkcode_chart_b.jpg
|
| This is apparently a 'Worked Out Key' cipher, not a OTP as
| mentioned in the article, but both were in use due to Leo Marks
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Marks#:~:text=Developments...
| .
|
| (in fact, here's a photo of Leo with one of these code tables
| https://www.historynet.com/was-this-the-uks-worst-spy-failur...
| )
| alana314 wrote:
| I'd love to see photos of the original pattern. But I just
| bought that scarf because it's pretty anyway.
| fsckboy wrote:
| opsec slip-up my dear, now the gpt4 driven facial
| recognition cameras are looking for your scarf! but, you
| will look great so you have that going for you, important
| for getting your mugshot to go viral, like Jeanne d'Arc
|
| I liked this: "The patterns on the goods in this shop are
| designed to trigger Automated License Plate Readers,
| injecting junk data in to the systems used by the State and
| its contractors to monitor and track civilians and their
| locations."
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| Comprehensive answer with everything backed up by links, well
| done mate!
| StrangeATractor wrote:
| "Between Silk and Cyanide" was a great book with some very
| interesting and funny stories from SOE. I recommend it.
| tgv wrote:
| Wikipedia also tells us that aged 102, "she is the last living
| female SOE agent of the forty who worked in France during World
| War II." Quite the life.
| GalenErso wrote:
| Christopher Lee (of Dracula, James Bond, Star Wars and LOTR
| fame) worked for the SOE, did he not? I wonder if they ever
| met.
| atdrummond wrote:
| He was attached but not part of the SOE. Much of his
| claimed spec ops/spy work stemmed from exaggerations others
| made that he made no real effort to correct.
| https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/who-dares-lies/
|
| Not that it makes his service any less incredible or
| admirable in my book.
| bell-cot wrote:
| With the UK's kinda-draconian Official Secrets Act, and
| tendency to keep WWII stuff Secret for extremely long
| periods - was telling the truth a good option for him?
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| He also joined the volunteer forces fighting for Finland
| against the Soviet invasion in the winter war of 1939.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_support_of_Finland_
| in_...
| mach1ne wrote:
| Quite amazing when you contrast it with going to Ukraine
| as a volunteer today.
| vrglvrglvrgl wrote:
| [dead]
| DesiLurker wrote:
| reminds me of 'Courage Mom' from movie Wag the dog.
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