most badass secret codes in history

In the words of Edgar Allen Poe “human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve”

The act of creating secret messages has probably been around for as far back as humans have existed and communicated, secret codes have been used in wartime, in business and in personal affairs to conceal everything from battle plans and assassination plots to dodgy deals and illicit love affairs.

The process of cracking these codes has caused major headaches for intelligence officers and cryptologists throughout the ages, even turning some people insane whilst trying to do so. Indeed, a code maker may believe that their code is unbreakable, but some of the most complex of coding systems have in fact been deciphered, changing the course of mankind in the process.

The following are 10 of the most badass secret codes in history.

1. The Caesar Cipher

One of the easiest codes to crack has to be the Caesar Cipher, which was used by Julius Ceasar whenever he wanted to send a secret message about his military plans and intentions. In reality, it didn’t really have to be particularly complex back then as most people couldn’t read anyway but nevertheless, he still found it necessary to take precautions.

The Caesar Cipher is basically a simple system whereby each letter of the alphabet is shifted by three places. For example:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
DEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABC

So if we wanted to encode the words “secret message” we would transpose each letter and come up with “vhfuhw phvvdkh”. The recipient, who obviously had to be aware of the code, would simply transpose the letters back to read the message. The Caesar Cipher or Caesar Shift has since been used to describe any method of encryption where there is this kind of displacement of the alphabet.

2. Cardan Grilles

A Cardan Grille was a method of hiding messages first used by Gerolamo Cardano back in 1550. Rather than an encrypted message, which actually looks like a code, by using a Cardan Grille you can create a secret message that doesn’t stand out in any way so no one realises there is a hidden message at all, except of course the sender and the intended recipient. Sir Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626) and Cardinal Richelieu (1585 – 1642) are just two prominent figures in history who were known to be fond of using Cardan Grilles. So how does it work?

You can easily create a Cardan Grille yourself using a simple piece of cardboard where you then cut out squares and rectangles at intervals so that they can act as a stencil in which you can write letters or words that make up your secret message. By placing the cardboard over a piece of paper you can then write your secret message in the spaces. When you lift the cardboard off you simply make up the rest of the text so that it doesn’t look like a secret message, more like an innocent note or letter. All the decoder has to do is have an identical bit of cardboard, or grille, which they then place over the text and all will be revealed.

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The skill in creating a secret message using this method is in how well you can make the whole text flow so that it doesn’t look like a coded message or out of place in any way. An obvious disadvantage is if the grille itself is lost, stolen, or falls into the wrong hands.

3. Mary Queen of Scots and the Babington Plot

One example of using coded messages which had drastic implications for the course of history was the Babington Plot concerning Queen Elizabeth. The cracking of the code used in this plot is what led to the beheading of Mary Queen of Scots in February 1587. So what happened?

Mary and her conspirators wrote letters to each other using a system of substituted letters and symbols in place of the real letters of the alphabet with a few red herrings thrown in where some symbols and letters had no meaning at all and were put there just to throw people trying to decipher the code off the track.

Mary was already held captive by Queen Elizabeth when she received a coded letter from Sir Anthony Babington basically asking her to condone the assassination of Elizabeth. She replied using the secret code and her letters were smuggled out in barrels of beer.

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Unbeknown to Mary, there was a double agent at work who had connections with both Mary’s secretary who helped encode the letters and Sir Francis Walsingham, head of an intelligence operation who had enlisted the services of Thomas Phelippes, a master code breaker who was also fluent in many languages.

All of Mary’s letters were passed straight to Phelippes who not only deciphered Mary’s code, he also added to her letters asking for the names of all the supporters of the plot before sending the letters on. Each person involved in the plot was then captured and dealt with. The letters were damning for Mary as they provided irrefutable proof that she was plotting to assassinate Elizabeth. Mary’s death warrant was signed on 1st February 1587 and she was executed a week later. Who knows what might have happened if her code hadn’t been cracked.

4. The Vigenère Cipher

Now we come to a code that is a little more difficult to crack. The Vigenère Cipher was invented by Frenchman Blaise de Vigenère in the 16th Century using a polyalphabetic system of encryption. This means the code cannot be cracked using frequency analysis as the same letter appearing in the message can be encrypted with a different letter each time it appears.

First of all the alphabet is placed in a grid and in each subsequent row the alphabet shifts one place across, much like the Ceasar Cipher except that this time it happens over and over again so we have many alphabets. A key word is used, which is written across the top of the grid as many times as necessary. You can then use the first letter of your key word to look down the grid to find the corresponding letter of the alphabet for the first letter of your message and then look across for the encrypted letter.

The Vigenère Cipher took over 200 years to crack, a feat that was finally accomplished by British cryptographer Charles Babbage in 1854.

5. ADFGX Cipher

This is possibly one of the most famous ciphers of all, invented by Colonel Fritz Nebel in the early part of the 20th Century. It was used by the Germans during World War 1. Initially only the letters ADFGX but later the letter V was added to enable full use of the alphabet. These particular letters were used simply because they sounded very different to each other when used in Morse code.

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First of all the letters ADFGX are placed in a Polybius square along the top row and down the first column. The remaining squares are randomly filled in with the letters of the alphabet. The code could be made even more complex by the additional use of key words to transpose the letters and then these key words could be changed on a daily basis. Despite the difficulty involved in cracking this code, it was indeed unscrambled by Captain Georges-Jean Painvin enabling the French to foil a planned attack by the Germans in June 1918.

6. The Navajo "code talkers"

During world war 2 when Japan was basically cracking every code the Americans came up with, a more elaborate coding system was needed if important secret messages were to get passed on to the right people without being intercepted and unscrambled by the enemy. The answer came in the form of the Navajo code talkers.

Philip Johnston, son of a missionary, had grown up on a Navajo Indian reservation and came up with the idea that if these Native Americans were enlisted as code talkers, no one would be able to decode the messages. Not only were there no words in the Navajo language for military terms, the language was unwritten and less than 30 people outside of the Navajo reservations could even speak it and not one of them was Japanese.

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Around 450 Military terms were associated with words already existing in the Navajo language such as the Navajo word for Hummingbird which became a code for fighter plane and iron fish for submarine. For other words, the code talker would translate the Navajo word into the English equivalent using the memorised Navajo code talker’s dictionary and then use the first letter to spell an English word. In this way, the Navajos were able to transmit and receive radio and telephone messages that confounded anyone who happened to be eavesdropping.

Initially only a handful of Navajo Indians were recruited but the whole operation was so successful that by the end of the war more than 400 Navajo Indians were working as code talkers, helping to win battles such as the ones at Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal.

7. Enigma

During World War 2 the Germans had their best weapon against the allied forces in the form of a machine that looked a lot like a typewriter, or the Enigma as it was known. Rotating wheels basically replaced every letter with another letter so the same letter did not have the same substitution letter as the wheels moved again before the next letter was encoded. This meant for example that the letter A would not have the same substituted letter throughout the text and neither would B, C and so on. This is just a very simple explanation as the mechanisms of the machine were much more complicated than what can be explained here.

In order to decipher a message sent using Enigma, the receiver had to have their machine set up in exactly the same way that the message sender had set up theirs using the same settings for the rotors, which of course changed all the time. The ability to crack the Enigma code was thought to be impossible. But it was cracked and here’s how.

First of all the Polish who were stuck between the Germans and the Russians were gathering as much intelligence as they could and several brilliant Polish mathematicians managed to create a machine that could decipher three quarters of what the Germans were saying. That was until the Germans changed the way they used Enigma. Now the Polish were stuck. They decided to pass on what they knew to British and French intelligence who were in a word, flabbergasted, at what the Poles had already managed to do on their own.

This new information along with some captured enigma machines finally enabled the British at Bletchley Park in the UK to build a new machine altogether known as the “Bombe” that was finally able to crack the Enigma code. Consequently they found out what the Germans were doing, where they planned to attack and how they were going to do it. There is no doubt that the breaking of the Enigma code changed the course of history and what was learned at Bletchley Park became instrumental in the creation of computers that would later transform the way we live our lives on a day to day basis.

8. The Da Vinci Code

Now for something a little different. Many believe that Leonardo Da Vinci left messages and secret signs hidden in his paintings, the basis of which inspired the best selling book by Dan Brown and subsequent blockbuster film The Da Vinci Code, which has sparked a renewed interest in Da Vinci and what he might have been trying to say. But was he really trying to tell us anything?

Take the famous Mona Lisa smile as an example, this simple smile has been analysed, contemplated and written about by some of the most famous scholars in the art world. It seems the edges of the mouth might have been deliberately smudged to look out of focus so that depending on which way you look at Mona Lisa, her smile will change. What is that about? Some go as far as to say the Mona Lisa is actually a self portrait of Da Vinci, obscured to hide the truth to all but the most probing of eyes and of course minds.

No one can really be sure if Da Vinci was revealing the truth by hiding it but one thing is certain, Da Vinci wrote all his notes backwards in mirror style, which would indicate that he was no stranger to the concept of obscuring messages, not in such a way as to make them undecipherable of course as anyone could hold up backward writing to a mirror and read it clearly, but maybe that in itself is a clue.

What about Da Vinci’s painting of the last supper? The person sitting on the right side of Jesus is commonly thought to be John the Baptist, however, many believe it is actually Mary Magdalane and not John, and anyone who looks at it could hardly deny the feminine characteristics that make Mary the more plausible candidate. Do we have Da Vinci suggesting that Mary Magdalane meant much more and played a much greater part in the life of Jesus than the history books would suggest?

Perhaps one way to get an insight into Da Vinci is through one of his most famous drawings ever, that of the Da Vinci Man or “Vitruvian Man”. We’ve all seen it; it is the image of a naked man with arms and legs outstretched inside a circle and a square, a kind of code that explains how life and nature work together. Da Vinci believed that an understanding of this would transform humanity. Underneath the drawing he wrote notes, in mirror image of course. Interestingly, Leonardo said himself that man bridges the gap between the physical and the spiritual world or did he mean the seen and the unseen?

9. Nostradamus

How could we write about secret codes and messages and not include the writings of Nostradamus. Nostradamus is possibly the most unique of all the so called prophets as he managed to achieve fame in his own lifetime, such was the uncanny accuracy of his predictions. The prophecies of Nostradamus continues to inspire, baffle and even terrify people today but as yet, not one single person has managed to successfully decipher the writings of Nostradamus despite the fact that many people claim to have done so.

Michel de Nostradamus wrote all his “quatrains” or verses consisting of 4 lines and in blocks of 100 called “centuries”, each of which was written in code. To be more precise, he developed a way of obscuring what he meant by using plays on words, a mixture of other languages, symbolism and metaphors and mixing letters around making it virtually impossible to decipher the true meaning of his words, possibly to avoid accusations of heresy by the Inquisition.

Some of the events that were allegedly foretold by Nostradamus were the great fire of London, the rise of Hitler, the assassination of president Kennedy and more recently, the 9/11 attack on the twin towers.

As Nostradamus wrote in such an obscure fashion, it is not possible to translate the text accurately; particularly when we take into consideration that he used anagrams and many other techniques to cloud the true meaning. This is just one of the quatrains that is said to predict the attack on the twin towers. So what is it saying?

Ennofigee feu du centre de terre
Fera trembler au tour de Cite Neufve
Deux grandrochiers log repsferont la guerre
Puis Arethufa rougira nouveau fleuue

Roughly speaking it does mention an earthshaking fire from the centre of the earth that will cause trembling around the new city. It also talks of two large rocks and a war. However, the rest has to be made to fit the event. Some translations on the Internet say that it mentions New York specifically. This is not true, even if the new city could mean New York; do we have any other clues that this is the location?

Well if we use our imagination we could take Arethusa to pinpoint a location of sorts as Arethusa Falls are located not too far from New York and the final line of the quatrain does appear to mention Arethusa and a new river. Arethusa was in fact a mythological creature that turned into a fountain. So we can see that even with the words we cannot be exactly sure of what Nostradamus meant in his original text. Nevertheless, it makes for interesting reading and much speculation and until someone cracks his code we might never know the truth.

10. The mystery of the horned hand symbol

Conspiracy theorists are always banging on about the New World Order, secret societies with hidden agendas and a master plan for the world that is orchestrated and controlled by only a handful of people but as to whether there any real truth in this, we can only guess.

However, one thing that is particularly intriguing is a hand sign that is used by many people in so called positions of power and that is the hand sign of the horned god or Mano Cornuto. So what does it mean, if anything at all? Many reasons are given for the prolific use of this hand sign, such as warding off evil powers, or that it is the deaf sign language for I love you or peace, it is also associated with rock music and is often used by musicians. But, according to the conspiracy theorists it is also a secret sign used by the Illuminati to show solidarity for the cause.

George Bush uses the sign often, however, according to media reports; this is because it is the “hook ‘em horns” symbol for the Texas Longhorn. This is true, it actually is, except that it is the back of the hand that is shown, not the front. Nevertheless, even if Bush got it wrong, it doesn’t explain why he used it throughout his inauguration or why others are using it too, albeit back to front, when they have no connection with Texas football or even with the United States.

The first image represents the horned god of witchcraft, Pan or Cernunnos. Note the thumb under the fingers and given by the right hand. The next image is a sign of recognition between those in the Occult. When pointed at someone it is meant to place a curse. Note the thumb over the fingers and given by the left hand.

The horned hand is actually an ancient occult sign depicting allegiance to the horned god or to Satan so you would think that if there was the slightest doubt about its meaning, people in such high profile positions would refrain from using it, at least in public, unless of course it has another meaning altogether that the rest of us may not be aware of. Yes there are rumours that George Bush is a member of occult groups such as the skull and bones and Bohemian Grove, but the Pope and everyone else too??? Is it just an innocent case of monkey see monkey do or is it a secret sign? You decide!