Soviet SIGINT II.

This is coolbert:

Soviet SIGINT. [signals intelligence]

Conclusion.

Once again, from a Military Analysis blog entry from a long time ago:

"The question has been asked by some authorities, “to what extent during World War Two [WW2] were the Russians [Soviets] also able to “read” German Enigma encrypted radio traffic?"

Calvocoressi writes:

"They [Russians] must have captured Enigma machines and cypher books and must have supposed that we did so. They [Russians] were not lacking in mathematicians and chess-players capable of appreciating what was involved in the breaking of cyphers."

AND once more the question is answered by the book: "The sword and the shield: the Mitrokhin archive and the secret history of ... By Christopher Andrew, Vasili Mitrokhin" [thanks to Google books]

"Soviet cryptanalysts, however, were unable to match the success of the British wartime SIGINT agency at Bletchley Park in breaking the main high-grade ciphers used by the German armed forces. They failed to so part for technological reasons to include:

* "unable to construct the powerful electronic 'bombes',"

* "[unable] to replicate COLOSSUS, the world's first electronic computer"

AND an additional reason as to why the lack of Soviet success with ENIGMA:

* "[Also] a human as well as a technological explanation for the inferiority of Soviet to British SIGINT.  The Soviet system would never have tolerated the remarkable infusion of unconventional youthful talent on which much of Bletchley's success was built . . . those cryptanalysts who would  surely have been incapable of conforming to the political correctness demanded by the Stalinst system."

Undoubtedly the Red Army was able [?] to capture in enormous numbers working ENIGMA cipher machines, intact or in pieces, the key lists, and operators that knew the intimate working details of the machine. Messages were available for comparison with actual encrypted transmissions for comparison, etc.

Many messages were read [?], this we can assume, I guess you might ask in what quantity and in what time!

ALSO, there was not a focused degree of energy on the part of the Soviets as regarding the ENIGMA machine? Recall that the Soviets would have had two intelligence agencies working simultaneously on the same problem, the NKVD [secret police] and the GRU [military intelligence]. A lack of focused energy and resources hindering progress toward a real-time reading of ENIGMA on a massive basis.

coolbert.