Tale of a Would-Be Spy, Buried Treasure, and Uncrackable Code

[mouser]

Another nice real life spy story:

When officials searched the aspiring spy, they found a paper tucked under the insole of his right shoe. On it were written the addresses of several Iraqi and Chinese embassies in Europe. In a trouser pocket they discovered a spiral pad in which Regan, who had been trained in cryptanalysis by the Air Force, had written 13 seemingly unconnected words — like tricycle, rocket, and glove. Another 26 words were written on an index card. In his wallet was a paper with a string of several dozen letters and numbers beginning “5-6-N-V-O-A- I …” And in a folder Regan had been carrying, they found four pages filled with three-digit numbers, or trinomes: 952, 832, 041, and so on. The spiral pad, the index card, the wallet note, and the sheets of trinomes: The FBI suddenly had four puzzles to solve.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_hideandseek/

[housetier]

First, hooray for wired having a "full page" link, so I do not have to go through hoops to read the whole article.

Second, it was interesting to read. Very exciting with real FBI agents and such. I did not look, but do you know if they released all of Regan's ciphertexts for hobby cryptographers to decode? I might find the time to try to crack it myself

Neal Stephenson also uses various encryption methods in his book "Cryptonomicon" which I can highly recommend.

[Deozaan]

Another nice real life spy story:

Another? Where is/are the other(s)?

Very interesting read.