TheCodeBreakers
minister who then headed the Admiralty, the First Lord, Winston
Churchill:
At the beginning of September, 1914, the German light cruiser
Magdeburg was wrecked in the Baltic. The body of a drowned
German under-officer was picked up by the Russians a few hours
later, and clasped in his bosom by arms rigid in death, were the
cypher and signal books of the German Navy and the minutely
squared maps of the North Sea and Heligoland Bight. On
September 6 the Russian Naval ATTACHÉ came to see me. He had
received a message from Petrograd telling him what had happened,
and that the Russian Admiralty with the aid of the cypher and
signal books had been able to decode portions at least of the
German naval messages. The Russians felt that as the leading
naval Power, the British Admiralty ought to have these books and
charts. If we would send a vessel to Alexandrov, the Russian
annaabi.ee 
