TheCodeBreakers
Petersburg to his ambassador in Berlin: "We possess
the ciphers of the correspondence of the king [of Prussia] with his charge
d'affaires here: in case you suspect [Prussian Foreign Minister Count
Christian von] Haugwitz of bad faith, it is only necessary to get him to
write here on the subject in question under some pretext, and as soon as
his or his king's dispatch is deciphered, I will not fail to apprise you of its
content."
Twelve years later, Russian cryptanalysis played an obbligato to the
grand symphony of the Russian winter in inflicting the first defeat on the
hitherto unconquerable Napoleon. That military genius, though not quite
the cryptologic moron that it has been the fashion to portray him as
being, certainly did not fully appreciate the importance of a tough
cryptography. He depended upon a single, easy-to-solve system during
most of his campaigns, including the Russian; this was his petit chiffre,
a nomenclator of about 200 groups. Even without his generals'
annaabi.ee 
