TheCodeBreakers
medieval masterpiece, they reconstructed a text that is as close to the
poet's own original as the extant evidence allows. The cast of mind that
can thus sort out, retain, and then organize innumerable details into a
cohesive whole was just what was needed for the Gothic complexity of
the 424-letter Witzke cryptogram. In a three-day marathon of
cryptanalysis, Manly, aided by Miss Rickert, perceived the pattern of this
12-step official transposition cipher, with its multiple horizontal shiftings
of three- and four-letter plaintext groups ripped apart by a final vertical
transcription. He drew forth a message from Heinrich von Eckardt, the
luckless German minister in Mexico whose very involvement with a
cryptogram seemed to mean its cryptanalysis,* to the German consular
authorities:
"The bearer of this is a subject of the Empire who travels as a Russian
under the name of Pablo Waberski. He is a German secret agent. Please
annaabi.ee 
