Station HYPO

Twenty thousand feet above Germany, Charles Brown was dying. His B-17 bomber looked like it had been chewed through a meat grinder—bullet holes riddled the fuselage, half his crew lay dead or bleeding out, and the tail gunner slumped lifeless, blood frozen to the metal. Charles could barely see through his cracked goggles, his hands trembling on the controls. One more hit and they would all be gone.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was created with a national sense of urgency in February 1958 amidst one of the most dramatic moments in the history of the Cold War and the already-accelerating pace of technology. In the months preceding the official authorization for the agency’s creation, Department of Defense Directive Number 5105.15, the Soviet Union had launched an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), the world’s first satellite, Sputnik 1, and the world’s second satellite, Sputnik II.

On January 18, 1918 the German spy Lothar Witzke was arrested carrying a codebook and an encrypted message. The message was signed by the German minister in Mexico City and was studied by Herbert Yardley and Dr. John Manly of MI8 in Washington, DC. The message proved to be a transposition cipher. At the end of three days, Manly had transcribed the message, which was damning in that it identified the bearer as a secret agent.

The motion picture about Alan Tuning, The Imitation Game, shows many of the interesting characters who worked at Bletchley Park during World War II. In order to emphasize certain aspects about the life of Dr. Turing the script sometimes portrayed these other characters differently from the way they were m real life.

Students frequently discover that historians sometimes arrive at the establishment of facts with great uncertainty of proof. Nevertheless, the opinions of narrators become, as years pass on, records of history, and as such are handed down to posterity. From time immemorial, political, factional, or religious influences have distorted the accuracies of important national events. Posterity, however, always eager for the truth, seeks full knowledge of the records of a historic past, and to it is justly entitled.