Codes, Ciphers, and Secrets by Christina Cole

Many, many years ago -- too many to mention -- when I was about twelve years ago, I sat down with a group of friends, and together we created a "super powerful, absolutely unbreakable" code. At least, that's what we thought.

We used our secret code to scribble oh-so-important notes, such as:

O gsomq Gaw oh jaeppu xysa, wim'g uiy?

Confident that no one could read our secrets no matter how hard they might try, we filled our diaries, wrote letters to one another, and even memorized a few handy phrases, such as "Piiq ifaj gsaja!" That was often used to alert a member of the group to the presence of a cute boy.

Looking back now, I have to laugh at our supposedly unbreakable code. Of course, no one read our secrets because no one really cared. Had anyone wanted to decipher our cryptic messages, it would have been very easy, indeed. In fact, any fan of puzzle-book cryptograms can easily break our code with no more information than what appears in the two example sentences above.

Note: If you're not a cryptogram solver, don't worry about what my little messages here are all about. They're truly not worth decoding.

What my friends and I were using is known as a simple substitution code in which one letter of the alphabet replaces another. To show how truly naive we were about "secret codes", ours was the weakest variety of substitution code.

So much for the brain power of silly 12-year-old school girls!

Soon after high school, I discovered magazine cryptograms. At first, I thought solving one must surely be the most difficult thing in the world, but being the curious sort, I set about learning how to unravel them. From there, I went on to learn about many different types of codes and ciphers, many of which are extremely complicated.

First, contrary to what many people think, the term code and cipher are not interchangeable. What we referred to as "Our Secret Code" back in sixth grade, was actually not a code, but a cipher.

A message written in code is one in which each word is replaced by another word whose meaning is known only by the intended recipient. In similar fashion, many times individuals or places are given code names. During the Kennedy administration, the White House was known to the Secret Service as Camelot. President Kennedy was given the code name Lancelot.

A cipher, by contrast, is one in which each individual letter is replaced with another letter or with a symbol. In addition to substitution, popular forms of ciphers are transposition (writing words backward or transposing groups of letters), and "rotations" or "shifts", where letters are replaced by counting down a pre-determined number. A "ROT1" cipher, therefore, would use B forA, C for B, and continue through the alphabet in the same manner.

The illustration below shows a "Caesar Shift" coding device based on rotation. The inner wheel could be turned to align with a specific "key letter". For the "ROT1" cipher mentioned above, the letter B would be moved under the letter A in the outer ring. Most rotational ciphers are referred to by the key letter used. If we were exchanging secret documents, we might agree to use a "G" cipher on a certain day, or an "N" cipher the next.

A more complex form of cipher is the Vigenere in which multiple transitional ciphers are used within a single message. This is one type of "polyalphabetic" ciphers. Many others exist.

Codes and ciphers have played an important part in history, especially during wartime. Even during times of peace, intelligence communities still need secure methods for exchanging private information. Of course, "encryption" is also an important concern for online financial or personal transactions.

But what about the wild west? Were codes and ciphers used back then? Most definitely.

One of the most fascinating treasure quests involves a still-unsolved cipher. The story is told of a man named Thomas J. Beale who was alleged to have hidden away a treasure worth (in today's figures) about sixty-three million dollars. The treasure is said of have originated from a mine near Santa Fe. Some versions of the story place the treasure in Colorado; others tell of Beale returning to his home in Virginia to stash the loot.

What is known for certain is that Beale encrypted three documents. The first was said to reveal the location of the buried silver and gold. The second provided information on the content of the treasure. The third listed the names and the kin of the treasure's owners. These three documents were placed in an iron box and entrusted to an innkeeper with instructions not to open the box unless Beale failed to return for it within ten years. The box remained unclaimed, and finally, twenty-three years later, the innkeeper opened it.

Eventually the second cipher was solved. The content of the first and third ciphers remains a mystery and no one has yet uncovered Beale's treasure...if any treasure existed.

There are some who believe the Beale papers were nothing more than an elaborate hoax. Maybe so. There are others who claim to have found the hidden vault and many artifacts, but, alas, no treasure.

Here is an illustration of one of Beale's cryptic documents:

Although I don't know whether or not Beale's treausre truly exists, I've long been intrigued by the cipher. When I began writing He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not, the third book of my "Sunset" series, I knew my characters would be doing a bit of treasure-hunting of their own. It was a perfect opportunity to share my love for ciphers.

The document Ben and Emily set out to decode is a bit less complicated than Beale's cipher.

118	13	6
68	1	6
2	2	2
48	2	3
98	1	9
13	9	6
36	1	6
44	5	6
1	1	1
132	6	8
3	11	4
68	1	6
106	1	2
68	11	6
3	1	4

Creating it was great fun, and I hope readers will enjoy the challenge of solving the puzzle. Will it lead to gold? Or only to a lot of trouble?

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I could go on and on about codes and ciphers, secret writing, and code-breaking. Over the years, it's become a favorite past-time of mine. If I've sparked any curiosity -- and I hope I have -- you might want to pay a visit to the "Braingle" page on Codes, Ciphers, Encryption, and Cryptography.

You'll find that I've barely scratched the surface in this post. From "Playfairs" to "Four Squares" to "Book Ciphers" to "Semaphores", there's a lot of hidden messages in the world around us. 

* * *

He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not

Book Three of "The Sunset Series"

by Christina Cole

Available from Secret Cravings Publishing

January 28, 2015