David Kahn (writer)

David Kahn (Toulouse, September 2006)

David Kahn (b. February 7, 1930) is a US historian, journalist and writer. He has written extensively on the history of cryptography and military intelligence.

Kahn's first book was The Codebreakers (1967), widely considered to be a definitive account of the history of cryptography up to the mid-1960s. Also, at that point, cryptography exploded into high technology and deep mathematics - impossible for the layman to understand.

The Codebreakers

The Codebreakers comprehensively chronicles the history of cryptography from ancient Egypt to the time of its writing. It is widely regarded as the best account of the history of cryptography up to its publication. William Crowell, the former deputy director of the National Security Agency, was quoted in Newsday as saying "Before he (Kahn) came along, the best you could do was buy an explanatory book that usually was too technical and terribly dull."

Kahn, then a journalist, was contracted to write a book on cryptology in 1961. He began writing it part-time, at one point quitting his regular job to work on it full time. The book was to include information on the National Security Agency (NSA), and according to the author James Bamford writing in 1982, the agency attempted to stop its publication, and considered various options, including publishing a negative review of Kahn's work in the press to discredit him. A committee of the United States Intelligence Board concluded that the book was "a possibly valuable support to foreign COMSEC authorities" and recommended "further low-key actions as possible, but short of legal action, to discourage Mr. Kahn or his prospective publishers". Kahn's publisher, the Macmillan company, handed over the manuscript to the Federal government for review without Kahn's permission on 4 March 1966. Kahn and Macmillan eventually agreed to remove some material from the manuscript, particularly concerning the relationship between the NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ.

The Codebreakers did not cover most of the history concerning the breaking of the German Enigma machine (which became public knowledge only in the 1970s). Nor did it cover the advent of strong cryptography in the public domain, beginning with the invention of public key cryptography and the specification of the Data Encryption Standard in the mid-1970s. This book was republished in 1996, and this new edition includes an additional chapter briefly covering the events since the original publication.

The Codebreakers was a finalist for the non-fiction Pulitzer prize in 1968.

Biography

Kahn was born in New York City to Florence Abraham Kahn, a glass manufacturer, and Jesse Kahn, a lawyer.

Kahn traces his interest in cryptography to reading Fletcher Pratt's Secret and Urgent as a boy. Kahn is a founding editor of the Cryptologia journal. On October 22, 1969 he married Susanne Fiedler, with whom he has had two sons, Oliver and Michael.

He attended Bucknell University. After graduation, he worked as a reporter at Newsday for several years. It was during this period that he wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine about two defectors from the National Security Agency. This article was the origin of his monumental book, The Codebreakers. Subsequently, Kahn was an editor at the International Herald Tribune in Paris for two years in the 1960s.

Kahn was awarded a doctorate (D.Phil) from Oxford University in 1974 in modern German history under the supervision of the then Regius professor of modern history, Hugh Trevor-Roper.

He worked as a reporter and an op-ed editor for Newsday until 1998, and a journalism professor for a few years at the New York University. In 1995, Kahn was selected as the scholar-in-residence at the National Security Agency.

Kahn lives (as of 2005) in Great Neck, Long Island, a suburb of New York City. He has lived in Washington, D.C.; Paris, France; Freiburg, Germany; and Oxford, England.

Kahn has donated a collection of books, papers and artifacts on codes and ciphers to the National Cryptologic Museum.

Publications

• Plaintext in the new unabridged: An examination of the definitions on cryptology in Webster's Third New International Dictionary (Crypto Press 1963)
• The Codebreakers - The Story of Secret Writing (ISBN 978-0-684-83130-5) (1967)
• Cryptology goes Public (Council on Foreign Relations 1979)
• Notes & correspondence on the origin of polyalphabetic substitution (1980)
• Codebreaking in World Wars I and II: The major successes and failures, their causes and their effects (Cambridge University Press 1980)
• Kahn on Codes: Secrets of the New Cryptology (Macmillan 1984) (ISBN 978-0-02-560640-1)
• Cryptology: Machines, History and Methods by Cipher Deavours and David Kahn (Artech House 1989) (ISBN 978-0-89006-399-6)
• Seizing the Enigma: The Race to Break the German U-Boats Codes, 1939-1943 (Houghton Mifflin 1991) (ISBN 978-0-395-42739-2)
• Hitler's Spies: German Military Intelligence in World War II (Da Capo Press 2000) (ISBN 978-0-306-80949-1)
• The Reader of Gentlemen's Mail: Herbert O. Yardley and the Birth of American Codebreaking (Yale University Press 2004) (ISBN 978-0-300-09846-4)

Quotes

• The multiple human needs and desires that demand privacy among two or more people in the midst of social life must inevitably lead to cryptology wherever men thrive and wherever they write. (from The Codebreakers quoted at Liberty-Tree.ca)

References

• Bamford, James (1982). The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency, America's Most Secret Intelligence Organization. Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-006748-4. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

External links

• Kahn's Homepage.
• Biographical information
• Annotated bibliography
• Kahn's Remarks to the NSA at its 50th Anniversary Celebration
• James Madison Project profile
• New York Review of Books profile
• David Kahn: Historian of Secret Codes by Arnold Abrams, in Newsday 2004-09-19
• The Intelligence Failure of Pearl Harbor by David Kahn, from Foreign Affairs (Winter 1991/92)
• Codebreaking and the Battle of the Atlantic by David Kahn. USAFA Harmon Memorial Lecture #36 (1994-04-04)
• Decoding the NSA A 1996 interview with Kahn, while he was a visiting historian at the NSA
• The Hebern Code Machine
• The Enigma Machine