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Welcome to Spycast.

My name is Dr. Andrew Hammond, a historian and curator here at the International Spy Museum in Washington DC.

Every week, Spycast explores a world of intelligence and espionage by bringing you in-depth conversations, spies, spymasters, intelligence officers and authors.

We explore the stories, secrets, tradecraft and technology of a world that looms beneath the surface of everyday life.

Welcome to this week's episode of Spycast.

This week's guests are fascinated by code-breaking and cryptography, as well as they should be.

The Voynich manuscript, the Dora Bella letter, the bill papers, the zodiac cipher, cryptos, so much history, intrigue and speculation.

I sat down with Alonka Dunin, code-breaker extraordinaire, and Klaus Schmi, a world-leading expert on the history of cryptography, to discuss the cat and mouse game between code makers and code-breakers that has taken place across the ages from ancient Kuneha Farm up to quantum cryptography.

I'm really looking forward to discussing more about code-breaking and about the types of things that both of you have been up to and about your book, but I guess I just wondered how did you both meet, how did you both begin to work together and to collaborate on this stuff?

Well, we met at not too far away at the National Security Agency's cryptologic history symposium, and I believe Klaus had organized a dinner and had invited various speakers there.

And I think that's where we first met, right Klaus?

Yes, it was in 2009 at the pre-conference dinner. Yes, that was an unofficial dinner I organized. No, sorry, it wasn't.

The second time was organized by Niba, but the first time was organized by Karl Lüv, a Dutch crypto history expert, so it's the one who brought us together.

And we just got talking and got talking and got talking, and then we, you know, sometimes when we were traveling, like would you be going to the Voynich manuscript symposium in Italy?

And again, we're just like, oh, you're here and talking and talking and talking. It was just a very natural fit.

How many code-breaking experts are there out there along the lines of both of you? So I'm not talking about people that work for the NSA and so forth or GCHQ, but just like the code-breaking community, like both of you, what are the numbers that we're talking hundreds, thousands, millions, or a few dozen?

Well, at this conference where we met, there are usually like 200 people or so, but it's not only about code-breaking, it's also mainly about crypto history.

And well, to be honest, I'm not a hardcore code-breaker. I'm more interested in the history or in the background, and I write about code-breaking, and I've written this book together with Ilanka.

But I'm not the kind who spends all the code-breaking, I'm a modern journalist type.

Some of our listeners could very well be experts in this, but some of them won't. So just to start off, one of the things that we look at here at the Spine Museum is the difference between codes and ciphers.

Can we just start off by telling us what the difference is between both of them?

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