David Kahn, a historian and author of the best-selling book "Codebreakers," has died at the age of 93.
David Kahn, a journalist and historian who revealed the secret world of cryptology in his 1967 bestseller Code Breakers and became a prominent scientist in the field of radio intelligence, died on January 23 at his home in the Bronx. He was 93 years old.
According to his family, the cause of death was complications from a stroke suffered in 2015.
At the age of 13, Kahn was walking past a local library in Great Neck, New York, when he noticed the book "The Secret and Urgent: A History of Codes and Ciphers" by military historian Fletcher Pratt. The piece "stopped him in his tracks," he told The Washington Post years later.
Having become interested in this book, he became an amateur cryptologist and retained this interest throughout his career as a journalist.
Dr. Kahn was working for Newsday on Long Island in 1960, when two mathematicians working for the National Security Agency, William H. Martin and Bernon F. McCarthy, were working for the National Security Agency. Mitchell, defected to the Soviet Union and exposed the NSA's information-gathering activities. Among other charges, they claimed that the United States had hacked the codes of 40 other countries, including numerous allies.
Located in Fort Meade, Maryland, the NSA is so secret that its acronym is often jokingly interpreted as "No Such Agency". Amid the hype, Kahn offered the New York Times an article about the history of cryptology. This article was the starting point for his first and most famous book.
Code Breakers, described as "the first comprehensive history of secret communication from ancient times to the threshold of the space age," was an immediate sensation.
In more than 1,000 pages of authoritative and easy-to-read text, without any permission to access classified information, Kahn led the reader through millennia of history-from the time of cuneiform to the Napoleonic era, through the decoding of the Zimmerman telegram during World War I and the decryption of World War II codes to the modern activities of the NSA.
"No one has written about this before," says Nicholas Reynolds, author of Need to Know: World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence. "It opened the door to a whole new field, basically the history of radio intelligence."
Kang faced the desire of many U.S. government officials to leave that door closed. James Bamford, a journalist who has written extensively about American intelligence, described in his 1982 book, The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America's Most Secret Agency, the steps the NSA considered to block the publication of Kahn's work or limit the scope of his disclosures.
Ultimately, the rejected measures included: appointing Kang to a government position, which would allow certain criminal articles to be applied if his work was published; filing "secret service applications" against the author, which could mean everything from physical surveillance to undercover operations; and performing " secret infiltration"to Kahn's house on Long Island," said Bamford.
According to Bamford, Kahn's publisher, Macmillan, provided the entire manuscript to the Department of Defense, which responded that " publishing the book would not be in the national interest." As a result, Macmillan and Kahn agreed to remove several paragraphs related to the NSA's cooperation with British intelligence.
Even David Kahn's appearance on the popular NBC "Tonight Show," sparked by the success of his book, didn't make NSA officials admit its existence. That changed over time: as Kang continued to publish respected books on radio intelligence and the NSA's national security mission became more widely understood, the two sides reportedly found a path to mutual respect.
In the 1990s, William Crowell, then deputy director of the NSA Mike McConnell, pushed for Dr. Kahn to be appointed a research associate at the agency.
"I couldn't find anyone in the entire country who could compare with him in terms of knowledge in the field of cryptography and cryptanalysis in the civil sector," Crowell stressed. "It showed that there is a huge amount of information available, and awareness of this fact becomes a critical part of thinking about the future, which is necessary for ensuring our common good."
David Kahn was born in Manhattan on February 7, 1930. His father, a lawyer, and mother, a glass factory owner, raised their three children on Long Island.
While developing his interest in cryptology, Kahn created word puzzles that were published in comic books in the 1940s. As a teenager, he entered into correspondence with William F. Smith. Friedman, known as the dean of modern American Cryptographers, who supported his interest in the field.
In 1951, Kahn received a bachelor's degree in Social science from Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he worked on the student newspaper. Due to poor eyesight, he was unfit for military service in Korea and began his career as a journalist.
Since 1955, he has worked as a reporter for Newsday. He took a break from writing Code Crackers before moving abroad to work for the then Paris-based New York Herald Tribune. (Kahn later returned to Newsday.)
In 1974, while still in Europe, he received a doctorate in modern history from the University of Oxford in England, where his dissertation became the basis for the book Hitler's Spies: German Military Intelligence in World War II (1978). For the book, Kahn interviewed nearly a dozen high-ranking Nazis.
"I was sure that with their vaunted efficiency, they should have been basking in success, but in reality they were waiting for a series of failures," he shared with The Post his opinion on Hitler's intelligence.
"Their information was incomplete and inaccurate, partly due to the fact that Hitler put incompetent people in leadership positions in the intelligence service. But even if he had perfect intelligence in his hands, his arrogance would not allow him to believe that the Soviet troops are not so incompetent and weak, and would not fall apart at the first attack."
Kahn's subsequent books included Capturing the Enigma: The Race to Crack German Submarine Codes, 1939-1943 (1991) and The Gentleman's Mail Reader: Herbert O. Yardley and the Birth of American Cryptography (2004).
Kahn's marriage to Suzanne Fiedler ended in divorce. He left two sons, Oliver Kahn of Florence, Colorado, and Michael Kahn of Manhattan.
Twenty years ago, Kahn began looking for a permanent home for his papers and his vast collection of books and intelligence artifacts, including Napoleon's 1806 letter asking his son to correspond in code, as well as patents for U.S. encryption machines. He chose the National Cryptological Museum of the NSA to store the legacy.
David Kahn, a journalist and historian who revealed the secret world of cryptology in his 1967 bestseller Code Breakers and became a prominent scientist in the field of radio intelligence, died on January 23 at his home in the Bronx. He was 93 years old.
According to his family, the cause of death was complications from a stroke suffered in 2015.
At the age of 13, Kahn was walking past a local library in Great Neck, New York, when he noticed the book "The Secret and Urgent: A History of Codes and Ciphers" by military historian Fletcher Pratt. The piece "stopped him in his tracks," he told The Washington Post years later.
Having become interested in this book, he became an amateur cryptologist and retained this interest throughout his career as a journalist.
Dr. Kahn was working for Newsday on Long Island in 1960, when two mathematicians working for the National Security Agency, William H. Martin and Bernon F. McCarthy, were working for the National Security Agency. Mitchell, defected to the Soviet Union and exposed the NSA's information-gathering activities. Among other charges, they claimed that the United States had hacked the codes of 40 other countries, including numerous allies.
Located in Fort Meade, Maryland, the NSA is so secret that its acronym is often jokingly interpreted as "No Such Agency". Amid the hype, Kahn offered the New York Times an article about the history of cryptology. This article was the starting point for his first and most famous book.
Code Breakers, described as "the first comprehensive history of secret communication from ancient times to the threshold of the space age," was an immediate sensation.
In more than 1,000 pages of authoritative and easy-to-read text, without any permission to access classified information, Kahn led the reader through millennia of history-from the time of cuneiform to the Napoleonic era, through the decoding of the Zimmerman telegram during World War I and the decryption of World War II codes to the modern activities of the NSA.
"No one has written about this before," says Nicholas Reynolds, author of Need to Know: World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence. "It opened the door to a whole new field, basically the history of radio intelligence."
Kang faced the desire of many U.S. government officials to leave that door closed. James Bamford, a journalist who has written extensively about American intelligence, described in his 1982 book, The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America's Most Secret Agency, the steps the NSA considered to block the publication of Kahn's work or limit the scope of his disclosures.
Ultimately, the rejected measures included: appointing Kang to a government position, which would allow certain criminal articles to be applied if his work was published; filing "secret service applications" against the author, which could mean everything from physical surveillance to undercover operations; and performing " secret infiltration"to Kahn's house on Long Island," said Bamford.
According to Bamford, Kahn's publisher, Macmillan, provided the entire manuscript to the Department of Defense, which responded that " publishing the book would not be in the national interest." As a result, Macmillan and Kahn agreed to remove several paragraphs related to the NSA's cooperation with British intelligence.
Even David Kahn's appearance on the popular NBC "Tonight Show," sparked by the success of his book, didn't make NSA officials admit its existence. That changed over time: as Kang continued to publish respected books on radio intelligence and the NSA's national security mission became more widely understood, the two sides reportedly found a path to mutual respect.
In the 1990s, William Crowell, then deputy director of the NSA Mike McConnell, pushed for Dr. Kahn to be appointed a research associate at the agency.
"I couldn't find anyone in the entire country who could compare with him in terms of knowledge in the field of cryptography and cryptanalysis in the civil sector," Crowell stressed. "It showed that there is a huge amount of information available, and awareness of this fact becomes a critical part of thinking about the future, which is necessary for ensuring our common good."
David Kahn was born in Manhattan on February 7, 1930. His father, a lawyer, and mother, a glass factory owner, raised their three children on Long Island.
While developing his interest in cryptology, Kahn created word puzzles that were published in comic books in the 1940s. As a teenager, he entered into correspondence with William F. Smith. Friedman, known as the dean of modern American Cryptographers, who supported his interest in the field.
In 1951, Kahn received a bachelor's degree in Social science from Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he worked on the student newspaper. Due to poor eyesight, he was unfit for military service in Korea and began his career as a journalist.
Since 1955, he has worked as a reporter for Newsday. He took a break from writing Code Crackers before moving abroad to work for the then Paris-based New York Herald Tribune. (Kahn later returned to Newsday.)
In 1974, while still in Europe, he received a doctorate in modern history from the University of Oxford in England, where his dissertation became the basis for the book Hitler's Spies: German Military Intelligence in World War II (1978). For the book, Kahn interviewed nearly a dozen high-ranking Nazis.
"I was sure that with their vaunted efficiency, they should have been basking in success, but in reality they were waiting for a series of failures," he shared with The Post his opinion on Hitler's intelligence.
"Their information was incomplete and inaccurate, partly due to the fact that Hitler put incompetent people in leadership positions in the intelligence service. But even if he had perfect intelligence in his hands, his arrogance would not allow him to believe that the Soviet troops are not so incompetent and weak, and would not fall apart at the first attack."
Kahn's subsequent books included Capturing the Enigma: The Race to Crack German Submarine Codes, 1939-1943 (1991) and The Gentleman's Mail Reader: Herbert O. Yardley and the Birth of American Cryptography (2004).
Kahn's marriage to Suzanne Fiedler ended in divorce. He left two sons, Oliver Kahn of Florence, Colorado, and Michael Kahn of Manhattan.
Twenty years ago, Kahn began looking for a permanent home for his papers and his vast collection of books and intelligence artifacts, including Napoleon's 1806 letter asking his son to correspond in code, as well as patents for U.S. encryption machines. He chose the National Cryptological Museum of the NSA to store the legacy.
