This article was downloaded by: [Roberto Narvaez] On: 20 December 2014, At: 10:53 Publisher: Taylor & Francis Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Click for updates Cryptologia Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ucry20 Some Diplomatic Ciphers of the First Mexican Federal Republic (1824–1830) Roberto Narváez Published online: 20 Dec 2015. To cite this article: Roberto Narváez (2015) Some Diplomatic Ciphers of the First Mexican Federal Republic (1824–1830), Cryptologia, 39:1, 66-83, DOI: 10.1080/01611194.2014.915267 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01611194.2014.915267 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions
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This article was downloaded by: [Roberto Narvaez]On: 20 December 2014, At: 10:53Publisher: Taylor & FrancisInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Click for updates
CryptologiaPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ucry20
Some Diplomatic Ciphers of the FirstMexican Federal Republic (1824–1830)Roberto NarváezPublished online: 20 Dec 2015.
To cite this article: Roberto Narváez (2015) Some Diplomatic Ciphers of the First Mexican FederalRepublic (1824–1830), Cryptologia, 39:1, 66-83, DOI: 10.1080/01611194.2014.915267
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01611194.2014.915267
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arisingout of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
Some Diplomatic Ciphers of the First MexicanFederal Republic (1824–1830)
ROBERTO NARVAEZ
Abstract During the last two centuries, the Mexican diplomatic serviceproduced a huge amount of cryptographic documents. The author has collected,surveyed, and classified nearly 100 since he began to research this subject. In thisarticle, the author shall describe and briefly comment on four different crypto-systems from the first half of the nineteenth century.
1. The Dictionary Cipher of the Mexican Legation in Great Britain(1824–1829)
In 1824, diplomatic representatives of the Mexican government went to London withthe mission to obtain from the British Crown full acknowledgement of theircountry’s independence. After a number of reunions with Prime Minister GeorgeCanning, Britain finally recognized formally the new Republic on 30 December1824 [9]. From this year until 1829, they used a dictionary cipher to encrypt messagesof the highest reserve. The book presented as an example in the official instructions1
is a ‘‘Spanish Dictionary, fifth edition.’’ I was able to identify the exact title and thefull printing information: ‘‘Diccionario de la Lengua Castellana por la Real AcademiaEspanola, quinta edicion. Madrid, en la Imprenta Real. 1817’’ (Dictionary of theSpanish Tongue by the Royal Academy of Spain, fifth edition. Madrid, at the RoyalPrinting House. 1817). A complete digital version is available on the Internet [15].
Once the dictionary had been chosen, the users agreed on a number of words tobe counted upward or downward from the word to be enciphered. That numberwould be drawn inside a triangle pointing up or down depending on the directionto follow, like this:
Address correspondence to Roberto Narvaez, Vicente Garcıa Torres 75-7, LaConcepcion, Coyoacan, Distrito Federal 04020, Mexico. E-mail: [email protected]
Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online atwww.tandfonline.com/ucry.
1Acervo Historico Diplomatico de la Secretarıa de Relaciones Exteriores de Mexico(Historical Archive of the Secretary of Foreign Relations of Mexico, hereafter AHDSREM),dossier 40-11-3, ‘‘Claves para la correspondencia de la Legacion de Mexico en Inglaterra. Suuso y explicaciones sobre las mismas.’’
Cryptologia, 39:66–83, 2015Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0161-1194 print/1558-1586 onlineDOI: 10.1080/01611194.2014.915267
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The first two figures mean that one must move up from the term to encrypt ten and15 main entries, respectively, and the third means that the cipher character is found 20entries below the plaintext word. Only the principal entries of the lexicon were to betaken into account. In all cases, the triangle, which certainly functions as a sort ofkeyword, should be inscribed at the top of the ciphered dispatch, as shown in Figure 1.
In this case, the prescription is to move downward ten places along the diction-ary to find all cipher substitutions. Some words appear underlined, such as Torrente,Liorna, and Europa, which can immediately be read, in order, as the last name ofa person, the name of an Italian city,2 and the name of a Continent. Hence, in thiscryptosystem, any underlined term is in plaintext.3 The interspersed symbols ?, ,and > are used to specify the verb tenses in the indicative or subjunctive grammaticalmoods, given that in the lexicon all words appear in the infinitive. The sign ?, then,means ‘‘imperfect indicative,’’ > means ‘‘perfect indicative,’’ and ‘‘present (simple)indicative.’’ There are correspondent figures which indicate when to conjugate verbsin subjunctive present, imperfect, perfect, and future in Spanish (Figure 2).
The instructions end with a list of code terms to disfrazar (disguise) the names ofselected persons, countries, adjectives, and nouns. For example, Agustın de Iturbide4
is coded as Adonis, the United States as Los gemelos (The Twins), London as ElPadrino (The Godfather), Havana as El Ahijado (The Godson), and Favorable asPopa (Stern) (Figure 3).
Certain operative strategies which were applied as a rule are notwithstandingmissing in the instructions. To comment on this, I will examine the followingtranscription of the diplomatic note presented above as Figure 1 (undated andunsigned, though by internal evidence it is fair to suppose that it was written between1824 and 1825).
The translation into plaintext is also included in the dossier:
Por el senor Torrente que acompano a Iturbide de Liorna a Londres hesabido que su hijo Agustın solo se ocupa del arte militar, y que esta
2Liorna is no longer in use; the current name in Spanish is Livorno.3This should normally occur with prepositions and other short words, according to an
explicit recommendation. However, in many notes and memos from the dossier under scru-tiny, the majority of such terms are encrypted.
4Head of the First Mexican Empire (1821–1823). After his fall, the country was politicallyorganized as a Federal Republic [1, 5].
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Figure 1. A diplomatic dispatch from the Mexican Legation in London (c. 1825), encipheredwith a dictionary. Source: Acervo Historico Diplomatico de la Secretarıa de RelacionesExteriores de Mexico (hereafter AHDSREM). Dossier 40-11-3.
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buscando un Colegio en Europa en donde poder entender la ciencia de laguerra; esta propension natural es fatal en las circunstancias en que sehalla.
(By Mr. Torrente, who accompanied Iturbide from Liorna toLondon, I have known that his eldest son only cares about the militaryarts, and that he is looking for a college in Europe where he can learnthe science of war. This natural propensity is fatal for him under thecircumstances.)
This decipherment is not really precise, for the cipher term maximamente inthe first line hides the clear word mayor (in the sense of eldest) and not Agustın. Thisname refers to Agustın Jeronimo de Iturbide y Huerta (1807–1866), the first bornchild of the unfortunate Agustın I of Mexico. Since he was the mayor son and,therefore, the heir of the deposed emperor, I suppose the translator at theChancellery found it proper to directly call him by his first name and thus facilitatea more immediate, politically sensitive interpretation (given the context) to hissuperiors. It is to be noted that the author went 11 and not ten places downwardon the dictionary to find the cipher word maximamente [15, p. 561]. This proves thathis counting did not end on the tenth word inclusive—as the instructions prescribe—perhaps because he began at 0 and not at 1.
Figure 2. Symbols used to specify verb tenses or grammatical moods when operating withthe dictionary code of the Mexican Legation in London (1824–1829). Source: AHDSREM.Dossier 40-11-3.
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A technical observation of more interest arises when one considers the structureof the text in the reference dictionary. There are three columns on each page; let ustreat them as columns A, B, and C from left to right. In the instructions it is nowherestated how to conduct the movement, either upward or downward, when a given
Figure 3. List of code terms included in the instructions of the dictionary code of the MexicanLegation in London (1824–1829). Source: AHDSREM. Dossier 40-11-3.
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column comes to an end on any given page, that is, whether when you are countingdown from A you continue with A on the next page, or whether when you finishA you go to the top of B on the same page and again downward in that columnto find the substitute word, and then forward in the same fashion in C, in a sortof serpent-like motion. This second possibility proves to be the more frequent inthe ciphertext, as well as the fact that whenever in one page there happens to bea passing from one letter to another, the movement from A to B, or B to C, doesnot go downward to the bottom of the page and then up to the top and down again,but downward to the bottom and then up only to the exact point where the entriesunder a new letter begin. An example can be found on [15, p. 457], where you cansee that gusaniento was chosen correctly to encrypt he (‘‘I have,’’ present simple ofthe verb haber), insofar as a change of section occurs in the middle. If the systemwas to go down and up column by column invariably, then in this case gustadowould appear as the cipher term. The same method is applied to substitute theconjunction y (and) with xau [15, pp. 902–903].
2. The Polyalphabetic Substitution Cipher of Jose Mariano Michelena andLucas Alaman (1824)
Jose Mariano Michelena (1772–1852) acted as plenipotentiary minister and confi-dential agent of the Mexican government to negotiate the British recognition ofMexico’s independence from Spain [16]. In the first stages of his mission, he directedhis open or reserved correspondence to the statesman, lawyer, historian, and entre-preneur Lucas Alaman y Escalada (1792–1853), a prominent politician who was thenin charge of the Secretariat of Interior and Exterior Relations.5
Six ciphered letters sent by Michelena to Alaman in 1824 have been identified;three are dated in July, one in September, one in October, and one in November.6
The first four were transformed applying the dictionary cryptosystem described inthe previous section, while in the last two the encryption was made according to apolyalphabetic substitution method. Alaman encrypted a note by that same systemon July 12 and delivered it to his agent in London.
The official instructions to use this cryptosystem are kept in the AHDSREM.7
They are complemented by a 26� 25 table (Figure 4), which lets one see that the defi-nition alphabet of length 25 was based on the Spanish alphabet of 29 letters that wasprevalent in 1824, but excluding the CH (a digraph which was valid as a single letterin those times), the K, the N, and the W, which apparently were eliminated for thecryptologic reason that these characters can be formed, or their sounds can be gen-erated, by using other letters alone or in combination, for instance, CH can beformed with CþH, and the N can be taken as N given the proper linguistic context.
This matrix formally resembles the classic tabula recta, which is traditionallyassociated with a polyalphabetic cryptosystem attributed to the French cryptographer
5Alaman attended that department on five occasions in nine years, and it was duringthe second one that he promoted and supervised with a keen eye Michelena’s mission inLondon [6].
6Four of them can be seen in Gomez de la Puente [4, vol. 3]. I have made some criticalconsiderations about this series in [11].
7AHDSREM, dossier 40-11-3, ‘‘Claves para la correspondencia de la Legacion de Mexicoen Inglaterra. Su uso y explicaciones sobre las mismas.’’
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Blaise de Vigenere [2, 7]. Still, it contains as many plaintext alphabets as there are let-ters, a peculiar feature caused by the ordering of the double series of letters on theright of all the capital letters on the left, which certainly represent the key alphabet.As can be easily observed, beginning in the second row from top to bottom the lowerletters are systematically shifted one place to the right so that in the final row, A
Figure 4. Table of substitution ciphers used by Alaman and Michelena in 1824. Source:AHDSREM. Dossier 40-11-3.
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becomes paired with the Z, B with A, C with B, and so on. This sequence ofelementary Caesar ciphers creates a multitude of different alphabets to encipher theplaintext.
To select the cipher characters, you must take the first letter of a keyword, forexample, Firmeza (Firmness)—which was the one actually used by Michelena andAlaman—in the left column and then go right until you locate in the same row of thatkey letter the corresponding letter of the clear word to hide, which will always be theone on top of the pair, and then pick the lower letter to begin writing down the cipher-text. This technical property serves to explain why there is not just one plaintextalphabet—which would typically be identified as the first row of the square—but25, each one shifted one place to the right from B to Z.
The fact that there are no shifts in the row of A and all the letters are paired withthemselves shows that this part of the square is obviously useless to get any crypto-graphic effect whatsoever. This condition determines a continuous setback when itcomes to choosing a keyword, for in every case it should be advisable not to selectwords containing A’s. However, this problem was overlooked by the designers orusers of the method. (Of course, to avoid this it would be sufficient to design thetable with an independent, unique row for the plaintext alphabet on the top and thenorder the rows for each letter, beginning the shifts in the row of A and not of B, verymuch according to the general method to construct squares for methods based onthe classical Vigenere model.)
Figure 5. Fragment of a ciphered memorandum written by Jose Mariano Michelena inLondon on 6 October 1824. Source: AHDSREM. Dossier 40-11-3.
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The keyword Firmeza (Firmness)—Alaman spells it a little differently for thepossible reason that I shall discuss later—contains no repeated letters. This couldbe praised as a sign of cryptographic cleverness if the A were out or if the matrixwere free of the defect that I commented in the previous paragraph. The instructionsindicate that you must run the key over the plaintext words completely until youreach the end of the message, very much in the regular Vigenere style. This ortho-doxy, so to speak, was respected by Alaman but not by Michelena, whose habitwas to rewrite again the keyword from the beginning with each word of the plaintext,in a fashion that reminds one of the strategy proposed by Girolamo Cardano in asimilar autokey cryptosystem which preceded the methods of Giovan Battista Belasoand the one attributed to Vigenere [8]. As an example, one can consider a fragmentof an unsigned memorandum dated on 6 October 1824 (Figure 5).8
Below is a transcription of the first three lines (there are 27 in total).
Keystream f i f i r m e z f i r m e z a f i r m eCiphertext C v v v v v z p x g v h a t t u t q c jPlaintext H E Q E N I D O C O N T E S T A C I O N
Keystream f i f i r m e z A f i r m e z a fCiphertext y v A j i b y j A m v ll i y j d uPlaintext D E F R A N C I A R E D U C I D A
The plaintext thus recovered literally reads, He qenido contestacion de Franciareducida . . . (I have had answer from France reduced to . . .); the second term, qenido,should be tenido (have had). This can be explained by supposing that Michelenamistook a cipher character for another as he was encrypting the initial T, a minorblunder which can easily happen when operating with manual ciphers. On the otherhand, the graph clearly shows Michelena’s departure from the Vigenere model in hismanner to run the key.
Alaman, as I mentioned, runs the keyword in full cycles every time. This is dis-played by the analysis of a ciphered memorandum dated 12 July 1824 (Figure 6) thathe sent to Michelena.
Keystream F i r m e s a F i r m e s a F i r m e s aCiphertext J v c m x g e ll x t u e u i T v v f g h nPlaintext E N L A S N E G O C I A C I O N E S C O N
Keystream F i r mCiphertext o i f bPlaintext J A N O
8AHDSREM, dossier 40-11-3, ‘‘Claves para la correspondencia de la Legacion de Mexicoen Inglaterra. Su uso y explicaciones sobre las mismas.’’
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Figure 6. First folio of the ciphered memorandum sent by Alaman to Michelena on 12 July1824. Source: AHDSREM. Dossier 40-11-3.
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The plaintext reads, En las negociaciones con Jano . . . (In the negotiations withJanus . . .). This last term, Jano, is a code word for Spain, as Figure 3 above shows,making it thus apparent that a same code list was incorporated both to the diction-ary cipher (see section 1 of this article) and the one we are examining now.9 However,note that Alaman spells Firmesa and not Firmeza. I can only conjecture that this wasa deliberate action inspired by the idea that it would make it harder for any potentialunauthorized decipherer to ascertain the exact keyword, since it is patent that noplaintext would ever be transformed into cipher in the same way if there is in usea single keyword but with spelling variations. Indeed, this cryptological explanationshould be the most likely, for it is very difficult to imagine Alaman, a consummatedprose writer, failing to avoid such an orthographic slip-up (besides, Firmesa does notappear as a permitted alternative to Firmeza in the Spanish Dictionary of 1817).
A propos Michelena’s memorandum of 6 October 1824, I mentioned that it isnot signed. However, I concluded that he could very probably have written it aftera series of comparative analyses which I made [13] between that piece and a study ofa text classified as a dispatch by Jose Mariano Michelena, dated 6 November 1824(Figure 7) and kept in the AHDSREM.10 This little investigation was prompted by
Figure 7. Fragment of a ciphered dispatch by Jose Mariano Michelena, dated 6 November1824. Source: AHDSREM. Dossier 1-1-44.
9It is interesting to see that Alaman chose to encrypt even that coded element, thuscreating a not very common case of superencryption in Mexican cryptography.
10AHDSREM, Dossier 1-1-44, ‘‘1822–25. Reconocimiento de la Independencia deMexico por Inglaterra.’’ ff. 81–82.
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the description of item HD 17-5-4132, folder 2284, in the Calendar of the Juan E.Hernandez y Davalos manuscript collection (1954), a famous catalogue among histor-ians of nineteenth-century Mexico which is kept at the library of the University ofTexas at Austin. The editors place a question mark to indicate their uncertaintyabout the author. Still, the contents described in the synopsis (‘‘Arrival of Samuel;reports of Small; increase in French Navy; troops embarked at Ferrol; fundsexpected via the Tigre for work in Spain; favorable attitude of Holland’’) are totallycoincident with those which can be read in the original text of Michelena (both theciphertext and the clear version) in the AHDSREM.
3. A Cryptosystem Used by Jose Anastasio Torrens in Colombia (ca. 1825)
Colonel Jose Anastasio Torrens (1790–1857) was appointed secretary of the MexicanLegation in Washington from 1822 to 1824 [3]. On 31 August 1824, Lucas Alamanissued a document to inform him that he had been designated as secretary of theMexican Legation in Colombia and that his instructions and ‘‘other documents’’would be given to him by Pablo Obregon (who was to succeed him as extraordinaryenvoy and plenipotentiary minister) [18]. I think it is very probable that among those‘‘other documents’’ was a copy of a document entitled, Reglas para cifrar y descifrar(Rules to encipher and decipher), the description of a cryptosystem preceded by thespecific diplomatic instructions which Alaman gave to Obregon.11 At any rate, sucha cipher was in fact one of at least two that Torrens used during his Colombianmission.12
The cryptosystem was in the last instance nothing but a clave, that is, a key ofmultiple alphabets—in those days Mexican diplomats spoke of ciphers and codesin general as claves—configured as a rectangle of six numbered lines with groupsof letters and numbers in each one of them (Figure 8).
Of the six lines on the ‘‘key,’’ the number 1 comprehends all the letters of thealphabet numbered as singles from 1 to 27 (the W has been suppressed). The remain-ing five lines, numbered 2 to 6 consecutively, contain all the combinations whichevery vowel can form with itself (whenever orthographically permitted) and eachother and the consonants. Thus, the second line shows the combinations with A,the third with E, and so on until ending in the U.
To encrypt, the first step is to divide the words into as many fractions as thenumber of vowels they may possess, so that each vowel becomes adjoined withthe prior or posterior letter. If the word is of such length that any of its letters areleft without a companion, it should be treated as a single character and nota fraction, so that the purpose of line number 1 becomes totally apparent. Forexample, to encipher the proper noun Santiago, one must locate the line where thecombination SA=AS is found (it is number 2). The first cipher character is 2 andthe second and last is 21, since it is that numbered fraction where the case inquestion, SA, appears. To specify that the right direction to interpret the bigramis from bottom to top and not the opposite, you underline the ciphertext grouplike this: 221. The subsequent letter, N, must be enciphered alone according to theprescription, where it is denominated as a ‘‘simple fraction.’’ Given that it cannotbe combined, you locate it in its regular position as 15—considering the definition
11AHDSREM, Dossier 1, ‘‘Reglas para cifrar y descifrar,’’ fol. 4, ff. 42–43 and 44–46.12I present and discuss the other one in [10, 12].
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alphabet chosen—in line number 1, and you write it down without adding a line orany other auxiliary sign, for there is obviously no need for one. The fraction TIclearly represents a ‘‘combination’’ which is included on line number 4 as fraction22, and you underline the ciphertext 422 to indicate the right reading direction. Thefollowing fraction is AG, and to choose its cipher, you go to line number 1: The trans-formed character becomes 27 with an auxiliary line above it to signalize that the read-ing is from top to bottom. The final O cannot combine in any way since there are nomore letters, so it is enciphered as the ‘‘simple fraction’’ 117.
In this manner, then, ‘‘Santiago’’ has been turned into the cryptogram 221 115422 27 117. To decipher it, you only have to find each combination and ‘‘simplefractions’’ from top to bottom if they are singles or in the order marked by theposition of the line added to a cryptic group.
Figure 9 shows a fragment of a note by Torrens concealed by this cryptosystem.Now, we could here talk indeed of a fragment of a fragment since the original
piece has been ripped on all sides for some reason, being practically impossible toknow when and how such damage occurred. By this circumstance, it is very difficultto prove by any internal or external scrutiny whether the text was actually written byTorrens.13 In [10], I have presented an argument toward establishing Torrens’authorship, based on considerations and comparisons of the contents (obviously
Figure 8. Table of alphabets to encrypt and decrypt used by Jose Anastasio Torrens while hewas diplomatic minister to Colombia. Source: AHDSREM. Dossier 1.
13It is kept in the AHDSREM, dossier tagged as ‘‘L-E-1699 (3ª parte), t. III, ff.132–133bis.’’
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in plaintext) of some papers written by Torrens while he was in Colombia in 1825,just as they appear in a few historical monographs, with the deciphered versionsof the notes described above. For the purposes of the present article, let us proceedto examine the cryptograms assuming that Torrens was their author.
The following is a transcription, as accurate as I was able to make it, of the firstthree lines in folio 132 of the original text.
According to the method, the initial 121, as it stands free of any mark, should bedeciphered as S and the following 122 most certainly conceals the T, given that thealphabet has been placed in its natural order. The 620 must be read as RU and notUR, as is implied by the position of the line. The 19, unmarked, stands for the I. Inthe fifth place, I have 54; it hides the bigram DO and not OD, as I confirm byobserving the table. I have thus recovered a fragment of a word, struido. The nextfour elements, 34 512 619 15, are equivalent to de lo que, so by conjecture this firstline can be established as [in]struido de lo que (Instructed of what), which certainlymakes sense. After the addition of some letters that ensure grammatical continuity,the whole fragment reads in plaintext, [In]struido de lo que [he obser]vado acercadel estado de la republica de Colombia y de su adminis[tracion] . . . (Instructed of what
Figure 9. A fragment of a ciphered note by Jose Anastasio Torrens, written in Colombia in ca.1825. Source: AHDSREM. Dossier L-E-1699 (3rd part), Vol. III.
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I have observed about the present state of the Republic of Colombia and of itsadministration . . .).
It is evident, however, that even when the method can be interpreted as a sort ofalgorithm to produce ciphers, it would be justified to classify it also as a code, sinceevery combination—with or without lines on any position—used to encrypt a letteror group of letters tend to establish fixed units whose repetitions become logicallymore and more frequent as the ciphertext gets longer, hence making the cryptanalystentertain the possibility that he is dealing with a one-to-one code.14
4. The Nomenclator of Jose Marıa Tornel y Mendıvil (1830)
In 1828, President Vicente Guerrero appointed Jose Marıa Tornel y Mendıvil (1789–1853) as the new extraordinary envoy and plenipotentiary minister of Mexico inWashington (he was to succeed Pablo Obregon). He received his ordinary andreserved instructions on 17 November 1829. Guerrero ordered him to encrypt everyreserved dispatch and enumerate his correspondence, just as his predecessors haddone [17].
Tornel y Mendıvil arrived in Washington on 5 February 1830 and went on toreside in Baltimore. Among his priorities, he had to inform on the whereaboutsand actions of Agustın Jeronimo de Iturbide y Huerta and to be aware of SimonBolıvar’s movements in South America. In Figure 10 we can see the cryptosystemhe received from the Mexican Chancellor.15
From the first glance, one can identify this piece as a classical nomenclator.There are 44 substitution characters in total: 28 symbols for each of the 28 lettersof the definition alphabet (which notably includes the W, X, Y, and Z, probablybecause of the eventual necessity of encrypting terms in English or another languagewhere they are of more frequent use than in Spanish), seven substitution charactersfor six signs of punctuation (comma, period, semicolon, colon, question mark, andexclamation mark) and the parenthesis, and ten letters as substitutes for the naturalnumbers from 0 to 9, plus the nomenclator proper formed of 59 characters forproper and common nouns. Considering the historical context and the exclusivelydiplomatic purposes of the communication device, it is no wonder that countryand capital city names are the most abundant in the list: Mexico, England, France,Russia, Spain, Colombia, Texas, Philadelphia, Washington, New York, Baltimore,and London, among others. Curiously enough, there is not any symbol to standfor Iturbide’s son, a primary target of vigilance for Tornel, as I mentioned before;to assign a single symbol to that name would have allowed the authorized personto decipher it immediately, thus proving one of the advantages of such an encryptionmethod.16
14This is exactly what happens when one examines the dispatches or diplomatic noteswhich Pablo Obregon ciphered according to these rules while he acted as minister inWashington, as I discussed in [14].
15It comes from a copy that was added to a dispatch dated 18 August 1830, written byTornel y Mendıvil and sent to Eduardo M. de Gorostiza, who was then acting as charged’affaires of the Mexican Legation in England. AHDSREM, dossier 40-2-146, ‘‘Envıan clavea la Legacion de Mexico en Londres, ano 1830,’’ 2 ff.
16Indeed, it would have been more difficult to guess that a capricious symbol was stand-ing for Iturbide’s son than to infer more sooner than later that Adonis means Agustın deIturbide, in the code list of the dictionary cipher examined in section 1 of the present article.
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I have not yet been able to find any note or dispatch ciphered with thisnomenclator, so for the present I cannot offer technical observations about theactual practice which was given to it by those intended to apply it. I can say, how-ever, that Mexican diplomats apparently believed that such an archaic ciphering
Figure 10. The nomenclator used by Jose Marıa Tornel y Mendıvil as head of the MexicanLegation in Baltimore, 1830. Source: AHDSREM. Dossier 40-2-146.
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method should be secure, for they used it from time to time at least until the firstdecades of the twentieth century. I plan to describe and analyze them, along withother more varied and interesting cryptosystems, in future articles in Cryptologia.
About the Author
Roberto Sergio Rodrıguez Narvaez gained his master’s degree in History at theNational Autonomous University of Mexico. The logic, methods, and philosophyof history are his main areas of interest, and he has taught such subjects at variouscolleges and universities of Mexico. He has researched systematically the history ofMexican cryptology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries since 2006, publishinghis results in academic journals from Mexico and Spain. He has broken a number ofciphers found in documents related to the revolutionary movement of Francisco I.Madero at the beginning of the last century. He is also an active student of the worksof the American pragmatist philosopher Charles S. Peirce (who also had a few thingsto say about cryptography, by the way).
References
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