The Cold War held many secrets.  Some of these secrets had to do with how people talked to each other.  As hard as it is to believe, a lot of these secrets were broken by the code breakers at Bletchley Park.

            The Russians had some pretty strange names for the machines that created their secret codes.  One of these names was the Poets series, which included the Coleridge.  Another was the Caviar.                                      (http://www.historyteacher.net/AHAP/AHAPTopicSheets.htm)                                                                                                       

All of these were secret codes and ciphers with weird names. 

                                              
            When the code breakers moved their headquarters from Bletchley Park to Eastcote, Middlesex, they broke the Poets code.  This was done in early 1946.  This cracked code gave the allies a lot of information about the Soviets.  It told them about military strength, capability and dispositions.  If the code breakers had a wish list about what type of information they wanted, this would have been second only to atomic secrets that would have been a tremendous help to win the war.             

      Unfortunately, the code breaker’s secret was handed to the soviet military by William Weisband, an agent in the U.S. Army.

      The Venona Project was also used in the Cold War.  It was used to intercept telegrams and try to decode them.  The program was actually started on February 1, 1941, but was not fully depended on until the Cold War.  The first few months the analysts spent separating messages into diplomatic notes, different subscribers, and a system of the coding.  There were five systems of cryptology.  People intercepted piles of enciphered massages that had been sent over commercial telegraph lines.  Between 1947 and 1952, most of these messages were deciphered and read.

            There were many ways to give someone a message without letting the other side know what you were doing.  A lot of the codes were broken.  During the Cold War, people had to go around in secret a lot.  If they could not have communication the enemy did not recognize, they would have had secrets spilled.  That is why communication was so important.

By Lilly Bese and Danielle Islas