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Originally posted by DeltAlum
There are a couple of interesting allegations from WWII including that we knew in advance about Pearl Harbor and that the British allowed one of their cities to be bombed so that the Germans wouldn't find out we had caputred a cypher machine -- somebody help me with the name.
Even today, some politicians were asking whether we gave away some of our intellegence techniques by making this announcement.
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Coventry. The Enigma cypher machine decrypts (under the code name ULTRA) were so sensitive that they were one of the last secrets of World War II that have been declassified. Even then, there's still some information that remains classified because it would divulge 'intelligence sources and methods" (i.e. expose a well-placed 'mole' inside an adversarial foreign government).
A similar decryption program for Japanese message traffic was under the code name MAGIC.
All the indications that pointed to a probable attack on the United States by Japan were in plain sight, but the intelligence information was dismissed out of hand or acted upon too late to be of any use.
Enigma was a breakthrough in cryptological machines when it was introduced in the 1930s, though there are infinitely more powerful (and highly classified) cypher machines in use today. Most of the US crypto machines had to be redesigned after the traitor John Walker sold 'em out to the Russkies.