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The Special Operations Executive (SOE), a British WW2 group infiltrating Reich-dominated Europe, had during the War's early and middle years a continuing problem in certain parts of France. They would train new agents, drop them into French territory, note their contact with a local agent... and they were lost, presumed captured or killed. Two things needed to happen fast: first, a new network had to be built so fresh agents would not be compromised by the older, discovered network. And second, a code generation method must be implemented that did not give a field agent knowledge of how other field agents generated similar messages into encrypted form (knowledge that could be extracted by torture). The answer to the second problem was called a "one time pad", a method still in use today and which had life-saving results almost immediately in the Allied war effort.
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Good characters, amazing true story, not a super strong narrative path, but something is always happening. The author has a slightly weird style where his attempts at metaphor and wordplay seem sorta forced, but as you get to know his personality you start to appreciate it. One thing I found sort of frustrating is that the author attempts to demonstrate “how the code works” at a few points early in the book, and maybe it was the Kindle format or maybe I'm a little dyslexic, but I didn't follow at all. The good news for those of you who also experience this, is that it doesn't really matter in the end, as he generally explains the situation in lay terms as well. Highly recommended. Made me hate my job because it's not as noble as staying up all night decoding secret dispatches to help heroic secret agents blow up Nazi trains.