ABSTRACT
‘I had a disagreeable shock last night which will also have its impact on you’, wrote Sir Charles Hardinge, the British ambassador to Russia, to the permanent under-secretary (PUS) at the Foreign Office, Sir Thomas Sanderson, on 3 June 1904. At a formal dinner the previous evening, Hardinge had been told by a prominent Russian politician that the latter ‘did not mind how much I reported in writing what he told me in conversation, but he begged me on no account to telegraph as all our telegrams are known!’ 1 The British embassy had heard rumours for some time about the success of the Tsarist Foreign Ministry’s cabinet noir in penetrating diplomatic codes. Some months before, Cecil Spring Rice, the secretary at the embassy, had written to a colleague at the Foreign Office that ‘a private warning’ should be given about the security of British ciphers. 2 As Hardinge admitted after receiving his ‘disagreeable shock’, the task of Tsarist codebreakers was simplified by the lax security of the embassy’s filing system. ‘I have always had my suspicions of the security of our presses,’ he wrote, adding that this was crucial as ‘[njaturally everybody knows that the cyphers are kept in the safe and that the key of the safe is hung in one of the presses’. His suggested solution was for him ‘to have a specially secret cypher which must be kept apart from the others, of the existence of which nobody need know’. Though the secretary of state for foreign affairs, Lord Lansdowne, noted on Hardinge’s letter, ‘[t]he cypher matter is serious. Can you suggest anything for extra secret messages?’, it appears that nothing was done to deal with the security of the embassy’s presses. Nor is it clear whether or not Hardinge received his own secret cipher. 3
