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The ''Biuro Szyfrów'' (, Polish for "Cipher Bureau") was the interwar Polish General Staff's Second Department's agency charged with both cryptography (the ''use'' of ciphers and codes) and cryptology (the study of ciphers and codes, particularly for the purpose of "breaking" them). The precursor of the agency that would become the Cipher Bureau was created in May 1919, during the Polish-Soviet War (1919–21), and played a vital role in securing Poland's survival in that war. In mid-1931, the Cipher Bureau was formed by the merger of pre-existing agencies. In December 1932, the Bureau began breaking Germany's Enigma ciphers. Over the next seven years, Polish cryptologists overcame the growing structural and operating complexities of the plugboard-equipped Enigma. The Bureau also broke Soviet cryptography. Five weeks before the outbreak of World War II, on 25 July 1939, in Warsaw, the Polish Cipher Bureau revealed its Enigma-decryption techniques and equipment to representatives of French and British military intelligence, which had been unable to make any headway against Enigma. This Polish intelligence-and-technology transfer would give the Allies an unprecedented advantage (Ultra) in their ultimately victorious prosecution of World War II. ==Precursor== (詳細はPolish Army "Cipher Section" (''Sekcja Szyfrów''), precursor to the "Cipher Bureau" (''Biuro Szyfrów''), was created by Lt. Józef Serafin Stanslicki. The Cipher Section reported to the Polish General Staff and contributed substantially to Poland's defense by Józef Piłsudski's forces during the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–21, thereby helping preserve Poland's independence, recently regained in the wake of World War I. The ''Cipher'' Section's purview included both ciphers and codes. In loose Polish parlance, the term "cipher" ("''szyfr''") refers to ''both'' these two principal categories of cryptography.〔 (The opposite is the practice in English, which loosely refers to ''both'' codes and ciphers as "codes.") During the Polish–Soviet War (1919–1921), some one hundred Russian ciphers were broken by a sizable cadre of Polish cryptologists who included army Lieutenant Jan Kowalewski and three world-famous professors of mathematics — Stefan Mazurkiewicz, Wacław Sierpiński and Stanisław Leśniewski. Russian army staffs were still following the same disastrously ill-disciplined signals-security procedures as had Tsarist army staffs during World War I, to the decisive advantage of their German enemy.〔 As a result, during the Polish-Soviet War the Polish military were regularly kept informed by Russian signals stations about the movements of Russian armies and their intentions and operational orders.〔 The Russian staffs, according to Polish Colonel Mieczysław Ścieżyński, "had not the slightest hesitation about sending any and all messages of an operational nature by means of radiotelegraphy; there were periods during the war when, for purposes of operational communications and for purposes of command by higher staffs, no other means of communication whatever were used, messages being transmitted either entirely ("in clear," or plaintext) or encrypted by means of such an incredibly uncomplicated system that for our trained specialists reading the messages was child's play. The same held for the chitchat of personnel at radiotelegraphic stations, where discipline was disastrously lax." In the crucial month of August 1920 alone, Polish cryptologists decrypted 410 signals: from Soviet General Mikhail Tukhachevsky, commander of the northern front; from Leon Trotsky, Soviet commissar of war; from commanders of armies, e.g. the commander of the IV Army, Sergieyev; the commander of the Horse Army, Semyon Budionny; the commander of the 3 Cavalry Corps, Gaya; from the staffs of the XII, XV and XVI Armies; from the staffs of the Mozyr Group (named after the Belarusian city); the Zolochiv Group (after the Ukrainian town); the Yakir Group (General Iona Emmanuilovich Yakir ); from the 2, 4, 7, 10, 11, 12, 16, 17, 18, 24, 27, 41, 44, 45, 53, 54, 58 and 60 Infantry Divisions; from the 8 Cavalry Division, etc. The intercepts were as a rule decrypted the same day, or at latest the next day, and were immediately sent to the Polish General Staff's Section II (Intelligence) and operational section. The more important signals were read in their entirety by the Chief of the General Staff, and even by the Commander in Chief, Marshal Józef Piłsudski. Interception and reading of the signals provided Polish intelligence with entire Russian operational orders. The Poles were able to follow the whole operation of Budionny's Horse Army in the second half of August 1920 with incredible precision, just by monitoring his radiotelegraphic correspondence with Tukhachevsky, including the famous and historic conflict between the two Russian commanders. The intercepts even included an order from Trotsky to the revolutionary council of war of the Western Front, confirming Tukhachevsky's operational orders, thus giving them the authority of the supreme chief of the Soviet armed forces. An entire operational order from Tukhachevsky to Budionny was intercepted on 19 August and read on 20 August, stating the tasks of all of Tukhachevsky's armies, of which only the essence had previously been known. Ścieżyński surmises that the Soviets must likewise have intercepted Polish operational signals; but he doubts that this would have availed them much since Polish cryptography "stood abreast of modern cryptography" and since only a small number of Polish higher headquarters were equipped with radio stations, of which there was a great shortage; and finally, Polish headquarters were more cautious than the Russians and almost every Polish division had the use of a land line.〔 Polish cryptologists enjoyed generous support under the command of Col. Tadeusz Schaetzel, chief of the Polish General Staff's Section II (Intelligence). They worked at Warsaw's radio station ''WAR'', one of two Polish long-range radio transmitters at the time. The Polish cryptologists' work led, among many other things, to discovery of a large gap on the Red Army's left flank, which enabled Poland's Marshal Józef Piłsudski to drive a war-winning wedge into that gap during the August 1920 Battle of Warsaw.〔 The discovery of the Cipher Bureau's archives, decades after the Polish-Soviet War, has borne out Ścieżyński's assertion 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Biuro Szyfrów」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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