In the Army Security Agency I had a Top Secret Codeword security clearance. This is pretty high. My colleague and future best friend, the late Dick Crooks, translated the disturbing message that became the Berlin Wall: major movements of supplies and troops were heading to the city. It suggested an invasion, and every American soldier in Europe went on alert.
Long before this, my own military career did not begin smoothly. On a train to Baumholder, I was pulled off just before we got there. I was told there was a problem with my security clearance. Until it was straightened out, I would remain here on TDY, temporary duty.
It was winter and snowed every day. I was given a chow pass and issued bedding. That's it. I found a bed, found the small base library and read all day. I got away with this for almost a week before a sergeant noticed me and wondered why in hell I wasn't shoveling snow.
I made a deal with him. I'd volunteer for the earliest snow brigade at the Officers Quarters, 3 to 7 a.m., if he'd assign me to the library for the rest of my day's duty. He did, and I got off at noon.I liked the gig. He also loaned me money because I was broke.
This adventure lasted almost a month. I was told my clearance had been miss filed. I never believed them. I figured I was getting special attention for two possible reasons: I had joined in Berkeley, that lefty mecca; and at Cal Tech I had become a Linus Pauling groupy, peddling his new book, No More War. At any rate I finally was off to do what I had been trained 12 months to do.
In Baumholder my reputation had preceded me. My drinking buddies from the language school had been talking me up as a mathematical genius. Maybe I could solve a pressing problem, predicting the additive change. This referred to a page, 00 to 99, in a captured book of codewords used by the Russian army units in East Germany. If the "additive," or top page, was known, all the others fell into place and all the intercepted messages could be identified. But this top page changed about once a week or so, and until the change was figured out, we didn't know who was saying what. It would be terrific if we could predict these additive changes.
After more initial training I was called into the CO's office before final assignment. Did I want to look at the additive problem?
I was baffled by the offer. Why weren't real mathematicians at the Pentagon solving it? Probably were. What the captain saw, I quickly understood, was a chance to roll the dice for major. Sure, I'll look at it.
I suppose I looked like a math whiz to the army. I'd been to Cal Tech. I'd even published in a math journal. But I knew better. The beauty of math is you always know exactly where you stand.
What I was trying to do was predict what came next in a series of numbers. Not my area of expertise. No access to books that would teach me something. But I did notice a few things.
For example, no number got repeated in the same calendar year. Hmm. After a while, pressure mounted on me to make a prediction. What would come next? I had no idea. I also was getting bored. Even though I was being treated like a big shot, like an officer, with more or less a duty day defined by myself, once I understood I was in over my head, I was bored. I wanted to do what I'd been trained to do.
So I figured I'd make a prediction, it would be wrong, I'd admit defeat, and that would be that. I made a prediction.
I was right.
Terrific. My buddies called my insistence on luck "modesty." And the captain went nuts. He cabled the military world that HIS outfit had been doing Special Research and had just made HIS first breakthrough.
Now for an encore.
The next few months were the worst of my enlistment. I knew I had made a lucky guess, informed by a few dozen previous numbers I figured it would NOT be, I knew the truth, but everybody else assumed I was on to something. My next prediction was two numbers off, which had no significance whatever, but looks "close" to those who don't understand the problem. What a mess.
It took months of wrong predictions for me to talk myself off this boring, stressful, useless gig. The captain decided he had made a mistake bragging about my, that is his, success: the Russians had changed their system in response! I went down as the linguist who almost broke the additive code.
What a trip.
