David Kahn (writer)

David Kahn (February 7, 1930 – January 23, 2024) was an American historian, journalist, and writer. He wrote extensively on the history of cryptography and military intelligence.

Kahn's first published book,

Kahn said he traced his interest in cryptography to reading Fletcher Pratt's Secret and Urgent (1939) as a boy.^[2] Kahn was a founding editor of the Cryptologia journal. In 1969, Kahn married Susanne Fiedler; they divorced in 1994.^[2] They have two sons, Oliver and Michael.^[3][4]

Kahn attended Bucknell University. After graduation, he worked as a reporter at Newsday. He also served as an editor at the International Herald Tribune in Paris in the 1960s.

It was during this period that he wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine about two defectors from the National Security Agency. It was the origin of his monumental book, The Codebreakers.

The Codebreakers

The Codebreakers comprehensively chronicles the history of cryptography from ancient Egypt to the time of its writing. It is widely regarded as the best account of the history of cryptography up to its publication. Most of the editing, German translating, and insider contributions were from American World War II cryptographer Bradford Hardie III. William Crowell, the former deputy director of the National Security Agency, was quoted in Newsday as saying "Before he (Kahn) came along, the best you could do was buy an explanatory book that usually was too technical and terribly dull."^[5]

Kahn, then a newspaper journalist, was contracted to write a book on cryptography in 1961. He began writing it part-time, at one point quitting his regular job to work on it full-time.

The Codebreakers was a finalist for the non-fiction Pulitzer Prize in 1968.

Later career

Kahn was awarded a doctorate (D.Phil) from

Kahn continued his work as a reporter and op-ed editor for Newsday until 1998 and served as a journalism professor at New York University.

Despite past differences between Kahn and the National Security Agency over the information in The Codebreakers, Kahn was selected in 1995 to become NSA's scholar-in-residence. On October 26, 2010, Kahn attended a ceremony at NSA's National Cryptologic Museum (NCM) to commemorate his donation of his lifetime collection of cryptologic books, memorabilia, and artifacts to the museum and its library.^[10] The collection is housed at the NCM library and is non-circulating (that is, items cannot be checked out or loaned out), but photocopying and photography of items in the collection are allowed.

Personal life and death

Kahn lived in New York City. He also lived in Washington, D.C.; Paris, France;

• Plaintext in the new unabridged: An examination of the definitions on cryptology in Webster's Third New International Dictionary (Crypto Press 1963)
• ISBN 978-0-684-83130-5
  ) (1967)
• Hitler's Spies: German Military Intelligence in World War II (Macmillan 1978) (
  ISBN 0-02-560610-7
  )
• The Codebreakers – The Story of Secret Writing Revised edition (
  ISBN 0-684-83130-9
  ) (1996)
• Cryptology goes Public (Council on Foreign Relations 1979)
• Notes & correspondence on the origin of polyalphabetic substitution (1980)
• Codebreaking in World Wars I and II: The major successes and failures, their causes and their effects (Cambridge University Press 1980)
• Kahn on Codes: Secrets of the New Cryptology (Macmillan 1984) (
  ISBN 978-0-02-560640-1
  )
• Cryptology: Machines, History and Methods by Cipher Deavours and David Kahn (Artech House 1989) (
  ISBN 978-0-89006-399-6
  )
• Seizing the Enigma: The Race to Break the German U-Boats Codes, 1939–1943 (Houghton Mifflin 1991) (
  ISBN 978-0-395-42739-2
  )
• The Reader of Gentlemen's Mail: Herbert O. Yardley and the Birth of American Codebreaking (Yale University Press 2004) (
  ISBN 978-0-300-09846-4
  )
• How I Discovered World War II's Greatest Spy and Other Stories of Intelligence and Code, Boca Raton : CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014.
  ISBN 978-1466561991

References

1. ^ Burchard, Hank (May 5, 1972). "Leading cryptanalysts seek to break secret code reported to tell of buried treasure in Virginia" (PDF). The Washington Post.
2. ^
   ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved February 9, 2024. Embedded link: Myra MacPherson, "The Secret Life of David Kahn: Uncovering Spies and Secret Codes / From the Age of 12 He's Been Hooked on Spies and Codes"
   , Washington Post, June 8, 1978.
3. ISBN 978-0-8103-1941-7
   .
4. ^ David Kahn Official Website Archived January 31, 2010, at the Wayback Machine
5. ^ "David Kahn: Historian of Secret Codes" Archived September 13, 2005, at the Wayback Machine by Arnold Abrams, in Newsday 2004-09-19 (via History News Network)
6. ^ Bamford, 1982, p. 126
7. ^ ^{a b c} Bamford, 1982, p. 127
8. ^ Bamford, 1982, pp. 128–130
9. ^ The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing Archived December 11, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
10. ^ National Cryptologic Museum – Acquisitions
11. ^ David Kahn Echovita

Sources

• ISBN 978-0-14-006748-4
  .
• Kahn, David (1967). The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet. Scribner (later reprinted by Macmillan, 1996).
  ISBN 978-0-684-83130-5
  .

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to David Kahn.

• Kahn's Remarks to the NSA at its 50th Anniversary Celebration
• James Madison Project profile
• New York Review of Books profile
• David Kahn: Historian of Secret Codes by Arnold Abrams, in Newsday 2004-09-19 (via History News Network)
• The Intelligence Failure of Pearl Harbor by David Kahn, from Foreign Affairs (Winter 1991/92)
• Codebreaking and the Battle of the Atlantic^{[permanent dead link]} by David Kahn. USAFA Harmon Memorial Lecture No. 36 (1994-04-04)
• Decoding the NSA A 1996 interview with Kahn, while he was a visiting historian at the NSA
• The Hebern Code Machine
• The Enigma Machine
• David Kahn at
  IMDb