Thirty-ninth edition of the N&O column / Spooks newsletter

(Date: Wed, 01 Aug 2001 23:48:18 +0200)

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Crypto : The Navajos code talkers

I once read a short article about the ca 400 Navajo Code Talkers who served in the US Marine Corps between 1942 and 1945, and wanted to learn more about them. That was quite a long time ago; well before I got my internet connection and it was therefore hard to find anything about them. Except for a few short phrases, I couldn't find much in the libraries here in the Netherlands. I remembered the NCTs when I visited Utah during my vacation a couple of weeks ago and searched there for more info, which I found.

The idea to use the Navajo language for secure communications came from Philip Johnston, who lived then 22 years amongst the Navajo Indians. On 12 September, 1942, he wrote a letter to the Commandant of the United States Marine Corps in Washington DC, in which he says "Last February, it occurred to me that the Navajo language might be ideally suited to use by the Marine Corps for code in oral communications." The language proved to be ideal for coded transmissions. It has no alphabet and is spoken only in Navajo Nation.

Johnston was right because the code was never broken by the Japanese while it was used for telephone and radio messages in the Pacific theatre from mid 1942 to 1945. A Japanese intelligence general once said that the Japanese deciphered coded messages from the US Army and Air Force, but never a Navajo code as used by the US Marine Corps.

Philip Johnston met Major General Vogel and his staff in February 1942 to demonstrate that Navajo code really could work. Vogel was convinced and in May 1942, the first 29 Navajo recruits started to create the Navajo code. The original list of 263 terms was created by this group in the Marine Corps Communication School located at Camp Elliott. The original alphabet consisted of 26 words, one Navajo word for each of the 26 letters of the English alfabeth. The final version had two or three words for a most of the letters.

Coded messages consisted of strings of Navajo words that had to be translated in English first. The first letters of the English words eventually formed the real words.

Example:
"gah wol-la-chee be tkin a-kha" translates to "rabbit ant deer ice oil". When we take the first letters, the word "RADIO" appears. Because there were more Navajo words for each letter, RADIO could be spelled in many ways. As a result, the repeated letter frequency decreased, which made it more difficult for the enemy to find clues.

A Navajo word was assigned to a number of often used words and terms, but the developers of the code still found some 450 frequently used military terms that did not exist in the Navajo language. They invented new words for this purpose. Words like "ne-as-jah" (owl), meaning OBSERVATION PLANE; "dah-he- tih-hi" (hummingbird), meaning FIGHTER PLANE and "besh-lo" (iron fish), meaning SUBMARINE.

The Dictionary:

I have only listed a small part of the total list, just to give you an idea. Those of you who want the complete list, send me an e-mail at ary@luna.nl

[Note: the information about the NCTs has been declassified under Department of Defense Directive 5200.9]

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