At the reunion, Adamson somewhat grandly announced to Albright that if he was given command of a division—an outcome as inevitable as the rising of the sun, he seemed to think—he would see what he could do about having Albright assigned as his signal officer.
This was not at all a pleasant prospect for Major Albright. Having all his teeth extracted without novocaine seemed on the whole more desirable than serving under his old classmate. But he smiled and said nothing.
They next met several years later, at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. Albright was by then a lieutenant colonel, and Adamson was a major general and the Secretary of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. «This means,» he explained to his old friend, «that I'm finally in a position to do something for you.»
«I truly appreciate the offer,» Albright replied, «but I'd like to think I'm really making a genuine contribution to the war effort doing what I've been doing.» At that time, he was involved in developing a more efficient and reliable Radio Ranging and Direction system, called «Radar,» as well as doing some work he considered important in the area of cryptography.
«Odd that you should mention that, Augie,» General Adamson said. «Cryptography's more or less what I came to see you about.»
Lieutenant Colonel H. (Hulit) A. (Augustus) Albright preferred to be informally addressed as «Hugh»; he despised «Augie.»
«Yes, sir?»
«What I'm about to tell you, Augie, is Top Secret, and not to leave this room,» General Adamson said.
«Yes, sir?»
«Navy cryptographers at Pearl Harbor have managed to break some of the most secret Japanese codes,» General Adamson announced.
That was not news to Colonel Albright. Not only had he learned from peers in the Navy Department that they were working hard on that problem, but he had arranged for a Korean-American mathematics professor named Hon Song Do, whom he had known at MIT, to be commissioned into the Signal Corps and assigned to the Pearl Harbor code-breaking operation. He hadn't actually been
told
, in so many words, that the codes had been broken, but he
knew
.
«Yes, sir?»
«Now, I have been charged by Admiral Leahy with setting up an absolutely secure transmission channel for the transmission of this data between Pearl Harbor, Washington, and General MacArthur's headquarters in Australia. And I think, Augie, that you're just the man to handle it.»
Oh, shit! I don't want to be a crypto officer. I'm overqualified to be a crypto officer, and too senior. That's a job for a captain, not a light colonel. What this sonofabitch is trying to do is cover his ass. Again.
«In this connection,» Adamson went on pontifically, «intelligence has managed to lay their hands on a German cryptographic device. To our good fortune, the Germans believe the device has been destroyed rather than compromised…«
This caught Lieutenant Colonel Albright's attention. He had heard some interesting things about the German device. For starters, it was such a clever design that decrypting material first encrypted on it was virtually impossible without using a device like it and a matching signal-operating instruction. And, if Adamson knew what he was talking about, and the Germans did not suspect thatthe device had fallen into the hands of the Allies, it was a major intelligence/cryptographic coup, with enormous implications.
«Yes, sir?»
«The question has been raised: could we—that is to say, could
you
duplicate this device, if you had your hands on it. It would be used solely for the transmission of the intelligence, code-named magic, which has been generated in Hawaii.»
«They call that reverse engineering, sir,» Albright replied. «Yes, sir. If I can get my hands on one, I can duplicate it.»
Before going on, General Adamson stared at Lieutenant Colonel Albright a long moment— obviously weighing whether or not to believe him.
«I'll have to get the go-ahead from Admiral Leahy, of course, Augie, but what I'm thinking is that we should fly you to London, so that you could physically bring this device to the United States. A destroyer has been made available for this purpose; flying it here is considered too risky.»
Maybe, with a little bit of luck, I can do everything he wants, and stay here, and not find my self working for the sonofabitch.
Three days later, Lieutenant Colonel Albright was on his way to England to bring the device to the United States. By the time the destroyer with the device aboard tied up at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Adamson had arranged for his transfer to the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as Chief, Communications & Communications Security. He had additionally and not without difficulty, he said, arranged his promotion to full colonel and detail to the General Staff Corps. «Don't make me regret it, Augie,» he told him.
Within a month, Colonel Albright learned that he owed his promotion to the suggestion of the chief signal officer, not General Adamson, and that his detail to the General Staff Corps had been directed by Admiral Leahy himself, as a cover for his secret communications role. No one would pay much attention to one more GSC colonel on the Joint Chiefs; but people might wonder what a full bird colonel of the Signal Corps was actually doing.
In three closely guarded rooms at the Army's Signal Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, Albright immediately set up «the factory.» There the first machine was carefully reverse-engineered, and the devices based on it—naturally called magic devices, after the code name of the intelligence data itself—were put into production. The first two of these were installed in Washington and Pearl Harbor. The third went to Brisbane, Australia, for MacArthur's use, where it was placed in the care of Lieutenant Hon Song Do, Signal Corps, USAR. In time, the «factory» was capable of manufacturing two of the devices each month.
During the initial setup of the «Special Channel,» Major General Charles M. Adamson, USA, predictably proved to be a royal pain in the ass; but that was the price Albright knew he had to pay for being involved with an operation as important as magic… an importance confirmed to Colonel Albright on more than one occasion by Admiral Leahy himself. Leahy privately told Albright that the magic information transmitted over the Special Channel was one of the United States' two most important secret operations, the other being the Manhattan Project under Brigadier General Leslie Groves, USA. Under Groves, a team of physicists and mathematicians was engaged in developing a bomb that would release the energy Einstein theorized was contained in all matter. One such bomb, Admiral Leahy told Albright, would have an explosive force equivalent to that of twenty thousand tons of trinitrotoluene, better known as TNT.
It was now clear to Albright that he'd been wrong to worry about becoming an overqualified crypto officer, a colonel doing a captain's job. In fact, he sometimes wondered if he was qualified to protect the magic secret from compromise. The basic problem, as he saw it, was not technical or mechanical, but human. The magic devices worked flawlessly. The problem was that more and more people were being added to the loop.
The Special Channel was originally intended to provide an absolutely secure transmission channel for magic between the headquarters of Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief, Pacific, in Hawaii; General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander, South West Pacific Ocean Area, in Brisbane, Australia; and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States in Washington.