Scanned Document - National Security Agency

I. Church probably misspelled Stamford, Connecticut.
2. Church used two Fs; the deciphered letter used the currently accepted spelling ~ 4th one F.
Interestingly, General MTashington also spelled rifle with two Fs in his letter to Congress on the matter.
3. Parentheses were placed around "2 or 3 days recruits" in the deciphered letter; there is no hint of
punctuation in the original cryptogram which might help clarify Church's intended meaning.
4. The deciphered letter contained the ANT.
General Notes:
I. For the most part, punctuation has been added. Church only occasionally suggested punctuation,
mostly some apostrophes and a few periods.
2. Paragraphing has been arbitrarily introduced for readability, based on major changes in topics
discussed.
3. Numbers have been spelled out only when they start sentences.
4. -4mpersands have been used as deciphered.
Not a Children's Story, But Perhaps
the Key to the Puzzle of Studying History
Rummaging through my files in search of fodder for another children's article (four stories
published - three on ancient, 16th century, and 18th century secret writing), I came across a tear sheet
from a 1976 NSA Newsletter which printed a short (450-word) version of the Church incident. It told
of a "young rebel patriot" who received the Church letter from a "former intimate acquaintance." A
teenage boy uncovering espionage with the help of an ex-girlfriend seemed like a super hook upon
which to hang a children's stoly.
Further research, however, revealed the young patriot to be a bachelor from Newport who ran a
bakery and bread shop, undoubtedly the description of a man at least in his mid- to late twenties. On
top of that, he had "shared idyllic hours of dalliance" (Bakeless, p. 12) with the "professional lady" who
subsequently became Dr. Church's mistress! The mental image of the spunky teenager and his girl
tracking down treason in eighteenth-century New England dissolved in a blush of abashment. So much
for the children's story.
But another of my interests was senred. David Kahn's The Codebreakers (p. 175) reproduced the
last five lines of the Church cryptogram, and being an avid solver of Paul Derthick's monthly "Headline
Puzzle" in the NSA Newsletter. I used the last sentence of the deciphered letter ("Make use of every
precaution or I perish.") as a crib to decipher the available fragment.
Later, an entire page of Church's cqrptogram was discovered reproduced in Freeman's biography
of Washington (pp. 541-42). Deciphering that, which, considering the poor quality of the original text
and reproduction and the similarities of many of the enciphering symbols, was a challenge equal to Mr.
Derthick's puzzles. Eventually a photocopy of the entire Church letter was acquired and the cryptogram
was deciphered, with the help of a photocopy of the surviving decrypt to verify a couple of rough spots.
Church's letter came alive with colorful reflections of real people - loving, fighting, and, of course,
spying in colonial America. In shoi-t, it pried open the doors to a world which had remained closed
despite previous educational assaults on my ignorance. The accompanying article is one outcome of my
newly expanded interest in early American history.
Michael L. Peterson