[GreenKeys] History question: White House to Kremlin "hotline"

[Bob Camp]

Hi

My main interest is in the pre satellite era of the Hotline. It looks 
like that is the era that is not terribly well documented on the web. 
It seems that there were many connections between Russia and the US 
over the years. The details of each tend to bleed into each other. 
During WWII there were multiple RTTY circuits connecting both the 
military and the White House with various organizations in Russia.  I 
doubt that Stalin was to wild about any of it surviving the end of the 
war. In parallel with the White House / Kremlin Hotline there was a 
military to military connection as well. Often it was referred as a 
hotline as well.

Each of these connections lived a tangled life of it's own. The 
hardware and network configuration both changed multiple times over the 
years. Three years or less seems like about the typical lifetime of 
most of what was done. No matter what they did handling alphabet 
translation and encryption must have been a common thread in all of the 
systems that involved interoperation between the two countries.

I agree about the "model 15" with a Russian type box in it. That alone 
might be worth a bit of looking into. The Russians must have been 
producing something over the years to Tele-print messages. I wonder 
what their stuff looked like ...

All are interesting question and probably deserves more than guesses, 
speculation and half remembered data. That's about all I have at this 
point, no hard references or citations from authoritative sources. I'll 
keep poking around. I *must* have some of this in books around here.

	Enjoy!

		Bob Camp
		KB8TQ



On May 1, 2004, at 9:37 PM, Charles Ring W3NU wrote:

> McNerney, Tim wrote:
>
>> Does anyone remember any details on the White House to Kremlin 
>> "hotline,"
>> which is long-rumoured to have been a TTY connection of some sort.  If
>> anyone has the scoop, I'd love to hear it.
>>
> I know it uised 28ASR's and a  Cyrillic version of the 15 with three
> shift levels.
>
> 74 de W3NU
>
>
>
>
>
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