[GreenKeys] 43 years ago today

[Eugene Hertz]

no, it wasn't my birthday. But the hot line was put in between moscow and washington. Here is the article as it was published in the New York Times. A few nice little technical details about the machines...

Washington, Aug. 30 -- A diplomatic "hot line" between Moscow and Washington went into operation today with the simultaneous clattering of telecommunication machines in the Kremlin and the Pentagon. 

The emergency communications channel is designed to reduce the risk of accidental war. The opening was announced in a one-sentence Defense Department statement: 

"The direct communications link between Washington and Moscow is now operational." 

No ceremony accompanied the implementations of one of the few arms control measures that the United States and the Soviet Union, the two major nuclear powers, have been able to agree upon in years of negotiations. 

Text Message Is Sent 

There was no exchange of official messages. Instead, from Washington went the message used by Teletype operators to test whether a circuit is operating -- "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back 1234567890," 

Back from Moscow came a similar test message in Russian, which was completely unintelligible to the United States operators but at least showed that all the characters on the Teletype were working correctly. 

After a series of exchanges of such messages, the Pentagon said, it was determined that the link was "completely satisfactory" and it was "declared operational and made available for exchange of official messages between the two Governments." 

Now that the link has been established, it will be used only "in time of emergency" and then only for exchange of messages between the two heads of Government. 

The decision to establish the "hot line" is a direct outgrowth of the serious delays that developed in diplomatic communications between the two capitals during the Cuban crisis last fall. Diplomatic messages are now sent over normal commercial channels to the United States and Soviet Embassies in Moscow and Washington. 

With the time consumed by transmission, coding and decoding, translation and delivery, hours are often required before a message reaches its destination. 

The direct link, which is available 24 hours a day, will make it possible for the heads of the two Governments to exchange messages in minutes. 

A message from President Kennedy to Premier Khrushchev, for example, will be sent to the Washington terminal of the link in the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon. There American Teletype operators will type the message on a teleprinter and a punched tape. 

After checking the typed message against the original copy, the Teletype tape will be fed into a Teletype transmitter. As the message goes out, it will be encoded by a "scrambling device" to prevent anyone from reading it at relay points along the 10,000-mile cable circuit. 

In Moscow, the message will go through a decoding device and appear on a Teletype machine in the Kremlin near the office of Premier Khrushchev. 

Translation Necessary 

The plan calls for the United States to transmit messages in English and the Soviet Union in Russian. Thus at each end it will be necessary for the messages to be translated before they can be delivered to the leaders. 

The agreement to establish the link was reached in Geneva June 20, about eight months after the Cuban crisis. The idea had been studied for several years. 

Since June, Soviet and American technicians have been rushing to install the equipment by a Sept. 1 deadline. 

Four American Teletype machines- the 66-word-a-minute Model 28 manufactured by Teletype Corporation of Chicago- were carried to Moscow by plane in July and installed in the Kremlin by Aug. 1. 

Four comparable Soviet machines, built in East Germany, arrived last weekend at the Soviet Embassy here and were delivered to the Pentagon on Monday. On Tuesday, the machines were installed in an office in the section of the Pentagon occupied by the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

American technicians report that the German-built equipment was "very good" and that the installation and the first test transmissions in the last few days had gone "remarkably smoothly." The two countries also exchanged a year's supply of spare parts, special tools, operating instructions and telecommunication tape. In addition, there was an exchange of encoding equipment, which undernormal circumstances is treated with the highest secrecy. 

According to officials, the nature of the encoding equipment was a major difficulty in working out the hot line agreement. It was finally decided that what is known as "one time tape system encoding equipment" would be used. 

This equipment is employed by commercial as well as military communications systems, so that no military secrets were divulged in making it available to the Soviet Union. 

The one time tape system, regarded as being virtually "breakproof" by cryptographers, works in this fashion: 

As the Teletype tape containing a message is fed into one transmitter, an encoding "keying tape" is fed into another transmitter. The result is to scramble up the letters in the outgoing message so that it is unintelligible. 

At the receiving end, the same keying tape is fed into the Teletype, and the message comes out decoded. A keying tape is used only once, thus making the coding system impervious to "breaking" by cryptographic analysis. 

Under the agreement, the two sides exchange keying tapes. Thus, when the Russian center wants to send a message, for example, it sends along a number identifying the tape to be used in the Pentagon machines. 

Circuit's Route Given 

The two terminals are linked by cable and radio circuits, with the two sides sharing the cost of leasing the circuits from commercial companies. The cost is expected to range from $80,000 to $90,000 a year. 

The principal circuit is a land-line and ocean cable connection running from Wahington to London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki and Moscow. 

It is a duplex telegraph circuit capable of handling two simultaneous Teletype transmissions. 

In addition, there is a duplex radio circuit going from Washington to Tangier in North Africa and from there to Moscow. 

The radio circuit will be used for coordinating operations between the two