I noticed this interesting book on display at the NSA’s Cryptological Museum. It was in the 1920’s cabinet I think. It did not have any other description that I noticed.
I am kind of curious how this would actually be used. Here is my guess:
Let’s say the CIA or some intelligence agency has hired Lady X who works at the Kremlin. She wants to tell us things on a periodic basis. One way to do this is by what she wears. I suppose she could just meet us in a dark alley and tell us what she wants to tell us, but that necessitates more communication between the parties. Frequent communication between us and Lady X can be bad because it means she is more likely to be detected as a spy.
So some designated observer is tasked with noticing what she wears every day as she leaves her apartment to go to work in the morning. He then looks at his copy of Fairchild’s Illustrated Women’s Wear Code and determines that her pants code is EDPOE and her blouse code is UHRYI. He then uses some other code book to determine what these codes mean. For example, a US Dept. of State code book. So it looks like each code gets translated into one word. Maybe today’s code translates to “Drink Ovaltine.”
Does this sound plausible to everyone? Please someone come in and straighten me out with some facts.
I’ve still got a couple of questions about this system:
This doesn’t allow much transfer of information. Compared to a document drop-off, sending a couple of words a day is pretty inefficient. Some ideas may be easily transferred, but others are almost impossible.
I suppose other accessories can also be used (hats, gloves, shoes?). This brings another problem. What if the message that Lady X wants to send means that she has to wear a hat, a blouse, and a skirt that totally don’t work together? This is going to be awkward and hard to explain to her employer.
The code, it seems, was developed back when international communication (by telegraph or cable) was slow and expensive per unit of information. For example, a fashion writer in Paris could use the code to create a shorthand description of new clothing in order to reduce the cost of cabling the description back to her publisher in New York. It would also have the advantage of obscuring the information from being understood by the vast majority of people outside the field.
This advertisement describes some of the advantages of the standardized code:
Eminently practical, although I have to admit that your idea, Hermitian, has a considerable advantage in terms of creativity and mystique.
As cwthree points out, it was a commercial code, designed primarily for brevity rather than espionage. There were thousands of such codes in existence in the telegraph era, covering every possible business and field of endeavor. They were designed to save pennies at the telegraph station, though they had the added advantage of providing minimal security if your enemies were not already aware of the code.
Interesting. Since it was in the NSA museum I thought it may have had some kind of national security element to it, but it was tough to try to come up with a plausable situation where it would be needed.
Dead drops serve the OP’s speculative communication needs pretty well. A particular item of clothing, or worn in a certain way would be a good way to alert a handler that there is a message waiting at the dead drop…but then so would a newspaper tucked under the arm instead of carried in the hand, so there is no real need for fashions to enter in to it…especially women’s fashions which change with every season. I think I recall reading that Aldrich Ames communicated with his handlers via dead drops for years without being discovered on those grounds.
On edit, the wiki article linked above says Ames communicated openly, so I must have been thinking of another spy.