Cipher

history · EN

Cipher tells the true stories of espionage and codebreaking — the trade of secrets, and the mathematics of keeping them. Each episode, host Nirob takes one operation, one machine, or one traitor — a telegram that dragged America into a world war, a body washed ashore in Spain carrying deliberately false plans, a machine with rotors that its owners believed unbreakable and a hut full of people who broke it anyway, a man at the top of British intelligence who had been working for Moscow the whole time — and rebuilds it: the stakes, the tradecraft, the tiny slip that gave it away, and what it cost. From a queen's letters read by her enemies to the public-key mathematics protecting every message you send today, from a corpse with a briefcase to a bug with no batteries hidden in a gift from Moscow, Cipher is the history of the twentieth century told sideways — through decrypts, dead drops, and the people who lived double lives. Meticulously researched, honest about what remains c