The U.S. Has Been Spying on #France Since Before the #NSA Existed | Killer Apps
▻http://killerapps.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/10/22/nsa_spying_france_secret_documents
After Marshal Pétain’s Vichy government collapsed, in April 1943 the U.S. Army codebreakers turned their attention to the diplomatic codes and ciphers then being used by America’s nominal ally, General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French government-in-exile, which was based in London but maintained embassies in the United States and elsewhere around the world. The report shows that in October 1943, the U.S. Army’s French codebreaking specialists, then headed by Major William F. Edgerton, solved the first of General de Gaulle’s most important diplomatic cipher systems, designated FMD. In the months that followed, a half-dozen other Free French diplomatic ciphers were solved.
With the solutions of these systems, decrypted French diplomatic traffic became the single most important source of intelligence information being produced by the U.S. Army’s codebreaking unit after Germany and Japan.
