At the start of World War II the British worked to exploit German communications at Bletchley Park. Their activities were successful, especially with the ENIGMA communications, thanks to the Polish Cipher Bureau who had broken many ENIGMA codes early on and smuggled them to the French and British prior to the German invasion of Poland. As the British worked to gather and disseminate the wealth of knowledge that came from the ENIGMA decrypts, they had to find a way to suggest that the source was human rather than signal intelligence, to prevent suspicion from the Germans that the ENIGMA had been compromised.
They chose to stamp all ENIGMA intelligence "BONIFACE," suggesting that the source was a spy burgling safes and cleaning wastebaskets at a German communications center. Unfortunately, BONIFACE didn't last because the breadth and detail of the data being collected could not, reasonably, be tied to one individual. All high-level decrypts were then stamped "ULTRA."
BONIFACE was a tongue in cheek name derived from Saint Boniface who lived from 672 to 754. He is the patron saint of Germany and the first archbishop of Mainz. He was a British Missionary whose work converted large portions of Germany to Christianity before he was martyred by a group of people he had intended to convert. When the mob approached, he told his comrades, "Cease fighting. Lay down your arms, for we are told in Scripture not to render evil for good but to overcome evil by good."
The ENIGMA decrypts have been credited by Winston Churchill with ending the war years earlier. In 1974 the decrypts of the ENIGMA were declared to no longer have a relevance to security, as computer based encryption had taken hold, and the material was declassified.
-Professor Walter
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