TAMAMSHUD

PLACES OF INTEREST

Firstly thanks to the people who wrote in following the last post that showed a map of places of interest in Melbourne for Tibor Kaldor history, I have taken on your suggestion and above you will see another map but this time of Glenelg.

If you click on the icons, you will be able to read further information, some of the icons also have one or more images which you can click through.

Many of you will be familiar with the locations shown but there is a new location that could be of interest.

It is known that many business people were Freemasons and attended lodge meetings normally once a month. On this map you will find a location of 9 High Street Glenelg, the home of the Macdonnell lodge.

You will notice that it is a five-minute walk from Jetty Road which is where the Rubaiyat was found. If you click on each of the markers you will see more information and in some cases images.

There is a possibility that the person who found the copy of the Rubaiyat was a member of the lodge. and it will be explored.

I have also included the possible route from 90A Moseley Street to the beach where the man's body was found.

More will be added to this post in the coming days.

SUITCASE CONTENTS: THE PELACO SHIRT

Amongst the contents of the suitcase that was recovered by Detective Sgt Leane on January 19th 1949, there were two shirts, one white and the other a yellow Pelaco shirt, well at least that's the way the story goes.

Pelaco was a brand that was manufactured in Mebourne originally although there was also a factory in Brisbane. Their range tended to focus on pyjamas and on shirts.

In the image above you can see that the buttons appear to be of the metal type and you can also see that the shoulder panel behind the label is comparatively deep,. The hand tends to obscure the general line of the shirt at the collar such that it is not readily seen whether the flap that appears to the left of the image beneath the hand is part of the collar or possibly a shirt pocket flap.

Here's an ad from the late 40s for a normal Pelaco shirt with a similar fabric colour and dark buttons:

The collar looks to be somewhat different in style. and it has short sleeves.

The issue relates to the description of both shirts found in the suitcase and included in the Inquest document, were both described as 'COAT SHIRTS'.

My understanding is that a 'coat shirt' design means that the shirt doesn't have the traditional 'tail' but is square cut and it was made to be worn outside the trousers, this advert for Arrow shirts from the same era illustrates the difference quite well:

The 'coat' style is upper left in the image.

Why is this important? The shirt as shown is very much for casual wear, in fact sometimes they were worn with shorts and were at one time given the name 'SAFARI' shirts and suits:

Ex residents of Adelaide may recall the late Don Dunstan and his notorious photograph in a pink safari suit.

So, we have a shirt that is for casual wear and yet the rest of the contents point to very formal wear, the jacket, the shoes, the trousers are all formal. Should there have been a pair of casual trousers in the case? Is it possible that the two coat shirts were worn not over trousers but over swimming trunks which would leave the upper part of the body covered and therefore not tanned but the lower part would be?

For those interested, you can download a copy of the 1958 Inquest document here...

JIM BURROWES, OAM
M SPECIAL UNIT

‘The Coastwatchers saved Guadalcanal, and Guadalcanal saved the South Pacific.’ Admiral 'Bill' Halsey, US Navy.

Some days ago I managed to get in touch with this man, retired Sgt Jim Burrowes, Commando.

We had a phone call an exchange of emails and Jim kindly gave me permission to summarise our discussion and made materials available to me.

I explained to Jim the background to my enquiry and he was only too happy to share his knowledge of his time in New Britain, the work he did and the equipment he used. We covered a lot of ground in what was a relatively short time

RECRUITMENT & TRAINING

Jim was 'recruited', for want of a better term, in January 1942 at the barracks in Albert Park at the age of 18.

'There were about 50 of us in my group and a burly Sergeant-Major commanded ‘Okay you lot, raise your hand if you work in an office or as a school teacher.’ He told those of us who raised our hands to ‘Stand over there!’ As I had worked in a Chartered Accountants’ office for the previous two years, I stuck up my hand. He then said to the others: ‘The rest of YOU ARE INFANTRY!’ Thus, my later destiny as a Coastwatcher was set.'

His first 6 weeks were spent training, he was stationed at Camp Pell interestingly enough, those followers of the blog will recall the role that Camp Pell played in the Tibor Kaldor posts. He was trained in the use of Morse code with that part of training taking place at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, RMIT. He managed to reach a very useful speed of 25 words a minute. If you learnt Morse code in your past you would understand that the speed he mentions was well above average.

DEPLOYMENT & RABAUL

Following a spell in both Melbourne and Brisbane both sending and receiving signals from Port Moresby and other locations to the North, Jim volunteered for special service, that despite the army maxim, 'Never volunteer for anything!, was subsequently transferred to the Amphibious Landing Force of the US Navy's 7th Fleet, Jim is now the last surviving Australian member of that force.

Jim spent 10 months in the jungle overlooking Rabaul which had earlier been captured by the Japanese, the role of his group was not to fight but to avoid detection and to transmit much needed and valued intelligence reports on troop and particularly aircraft movements from Rabaul airfield.

Jim Burrowes, kneeling, the centre of the front row.

We spoke of the practicalities of the Rabaul operation, the details of how intelligence was gathered and then how it reached AIB HQ.

THE EQUIPMENT

Below is the set, type ATR-4A, which was in use by the M Special units at the time. A standard Morse code key s also shown.

There were two officers in Jim's group and it was generally they that took off into the bush surrounding the airfield and then made notes in pencil that described the aircraft types that were seen, if and when they took off and which direction they headed.

Naturally capturing details of the loading of bombers was of high importance. On most occasions, the information was returned to the camp and from then, Jim or another operator would encode the handwritten notes and then transmit the details using Morse code.

THE CODES

They made use of two codes, one of which was Playfair and the other was a code he referred to as the 'Nave' code, that was the code created by Eric Nave. Most interestingly, they used a standard book, in this case, a Dickens novel, to help with the encoding for both codes used. to use Jim's words. 'We encoded and referred to the page line and word numbers from the book to create the finished messages.' He may have used the book as a rest when writing up the encoded message, he couldn't honestly remember that detail.

Jim believed that each group may have had their own books, it could have been a decision of the senior officer who may have chosen his own favourite novel. All that mattered was that the HQ people knew who was using which book. Jim had not heard of the Rubaiyat being used but it could have been.

THE DENTIST CAME TO CALL

The visit of the travelling dental technicians, Jim was sure these guys couldn't have been qualified. was both amusing and somewhat painful. Equipped with their pedal powered drills, they set about removing teeth only, not materials for fillings.

This, explained Jim, was the reason he came back from his tour minus all but two teeth. When asked about dental plates, he laughed and said they were given wooden pegs to act in the place of their now departed teeth. He hastened to add that as soon as he could he invested in a proper set of dentures.

We covered so much more in what was a fascinating discussion. Jim is a real gentleman of the old school, honourable, trustworthy and not a bad word was said about anyone except the enemy.

Jim went on to a long and highly successful career in the private sector as an accountant. Not quite a bookkeeper Pete Bowes :)

It was an absolute privilege to talk with Jim, now 94 years old and last of the M Special Unit heroes.

Jim with the help of his son has put a website together, filled with accurate historical information, it is a great read and I highly recommend it to you:

https://thelastcoastwatcher.wordpress.com/2017/01/01/introduction/

General Douglas Macarthur, Supreme Commander, Allied Powers, South West Pacific wrote the following commendation for the Coastwatchers:

'The enormous contribution of the Australian Commonwealth to the Allied war effort contains no brighter segment than this comparatively unknown unit which naturally worked under the cloak of military secrecy during the war.… They are officially credited with having been a crucial and decisive factor in the allied victories of Guadalcanal and Tulagi, and later on in the operations of New Britain especially in the landing on and capture of the Cape Gloucester area.'

THE TEST

Over the years there has been lots of reaction to the discovery I had made that showed the presence of micro written letters and numbers within the larger letters of the code page. It reached fever pitch when the same kind of code was found in the Verse 70 poem written by Jestyn and also within the torn piece.

Amongst the reactions, there was one case of a person who roundly denounced the findings and ridiculed the example of the letter Q which clearly showed the presence of code letters and numbers. This person went so far as to mock the very idea that spies communicated with each other using tiny handwriting. The result of that episode was that the claims made against the existence of micro-code were completely unfounded, you see this person had asked me how I had gone about finding the code which I duly did in sufficient detail for him to replicate the process and get the same result. Despite him inferring initially that he had followed the process and couldn't get the result, he later admitted that he hadn't followed it at all. Sad.

For the record tiny handwriting is proven to have been used extensively by intelligence agencies over centuries and more recently on this blog we showed it's use on the Hay Internment Camp bank notes.

As a matter of interest, Detective Brown in the case told Professor Abbott that Jestyn's phone number that was found on the code page, was written in tiny handwriting. Indeed, SOE had a technique known as INK H which described exactly how pencilled micro-code could be hidden within handwritten normal sized letters.

The same 'critic' of the earlier discoveries then loudly announced that he had found a new high-resolution scan of the code page that didn't show any sign of micro writing. Sadly and yet again, he was proven wrong as I have come to expect from our 'friend'. In this case, the new scan he had found wasn't a new scan, it was an image of the same code page and someone had gone to the trouble of injecting additional pixels into the file in the mistaken belief that it would improve the quality of the code page. Anyone with even basic knowledge of photo editing and digital imaging would know that you cannot improve the quality of an image by simply adding more pixels, the fine detail is lost and though the output may look 'smoother' it's because the edges of shapes within the image have effectively been 'smudged'. My verdict is that the effort was decidedly amateur and I had actually thought that the person responsible for this 'find' had more about them than to stoop to such inane practices.

Interestingly and as you might expect, much of the criticism came from those who do not believe that the Somerton Man case is an espionage case. On that particular point, I read a survey just last week on a public site that showed that 72% of people who visited that site believed it to be a Spy case.

Example from Louise de Bettignes
during WW1. Micro Code written
beneath a stamp.

Feint but clearly there, set of numbers in the
upright of the T in the torn piece, Tamam Shud

A string of numbers found in the blet section of the Fez Lady sketch beneath the Verse 70 written by Jestyn.

The Test

It strikes me as being obvious that the critics and naysayers are telling us that because they know what micro writing doesn't look like, then it stands to reason that by default, they must know what it does look like.

So here's their chance to prove their skill.

Below there are 4 images, more than one of them contains micro-written numbers and/or letters.Your challenge is to identify which are the ones that have it.

Remember that this is micro written and the characters are all below .7mm in height, you won't suddenly see a set of crystal clear words and letters, these things were made to be difficult to find even if in most cases they were hidden in plain sight.

The answers will be published in 7 days time, it will be interesting to see how many got it right. I suspect some will dismiss it as it won't fit with their narrative :) Sad.

Last but not least, here's an image that has a secret written message, see if you can find it!

The answer to this last challenge will also be published in 7 days time.

Before starting this post, a message for WEDNESDAY, many thanks for your message received yesterday, your information was correct. Is it possible that you have further information on the gentleman concerned?

As far as images go, the two books above are quite intriguing, to the left is the image of the book contained in the SAPOL files as being the front page of the book found in Jetty Road Glenelg, well at least one of the two Rubaiyats found Jetty Road Glenelg. The book on the right is a copy of the much talked about 'Courage &Friendshipp' version. The aspect ratio is quite different. The one on the left is a slimmer, more pocket size and shape book. Gerry Feltus was able to find one of that pocket sized version from Whitcomb and Tombs.

But, on to the question of the fourth Rubaiyat. We know of the Collins Version owned by Alf Boxall and into which Jestyn had written a copy of Verse 70 of the book. We know also of the book that was found on 22nd July 1949 a month after the first inquest was concluded. We know of the book found with George Marshall in 1945.

But another book was found in Jetty Road by yet another business man according to the Advertiser dated 27th July 1949. This article was uncovered by the eagle eyed Clive a few days ago. another exceptional find!

Also of note is the note regarding the body of the man stating that his features had materially altered I found that strange given that he had been embalmed, having said that this blog has held for a long time that the body from whom the bust was made was quite possibly a different body to that found on Somerton Beach.

I have underlined the relative sections and as you will read, there were, in fact, two copies of the Rubaiyat found in Jetty Road by businessmen.

Army Officer Sought To Help Solve Somerton Body Case

Detectives investigating the Somerton body mystery yesterday interviewed a woman who had given an Australian Army lieutenant a copy of the "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam." which she believed could be identical with the book found in a motor car at Glenelg last year.

The book handed to the police was found in the back seat of an Adelaide businessman's car in Jetty road. Glenelg shortly before the body was discovered at Somerton on December 1. The words 'Taman Shud" had been torn from the last page of the book. Similar wording was printed on a piece of paper found in the clothing of the dead man. Tests made yesterday revealed that the piece of paper found on the body was of the same texture and color as the torn page in the back of the book.
Yesterday's discovery caused local police to enlist the aid of Sydney and Melbourne CIBs in an effort to trace the man mentioned by the woman.

The police have also forwarded to Army Headquarters, Melbourne, a copy of a series of letters printed in pencil on the back of the book. They believe that it is possible that the letters may be some coded message. Police located the woman from a telephone number, also written in pencil on the back the book. The woman, who wishes to remain anonymous, told police that when she was nursing at the North Shore Hospital, Sydney about 31/2 years ago, she gave a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam to an Australian Army lieutenant who was serving in the water transport section. The woman said that she subsequently went to live in Melbourne, where she was afterward married. After her marriage, she received a letter from the man. She replied telling him that she was now married. Sometime last year, she could not remember the month, she, was told that a man had come to some flats next door to her home and enquired for a nurse. She did not know, however,

whether this was the same man. It was after this incident that the body was found on the beach at Somerton, not far from the woman's home.

After seeing a plaster cast of the head and shoulders of the dead man. the woman said that she could not say whether the dead man was the lieutenant she had known. It was pointed out yesterday that the features of the dead man had altered materially before the cast was made.

An amazing coincidence was revealed yesterday when another Adelaide business man called at police headquarters with a copy of the "Rubaiyat" which he had found in his motor car at Glenelg about the time the body was found. This book was a different edition.

Between 4 p.m and 11 p.m. yesterday police headquarters received 49 telephone calls from people stating that they possessed copies of the "Rubaiyat." In many instances, the copies were not identical with that of the book linked to the case. Four or five were of the same publication. ' |

If this book did exist, and it would seem possible given that the go on to specify that it was from a different edition, how would the coincidence be explained? Could it be that there was perhaps some kind of group that met to discuss issues that in some way were tied up with the Rubaiyat? It has to be considered as a possibility, I am sure there are others reading this that may have other thoughts.

THE SOLUTIONS

In the last post there were a number of images of items amongst which I stated that one or more contained micro writing.

Let's go through the list:

1. This image is of the dash in Verse 70 which we know to have been written by Jestyn. If you look carefully, you should see the presence of the letter X to the left near the start of the dash followed by a string of numbers

2. This is most interesting, this image has been constructed using clips from the 'Pigeon Code' that was found by David Martin some 4 years ago. The top image is a cross bar from the letter T whilst the lower one is from an upright of a letter M both of which came from the Pigeon Code. For the record, I spoke with David on a few occasions back then and he kindly sent me a high-resolution image of the code. Does it contain micro letters/numbers?

3. I have always found it interesting that people, myself included, will view an object such as the code page, and we almost always assume that it should be read from left to right and from top to bottom of the document. In this case, what we have is a section of the so called 'flourish' at the base of the code page, but instead of it being viewed as one would normally from the base of the page, this image was taken from the top of the page. You should be able to see the various numbers and letters and read them across from left to right, super small but there nonetheless.

Whilst this is interesting as it stands, there are two other aspects that raise questions and the answer to each question supports the presence of micro code on the page. As everyone knows the story goes that the Police or whoever, overwrote the indentations that they found on the code page to reveal the nature of the larger letters. 1. Why would they do that if they had been written in Pencil and should have been visible in any case? 2. Given that the idea was to show the shapes of letters, why did they then go on and overwrite the flourishes?

4. This image below is from the SOE files, it shows micro writing taken from a report written by an SOE operative. it is in fact reversed. Why would I do that? To illustrate a point and that point being that this form of communication was designed to pass on what in most cases was highly secret information and all efforts were made to conceal or disguise such messages, hence the name 'clandestine communications' is applied to micro writing.

So we have 3 out of 4 definites and one, the pigeon code example, that could well be another example of hidden codes.

On to the final part of that last blog post, the image of the Victoria Hotel in Strathalbyn. The same place that Paul Lawson and his good lady used to visit and one occasion whilst there, he had suggested to his wife that they should take a detour on the way home and visit Jestyn. Request denied we understand.

The image does contain a 'hidden message' though not strictly speaking hidden in plain sight. The method I used was a more modern concealment technique. I hid the message within the code structure of the image.

You can use this simple online tool to both hide and then reveal a secret message, so if you would like to know what the message is, you should first right click and download the image of the hotel then go to this link:

https://manytools.org/hacker-tools/steganography-encode-text-into-image/

Next, you simply select 'Host image' and then upload the image of the hotel and then tick the box, 'decode this image instead' and hit the blue button, 'steganogra-fy!'. You can then read the hidden message.

Messages of many types have long been concealed, sometimes in plain sight and sometimes, as in the code page not quite in plain sight. From well before the days of The Queen of Spies, back to ancient Mesopotamia, tiny hieroglyphics were used and finely scratched into clay tablets. Both Hebrew and Muslim religions created wonderful artworks using micro writing, the majority of carrier pigeon messages were written at sub 1 mm in height. On this blog, we have not only shown images and provided documented proof of its use as a clandestine communication method and in the appropriate time frame, we demonstrated exactly how it was done. There is no doubt about its existence and in the documents that have been named. In the previous post we issued the challenge, if you say you know what Micro writing isn't, then by default you should be able to recognise it when you see it. Another fail on behalf of the grand-standers :)

GRAZ UNIVERSITY SEAL

With thanks to the writer, WEDNESDAY, of a message left on this blog, we have dutifully followed up on the suggestion that was given.

Clive made the inquiries of Graz University and found that indeed, a man called Tibor Kaldor had attended there and had in fact been awarded his Phd in law, Doctor.Jur. in early 1933. Our man, it appears, was a lawyer.

Whilst it does look very much like this is our man, we must also be mindful that in 1945, two men of similar age and also named Tibor Kaldor, died in Vienna after being released from one of the camps. The records from Graz have yet to reveal a description or photographs for us to compare.

The University was an imposing building and had at it's center a vast reading room which still exists today:

We now have 'probably' filled in a time gap, on the assumption that Tibor's University education would have taken some years to complete, we can make a qualified assumption that he would have been resident in Graz from around 1927 to at least early 1933.

1933 was also the year that saw the beginnings of the expanded Nazification of Germany and Austria:

For Graz at least though, the years between 1933 and 1938 were relatively peaceful and life went on fairly normally for the Jewish inhabitants, Graz had been viewed as one of the oldest centers of Jewish culture dating back to the late 12th Century. Was it this then that attracted the young, and Jewish Tibor Kaldor to Graz to further his education? It does seem at odds with the contents of his last note which all-but outright denied his Jewish heritage and customs.

Apart from the cultural history of Graz, it was and still is a centre for advanced manufacturing although in the 1930's their main claim to fame would have been the PUCH cycle and motorcycle factory. A strong competitive spirit led to the formation of many motorcycle clubs and what we call these days, 'dirt bike' riding.

Then in April 1938, the city was visited by this man:

Within weeks the once idyllic life of this beautiful city began to decay as Nazism and a wave of 'patriotic' fervor accompanied by extreme anti-Semitism spread throughout Austria.

November the 9th and 10th 1938 saw the culmination of this tide of evil, Kristallnacht:

Both the main synagogue and the Ceremonial Hall in the Jewish Cemetry at Graz were burnt and with those events, the hopes and dreams of the entire Jewish population perished.

It was at this time, according to the records we have, that Tibor Kaldor began his journey first to Italy and then to London.

To this point, we do not know here Tibor lived or worked between 1933 and 1938, Clive is continuing his efforts to uncover more information.

For those interested you can read more on the History of Judaism in Austria here:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/graz

At the outbreak of WW2 in 1939, the Australian Red Cross mobilised. With a huge range of services to offer, the number of volunteers rapidly grew until, by 1944, its membership reached a staggering 450,000.

Where is the link for Tibor Kaldor and the Red Cross? In his final letter, he made specific mention of the organisation to the effect that he asked that any of his belongings should be donated to the Red Cross which was one amongst many such organisations operating in Australia during and after the war years The question is, why the Red Cross?

Apart from the better-known aspects of the services offered by the Red Cross as in food parcels, for example.

They handled donations of used clothing and, interestingly, they also had tutors in quite a range of subjects including languages with German to English and Russian to English, from what I know to this point, volunteers were found amongst ex-internees and also amongst the general population. Those who have been following this blog especially the life of Tibor Kaldor, will recall that the internment camps at Hay and Tatura actually had their own 'Universities' and no shortage of tutors to cover a wide range of subjects including maths, languages and even nuclear physics.

It is possible that Tibor was amongst the Red Cross Volunteers as a Tutor of languages and that in that position, he would have met other tutors perhaps even in the Russian to English field.

We are still following this line and hope to have more information in the coming weeks.

READING BETWEEN THE LINES

Above we have a copy of the first page Tibor's last letter, and below, is that same page but this time enhanced to provide a more readable version of that same page. FYI, JS, you can see that the letter is dated, top right of the page.

Now look very closely at the image above, in particular, focus on the area between the date and the top of the page. What do you see? It's very faint but glad to say that we can improve on that. What you can see is line after line of tiny writing, at least half the size of the handwriting in the letter itself and smaller. There are other instances in various locations on the page.

Below is page 2, again, first, we have the original as scanned by Clive and ever so faintly you can see markings over the surface of the page.

Below is the enhanced version of page 2 of Tibor's letter.

On page 2 we can see yet more examples of faint writing, some are very small, near the top right of the page, and other examples somewhat larger. Some are written horizontally across the page and some, mid way up the page on the left, are diagonally written.

How did this get there? The fact appears to be that this letter was written whilst the paper was still on the writing pad thus some of the faint writing on page 2 will be indentations from the page 1 writing, but some aren't. It will have come from previous pages.

Similarly, the faint writing on page 1 will have come from pages that were previously written, hopefully, those pages were about the inventory to be found in Tibor's suitcase and maybe more. A telephone number or two perhaps?

Thankfully, this letter still exists and Clive has undertaken to revisit the archive and to get some clearer images. In the meantime, I will continue to work on the copies we already have with the aim of further enhancing the details. More to come.

THE LAST LETTER

In the previous post, we discussed the finding of very small writing/indentations on both pages of Tibor's last letter. If you look carefully at the images above you will see a series of lines running across the top of page 1 and in numerous locations on page 2.

It must be said that getting close ups is quite difficult but we have managed to retrieve some examples. I should point out that this is the first of a number of posts on this topic and the next will be a summation of Clive's findings following his recent return visit to the SA Archives.

The image to the right is the top right corner of page 1. You can see the faint indentations of numbers and letters reasonably clearly.

To the left, quite a number of examples of indented micro written letters and numbers are visible on page 2 just below the last line.

On the left is an image from page 2, this time further down the page beneath and to the right of the signature.

To the right, page 2 image close to the base of the page and to the right.

You will note that in these images thgere is what appears to be examples of overwriting, that is because there were a number of previous pages on which the original micro writing had appeared and the indentations, of course, are transferred from several pages onto the two pages we see above.

AND THE QUESTION IS...

The big question is what does this all mean? What we have is yet another example of micro written letters and numbers completing the chain from:

1. The Hay Bank Notes

2. Jestyn's verse 70

3. The 'Code page

4. And now we have an example that ties Tibor Kaldor firmly into the picture

Tibor whose body was found in a Hindley Street hotel in Adelaide 2 weeks after the discovery of the Somerton Man not more than a 15-minute drive away from the hotel.

The Somerton Man was found just a 5 minute walk away from Jestyn's home and Tibor was found a 2-minute walk away from Jestyn and Prospers Hindley Street office.

The next post will be a joint one from myself and Clive, and as you might expect, he has some additional and very interesting information to share.

Numbers Stations have been in existence since WW1, these are transmitters that send out strings of numbers, codes, via short wave radio. They are an audio equivalent of a one time pad in many ways.

In the case of the code page, the crossed out line and the two crossed lines as well as the 'flourish' at the base, contain numbers strings.

However with Tibor's last letter, the indented writing close ups show strings of numbers and sometimes letters only in this case they haven't been overwritten by any other agency.

The example below is of an actual numbers station transmission.

You can listen to many more examples of numbers station transmissions on The Conet Project website.

With thanks to Clive for his notes on his recent visit to the SA Archives, that should be the SA Archives revisited because it was almost 12 months ago when Clive made his first trip there and gathered a good deal of valuable information regarding Tibor.

1. The first thing that Clive did was to gain permission to see the actual files rather than just the scans. That turned up an interesting fact immediately. What we had considered to be two pages of a letter from Tibor was in fact a single page but written on both sides.

2. The paper itself was very thin, rather like air mail paper and you could see through it if held up to the light. That would reflect perhaps the general shortage of paper at that time but also it might mean that Tibor was in the habit of writing air mail letters as indeed he most probably did when he 'informed friends in London' as he put in his letter. We have no other hard evidence that supports regular writing of air mail letters, at least at this stage we don't.

3. Clive had taken a UV lamp in the hope he would be able to make use of one to examine the letter more closely, sadly he wasn't offered access to a darkened room which meant that the UV light was all but useless.

4. On examining the letter in normal light, Clive was able to confirm that there were indeed examples of tiny writing on the paper and further, he was able to make out the following:

'On the first line, under the words "to cause" it looked like a figure '625', above the same words, I thought I could make out a part word, "etta", which I thought, for a moment, could be Danetta! But, I just couldn't make it out.

On the second line, under the word "inconvenience" it looked like a figure '45'.

On the seventh line, above the words "fairly simply" it looked like a figure '39'

Under other lines I notice what looked like the figures 3289 and 3345-But, it was nearly impossible to be sure.'

Is it possible that invisible ink was used to write between the lines?

The short answer for Invisible ink was yes it is possible but without proper testing, it would be hard to show.

Another point to consider is that because the page was written on both sides of the same sheet of thin paper, could it be that the micro writing that Clive saw was just the writing on the other side of the page? Possible but not sure how likely, Clive says that he was able to make out part of a word and then numbers, that would mean that the figures he saw could be read from left to right, had the figures and part word been from the back side of the page they would have been reversed. They would also have been noticeably sloped in the opposite direction and finally, there are no numbers written on either side of the page.

Personally, I think that given Clive had no tools that he could use to get a clearer view, this was an amazingly good result. We now know that it was a single sheet and that it was similar to air mail quality. Micro writing in the letter has been confirmed by viewing the actual letter as well as the scans. We have some specific areas to target more closely, wouldn't it be something if it was Danetta! It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that we may even uncover a telephone number.

In conjunction with this work, we are still waiting for feedback from Melbourne that may give us a positive link between Tibor and Jestyn, too soon to be sure but it is a possibility.
Many thanks Clive!

TIBOR'S LETTER

Tibor Kaldor's last letter was written on very thin paper, much like air mail paper and was a then standard foolscap page. He had in fact written on both sides of the one page which measured approximately 330 mm X 200 mm. This was a standard size in the UK and Commonwealth countries prior to their standardising on the A4 page that we now have which measures 210 mm X 297 mm.

In the video, you can get a good idea of how Tibor Kaldor's last letter may have looked to Clive Turner when he examined it in early September. Effectively what was done was to first take the 2nd 'page' of Tibor's letter and flip it horizontally so that for all intents and purposes you would be looking at it from the back of that page. Next, we imported the first page and overlaid that on the reverse view of the 2nd page.

You should be able to see the faint outlines of micro- writing in spaces to the top right and down the right side of the page.

ANOTHER CODE?

The previous post showed a video of Tibor's last letter, it was written on thin, air mail style paper and the sheet size was believed to be foolscap, an old British and Commonwealth standard and with Australia being a Commonwealth country it would not be unusual to see that size available here.

Many months ago, I ran the contents of that letter through an acrostic decoder, many will recall that the exercise resulted in a single name emerging, DANETTA. In Clive's last visit to the SA Archives, he examined the actual letter as much as he could given the lack of suitable facilities, and he found what appeared to be part of that name 'etta' written beneath one of the words on the first page.

Given that we have shown the presence of micro written letters and numbers on both sides of the sheet of paper on which the letter is written, it begs the question whether or not there is yet another code to be found within the letter. We had some success with the acrostic decoder but could there be yet another code hidden within the writing?

Another question that is raised relates to the manner of Tibor's demise. Was it suicide or did he meet with foul play? Tibor was Jewish, he stated it on his various forms, yet in his letter, he requests a form of burial/disposal which falls well outside the norm for those of the Jewish faith. Was he trying in his last hours, to tell us that something was very wrong?

Look closely at his signature above, look at the smudging around the signature itself and compare it to the other words, no smudging. Is it possible that the signature had been traced? Some research into forensic document examination techniques of the time may give us a better idea.

The Youtube video clip below, whilst heartrending and sad in the extreme, shows the ingenuity of one of the poor souls who was held in Auschwitz. In these horrendous situations, people found ways to conceal things of value. Tibor escaped his possible fate in the camps but did he conceal things just in case? And were those things later hidden amongst his personal possessions? We probably will never know but we do know that he used an Acrostic code to pass on a name, what else did he leave us?

OLD CODES, NEW CODES AND CONCEALMENT

It seems to me that there are only two blogs who seriously pursue the Somerton Man case, being this blog and Pete Bowes over at Toms By Two, there is a difference between what we write and what we actively pursue. Pete has always been upfront about his style and content which is meant to be part truth and part fiction and it does make interesting reading. This blog has at its focus just the actual evidence, the pursuit of factual information, the hard evidence that was left behind and still exists. That includes the code page, Alf Boxalls book and various documents and images.

As regular followers of this blog will know, we have for some time been pursuing the case of the man TIBOR KALDOR whose story was discovered by Clive almost 12 months ago. The work has been ongoing and laborious and has yielded some most interesting additional facts that have a bearing on the Somerton Man case. Right at this moment we are awaiting responses from a number of organisations regarding Tibor and his possible links to other known players in the case. It takes time.

My thought is that it would be interesting to examine examples of some of the codes that were in use during WW1 and WW2 as well as perhaps some more recent ones, below is the first of them:

POSTCARDS, STAMPS AND THE CIA

Way back when, I posted some documents that had relatively recently been released by the CIA. Amongst them were some notes about the use of 'Secret Writing' , how to create it and where and how to find it and hide it.

One particular aspect I found fascinating not because it was clever, which it undoubtedly was, but because it referred to micro writing over the top of a stamp, an orange stamp in this case to be precise. The method was to use a red coloured ink to write in miniature across shaded areas of the stamp.

This where the story starts to evolve a little, amongst the items found in the suitcase that was recovered from Adelaide Railway Station was a suitcase and in amongst the many items there were some pre paid airmail letter cards. These letter cards had orange coloured stamps. That was an interesting item but nothing conclusive about it, purely that there were some cards with orange stamps and the CIA many years later released some notes that discussed how they could be used to communicate with little chance of being discovered. Nothing had been found on those cards, they were unused.

That was that until quite recently when I came across a postcard that dated back to 1943. This was one was from Spain in fact and it to bore an orange coloured stamp of General Franco. What was also interesting was that the postcard with its stamp was headed for a destination in Melbourne and its colour was red. I managed to chase down the addressee, James Roberts, he was apparently a labourer at the time.

Nothing wrong with that except that he had never been outside of Australia and there is no sign of the writer: Luis Santasulagna, ever having visited Australia and yet the writing clearly suggests otherwise. You can also see that the censor has been at work which was very common in those times. You might also look at the censored lines, the felt or paint brush used leaves an effect not that dissimilar to that used on the Somerton Man code page. In addition you can see the handwriting and it is quite normal even under magnification, the franking though, well we'll leave that for another time.

Here's the grey scale version:

And now the negative version:

And finally, this version has been turned negative and to grey scale:

Two questions for those interested, if you were involved in espionage where and how would you hide a message in this postcard?

After some chasing around I found another Franco stamp from the same era, in fact the stamps were the same but they bore different colours and different values.

I am posting two of the stamps here because there is something more than a little amiss about the Orange Franco stamp and I thought it might be a good exercise to have the site visitors take a look at them and see if they can spot the differences between what are essentially the same stamp apart from the colour and value issues.

This is the Orange stamp dating back to 1943 and which was affixed to a postcard heading for Melbourne from Spain. The franking, no pun intended, that you see is from two sources, in fact on the postcard there are a total of four. One is the normal circular frank and the others are all censor franking.

Take a good close look at this stamp and bear in mind the CIA suggested method of writing in red ink and in shaded areas across the face of orange or red coloured stamps.

Now on to the second, control, stamp. It is from the same era and as you can see the colour and values are the only differences, well at least on the face of it they are.

On this stamp look closely at the forehead, there are some other areas worth inspecting but for now, take a good look at the forehead in particular.

To help a little, we also have a side by side, in colour, comparison.

Here's a negative shot of the red stamp, there are some quite distinctive
markings to be seen here.

Now here's a negative image of the grey stamp. Again the markings are quite clear

And now here's a side by side comparison of the negative images of both stamps:

Now the differences that you may see could be accounted for by the variations in colour and the way the stamps were printed no doubt in different batches but using the same plates I would have thought.

Now here's some good news, I have been able to track down other examples of this 45 CTS stamp and here it is. This as you can see is unused and quite a lot of detail can be seen.

See if you can spot the differences between these two stamps could be a raised eyebrow and maybe more?

Similar techniques are being used here as were used in the Hay Bank notes.

NEXT POST: THE POEM CODE

THE POEM CODE

This is the second in our series of WW1 and WW2 codes that were in use by British intelligence services, in fact this particular one was used with great effect by Leo Marks of SOE. An example of his work follows the first few paragraphs.

THE POEM CODE EXPLAINED

This is how a poem code works. Start with a poem which you have memorized: it needn’t be especially long, nor complete. For example, this fragment from Ulysses will do: “for my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths of all the western stars until I die.” Select five words as a key from this: say, “for”, “sail”, “all”, “stars”, “die.” String them together and then number the letters, starting with “a” as 1, the second “a” as 2, etc.; or if there is no second “a”, then “b” is numbered 2; if no “b” then “c” gets labelled 2, and so on until we have numbered all letters. The result:

Now suppose we want to encrypt the message, “We have run out of cigars, situation desperate.” Incidentally, encoding must not be confused with encrypting—our message, for example, may be encoded, “Nothing left for Mark Twain to do, dammit” (where we hope the person hearing this is clever enough to figure it out). Since there are 18 letters in our poem selection, we write out the message in groups of 18 letters, padding the end with nonsense letters, like this:

Note the first letter from our poem snippet, an “f”; under it is a 6: the second letter is an “o” and under it is a 12. In our (padded, grouped message) the 6th column of letters is “eud”, and under the 12th is “tdk”. It was more or less standard practice to send the encrypted message in groups of five letters, which reduced (but of course did not eliminate) transmission errors. So the first part of our message would be: eudtd koekc pmwrt.

SOE Poem Code

The 'Slideshare' presentation below is courtesy of Derek Buff, it discusses a Leo Marks Poem, in fact it is the one he gave to an SOE operative, Violet Szabo, you may recall her name, a film was made of her work and her sad passing, CARVE HER NAME WITH PRIDE. It is an excellent presentation and one I hope you will enjoy.

Poem Codes from Derek Bruff

We have a number of upcoming posts in this same vein and all related to various war time codes including the Cold War and agents such as the Somerton Man, Pavel Ivanovich Fedosimov..

THE SPY

Once he was young and brave and fair,

Free from the strain of guilt and care; His mind was pure, his heart was clean,

His face bore marks of happy mien;

His teacher looked with hopeful pride

Upon the joys that thrift betide;

And often said, "Life well begun,

Assures the laurels will be won."

He grew to manhood tall and fair,

With manly strength and shoulders square;

He stood six feet, and every inch

Was borne to work and not to flinch;

When others fainted by the way,

He did his part without dismay;

With all his mind and all his heart

He ever strove to do his part.

Then came the tempter and he fell Before the vile, seducing spell;

He learned to fetch and feint and lie, Which fitted him to be a spy;

Although oftimes he was dismayed,

From day to day he plied his trade,

But proved a traitor to his cause And wronged the mandates of the laws.

He shrank from man. His silent mood

Made him but fit for solitude;

He hid his face and breathed a sigh,

When he met others eye to eye;

And when a sound came to his ear He trembled much with deadly fear;

And, as his dubious course he ran, He palled beneath the curse of man...

Special Operations Executive

Whilst we are waiting for results from a couple of organisations, I thought I would continue with the release of various code and cypher information from a collection I have built over the years. I am doing this as a direct result of the very positive feedback received from the members of our private list and so I thought I would share more of these examples.

In this post we are looking at an excerpt from an SOE manual for field operatives, it shows how a Double Transposition message is created and deciphered, I hope you enjoy the following:

In the coming days we will post an 'Innocent Letter' example plus a fairly comprehensive list of Secret Inks with development techniques. In all I have perhaps 16 different examples that were in active use in WW2 and probably thereafter.

AN INNOCENT LETTER:
TRANSMITTING MESSAGES BY OTHER MEANS

This waiting business can be a little tedious but very much part of the task of investigation, we are right now are still waiting for further information that may or may not provide some vital links.

In the meantime here is yet another method of 'Clandestine Communications', the concealment of a message in what could be at first glance a totally innocent letter. It actually hides another code which is exactly what was found on the code page, a hidden code within the letters found on the code page. That method was known as 'INK H' which was, as is the Innocent Letter found in a WW2 SOE Manual.

I find the lateral thinking skills of these intelligence agents and the people who developed these various methods to be fascinating, to say the least. There is literally nothing that couldn't be used in Tradecraft of the day.

THE INNOCENT LETTER TECHNIQUE

In the next post, we'll look at the vast array of 'Secret Inks' that is, various liquids that can, were and probably still are used to conceal messages and commonly, instructions.

For some years now I haven't deviated from the position that the Somerton Man code page was initially written using the SOE's INK H technique. I can honestly say that I have examined and re-examined the images many times but each time with the same results.

Found in an SOE Manual from WW2, the Ink H technique was amongst other methods used by intelligence services of all persuasions to conceal clandestine communications.

The method is simple and I have previously posted step by step images of the process. Essentially, larger letters are written out in ink, probably a blue/black colour. These letters could be stand-alone block capitals or cursive writing as in a poem or a standard letter. Think 'code page' and Jestyn's Verse 70 and there are now thought to be other examples.

The next step is to use a sharpened hard pencil, a 5H or 6H in today's standards, and insert micro letters and/or numbers into the shape of the already written letters.

Next, the inked letters with their microcode are written over again in the same blue/black ink. To the naked eye, the pencilled microcode would be hard to see and thus would be missed.

The recipient of the letters or poem etc, knowing the true nature of the communication would immerse the paper containing the writing into a strong bleach solution. This would develop' the hidden code by removing the ink but leaving the pencilled micro-message.

Immediately you will have noticed one small problem and that is once the code has been developed there is nothing to show as the bleach continues to act after the message has been removed, the full message disappears unless of course, you were to take a photograph of each stage of the process.

But, moving on...

INDENTATIONS

Having said that the message eventually disappears, there is something else left behind and that is the indentations left on the paper that was used as a rest for the original set of letters or words.

This post is all about how the microcode was written and how the indentations were left. A separate post will cover off the recovery method.

Indentations were a perennial problem for field agents, it was something they were always aware of and were, in fact, taught ways in which to remove them from pages beneath the one on which secret ink messages had been written. One method is to use a flat iron on the offending pages and another was to use steam.

In the case of the Somerton Man, however, the indentations remained and that fact was pointed out to me by ex-Detective Sergeant Gerry Feltus, author of the Unkown Man book, Gerry also told me that part of the process was to turn the initial image of the indentations on the code page negative.

THE PAPER TYPE

In a recent post regarding the Tibor Kaldor letter, Clive mentioned the nature of the paper that TK ad used, it was almost transparent as used to be the standard for airmail letters because of the lightweight yet tough nature of the paper which was referred to as 'Onion Skin' paper.

Interestingly Yatskov/Yakovlev handed Harry Gold a sheet of onion skin paper containing a list of instructions during their meeting ( See 'DARK SUN' The making of the Hydrogen Bomb.)

The following images show clearly step by step, just how the INK H method was used on the Somerton Man Code Page and more to the point for this blog post, how the indentations were left behind by the person who wrote them and then how they were discovered

Step 1. The Materials. Lightweight paper, 50gsm. Semi-translucent, white stock paper 120 gsm, 5H Pencil, Charcoal pencil, Fountain pen with blue/black ink.

Step 2. Insert the white stock paper beneath the translucent paper

Step 3. Using a 5H pencil, the word SECRET is written on the upper, translucent paper and photograph:

Step 4. Remove the translucent paper and rub over the surface of the white paper where it was seated beneath the translucent paper using, in this case, a charcoal pencil:

Step 5. The indentations show up perfectly in white, a photograph is taken. These nor anything like these markings exists on the Somerton Man code page.

Step 6. The photograph is turned negative and the word SECRET now turns to black and quite bold:

Step 7. Next, write in the Letter 'E' in ink on the translucent paper and Insert microcode letters/numbers into the inked space of the letter using a 5H pencil and photograph:

Step 8. Once again, remove the top translucent paper and then rub over the location beneath to reveal the indentations left by the microcode and photograph:

Step 9. Next, the photograph of the 'rubbed' letter 'E' containing microcode is turned negative, the white coloured microcode is turned black and the pencil rubbed area is turned white:

It was these markings that the Police or whichever agency wrote over.

In the next post, we'll look at the method used to recover the microcode from the code page.