2021/plaintext.2a.txt

   1 Jodie, you were not placed with the Archaeologists as a punishment; everyone takes their turn on that shift because we never know what might turn up in old documents. When I ran the group, we found evidence of a Russian agent placed in the SDECE in the aftermath of the war who was acting as liaison with British and US intelligence. She had remained undiscovered for thirty-five years and leaked a whole load of information across the iron curtain. The team cracked a Fialka cipher from 1956, and that led to an arrest and confession. I admit that the case you are working on doesn’t seem likely to have the same impact, but you never know where it might lead. I took a look at the papers you sent, and I thought this one looked very interesting. The information it contains ties down the year it was written pretty conclusively, and I have to say I don’t like the sound of the phrase “profit from the Schleswig conflict”. I think it is clear who M must be, but I am still unsure about the others mentioned in these letters. I am also very unclear why M might have been involved in what looks like a conspiracy aimed at wartime profiteering. I checked, and there is nothing on file from the period to suggest that this was suspected. Indeed there was nothing on file at all, which, thinking about it is slightly strange. M was a public figure and of definite interest, so there should be something. If you have time it might be worth logging in to the records system to see if anyone else from around then has a suspiciously empty file. I would start with public figures who have the initials CH or FN, as the single letters A, T, E and W don’t give us much to go on. Of course, we do know a little more about W, so that might also be a good place to start. We know we are looking for an engineer with initial W, who knows something about codes and ciphers. Whoever FN is, they are right that they should talk to W. Using Caesar and affine shift ciphers to encode their secret communications is poor, and I would have expected better from an organisation containing M. Perhaps they will have taken the mysterious W’s advice and will have switched to something more secure in their future communications. That will make life a little more interesting for you and the team. Good luck, Harry