The Spy

Although the list of people with whom I maintain contact is getting smaller, since some have moved far away, and there are even those who no longer want to know anything about these government issues.

It is true that others are gone, at least I can count another day of life and I must be grateful for it, but I have long since lost count of how many days have passed, in fact, if it were not for the notebook that I always carry around, I wouldn't even know what year I was born.

In this small notebook I have written down the most important information: my name, my address, date of birth, what are the things I should do on the day, who to call if I have any issue…

Although I don't know why, there are fewer and fewer numbers on that list, several deleted, I guess the person will have changed the phone number or is no longer among us.

My memories! How many times I was offered to write about my life, so that the new generations could learn from it, but of course, I couldn't! I was forbidden to do so, due to my work I signed several confidentiality agreements.

If I told any of the military secrets which I knew, I would be sentenced to death.

Well, said like that seems very drastic, but it was the truth. I had seen it before, enthusiasts who wanted to raise their voices and let the whole world know about the secrets of the government they had worked on and even a journalist who was willing to tell it on the front page, and all of them simply disappeared.

Traffic accidents or in the bathtub of their homes, were the official reasons why two days before being published, the people involved simply were not longer there.

It was something they taught us from day one, you do not play with the government! They know everything and don't allow any information leaks.

Even when there are, it is they who take care of it, because they do not allow a single detail to come out to light without their authorization.

For a long time I just had to close my mouth and look the other way, as if everything was normal, and as if society as we know it had no alternative, but it is not like that.

I tried to have my own documentation of everything I did, as an activity record, but it was not possible, the day I left the army, interestingly, all my belongings were confiscated and they only allowed me to take out of the base a suitcase with my clothes in it.

I, who had accumulated so much information and enjoyed my own home since the day I had arrived in the army, I saw myself with a small suitcase and the number of a bank where I would receive my pension for the rest of my days.

In the following months, I locked myself in my home office trying to remember all that knowledge, looking for data and writing about it to put together my own files, a strenuous work that resulted in an office full of folders everywhere, and what was the point of it?

When I entered that place, I felt proud of my job and proud of being able to collect as much information, to order, classify and shape it, but now I hardly know what's in those piles of folders.

When I see it and I read the sign on the folders, I think that will be important, but it has been a long time that I lost curiosity about things.

I guess everything is now old paper, past cases that nobody cares about, government secrets that have been forgotten.

So many and so many lives saved, that they will never know they were, so much work done to achieve it, and the world remains oblivious to the reality that it was about to live.

"A change in the course of history" our commander had told us when he gave us our first case.

The instruction was over after the hard training. Unlike what I had imagined, I did not have to do as much physical as intellectual activity in there, from the first day they had me attending classes of all kinds, mainly languages and mathematics.

Soon I started taking private lessons on a subject that I had not heard anything about before, cryptography.

This is an art, so to speak. The ability to hide messages in sight, something that was already used since the ancient Greeks, and that consists in making variations on the text, either of the position of the letters or of the letters themselves to send the message to its recipient. No one else can understand it without the decoding key.

The Enigma machine was the first and last thing I saw in my classes, it was like the height of mathematical development for message coding.

At first, all of that seemed confusing and complicated, but when they taught it to me as simple, chained mathematical processes, everything was easier to learn.

It is nothing more than making a message difficult to read, at least difficult for the enemy, because to whom it is addressed, it must be simple and unambiguous.

So many and so many read encoded messages, that sometimes I have dreamed of them seeing myself deciphering messages. The numbers, the hidden, who would think that there would be such a close relationship between them?

When I started it, I was so enthusiastic that I even dared to propose my own coding methods, but of course, many before I have worked on it, and quickly discovered my codes and unmasked my method.

It was about making a coding impossible to discover, except for the person that who had the decoding key.

They asked us to be able to invent new methods while showing us intercepted messages to decode.

At first, they were simple test messages with contents as simple as: “Well done!”, “You are improving!”. But soon they were changing, they were true messages used in ancient times to communicate positions, bases’ names or missions.

And then we began to receive "messages from the enemy" in our hands, as we called them, although we didn't really know who they belonged to.

They were intercepted messages, which we had to decode and know without error what they said.

Hence the importance of knowing other languages, because these, unlike those we had seen so far, were not in English and the first thing we had to do was identify the language in which they were written and then be able to decipher the message.

Some were simple, such as French or German, since they have very characteristic accents, which make them easily identifiable, but, on the contrary, others were very complicated, such as those from Eastern European countries.

Although we were clear about its origin, due to the influence of Russian among its characters, identifying which of those multiple countries of the so-called “Iron Curtain” came from was a more complicated task.

Our enemies, on the other hand, seemed to have the same task as us, to complicate everything, and if we managed to crack a code, the next one would surely be more complex, mathematically.

But all that effort had been worth it, we had managed to stop spies, transactions with stolen sensitive information, and even small-scale attacks, but that was nothing in our record of success.

As we progressed in our work, we were less and less, as we were distributed throughout the country as intelligence specialists, to help the various government agencies.

Although we all corresponded fluently, because that way we could share the advances we made, the work gradually became more solitary, or well, more technological, the machines at the beginning and the computers later, began to have a notable role in our work.

It was no longer necessary to perform large calculations in order to find replacement values, now it was necessary to give the parameters to the machine, so that they were the ones that worked for us, but of course, we had to give them the correct parameters to work properly.

That was the greatest risk of our work: making mistakes, which in any other position could mean the delay of an airplane or a lost letter, in our case, it meant losing the opportunity to get ahead of the enemy, see what he thought or how he planned to act.

And all this despite the fact that the civilian population was not aware of anything, it is true that they talked about the tension between nations and that some were sensitized regarding the policies on the other side of the iron curtain, but little did they know about the "Intelligence war" that was carried out every day.

At the beginning our work was easy, the messages were either translated or not, that means, when they are translated they have a meaning and they can be read, if you do not find the code, you can't know what it says. You only had to try combinations of keys until the message made sense.

"At eleven at the embassy”, "Under the statue of …", or "We continue south, near the border …".

Sometimes they were simple fragments of something, short and specific instructions, addressed to someone to follow up.

Many times, we did not know what they meant and our mission ended when we returned the message with the translation, so the army knowing who had been intercepted and after knowing its contents, could take the appropriate measures, which we never cared about much, that was not our mission.

But the most difficult thing was when the messages had more than one meaning, something that took time to find out, because we were still using the same method, decoding and sending.

The high spheres began to complain about our results, "we had not succeeded," they told us over and over again. We were surprised, we did not understand how it was possible, we had managed to decode the message, as we had always done: "Behind the third tree" or "At eleven in the same place."

The content was the same as always, we had done the decoding well, despite this our bosses were not happy.

Life is like that sometimes, we think that we are doing our best and that that will be enough, and everything changes overnight. I still remember when I had to move to Spain, I knew the language and some customs of its inhabitants, but nothing more.