Grandma was just making a sweater. Or was she?

December 17, 2019 1:27 PM

The Wartime Spies Who Used Knitting as an Espionage Tool
posted by bq (13 comments total)

Paging webgoddess to the courtesy phone with a tastefully knitted cover...
posted by zamboni at 1:42 PM on December 17, 2019 [1 favorite]

I love reading about these sorts of things! The use of knotted string as a form of writing is ancient. For example, quipu.
posted by acidnova at 1:53 PM on December 17, 2019 [5 favorites]

See also Kristen Haring knits Morse Code.
posted by scruss at 2:54 PM on December 17, 2019 [2 favorites]

Also reminds me a bit of Magnetic-core memory... the predominant form of random-access computer memory between about 1955 and 1975.

It’s essentially a textile product, though I’m not sure what exact elements or weaving and knitting and beading were employed by the women who made most of it.
posted by SaltySalticid at 3:47 PM on December 17, 2019 [1 favorite]

knitting intensifies
posted by logicpunk at 3:47 PM on December 17, 2019 [3 favorites]

Didn't Neal Stephenson include a segment about women sending encoded messages via knitting or embroidery in either Cryptonomicon or Quicksilver?
posted by Chuffy at 3:59 PM on December 17, 2019 [3 favorites]

Yes, Eliza kept records of her reconnaissance of french forces in the rhineland in the form of binary embroidery where zeros and ones were indicated by the topmost thread (lower left to upper right, or vice-versa). Additionally, the binary code was written in the qwlghm language for an extra layer of protection. This was all for show however as Eliza intended for the records to be deciphered by her lover, Louis XIV's spymaster, as part of a larger ploy. I believe this was all in the second book of the Baroque Cycle, The Confusion, but it has been ages since I read it
posted by logicpunk at 4:18 PM on December 17, 2019 [4 favorites]

COURAGE, MOM
posted by St. Oops at 10:04 PM on December 17, 2019

I once saw a beautifully styled wartime vintage dress, an elaborate black squiggle pattern embroidered around the hem , turning up the hem revealed the phrase
"there'll always be an england" .
posted by hortense at 12:28 AM on December 18, 2019 [2 favorites]

Aargh, this is making me crazy, because I just read this — somewhere — very recently, and now I can't find it, but regarding the iconic complex knitted patterns of the famous fisherman sweater (examples), wives and mothers would create their own one-of-a-kind designs, as this was often the only way to identify a recovered body later if the worst should happen, and their loved one lost his life in a sea accident.
posted by taz at 1:52 AM on December 18, 2019 [1 favorite]

Phyllis Latour Doyle, secret agent for Britain during World War II, spent the war years sneaking information to the British using knitting as a cover. She parachuted into occupied Normandy in 1944 and rode stashed bicycles to troops, chatting with German soldiers under the pretense of being helpful—then, she would return to her knitting kit, in which she hid a silk yarn ready to be filled with secret knotted messages, which she would translate using Morse Code equipment. “I always carried knitting because my codes were on a piece of silk—I had about 2000 I could use. When I used a code I would just pinprick it to indicate it had gone. I wrapped the piece of silk around a knitting needle and put it in a flat shoe lace which I used to tie my hair up,” she told New Zealand Army News in 2009.

The Atlas Obscura writer misinterpreted this rather badly. The "codes" on Ms. Doyle's silk were her one-time pads used for encrypting messages -- which is why she tagged each one as "gone" once she had used it. Also, a piece of silk that she could wrap around a knitting needle in order to insert it (the silk) into a shoelace to tie her hair up with is a piece of silk cloth, not a "silk yarn ready to be filled with secret knotted messages".

For more on one-time pads printed on silk cloth used by British agents in occupied Europe, read Leo Marks' Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War 1941-1945.

The one-time pad idea is the ultimate in unbreakable cryptography. Quantum cryptography is just a fancy new non-interceptable way of distributing one-time pads.
posted by heatherlogan at 5:14 AM on December 18, 2019 [8 favorites]

I once saw a beautifully styled wartime vintage dress, an elaborate black squiggle pattern embroidered around the hem , turning up the hem revealed the phrase
"there'll always be an england" .

There's also this one, which has a mirror reversed There'll Always Be An England print.
posted by zamboni at 5:50 AM on December 18, 2019 [3 favorites]

I just learned about the Casdagli sampler.

Around the outer edge, Casdagli stitched a border of irregular dots and dashes. Over the next four years his sampler was seen in various POW camps in Germany. It would appear that his captors never deciphered the messages worked in Morse code: “God Save the King” and “Fuck Hitler.”

posted by zamboni at 7:26 PM on December 30, 2019 [1 favorite]