Deciphering Romanized Russian

"Radio Station at Fort Simpson," 1925. Credit: Oswald S. Finnie / Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development fonds / Library and Archives Canada / a100351-v8

On February 20th, 1941, Lieutenant-Colonel W.W. Murray of Military Intelligence received a report of an enciphered radiogram from the Officer in Charge of Simpson Radio Station (located at Fort Simpson, Northwest Territories). The message from February 17th informed National Defence Headquarters that an unidentified “foreign” station called UPV 1 was heard on the same frequency that the R.C.C.S. station in Edmonton was using to communicate with the more remote stations, and that an intercepted transmission from UPV 1 would be mailed to Ottawa. Lieutenant-Colonel Murray was informed that while it was not known what precisely was of interest in the intercept—which would likely not be delivered until early March—other stations in the Northwest Territories and the Yukon would be instructed to monitor UPV 1 (CDWI00065). This report was also shared with the Officer in charge of the Experimental Section at Rockcliffe in Ottawa, Captain E.M. Drake.

On the following day, Lieutenant-Colonel Murray received a memorandum clarifying the situation (CDWI00066). The original message from Fort Simpson had been for Ottawa’s information, as the station UPV 1 had not been heard before. There was nothing particularly suspicious about the broadcast other than it being foreign. Additionally, Captain Drake had been able to identify the station UPV 1 as a coast station in Dikson Ostrov, Russia, in the Arctic of the U.S.S.R.

Because nothing about hearing a northern Russian station in the Canadian north seemed suspicious, the Canadians quickly decided to stop monitoring it. But the original intercept from February 17th was still in the mail and on its way to Ottawa. 

In early March, the letter arrived with an excerpt of the Russian broadcast (CDWI00068):

“ZPT DE SWOIH PREDPRIATIJ ABZ TAKOWY NEDOSTATKI P RUKOWODSTWE NARKOMATOW ABZ TEPER X O NEDOSTANKAH RABOTY PARTORGANIZACIJ W OBLASTA PROMY… TRASPORTA ABZ GLAWNOE TUT ZAKL PREDPRI SWOEJ OBLASTI GPT GORODA ZPT RAJONA ABZ PARTORGANIZACI 3400 SLI AR CQ OMY PERKUIM 3 CQ CQ NORD DE UPV1 UPV1 CQ CQ NORD DE UPV1 UPV1”

Captain Drake’s Experimental Section was tasked with translating the intercept from Russian. There was only one problem: the intercept did not look like Russian. The message intercepted at Fort Simpson was entirely in Roman letters, and Russian is written using the Cyrillic alphabet.

"Russian alphabet," Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:00Russian_Alphabet_1.jpg)

Since there is no one-to-one mapping between Roman (or Latin) letters and Cyrillic ones, the Experimental Section had a hard time making sense of the intercept. Captain Drake expressed the limitations of his section’s ability to make the message readable in a memorandum on the 10th of March, writing that “It appears that the Russians are using Romanized alphabet for wireless transmission, making it difficult to obtain a concise translation of the text” (CDWI00067).

Before supplying a woefully incomprehensible partially-translated copy of the intercept, Captain Drake acknowledged that if the Experimental Section had a “specialist” on the Russian language, they may be able to produce better results.

The Canadians’ position was such that even though this Navy Coast Station in the U.S.S.R. was transmitting broadcasts in the clear (without encryption), Canadian intelligence could not really understand what it was that they had intercepted. At the time, Canada was more concerned with capturing (and sometimes deciphering) Japanese and German radio traffic than with whatever the Russians were up to.