| B | E | A | T | R |
| IJ | X | C | D | F |
| G | H | K | L | M |
| N | O | P | Q | S |
| U | V | W | Y | Z |
With this square, the message is deciphered without difficulty.
“It is very frequently neces(x)sary to employ ciphers and they have for many centuries been employed in the relations betwe(x)en governments, for com(x)munication betwe(x)en com(x)manders and their subordinates and particularly betwe(x)en governments and their agents in foreign countries; there are many cases in history where the capture of a message not in cipher has made the captors of the message victorious in their military movements.”
It will be seen that the method of Lieut. Moorman enabled us to pick out six letters of the key word out of eight letters chosen tentatively. The reason for the appearance of F has already been noted; the letter O occurred with many other letters because it happened to remain in the same line with N and S and to be under H. It thus was likely to represent any of these three letters which occur very frequently in any text.
Two-character Substitution Ciphers
Case 9.—Two-character substitution ciphers. In ciphers of this type, two letters, numerals, or conventional signs, are substituted for each letter of the text. There are many ways of obtaining the characters to be substituted but, in general, these ciphers may be considered as special varieties of Case 6 or Case 7. The ciphers which come under this case are not well suited to telegraphic correspondence because the cipher message will contain twice as many letters as the plain text. However they are so used; an example is at hand in which two numerals are substituted for each letter and this makes transmission by telegraph very slow.
Case 9 can be recognized by some or all of the following points; the number of characters in the cipher is always an even number; often only a few, say five to ten, of the letters of the alphabet appear; either a frequency table for pairs of the cipher text resembling the normal single letter frequency table can be made, or groups of four letters will show a regular recurrence, from which the cipher can be solved as in Case 7.
Case 9a.—
Message
RNTGN RAAGR NARNA GTGRA TGAAN NANGG RARAT NAANR NNNRN AAAGG AANGR NGGNN NRNAA AANRA TNANN NGGRN RNNRG TTGRG TGGRN ARNTG NNART GGRNR GRNNT GTGAA NNARN ARNRT TGAGG GAAAA NANNA RNAGA NGNAT NNNAT