Episode 26 - Operation Vula

How did those dial tones, a flight attendant, some payphones, and an electronic calculator fit together to change the history of apartheid in South Africa? In this episode of One Time Pod, I'll explain Operation Vula. a system used for communication between underground anti-apartheid activists in South Africa and their headquarters in London and Zambia. The year is 1980.

Oppressive white minority rule reigns in South Africa. The African National Congress, the nation's primary anti-apartheid organization, has been banned to London or Lusaka, Zambia, with many of its key leaders, Nelson Mandela included, exiled or imprisoned. The South African government retaliates against ANC activism with brutal police repression and intense surveillance measures. The future looks grim for anti-apartheid activists. The ANC

with little cohesion and almost no strong leadership, is unable to mobilize. If the black majority hopes to break free of this brutal oppression, they'll need a new strategy, a way to communicate without their messages being intercepted or decoded by the enemy. A final push. Operation Vula was that final push.

Previously, communications between London, or Lusaka, and South Africa were maintained using a one-time pad encryption. This methodology was far too cumbersome and inefficient to send multiple or longer messages. Though it was theoretically uncrackable, It was difficult for the sender and receiver to obtain identical copies of the key needed to decrypt it. It's a complicated cipher, but I'll give you a little idea of how it works. First, we assign every letter in the alphabet a two-digit number.

Next, we fill a separate page with random digits from 0 to 9. This will be our key. Now, let's say we wanted to encode the first letter of our hidden message, which happened to be a T. And let's say we had given that letter T the value 84 when we first assigned two-digit numbers to each letter. To convert this T to ciphertext, we take its random numeric value, 84, and add it to the first two digits of the key.

If our key's first two digits were 3 and 7, you'd add 84 to 37. Finally, you'd take that sum and use modular arithmetic, modding by 100, to get the cipher text. In this case, 84 plus 37 is 121, which modded by 100 is 21. If you're not familiar with the mod operation, it's basically just dividing and then using the remainder as your answer. So 121 divided by 100...

is 1 with a remainder of 21. The ciphertext is 21. Back to our story. To encrypt and decrypt each letter would take time that the ANC simply did not have. One message could take from hours to days to decode due to the fact that each individual character had to be decoded separately.

Additionally, these messages had to be carried through couriers who traveled throughout the country carrying encrypted instructions and banned literature. But again, this was inefficient. The ANC's propaganda wing did have a radio station. but even that was difficult to access in most areas. Something new was needed. Enter Tim Jenkin, a hacker and South African freedom fighter.

Jenkins initially became associated with the anti-apartheid movement after visiting the ANC office in London, where he was originally from. He had been trained in covert operations, and in 1975, he began working as an undercover operative in south africa for the anc now jenkin wasn't your ordinary field worker after being sentenced to 12 years in a high security prison

He escaped after just 18 months with keys he had fashioned from wood. Upon returning to London, Jenkin cracked down on developing a new communication system. He knew it was necessary. He's quoted saying, Poor communications had determined the shape of our struggle. It was because our fighters could not communicate with their leaders and between themselves that the underground never developed and the people's war never became a reality.

Jenkin developed one-time pad encryption software that used floppy disks filled with random data as the key. This increased encryption and decryption speed, but still required both the sender and the receiver to have physical copies of the key, the floppy disk. The first step in the right direction was the realization that they could use telephone dial tones to send these messages electronically. First, encrypted messages were converted into dual-tone multi-frequency or DTMS sounds.

These are the beeps that you hear when you press a button on your telephone, if you still have one of those. This series of tones sounded a little something like this. You might recognize that sound from the beginning of the podcast. These tones were recorded onto a cassette tape. In case you forgot, this was the 80s. Operatives would use telephone booths to play these messages into phones.

leaving a message if needed. Whoever was on the receiving end would record the message, take it back to the base, and decode it. To decode the messages, they used a device disguised as a calculator that could transform the tones into digits.

However, they still had to manually decrypt the message. There wasn't time for this. Jenkins' major breakthrough was finding out how to use software and computer technology to record the sounds to the cassette tape directly from the plain text. and developing software that could automatically decrypt it. The process worked like this. It started off with writing the message in a computer program. Next, the file was compressed using password encryption.

This is just another level of security. Next, you'd use the automatic one-time pad encryption software to encrypt the message, delete the key from the disk, and record the message onto a cassette tape. Finally, the usual. call the answering machine in London, place the message into the telephone, and wait for it to be received on the other side. While this newer, more secure electronic communication system was ready to be put to use,

there were still a few obstacles that had to be overcome. Computers and softwares that hosted the network needed to be distributed to key people in South Africa without being captured by the government. It was crucial that none of the materials fell into the wrong hands. For this job, air hostess Antoinette Vagelsang was the perfect choice. She didn't need to go through airport security checks and could smuggle laptops and software into South Africa.

Since she was constantly traveling back and forth, she was able to provide a constant supply of floppy disks containing these one-time pad keys. This role was absolutely key in getting Operation Vula up and running. Had she provided any copies of these disks to the authorities, the system would have been immediately compromised. This was huge. Previously, long reports had taken many hours to encrypt and even days to get across.

Now, messages could be sent real-time between headquarters in London and operatives in South Africa within hours. This allowed for fluid communication closer to actual conversation. It was used for discussion, planning, and negotiation. and all of it was encoded. To make things even better, to track these messages would have required the government to monitor each and every payphone. This essentially made communications untrackable. And if they managed to intercept a message,

it would merely contain what seemed like random facts and dial sounds. This cover-up layer is an example of stenography, which is not encrypting the message, but hiding it.

Operation Vula combined the stenography of dial tones with the cryptography of the electronic one-time pad. Typically, just one of these isn't enough. The fact that the message was both disguised and encrypted provided a double layer of security that made it extremely difficult to find and decrypt the messages. The effects of this system were groundbreaking. First, of course, the obvious.

An outlawed organization could now communicate and coordinate actions with an underground group that had initially been in shambles. Also, ANC leaders succeeded in setting up communications with Nelson Mandela while he was in prison through his lawyers. At that point, the South African government was negotiating with Mandela himself, believing him to be isolated from his organization. Little did they know, Mandela was in direct contact with a well-organized ANC underground leadership team.

In effect, the South African government was essentially talking directly to the ANC without knowing it. Unfortunately, the operation was indeed compromised after almost a decade. Authorities discovered some floppy disks and plain text messages in a Vula hideout. Someone had forgotten to delete the keys.

and on top of that hadn't destroyed the plain text messages. At that point, it was too easy for the government to figure out what was going on. When using cryptography to perform operations as high stakes as these, it's imperative that every rule is followed to the T. one misstep could result in the failure of the entire system. While it's not known exactly whose fault this was and exactly what the police discovered, it's known that failure to follow Vula protocols was the cause.

Earlier on, I had mentioned that deleting the keys were a crucial part of the procedure so that the messages couldn't be deciphered by the enemy. No matter how complex and intelligent an encryption system may be, if its methods aren't followed, it will fail. It's up to those using the system to maintain and organize it, ensuring that operatives don't stray from protocol. Unfortunately, it's likely that we will never know exactly why the system failed.

South African police destroyed most records from the apartheid era when they realized that a democratic government was likely the future for the country. Since then, Tim Jenkins himself has been the primary source of knowledge for Operation Bulo.

and has written an extensive article depicting the operation. In fact, it's where I got most of the material for this podcast. Jenkins and his Operation Vula were absolutely key in ending apartheid in South Africa. Without it, One can only imagine how long freedom might have stayed out of reach.