The telegrams were encoded using a simple book cipher—the key being the Bengali novel Anandamath (Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, 1882), famous for the song Vande Mataram . British cryptanalysts at the (the precursor to GCHQ) broke the cipher after intercepting a repeat transmission error.
The name “Kalikot Telegram” is somewhat misleading. It refers to a series of exchanged between July and September 1924 among revolutionary cells in Calcutta, Rangoon, Shanghai, and Moscow . The messages were routed through a small telegraph office at Kalikot (near the Nepal-India border, in present-day Uttar Pradesh’s Pilibhit district), chosen for its obscurity and proximity to the Himalayan routes into Tibet and China.
Key figures of this era included:
– A message from Shanghai (signed “Li”) mentioned a “revolutionary teacher from Canton” (likely a representative of the Chinese Communist Party or the Kuomintang’s left wing) ready to send 200 veterans of the Whampoa Military Academy to train Indian guerrillas in the Chittagong Hill Tracts .
Kalikot Telegram [patched] -
The telegrams were encoded using a simple book cipher—the key being the Bengali novel Anandamath (Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, 1882), famous for the song Vande Mataram . British cryptanalysts at the (the precursor to GCHQ) broke the cipher after intercepting a repeat transmission error.
The name “Kalikot Telegram” is somewhat misleading. It refers to a series of exchanged between July and September 1924 among revolutionary cells in Calcutta, Rangoon, Shanghai, and Moscow . The messages were routed through a small telegraph office at Kalikot (near the Nepal-India border, in present-day Uttar Pradesh’s Pilibhit district), chosen for its obscurity and proximity to the Himalayan routes into Tibet and China. kalikot telegram
Key figures of this era included:
– A message from Shanghai (signed “Li”) mentioned a “revolutionary teacher from Canton” (likely a representative of the Chinese Communist Party or the Kuomintang’s left wing) ready to send 200 veterans of the Whampoa Military Academy to train Indian guerrillas in the Chittagong Hill Tracts . The telegrams were encoded using a simple book