Welcome to this week’s Six Secrets where we’re celebrating Pride month and LGBTQ+ communities around the world. Today is also the birthday of British cryptanalyst Alan Turing, one of the heroes of the Pride movement, so SPYSCAPE put together some of our trickiest puzzles and code-themed crosswords as a devious challenge to budding codebreakers.
Codebreaker challenge
Do you have the skills to work for the intelligence services? We’ve selected five devilish puzzles ranging from beginner to advanced levels, with each challenge becoming more difficult as you progress. See if you can match wits with Bletchley Park’s sharpest minds in SPYSCAPE’s codebreaker challenge.
The Imitation Game explored codebreaker Alan Turing’s greatest triumph: his thrilling invention of the WWII ‘Bombe’ that decrypted messages sent by German Enigma cipher machines. While Benedict Cumberbatch’s sympathetic portrayal won praise, there is much more to Turing’s life and shocking prosecution for his sexuality. Here are seven secrets you probably don’t know about the British math genius.
SPYSCAPE’s sneaky cruciverbalist Will Nediger has hand-picked five crossword puzzles in honor of Turing - all themed around ciphers, Bletchley Park, and codebreakers. Try your hand at our exclusive online puzzles, time yourself with our built-in clock, or challenge a friend to match wits! And don't forget to sign up to get our crosswords delivered to your inbox each Friday.
True Spies host Vanessa Kirby meets Pat and Jean Owtram, British sisters who played crucial roles as Allied codebreakers in WWII. Bound by the Official Secrets Act, neither sister knew that the other was a spy for decades. Now in their 90s, they reveal their hidden hands in planning D-Day, aiding the Resistance, and cracking the Enigma code.
Turing is possibly the world’s best-known codebreaker although certainly not the only one. American intelligence officers, Irish spies, Polish mathematicians, and many others all helped break German ciphers and Japan’s so-called Purple cipher in WWII. SPYSCAPE celebrates five of the greatest minds in intelligence history.
SPYSCAPE has pulled together the top, must-stream movies, series, and documentaries to give you a 360-degree view of the secretive world of codes and codebreaking. So get cracking.
