Welcome to the Diefenbunker, Canada’s Cold War Museum. This audio tour will take you four stories below ground and lasts approximately 1 hour. Use this device to start, stop, skip, or go back. Listen for this chime [chime] to signal the end of a stop.
From late 1961 to 1994, this small office served as part of the larger message control centre—the MCC. All incoming and outgoing messages came through here.
MCC staff logged, processed, duplicated, and distributed messages. From this room, messages were recorded onto magnetic tape and passed through the slot in the wall. On the other side of the slot was the Encryption Room. The light signaled a message was coming through.
Encryption is the process of converting plain text into an unreadable code for anyone other than the intended recipient. During the Cold War, encryption was vital in keeping top-secret information from falling into Soviet hands. Teletype operator Brenda Langman explains her work using this crucial step in message secrecy:
“We had a certain time of day that we had to reset our crypto machines, and at the very same time, wherever they lived in the world, the other end of that circuit was also resetting, so that our keys, our crypto keys always matched. Because if one number was wrong on either end nothing would work. So it was very detailed, painstaking, to set the crypto key.”
We still use encryption every day, usually to keep passwords and personal information private in our digital world.