SOMERTON MAN: OLD CODES AND NEW, POSTCARDS, STAMPS & THE CIA

OLD CODES, NEW CODES AND CONCEALMENT

It seems to me that there are only two blogs who seriously pursue the Somerton Man case, being this blog and Pete Bowes over at Toms By Two, there is a difference between what we write and what we actively pursue. Pete has always been upfront about his style and content which is meant to be part truth and part fiction and it does make interesting reading. This blog has at its focus just the actual evidence, the pursuit of factual information, the hard evidence that was left behind and still exists. That includes the code page, Alf Boxalls book and various documents and images.

As regular followers of this blog will know, we have for some time been pursuing the case of the man TIBOR KALDOR whose story was discovered by Clive almost 12 months ago. The work has been ongoing and laborious and has yielded some most interesting additional facts that have a bearing on the Somerton Man case. Right at this moment we are awaiting responses from a number of organisations regarding Tibor and his possible links to other known players in the case. It takes time.

My thought is that it would be interesting to examine examples of some of the codes that were in use during WW1 and WW2 as well as perhaps some more recent ones, below is the first of them:

POSTCARDS, STAMPS AND THE CIA

Way back when, I posted some documents that had relatively recently been released by the CIA. Amongst them were some notes about the use of 'Secret Writing' , how to create it and where and how to find it and hide it.

One particular aspect I found fascinating not because it was clever, which it undoubtedly was, but because it referred to micro writing over the top of a stamp, an orange stamp in this case to be precise. The method was to use a red coloured ink to write in miniature across shaded areas of the stamp.

This where the story starts to evolve a little, amongst the items found in the suitcase that was recovered from Adelaide Railway Station was a suitcase and in amongst the many items there were some pre paid airmail letter cards. These letter cards had orange coloured stamps. That was an interesting item but nothing conclusive about it, purely that there were some cards with orange stamps and the CIA many years later released some notes that discussed how they could be used to communicate with little chance of being discovered. Nothing had been found on those cards, they were unused.

That was that until quite recently when I came across a postcard that dated back to 1943. This was one was from Spain in fact and it to bore an orange coloured stamp of General Franco. What was also interesting was that the postcard with its stamp was headed for a destination in Melbourne and its colour was red. I managed to chase down the addressee, James Roberts, he was apparently a labourer at the time.

Nothing wrong with that except that he had never been outside of Australia and there is no sign of the writer: Luis Santasulagna, ever having visited Australia and yet the writing clearly suggests otherwise. You can also see that the censor has been at work which was very common in those times. You might also look at the censored lines, the felt or paint brush used leaves an effect not that dissimilar to that used on the Somerton Man code page. In addition you can see the handwriting and it is quite normal even under magnification, the franking though, well we'll leave that for another time.

Here's the grey scale version:

And now the negative version:

And finally, this version has been turned negative and to grey scale:

Two questions for those interested, if you were involved in espionage where and how would you hide a message in this postcard?

After some chasing around I found another Franco stamp from the same era, in fact the stamps were the same but they bore different colours and different values.

I am posting two of the stamps here because there is something more than a little amiss about the Orange Franco stamp and I thought it might be a good exercise to have the site visitors take a look at them and see if they can spot the differences between what are essentially the same stamp apart from the colour and value issues.

This is the Orange stamp dating back to 1943 and which was affixed to a postcard heading for Melbourne from Spain. The franking, no pun intended, that you see is from two sources, in fact on the postcard there are a total of four. One is the normal circular frank and the others are all censor franking.

Take a good close look at this stamp and bear in mind the CIA suggested method of writing in red ink and in shaded areas across the face of orange or red coloured stamps.

 Now on to the second, control, stamp. It is from the same era and as you can see the colour and values are the only differences, well at least on the face of it they are.

On this stamp look closely at the forehead, there are some other areas worth inspecting but for now, take a good look at the forehead in particular.












To help a little, we also have a side by side, in colour, comparison.









Here's a negative shot of the red stamp, there are some quite distinctive 
markings to be seen here.

 Now here's a negative image of the grey stamp. Again the markings are quite clear

And now here's a side by side comparison of the negative images of both stamps:

Now the differences that you may see could be accounted for by the variations in colour and the way the stamps were printed no doubt in different batches but using the same plates I would have thought.

Now here's some good news, I have been able to track down other examples of this 45 CTS stamp and here it is. This as you can see is unused and quite a lot of detail can be seen.

See if you can spot the differences between these two stamps could be a raised eyebrow and maybe more?

Similar techniques are being used here as were used in the Hay Bank notes.

NEXT POST: THE POEM CODE