González Garza to McCarty (1911)

At a glanceKnown key applied · partial (95% of the cipher)

The telegrams: CMXV.15.1432.1-4, 29 March 1911, Federico González Garza (El Paso) to “John McCarty”, 437 Main Ave., San Antonio, the cover name of Adolfo González: six coded words in a clear Spanish sentence. And CMXV.16.1561.7-13, 19 April 1911, González Garza to Adolfo González: four coded words.
Where: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México (CEHM), Fundación Carlos Slim, Archivo Federico González Garza, Fondo CMXV. Part of catalogue entry 1462; not on DECODE.
The cipher: A digraphic table of two rows and fifteen columns from the archive’s key sheet (“Clave G.A. (una de las usadas en San Antonio)”, CMXV.16.1557.1): a plain letter is one of five row letters followed by its column letter, and the coded groups of a run are read together two letters at a time.
How it was read: The card, applied unchanged, was first tested on eight sibling telegrams whose clear text was written on the sheets at the time: agreement 0.866 on 769 cipher letters against at most 0.257 for 400 controls, thresholds fixed in advance. It decodes all ten coded words of the two telegrams.
What it says: On the 13th Dr and Ag separated at Galeana, Ag taking the road to Guerrero and Dr that to Chihuahua, camping on the 23rd at Encinillas; and, on 19 April, Dr wants Elías to come too, the old key stays in use while the crisis lasts because it is quicker, and funds and ammunition are to be sent at once.
Still open: Two words of the first telegram (GALEANA, GUERRERO) rest on a faulty or lost pair repaired by the sense: 18 of its 20 words give sense (90%), under the 95% bar. The class “read in part” is set by this telegram alone (1432.1-4, 90%); the other telegram, 21 of 21 words, is read. “Ag” is not identified; no one compared the transcriptions with the images.
Credit: Brice Dudout (with AI language-model agents): transcription of the card and of the telegrams, the test of the card and the readings. Daniel Bourdeau: catalogue entry 1462 and the pointer to the key cards. A different cipher of the same traffic, the “nueva clave” of 18–20 April, has its own page.

01 The telegrams

CMXV.15.1432.1-4 is the sender’s copy of a telegram on a Texas Telegraph Company form, typed, from Federico González Garza at El Paso, 29 March 1911. Six words are coded; the rest is clear Spanish: “El 13 separáronse en [coded] [coded] y [coded]; este tomó rumbo [coded] y aquel rumbo [coded], acampando 23 en [coded].” The CEHM record calls it “en clave”; no decipherment stands on the sheet and the telegram is not in the typed list of 66 period decipherments, CMXV.18.1795.1. CMXV.16.1561.7-13 is a typed copy of 19 April, without a gloss and not in 1795.1 either, with four coded words.

The addressee “John McCarty” is, according to the typed list and the CEHM record, a cover name of Adolfo González. “Dr” is probably “Doctor”, the cover name of Madero in this traffic (the period glosses of sibling telegrams use “Dr” where 1795.1 types “Madero”); “Ag” is not identified. No further history is claimed here.

02 The card

The card, signed “Dr. V.G.”, is a table: the two rows have the row letters W Z C T G and M V P K I, and the fifteen columns the letters B L R A F Q E N H D X Y O S J. A plain letter is written as one of its row’s five letters followed by its column letter. The coded words of one run are taken together: in the telegram of 19 April the pairs run across the five-letter groups (PY ZY G|H VR IB), and the first attempt, group by group, failed. The card was transcribed from the CEHM image the day before the reading and not changed since; no second reader has checked it.

03 The test of the card

The card was tested once, with a pre-registered protocol, on eight sibling telegrams of the same traffic (March–April 1911) whose clear text was written in pencil over the coded words at the time. The cipher letters of the telegrams were transcribed blind (the scans were filtered so that the pencil glosses were erased), and the period clear texts afterwards; one telegram whose gloss could not be masked was dropped, and another, in a different system, was excluded by a filter that uses no value of the card. The statistic is the edit-distance agreement between the card’s decryption and the period clear text, against 400 controls (permuted tables and shuffled texts). The thresholds were fixed in advance: 0.85, a margin of 0.30 and at least 300 letters. Result: A = 0.866 on 769 cipher letters of 28 segments, against at most 0.257. We recomputed 0.8655 from the table of segments in the file; the scripts and the clear and cipher files of the test are kept outside the repository, so it was not re-run. The test passed; its order (hashes frozen before the decoding) is by the contributor’s record.

04 The reading

El 13 separáronse en {GALEANA} DR y AG; este tomó rumbo {GUERRERO} y aquel rumbo CHIH[uahua], acampando 23 en ENCINILLAS.

In English: on the 13th Dr and Ag separated at Galeana; the latter took the road to Guerrero and the former the road to Chihuahua, camping on the 23rd at Encinillas. Braces mark a word where one pair is faulty: the last pair of GALEANA is CA (m) for na, and GUERRERO has a stray EB with one pair lost; the sense fixes both. CHIH is the abbreviation of Chihuahua.

DR quiere venga también Elías. Mientras pasa crisis sigan usando por más rápida CLAVE antigua. Manden violentamente FONDOS y PARQUE, todas clases.

In English: Dr wants Elías to come too. While the crisis lasts, go on using the old key, since it is quicker. Send funds and ammunition of all kinds at once. All four coded words (KNGB = DR, PYZYG HVRIB = CLAVE, PLMJP AVNVJ ZF = FONDOS, MFZHC BZDCN PB = PARQUE) decode letter for letter. A telegram of the previous day ended with the clear words “nueva clave” (its own page); this telegram is itself in the card, which fits the contributor’s reading that “the old key” is the card.

Counted by the README rule: 1432.1-4 has 20 words, of which GALEANA and GUERRERO are restored by the sense: 18 of 20 read (90%; the contributor counts 19 of 20). 1561.7-13 has 21 words, all read. Together 39 of 41 (95.1%), but the first telegram alone is under the bar, so the target is read in part.

05 What remains uncertain

GALEANA and GUERRERO each rest on a faulty or lost pair repaired by the sense; only the original telegram form would show whether the slip is the sender’s or the typist’s.
“Ag” is not identified; the sources that might name him (the recipients’ papers, Narváez 2011 and 2019) were not searched, and the books are not available to the project.
No second reader has compared the card or the telegrams with the CEHM images; the images may not be redistributed, and the CEHM image server failed TLS verification in the integrating session, so no image was compared there either.
Whether the telegrams are in print is not known.

Full texts

The transcription and the decryption of every document on this page, so that the reading can be used and checked. Short files are shown here; all are in the repository.

Telegram of 29 March 1911 to John McCarty (CEHM-Carso CMXV.15.1432.1-4) read in part

González Garza at El Paso to Adolfo González at San Antonio: on the 13th Dr (probably Madero) and Ag separated at Galeana, one towards Guerrero, the other towards Chihuahua, camping on the 23rd at Encinillas.

Builds coherent sentences, but under the read bar of 95% of words read as sense (90% here); the holes are marked in the reading.

Transcription

transcription.txt

# CEHM-Carso, Fondo CMXV (Archivo Federico González Garza), CMXV.15.1432.1-4 (CEHM record 12730). Telegram of 29 March 1911,
# Federico González Garza (El Paso, Texas) to "John McCarty" (alias of Adolfo González), 437 Main Ave., San Antonio, Texas.
# Typed on a Texas Telegraph Company sending form (the sender's copy). Transcribed by Brice Dudout from the CEHM viewer image.
# Coded words in capitals; the rest is clear Spanish as typed.
To John McCarty, 437 Main Ave., San Antonio, Tex.          El Paso, Tex. March 29 1911.
El 13 separáronse en IHTHT YKBGH PACA INTB y THKH, este
tomó rumbo KHTNI BGBTB PBEBP J y aquel rumbo KYIXG LKX acampando 23
en IBKAI YGLIA GLGYT YKETF.
González Garza.

Decryption

decryption.txt

# Coded run -> pairs (row letter + column letter) -> letters, with key.tsv (the "Clave G.A." card), applied mechanically.
# Words typed next to each other form one run; "?" = a pair that is not on the card (row+row or column+column).
IHTHT YKBGH PACA	ih th ty kb gh pa ca	g a l e a n m	-> GALEANA (last pair CA = m, faulty for NA or PA = n; one wrong letter)
INTB	in tb	d r	-> DR
THKH	th kh	a g	-> AG
KHTNI BGBTB PBEBP J	kh tn ib gb tb pb e b pj	g u e r r e ? ? o	-> GUERRERO (the typed EB is not a pair; one pair lost, the sense fixes it)
KYIXG LKX	ky ix gl kx	c h i h	-> CHIH (abbreviation of Chihuahua)
IBKAI YGLIA GLGYT YKETF	ib ka iy gl ia gl gy ty ke tf	e n c i n i l l a s	-> ENCINILLAS

Reading

reading.md

# Telegram of 29 March 1911, the text read (Spanish)

Decoded words in capitals; {} = one faulty pair corrected by the sense.

El 13 separáronse en {GALEANA} DR y AG; este tomó rumbo {GUERRERO} y aquel rumbo CHIH[uahua], acampando 23 en ENCINILLAS.

González Garza.

Translation

translation.md

# Translation

On the 13th, Dr and Ag separated at Galeana; the latter took the road to Guerrero and the former the road to Chihuahua, camping on the 23rd at Encinillas.

González Garza.

"Dr" is probably "Doctor", the cover name for Francisco I. Madero in this correspondence (the period decipherment of a sibling telegram, CMXV.15.1458.4-6, writes "matar doctor", which the typed list CMXV.18.1795.1 glosses "(Madero)"; in CMXV.14.1392.1-2 and 1411.4-4 the period gloss "Dr" stands where 1795.1 types "Madero"). "Ag" is not identified (Abraham González, the Maderista leader in Chihuahua, would fit, but nothing on the sheet says so).

Telegram of 19 April 1911 to Adolfo González, Clave G.A. (CEHM-Carso CMXV.16.1561.7-13)

González Garza to Adolfo González: Dr wants Elías to come too; keep using the old key while the crisis lasts, it is quicker; send funds and ammunition of all kinds at once.

Transcription

transcription_1561-7-13.txt

# CEHM-Carso, Fondo CMXV (Archivo Federico González Garza), CMXV.16.1561.7-13. Telegram of 19 April 1911, Federico González Garza
# (El Paso, Texas) to Adolfo González, 437 Main Ave., San Antonio, Texas. Typed copy, no pencil gloss. Transcribed by Brice Dudout
# from the CEHM viewer image (study copy, not redistributed), hashed before any key was tried (T-c02.txt f3f67dc3...).
# Coded words in capitals; the clear words as typed, accents not reproduced.
KNGB quiere venga tambien Elias mientras pasa crisis sigan usando por mas rapida PYZYG HVRIB antigua manden violentamente PLMJP AVNVJ ZF y MFZHC BZDCN PB todas clases

Decryption

decryption_1561-7-13.txt

# Coded run -> pairs (row letter + column letter) -> letters, with key.tsv (the "Clave G.A." card), applied mechanically.
# The coded groups of one run are joined before cutting into pairs: the pairs run across the five-letter groups (PY ZY G|H VR IB).
KNGB	kn gb	d r	-> DR
PYZYG HVRIB	py zy gh vr ib	c l a v e	-> CLAVE
PLMJP AVNVJ ZF	pl mj pa vn vj zf	f o n d o s	-> FONDOS
MFZHC BZDCN PB	mf zh cb zd cn pb	p a r q u e	-> PARQUE

Reading

reading_1561-7-13.md

# Telegram of 19 April 1911 (CMXV.16.1561.7-13), the text read (Spanish)

Decoded words in capitals; all four decode letter for letter with the card.

DR quiere venga también Elías. Mientras pasa crisis sigan usando por más rápida CLAVE antigua. Manden violentamente FONDOS y PARQUE, todas clases.

González Garza.

Translation

translation_1561-7-13.md

# Translation (CMXV.16.1561.7-13, 19 April 1911)

Dr wants Elías to come too. While the crisis lasts, go on using the old key, since it is quicker. Send funds and ammunition of all kinds at once.

González Garza.

"Parque" is the Mexican military word for ammunition and supplies. "The old key" is set against the new key of 18 April (CMXV.16.1551.3-4, `reading_grille.md`): the turning grille is slower to work than the Clave G.A. card.

Key: key.tsv

06 Sources

CEHM-Carso, Fondo CMXV: CMXV.15.1432.1-4 (CEHM record 12730), CMXV.16.1561.7-13, the key card CMXV.16.1557.1 (scans 12–13), the typed list of decipherments CMXV.18.1795.1; study copies from the CEHM viewer, not reproduced here.
Other readings in the same fonds with other cards: Hernández card, Herrera Moreno card.
Transcriptions, test and readings by Brice Dudout with AI language-model agents (pull request #442), in targets/mccarty1911.

The key, the transcriptions, the readings and the test are in targets/mccarty1911.

Cite this page

Brice Dudout and Daniel Bourdeau, “González Garza to “John McCarty”, El Paso, March–April 1911”, Cyphersolver, posted 12 November 2026, https://cyphersolver.com/mccarty1911.html.