Israeli government

The Israeli government is portrayed as a state actor that enlisted mathematical expertise for military cryptanalysis. Its role in the narrative is concentrated in one consequential episode: an appeal to Jan Liseiwicz led him to set aside artificial-intelligence research and spend several years decrypting neighboring countries’ military codes. The episode makes the government’s intelligence work visible through the choices and later recollections of the mathematician it recruited, rather than through an account of its internal structure.

Recruitment and the appeal to service

In the winter after Liseiwicz brought two packing cases of books back to University N, he planned to begin researching artificial intelligence. The following spring, an important personage from the newly established state of Israel came to visit him. The visitor invoked the long-standing Jewish aspiration for a homeland and the severe problems facing the people, then asked whether Liseiwicz was prepared to see them suffer any more. Liseiwicz answered that he was not. The visitor’s appeal turned that response into a request for service on their behalf.

The account frames the recruitment through Liseiwicz’s own divided understanding of it. In a letter to Rong Jinzhen, he described his decision as a terrible mistake made out of sympathy and love for his people, and said that accepting the mission had ruined his life. The wording is retrospective: it records both the force of the appeal and the cost Liseiwicz later attached to his answer. The text does not identify the visitor by name or describe the government’s recruitment process beyond this meeting and request.

Cryptographic work

The assignment was to decrypt military ciphers used by neighboring countries. Liseiwicz said that he carried out this work for the Israeli government for the next couple of years. He was able to break several mid-level ciphers and a couple of high-level ones without too much difficulty. His success quickly restored a standing in cryptography comparable to the fame he had attained in mathematics. The government’s role is therefore tied to practical intelligence work: Liseiwicz was not simply asked to study codes in the abstract, but to apply his abilities to ciphers in use by other states.

The novel gives little technical detail about the government’s methods, the identities of the neighboring countries, or the particular ciphers Liseiwicz decrypted during this assignment. It does, however, set his work against a broader account of cryptanalysis. The conventional approach described in the narrative proceeds by gathering relevant information and testing hypotheses, gradually eliminating possibilities. That discussion explains the demanding character of codebreaking, but it does not establish that this was the Israeli government’s specific procedure or that Liseiwicz used it in these operations.

The later Country X assignment

Liseiwicz’s Israeli government service is distinct from what followed. Country X later took him and his family away in circumstances connected to its desire to use his cryptographic abilities. He expected to decrypt enemy codes; instead, he was assigned to work on the Country X cipher PURPLE. He described this as an entirely different and unwelcome role: his progress might signal that PURPLE was close to being broken, and success would make the cipher obsolete. He warned Rong Jinzhen not to attempt to solve PURPLE himself.

That later assignment casts the earlier service in sharper relief without making the two governments’ operations interchangeable. Liseiwicz’s Israeli work involved decrypting neighboring countries’ military codes; Country X’s demand turned his attention to one of its own ciphers. The narrative thus traces a change in the political use of his expertise, from codebreaking on behalf of the Israeli government to a situation in which his cryptographic labor was directed against the security of the state employing him. It does not say that the Israeli government arranged his removal or directed the later PURPLE assignment.

Significance in the narrative

The Israeli government’s importance lies in the turning point its appeal creates in Liseiwicz’s career. A mathematician preparing to pursue artificial intelligence accepts intelligence work because the visitor connects service with the suffering and future of his people. His success brings renewed fame in cryptography, but his later letter describes the choice as a personal catastrophe and a relinquishment of a long-held ambition. The account keeps both sides in view: the work was consequential and accomplished, yet the professional recognition it brought does not erase the cost Liseiwicz says he paid.

The episode also helps explain why Liseiwicz later recognizes the danger of placing a gifted cryptographer under political pressure. When he writes to Rong Jinzhen, he draws on his own experience to urge him not to abandon artificial-intelligence research for secret work. That warning is not presented as a policy statement by the Israeli government; it is Liseiwicz’s judgment, formed after accepting its mission and later confronting another government’s demands. Through this limited but revealing history, the organization appears as a state commissioning cryptanalytic skill, while the narrative’s fullest attention remains on the human consequences of that commission.