Before computers, every classified telegram or cable had to be hand-encrypted and hand-decrypted using codebooks and cipher machines by dedicated clerks working around the clock in embassy communications rooms. Electronic encryption and, later, computerized cable systems automated the work almost completely by the 1980s, eliminating a role once considered one of an embassy's most sensitive postings.
Cipher clerk no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
1648 – 1945
Foreign ministries and the balance of power
Sovereign equality after Westphalia let states build permanent, professional foreign ministries on Richelieu's model, staffed increasingly by career officials rather than aristocratic favorites. The Congress of Vienna fixed formal diplomatic ranks in 1815, and secret alliance treaties became the era's dominant, and eventually catastrophic, negotiating tool — a system that collapsed so completely in 1914 that Woodrow Wilson later demanded "open covenants, openly arrived at."
What else was happening then
1961
The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations
Codifying centuries of customary practice into binding treaty law, the Convention fixed the rules nearly every state now follows: the inviolability of embassies and the diplomatic bag, and the personal immunity of accredited diplomats from arrest and prosecution in the country where they serve.
1978
The Camp David Accords
US President Jimmy Carter secluded Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at the Camp David retreat for thirteen days of closed-door negotiation, producing the framework for the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state, signed the following year.
Where that work lives now
From ancient royal envoys and Venice's resident ambassadors to the Congress of Vienna and the UN, still negotiating peace one careful sentence at a time.
🕊️ Diplomat →