In the transposition stage, the cipher clerk would write out the plaintext into a "cage" - a shape on a piece of paper.

He was the youngest cipher clerk in the U.S. Army.

But, sir," the young cipher clerk insisted, "the code is Maximum Priority.

The cipher clerk may also add entire null words, which were often chosen to make the ciphertext humorous.

During the summer of 1945, a Soviet cipher clerk had reused a one time pad to transmit intelligence traffic.

You're talking to me like I'm a cipher clerk in East Berlin.

But wasn't the one person KGB always tried to compromise the cipher clerk in a foreign embassy?

Instead of having a cipher clerk do the encryption, he didn't say.

Eliminating the cipher clerk just halved the number of people that would see this particular message.

It was ten minutes after the hour when a cipher clerk came to him with a folder.