The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

Captain Joe Rochefort, one of the navy’s top codebreakers from 1925 until the end of the Second World War, suffered from ulcers. A slender, high-strung man, Rochefort recalled later that he would come from work three days out of four and lie in bed for two hours, unable to eat, because he felt so much pressure. The pressure didn’t come from superior officers, or even from the urgencies of war; it came from within. “Here is a bunch of messages and I can’t read them,” Rochefort said. “Now what’s wrong? It was this sort of a thing, you see. And this was sort of standard. You’ll find people like this who maybe go into a trance, what looks like a trance when you’re talking to them, and the first thing you notice is that they are not paying any attention to you at all, and their mind is on this other problem which they brought home from the office.” Rochefort had to stop breaking codes for two years in the late 1920s for health reasons, but the navy pressed him back into duty. He knew William Friedman well. “There is no one that could compare with Friedman,” Rochefort said, “no one at all.”