The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

But when powerful men started telling the story, they left her out of it. In 1945, Elizebeth’s spy files were stamped with classification tags and entombed in government archives, and officials made her swear an oath of secrecy about her work in the war.

It’s not quite true that history is written by the winners. It’s written by the best publicists on the winning team. What follows is my

“The odious name of Smith,” she called it once, in a diary she began keeping at age twenty. “It seems that when I am introduced to a stranger by this most meaningless of phrases, plain ‘Miss Smith,’ that I shall be forever in that stranger’s estimation, eliminated from any category even approaching anything interesting or at all uncommon.”

“We call a lot of things luck that are but the outcome of our own bad endeavor,” she wrote in the diary, “but there is undoubtedly something outside ourselves that sometimes wins for us, or loses, irrespective of ourselves. What is it? Is it God?”

“We glide over the offensiveness of names and calm down our consciences by eulogistic mellifluous terms, until our very moral senses are dulled,”

“Let things be shown, let them come forth in their real colors, and humanity will not be so prone to a sin which is glossed over by a dainty public!”

For an educated American woman in 1915, teaching at the high school level or below was what you did.

But she was learning to see the splinter as a permanent piece of her, impossible to remove.

am never quite so gleeful as when I am doing something labeled as an ‘ought not.’

At the time they didn’t know what was supposed to be hard, and there was no one around to tell them.

For the first eight months of the war, as incredible as it sounds, William and Elizebeth, and their team at Riverbank, did all of the codebreaking for every part of the U.S. government: for the State Department, the War Department (army), the navy, and the Department of Justice.

One of the mysteries of falling in love is that it makes you inarticulate and eloquent at the same time. You lose the ability to speak and write in normal ways (How futile are words!) even as you develop, with this person you love, assuming this person loves you back, a shorthand of glances and gestures.

The press had a way of praising Elizebeth and condescending to her at the same time, professing amazement at the capabilities of the female brain.

Lindbergh became the public face and champion of an antiwar group called the America First Committee. “America First,” a campaign slogan of Woodrow Wilson, had been adopted by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

This is how the history of the Invisible War would become distorted; these are the small decisions that erased Elizebeth from the record and later allowed J. Edgar Hoover to take credit for her achievements.

was the only time before or since when Americans became emotionally invested in the idea of self-deprivation and frugality.

That was the celebration, sleeping in. It was amazing. They were so tired.

Nikola Tesla predicted in 1926 that “when wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain.”

But who can say what catastrophic results will come from his going? Or worse, the results, hidden, subversive, that take place with no fanfare, no appearance on the surface, but so quietly, hiddenly evil.”

“The destruction to be seen in cities such as these should be noted by anybody who believes in war,” he wrote, “because it can tell more about what happens in modern warfare than reams of literature.”

William always believed the war was worth fighting. But he saw it as a grim duty, not a crusade, and his experience of fighting the war had permanently destroyed his faith in the way the world was put together.