The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

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

Francis Bacon and Shakespeare had lived in the same country in the same era, the England of Queen Elizabeth I, and of the two men, Bacon was by far the more distinguished, a child prodigy who graduated from Trinity College at age fifteen, studied law, served in Parliament, became lord chancellor, won the lofty titles of Baron Verulam and Viscount St. Albans, and wrote manifestoes that heralded the dawn of the scientific age and inspired generations of inventors and revolutionaries. Charles Darwin idolized Francis Bacon; Thomas Jefferson thought Bacon was among the two or three greatest men who ever lived; Teddy Roosevelt’s love of Bacon’s writings encouraged him to create America’s system of national parks.

If all else failed and the Germans invaded, Fabyan said he would open the bear and wolf cages in the garden and sic the beasts on the intruders.

“It was once remarked of a well-known Oxford scholar that, while he had no enemies, he was hated by all his friends. Something of the same kind would express the feelings towards the FBI of its fellow U.S. agencies.”

So this is where the CIA began—with J. Edgar Hoover telling the British to go to hell, and the British not appreciating it.