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Codebreaking is about noticing and manipulating patterns. Humans do this without thinking. We’re wired to see patterns. Codebreakers train themselves to see more deeply.
“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?”
Almost 90 percent of professors at public universities were male; only 939 women in the country received master’s degrees in 1915, and 62 women earned Ph.D.s. Elizebeth had arrived at the last stop on a dreary train. There was no path from teaching that led anywhere else she might want to go. A woman taught, had kids, retired, died.
The Bard’s plays were never collected and printed in one place during his lifetime, because the culture in which he worked, Queen Elizabeth I’s England, revered the spoken word above the written. It wasn’t until 1623, seven years after his death, when a group of admirers gathered thirty-six of Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies in a single hefty volume that came to be known as the First Folio.
The radical idea that made Bacon a legend is one of the epigraphs of this book: “Knowledge itself is power” (his admirers often shortened it to “knowledge is power”).
And he wasn’t selling these ideas cynically; he really believed them. He was good at blurring the line between fantasy and reality because he didn’t believe any such line existed.
He sounds like Donald Trump
It strained credulity to think that the printers, setting the type by hand in 1623, could have duplicated these minute fluctuations across hundreds of copies of the First Folio, and in fact the variations between different Folio copies were sometimes larger than the variations Mrs. Gallup thought she saw in a single book.
Popular American magazines portrayed Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe as a “Jewish Invasion,” a threat to the jobs of whites, with the Russian Jew said to be especially conniving thanks to his “nervous, restless ambition.”
It wasn’t until later that the Friedmans learned the truth. They heard it from Mauborgne and others who had been desperately trying to reach them the whole time. Fabyan was intercepting the Friedmans’ mail. He had taken the job offers that arrived for them from Washington, put them in a drawer, and responded himself, informing Washington that the Friedmans were unavailable.
As for William, he didn’t want to be in the military anymore. He hated knowing that the army could send him anywhere in the world on a whim, separating him once again from his wife. The little he had seen of war convinced him there was no glory in it,
Cryptographers are professional paranoids. It is important to separate your professional paranoia from your real-world life so as not to go completely crazy.
You can intercept and decrypt the juiciest enemy secrets in the world, but if your own codes and ciphers aren’t secure, you are defeating yourself, filling a leaky bucket at the top while secrets spill out the bottom.
If you would like to imagine the birth of the mighty National Security Agency, please visualize two men in a small room, one with a pug nose, pecking at a typewriter, the other a dandy in a suit and bow tie, smoking a pipe, wondering what his wife was up to at home, and if she was missing him.
she wanted kids to know that the alphabet is a miracle.
The department contained no fewer than six separate law enforcement agencies: the Prohibition Bureau, the Narcotics Bureau, customs, the coast guard, the IRS, and the Secret Service. The six agencies had broad authorities to probe financial fraud and most any product or person that moved illegally across a border—guns, liquor, drugs, migrants, counterfeit money. The Treasury detectives were known as “T-men” in the press, as opposed to the “G-men” of the FBI, part of the Justice Department. And although the G-men of the FBI tended to get the glory when famous gangsters went down, thanks to the
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Worried about being left in the dark, the army turned to William, and in 1930 he launched a new army codebreaking unit that would later become the nucleus of the National Security Agency. William called his new organization the Signal Intelligence Service, or SIS.
The SIGABA was like an American Enigma machine or Purple machine, only inviolate. No enemy codebreaker, whether German, Italian, or Japanese, would ever manage to break it, despite strenous efforts; the Nazis ultimately stopped intercepting SIGABA messages altogether, since they could not be read.
Everything that happened to John must of necessity happen to her; when two people marry they cease to be purely themselves but step into a new and expanded character, the character of their marriage.
When Prohibition was repealed in 1934, destroying the market for bootleg liquor, several of the rum rings made a nimble transition to smuggling drugs, mainly opium and the drugs derived from it, heroin and morphine, which were refined by pharmacists and criminal gangs in the port cities of China.
This is where Naujocks and his colleagues entered the picture. They would invent the proof of Polish aggression.
It was SS men who built the concentration camps and managed the ghettoes and trains that herded and transported Jews and other minorities into the camps to be enslaved, tortured, and killed. They were the guards at Dachau and Auschwitz, the murderers of millions. They were the mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen, that swept in behind the advancing German military, shooting resisters and Jews.
What if the Nazis got control of South America?
A visiting U.S. consul reported “a fair sale for German Bibles” across three Brazilian states and that 20 percent of all residents spoke only German; parts of southern Brazil became known as Greater Germany.
Hitler appreciated this wellspring of sympathy in South America. His strongest affinity was for Argentina,
They learned how to operate a German-invented “microdot” camera that shrunk documents to the size of the dot above an i, allowing espionage reports to be concealed in otherwise innocuous letters, and they were shown different methods of writing messages in cipher, including an ingenious system for exploiting a popular novel, any novel, to generate garbled text.
In the 1950s and 1960s, when she gave speeches or interviews about her career, she freely shared anecdotes about various colorful adversaries of the past—the millionaire George Fabyan, the rumrunners, the drug smugglers—but she skipped the Second World War entirely. These were the years when she disappeared into “a vast dome of silence from which I can never return,” she said.
At first, the messages looked similar to the thousands of smuggling messages she had solved before. They used the same kinds of call signs and similar frequencies. But after a brief period of confusion, Elizebeth realized that the messages hadn’t been sent by smugglers at all. The plaintexts were in German. They contained sensitive information about the routes of U.S. and British ships and the capacities of U.S. factories. And according to the bearing fixes, the signals originated from unknown radio stations in Mexico, South America, and the United States.
Counterespionage, counterintelligence—these are the formal terms for what Elizebeth was beginning to do. She was counterspying on foreign spies, serving as America’s eyes and ears in the invisible world of fascist espionage.
The two Nazi spies were reporting to Berlin on the movements of U.S. and British ships, making those ships vulnerable to U-boat attacks.
Guarding the United States meant guarding the entire Western Hemisphere from Nazi encroachment. In other words, it wasn’t enough to fortify U.S. defenses. South America must be protected as well. Roosevelt talked about hemisphere defense in speeches, arguing that “no attack is so unlikely or impossible that it may be ignored,” and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox raised the specter of Nazi planes taking off from South American airfields in the night and dropping bombs on “our own women and children in our teeming seaboard cities.”
Hoover got his wish in June 1940, with a presidential directive that represented a historic expansion of the FBI’s power. For the first time, the bureau was free to dispatch agents into other countries. He created a new division called the Special Intelligence Service (SIS) and began recruiting agents for duty in South America.
The SIS man sent to Brazil had been given a crash course in Spanish. When he arrived, he realized, to his frustration, that the language of Brazil was actually Portuguese.
All of this spelled trouble for J. Edgar Hoover. At the very moment he was launching a hemisphere-wide hunt for spies who communicated in code, his bureau had no ability to discover what they were saying.
MAGIC led directly to bombs falling on imperial ships at Midway and other decisive naval battles.
MAGIC changed the war. It was also one of the great secrets of the war, exactly like ULTRA, the Enigma codebreaking program.
The bombings of London continued for fifty-six straight days. Sirens and shelters, blackouts at night. The Axis was growing bolder in the final months of 1940.
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. Within a year the America First Committee was holding rallies at Madison Square Garden.
BSC planted anti-Nazi information in the American press, some of it false, through relationships with columnists like Walter Winchell. BSC staged protests at rallies for isolationist politicians and dug up dirt on their pasts. It used sex to steal information, sending gorgeous female spies to seduce enemy diplomats and swipe documents. And BSC also hoped to apply British radio expertise to catch enemy spies operating in the Western Hemisphere, which put BSC in direct conflict with the formidable American who had already claimed that ground and was not eager to give it up.
Hoover didn’t want the British operating in America because he saw them as a rival to the FBI.
They planted the seed that eventually grew into the CIA. Behind the scenes, the British argued to U.S. officials that the FBI was ineffective.
In July 1941, Roosevelt established the Office of the Coordinator of Information, a new civilian intelligence organization attached to the White House. The following year, the Office of the COI was renamed the Office of Strategic Services, which was the forerunner of the CIA.
“The whole system” of rum-running had the air of a German spy network in miniature,” BSC historians later wrote. “Hence, on the outbreak of war, the Coast Guard was already experienced in the tricks of the illicit wireless operator.”
Psychiatry, however, had never been a priority at Walter Reed or in the army as a whole, and in 1940 and early 1941, the energies of army psychiatrists were almost entirely geared toward keeping the mentally ill out of the army, not treating them once they got in.
Becker had the contacts and the vision. Utzinger had the technical skill. Soon the Hauptsturmführer and the Funkmeister would prove to be the most dangerous Nazis in the West.
Hollywood later filmed a movie about the Duquesne spies, The House on 92nd Street, in close cooperation with Hoover himself.
U-boat
destroyed an American ship off the coast of Ireland, killing more than one hundred sailors, Roosevelt signed an executive order declaring that the coast guard was no longer a Treasury agency. Instead, effective immediately, the coast guard was part of the U.S. Navy, and all coast guard personnel were subject to the authority of Navy Secretary Frank Knox.
Basically, with a stroke of the presidential pen, Elizebeth and all her colleagues had b...
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They heard that two thousand Americans had been killed, maybe more, including 1,177 crewmen aboard the battleship USS Arizona, incinerated by an armor-piercing bomb that had burrowed its way into the forward ammunition hold. Twenty-one ships sunk, almost two hundred planes destroyed. A good portion of the Pacific Fleet lay at the bottom of the ocean.
