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It was a prime example of the brutal choices that codebreakers must live with. Do you take risks to keep a secret that may save hundreds of thousands of future lives, or do you expose the secret to save a small number of lives right now? William once referred to this broad dilemma as “cryptologic schizophrenia,”
William Donovan, a tall, irascible former army colonel with a manic personality, whose soldiers used to call him “Wild Bill.” FDR had asked his son to help Donovan launch the Office of the Coordinator of Information, the spy organization that would become the OSS and later the CIA.
After Pearl Harbor, Brazil had declared solidarity with America, and the Nazis responded by going after Brazil, firing torpedoes at Brazilian ships for the first time.
Elizebeth’s decryptions (and similar decryptions provided by other Allied codebreaking units) were quickly shared with the Queen Mary captain, who was able to take evasive maneuvers, sneaking past a U-boat that was lurking in wait and saving the lives of more than eight thousand U.S. troops and his crew.
Only two nations in the Western Hemisphere now maintained formal relations with the Reich—Chile and Argentina—and in early 1943, Chile would sever the link, making Argentina the lone holdout.
called TICOM, a joint U.S. and British effort to seize intelligence secrets from former Nazi territories. One historian has called TICOM, short for Target Intelligence Committee, “the last great secret of World War II.” The aim was to preserve Western dominance in whatever the next war might be: perhaps, it seemed, against the Soviet Union. This meant preventing knowledge and technology from falling into the hands of Joseph Stalin.
After listening to the POWs and analyzing the documents, William concluded that Germany had never lost faith in the security of the Enigma machine. They thought Enigma was unbreakable all the way to the end. He was proud to learn that Nazi codebreakers had never managed to defeat America’s best cipher machine, the SIGABA, which he had invented with Frank Rowlett.
“The mere fact that Dunninger is still going strong is proof that human beings, the credulous dears, want to believe in the mysterious and supernatural.”
William didn’t understand why information about hand ciphers from the First World War needed to be seized. The ciphers were obsolete. Was it really necessary to seize papers from 1917 and 1918? To raid their home, their sanctuary, their archive of knowledge? He told a friend, “The NSA took away from me everything that some nitwit regarded as being of a classified nature.”
From the start the NSA was the most secret of agencies, basic facts of its existence concealed. William accepted a job there as a counselor and adviser, a role befitting a respected elder. But the agency had less and less use for him as it grew through the 1950s. It hired thousands of young linguists and cryptanalysts who were trained by the textbooks William wrote but who didn’t necessarily listen when he spoke.
it continued to conceal and classify more and more kinds of documents that William thought should be publicly available. At other times in his life he had argued for greater secrecy, as when he objected to Herbert Yardley’s book in the 1930s; now he muttered darkly to friends about a “secrecy virus” loose in government.
The author James Bamford relied partly on William’s collection to piece together his 1981 book, The Puzzle Palace, the first popular history of the NSA, whose publication the agency tried and failed to stop. The NSA sent representatives to the library twice, in 1979 and 1983, each time removing an unknown number of William’s items, but the Friedmans had done such a careful job of indexing that a sharp-eyed professor at Virginia Military Institute, Rose Mary Sheldon, noticed that about 200 of the 3,002 index cards were missing. Sheldon submitted a series of Freedom of Information Act requests
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She told him computers are a curse. “The problem with machines is that nobody ever gets the thrill of seeing a message come out.”
She intended to use all of these archives to write her own story. She never got around to it. Maybe she lost hope. But the files are exactly where she left them, the fragments of an extraordinary life. The files have a weight to them, a texture. They can’t be erased any more than Elizebeth’s legacy can be erased, because her legacy is embedded in our lives today, in our smartphones and Web browsers, in the science that
