The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

All her life, Elizebeth assumed that her restlessness was a defect that adulthood would somehow remove. She had called it “this little, elusive, buried splinter” and hoped for it to be “pricked from my mind.” But she was learning to see the splinter as a permanent piece of her, impossible to remove. “I am never quite so gleeful as when I am doing something labeled as an ‘ought not.’ Why is it? Am I abnormal? Why should something with a risk in it give me an exuberant feeling inside me? I don’t know what it is unless it is that characteristic which makes so many people remark that I should have been born a man.”

One way of thinking about science is that it’s a check against the natural human tendency to see patterns that might not be there. It’s a way of knowing when a pattern is real and when it’s a trick of your mind.

“A cryptanalyst is a person who analyzes and reads secret communications without the knowledge of the system used.”

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. The machine ensured “the absolute security of army and navy high command and high echelon communications,” William later wrote with pride, and “contributed materially to the successful outcome of the war.”

The codebreakers had known for days, if not weeks, that a large Japanese attack was coming. William and the rest of his team had seen the MAGIC intercepts. It was obvious from MAGIC that Japan had been poised to strike; the only mystery was where. What surprised William on December 7 was not the attack itself but the location. He thought it would happen in Manila, not Pearl Harbor.