The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

In the early summer of 1940, British officers began to arrive in America on a covert mission. Some went to Washington, making the rounds of embassy cocktails and dinner parties, looking for all the world like bright young chaps out for a good time, and others worked in the heart of New York, in a Fifth Avenue skyscraper, the thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth floors of Rockefeller Center. The group included Ian Fleming, a handsome lieutenant with blue eyes and a smart blue naval officer’s jacket, and twenty-three-year-old Roald Dahl, a tall, elegant Royal Air Force fighter pilot who looked a bit like Gary Cooper. These guys would both become famous fiction writers after the war; Fleming invented the character of James Bond, and Dahl wrote children’s books about chocolate factories, flying peaches the size of zeppelins, and foxes who outwit monstrous humans. For now, though, Fleming and Dahl were spies. Dahl was a particularly good spy. He seduced actresses and heiresses in Washington, gathering gossip in bed, and he charmed the president and the first lady, becoming a regular guest at their Hyde Park, New York, home, where they spoke so freely with the young pilot that he had difficulty maintaining his composure: “I would do my best to appear calm and chatty,” he later wrote, “though actually I was trembling at the realization that the most powerful man in the world was telling me these mighty secrets.”