The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

Fabyan never claimed to be an altruist. “I ain’t no angel,” he said once, “and there are no angels in the New England cotton textile business, and if there are, they will all be broke.” But in one part of his life he did strive toward some kind of greater good, and he wanted people to know it. In his free time, for his own amusement, he had made himself into a man of science. The steel magnates of Pittsburgh collected paintings, old and contemporary masterpieces. Newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst would soon build a 165-room castle in California full of marble statues. Fabyan was thinking bigger. “Some rich men go in for art collections, gay times on the Riviera, or extravagant living, but they all get satiated,” he said. “That’s why I stick to scientific experiments, spending money to discover valuable things that universities can’t afford. You can never get sick of too much knowledge.”

Truth was truth and anything else was fuckery.

over the previous twenty-five years, encountering tens of thousands of messages, Elizebeth had solved so many different kinds of puzzles that she knew how to find shortcuts, to identify patterns in fields of text that were like signatures telling her what to do next. She was a kind of human computer in this sense. Today, if you want a computer to recognize certain patterns, you can train it through a process of “machine learning.” How do you get a computer to recognize a picture of a cloud, for instance? You feed it a lot of pictures and say, essentially, This here is a cloud, and This here is not a cloud. After the computer gains enough “training data,” it’s able to look at a new image, do some math, and say, This is almost certainly a cloud. By 1940, Elizebeth’s brain had probably accumulated more training data about codes and ciphers than any other brain on the planet. She had just seen so many damn clouds.

There were too many Germans using too many Enigmas with too many shifting keys to ever recover the keys by hand, so codebreakers needed to build machines of their own to assault the enemy’s machines, giant electro-mechanical contraptions and some of the first digital computers, too. Automation. Polish codebreakers were the first to solve Enigmas and automate the process of recovering keys. They built “bombes” that mirrored the Enigma rotors, ticking through possible alphabets until they found ones that might fit. Later, the British mathematician Alan Turing discovered how to make bombes dramatically more powerful, based on mathematical principles and previously solved bits of text known as “cribs”—a crib might be the name of a Nazi officer, the time of day, or “Heil Hitler.” His solutions were essentially search algorithms, ancestors of the Internet search algorithms of today. Turing’s biographer calls these “search engines for the keys to the Reich.” It was anti-Nazi Google.

Today historians of cryptology believe that in terms of sheer, sweaty brilliance, the breaking of Purple is a feat on par with Alan Turing’s epiphanies about how to organize successful attacks on German Enigma codes.

The original messages had been written in German, Spanish, and Portuguese, and to recover the plaintexts and translate them, Elizebeth worked closely with her lead coast guard linguist, thirty-two-year-old Vladimir Bezdek, a handsome Czechoslovak army veteran with black hair and high cheekbones. Born in Czechoslovakia, Bezdek had escaped to America when the war broke out by sneaking onto a ship. He spoke eight languages fluently: Czech, German, English, French, Polish, Latin, Italian, Russian. He read dictionaries in his free time, for fun, so of course he and Elizebeth got along,

The code names of the suspected Nazi agents were always typed in capital letters, to make them stand out and help everyone on the team get familiar with this strange cast of characters scurrying across the continent next door. You had to get to know your adversary, to see into men’s hearts and predict their behavior from a running conversation of potentially enormous stakes that no one else in the world was watching except you.

Throughout 1940 and the first half of 1941, the coast guard was pumping solved puzzles to the FBI on a steady basis, dozens per week, hundreds of messages on each clandestine network and ultimately thousands taken all together. Yet this relationship between the coast guard and the FBI only went in one direction. SIS agents in South America never sent useful information or evidence to the coast guard codebreakers. Worse, the FBI systematically obscured all traces of the coast guard’s deep involvement in the spy hunt. When Elizebeth sent them a decrypt, the FBI placed it in their own SIS filing system, with a new four-digit identifying number, and the FBI invented new names for the radio networks that Elizebeth had already named. This is how the history of the Invisible War would become distorted; these are the small decisions that erased Elizebeth from the record and later allowed J. Edgar Hoover to take credit for her achievements. “A considerable amount of the investigation conducted relative to these espionage groups was based on information obtained from the messages transmitted to and received by the clandestine stations,” the FBI wrote after the war in a three-volume history of the SIS. “The technical facilities of the Bureau were used to monitor the several German transmitters, and by analysis and coordination of information obtained from the decodes of the messages, furnished by the Technical Laboratory, and the intensive investigation by SIS representatives, the pe...

Nikola Tesla predicted in 1926 that “when wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain.”

“Technical advantages played a big role in the undercover struggles,” Rout and Bratzel concluded in 1986’s The Shadow War. “Technical brilliance in cryptography and radio interception plus hard work by field agents proved to be the unbeatable combination which made victory possible.” The two historians credited the FBI for both the fieldwork and the technical brilliance (the coast guard’s files were classified at the time), and authors of more recent books have also praised the bureau for destroying the Nazi networks in South America. But the FBI didn’t intercept the messages. It didn’t monitor the Nazi circuits. It didn’t break the codes. It didn’t solve any Enigma machines. The coast guard did this stuff—the little codebreaking team that Elizebeth created from nothing.

During the Second World War, an American woman figured out how to sweep the globe of undercover Nazis. The proof was on paper: four thousand typed decryptions of clandestine Nazi messages that her team shared with the global intelligence community. She had conquered at least forty-eight different clandestine radio circuits and three Enigma machines to get these plaintexts. The pages found their way to the navy and to the army. To FBI headquarters in Washington and bureaus around the world. To Britain. There was no mistaking their origin. Each sheet said “CG Decryption” at the bottom, in black ink. These pieces of paper saved lives. They almost certainly stopped coups. They put fascist spies in prison. They drove wedges between Germany and other nations that were trying to sustain and prolong Nazi terror. By any measure, Elizebeth was a great heroine of the Second World War.

J. Edgar Hoover did not have these constraints. His power allowed him to manipulate the press and disclose secrets without consequence. And because his agents were old-school detectives, not technical wizards like Elizebeth, Hoover was able to frame the Invisible War in terms of instantly familiar images: disappearing inks, saboteurs, hidden cameras, police raids on clandestine radio stations, gumshoes in snap-brim hats. So this was the picture of the spy hunt that the public ended up receiving. They got Hoover’s story, not Elizebeth’s. Hoover made sure of it. In the fall of 1944, with the Wehrmacht collapsing across Europe, and the Red Army moving toward Berlin, he launched a publicity blitz to claim credit for winning the Invisible War. He published a seven-page story in The American Magazine titled “How the Nazi Spy Invasion Was Smashed.” The sub-headline read, “One of the great undercover victories of the war—the defeat of a vast Axis plan to penetrate South America—is revealed here for the first time by the Director of the FBI.” Hoover claimed that his bureau had disrupted seven thousand Axis operations, catching two hundred and fifty spies and seizing twenty-nine radio stations, and that these actions had “stopped Hitler in South America. He needed his men and radio stations to carry out his plans of conquest and sabotage. . . . Without his machine he was lost.” Hoover did not mention Elizebeth or the coast guard, but he did thank the policemen of Brazil and Argentin...

It was funny how he felt more and more generous toward Fabyan by the year. You get older and want to connect to the people who understand. You try to speak with the young and find that something is wrong with your ears. They use their own slang, their own code, and you start to feel nostalgic about your former enemies, who at least shared the same intense moment on earth and spoke words you could understand. Besides, if not for George Fabyan, William would not now be carrying a piece of Adolf Hitler’s smashed marble floor in his pocket.