The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

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...