with translators to read encrypted notes in Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Mandarin. She was able to take messages written in blocks of letters or numbers and trace these figures back to specific Mandarin words in commercial code books designed for Chinese merchants. Reporters and readers seemed amazed that she could break a code in a language she did not speak, but that was the power of having a system, a science. “The whole deciphering science is based on what we call the mechanics of language,” she explained on NBC radio, making it seem easy. “There are certain fixed ways
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