The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

the best intelligence professionals do. They become librarians. It’s no accident that J. Edgar Hoover got his start in government as an eighteen-year-old Library of Congress clerk, a job that gave him “an excellent foundation for my work in the FBI,” he later said, “where it has been necessary to collate information and evidence.” The FBI was a library of human fingerprints and human deeds. Elizebeth’s thirty bound volumes of rum messages were a library of the outlaw seas. The files of Herbert Yardley’s American black chamber, now controlled by William, were a library of diplomatic intrigues from many nations, and William’s SIS unit at the army was fast becoming a library of as-yet-unsolved Japanese communications, an archive pitched against a rising fascist power. For all the harmless innocence conjured by the word