The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

crusts of blood the speed and angle of the knife. Unbeknownst to the coast guard, groups of British and Polish codebreakers working on the Enigma problem had already discovered methods for working backward from the text to the machine. The Poles had done it with an algebraic approach, the mathematics of permutations, and one of the brilliant Bletchley codebreakers, a linguist and scholar

radio circuit. The codebreakers now realized two slightly disappointing facts: The plaintexts seemed to contain no Nazi secrets; later the codebreakers learned that the messages had been sent by the neutral Swiss army, which sometimes used

secret technical memo after the war. As far as Elizebeth and her codebreakers could tell, and they were hardly prone to bragging, they were the first Americans to solve an unknown Enigma. Until this moment, cipher machines had always been

solution of the commercial Enigma showed that she had a similar aptitude for solving machines, and this initial headfirst dive into the pool of Enigma codes would lead her to deeper waters later in the war. Of course, she didn’t know this in early 1940. Demolishing

as different intelligence agencies realized that Elizebeth had tapped into a trove of information about Nazi spies, they inevitably asked the coast guard for more decrypts. In the 1920s, she had complained about government men “appearing on my doorstep,” wanting her to solve puzzles. They were still appearing on her doorstep, but now, instead of relatively anonymous T-men, they were some of the most powerful spymasters in the world. J.

glass. He had respected William for years and appreciated his periodic assistance with FBI cases, with the little encrypted notes written by criminal suspects that William would solve in his free time and send back to the bureau. Hoover was almost

allowed to smoke at their desks as the men could. One of his least favorite people was Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote him a mildly indignant letter after the FBI conducted an intrusive background check on one of her friends.

compiled a secret dossier alleging she was a communist. “When a woman turns professional criminal,” he wrote once, “she is a hundred times more vicious and dangerous than a man.” Women at Hoover’s bureau were only deemed fit for “boring clerical functions,”

coming. They panicked and fled the country. Newspapers mocked the FBI for letting Nazis slip through its fingertips, and U.S. intelligence agencies that had long resented the FBI found

agencies.” For a man as vain as Hoover, and as publicity-obsessed, and as intensely disliked by rivals in his own government, the bungled Rumrich case represented both a personal black eye and a threat to the FBI’s future authority. Somehow he needed to salvage the bureau’s reputation, to prove that it was

Hoover argued, the FBI must be allowed to operate beyond U.S. borders. He demanded the authority to send men into South America, “to seek out and identify agents of the Axis operating in all the Americas, to ensure the ultimate safety of the United

stations, and destroying the rings. A tall order. The first five SIS agents were dispatched to the continent in September 1940, one each to Peru, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela. Pale and corn-fed, they stepped off their planes into the lacerating sun of another continent. They wore snap-brim hats and looked like detectives that South Americans had seen in newspapers and movies. The agents knew little about codes, ciphers, or radio, these crucial tools of their

Brazil was actually Portuguese. Hoover’s men in South America were so unprepared that they had almost no chance of catching the spies through old-school gumshoe tactics: interviewing associates, recruiting confidential informants, developing leads. They needed to know what the spies were saying to one another in private. They needed codebreaking. And this was exactly the problem. To break codes, you need intercepts and you need

disruption. Codebreaking is delicate work. You have to look at the page and get all the letters aligned just right, then you have to look at your team and get all the

listening to the rain on the roof, writing a technical paper on cryptology. He told her, “There won’t be anybody [to] read this thing, I imagine, at least not for some centuries,” and added a lament about the shackles of secrecy: “I wish I could write about

Rowlett showed Gene’s worksheets to the boss, and William agreed within seconds that they revealed a loose thread in the code. There was still more to do, but it was clear that the thread, if pulled, would allow the team, with great grinding effort, to recover the daily keys and consistently read the Japanese messages. The men were bouncing and laughing with the excitement of the discovery.

He turned to the codebreakers. “The recovery of this machine will go down as a milestone in cryptologic history,” he said in a formal, distant voice. Then he left the room. In codebreaking, the larger the success,

more it must be suppressed. Any leak might reach the enemy and cause them to switch to a new code system, destroying the value of the

They had never seen a drawing of it, or a patent illustration, or a photo. Yet they now understood how it worked and how to recover the daily key for a given set of messages. People had reverse-engineered cipher machines and devices before, but nothing at Purple’s level

other decisive naval battles. It caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Japanese and saved the lives of unknown numbers of Allies. MAGIC changed the war. It was also one of the great secrets of the war, exactly like ULTRA, the Enigma codebreaking program. These were tremendous military advantages that could not be revealed

well). He had reached his peak. Elizebeth, though, was still climbing, and she couldn’t see him up there, across the gap between their two towers, starting his descent. She couldn’t share this victory with him, because on the day he and his team broke Purple, a historic achievement

thought, ‘golly, golly. . . . ’ ” The bombings of London continued for fifty-six straight days. Sirens and shelters, blackouts at night. The Axis was growing bolder in the final months of 1940. Japan invaded Vietnam, expanding its empire

telephones of Jewish families and cordoned off the Warsaw Ghetto with barbed wire, trapping 400,000 adults and children, most of them Polish Jews. America

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

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

with the bureau and share intelligence on the Nazi threat. Hoover listened politely, “a chunky enigmatic man with slow eyes and a trap of a mouth,” in Fleming’s description. Then Hoover said he couldn’t help; U.S. neutrality rules prohibited him from giving aid to any combatant nation. This was true, but it was also an empty

Hoover didn’t want the British operating in America because he saw them as a rival to the FBI. The British didn’t care one way or the other. They needed a friendly American spy agency as a partner, and if Hoover wasn’t willing to be that agency, for whatever reason, they would find another one, even if they had to create

So this is where the CIA began—with J. Edgar Hoover telling the British to go to hell, and the British not appreciating it. This was also when the British began making friendly advances toward

British Security Co-ordination wanted access to any intercepted and solved messages that America happened to have. And they realized that when it came to radio intelligence and hard-core codebreaking, the place to be in America was the coast guard. Unlike the FBI, Elizebeth’s unit had access to intercepts from its own listening stations, and

got to talking that first time, Stratton and Elizebeth, they realized that if they combined their resources and their knowledge, they’d have a better chance against the Nazi spies than if they were working alone. The British operated radio posts across Europe staffed by 1,500 secret listeners, many of them volunteer hobbyists, and the

By now Elizebeth and her coast guard codebreakers had also begun working directly with the FBI at the request of J. Edgar Hoover. He wanted assistance with several different unknown code systems. Elizebeth obliged. She found that some of the spies who interested the FBI were using book ciphers, and others relied on

because Elizebeth had given the Technical Laboratory the means of solution—the laboratory run by the G-man she herself had trained in 1940. While

Chat” radio speech from the Diplomatic Room of the White House, FDR argued that it was time for America to rethink its role in the world. It was futile to hope that fascism would leave America alone if America returned the favor. Instead, the nation must become an “arsenal

“Any South American country, in Nazi hands, would always constitute a jumping-off place for German attack on any one of the other republics of this hemisphere.” Without getting into specifics, Roosevelt

was the nation’s flagship military hospital, and for soldiers or officers suffering from physical injuries or infectious diseases, it was about as good as could be. During the Great War, men returning from the trenches, many with amputated limbs, would sit on the wide porch in wheelchairs, covered in blankets, looking out at the manicured grounds

was

Sometimes, instead of discharging a patient from the army altogether, the section’s doctors recommended he be transferred to a desk job, presumed to be less stressful. The idea that desk work itself might be a cause of debilitating stress—that the army now employed puzzle solvers, cryptologists, who bashed their brains against the stone of codes and bore the heavy burden of secrets—never occurred to the doctors of Walter Reed. They didn’t

refused to admit that her husband might have a serious mental illness. She thought the word “depression” was “too strong a term” and preferred “mood swings” or “downswings.” At home she answered his personal mail, explaining that William was ill and would get back

Abe Sinkov and Leo Rosen, sailed across the Atlantic with two Purple machines, delivering them to grateful British codebreakers at

project.” The hospital discharged him on March 22 into Elizebeth’s arms. He went back to work at the army on April 1. He wasn’t quite the same, and never would be. The breakdown and the hospitalization had changed his universe in ways it would take years to measure and understand. For one thing, the ordeal had planted doubt in the military bureaucracy

a temporary employee. It was probably a paperwork snafu, but it struck him as a bizarre indignity—his twenty-five straight years of service to America had hardly been temporary—and his friends were so horrified on his behalf that they threw him a big surprise party at an officers’ club and staged a mock court-martial as a send-up of the

opportunities as the “sons of capitalists,” Elizebeth once wrote. And throughout the spring and summer of 1941, as William recovered, Elizebeth’s job was only getting harder. The Invisible War was intensifying. The documents produced by her team now bore its mark. On

whole.” He had some forty-seven aliases and several false passports and moved freely across South America, recruiting spies in seven nations, organizing political plots and military coups with Nazi sympathizers,

in South America and twenty-nine radio stations could be traced back to Becker by direct or indirect steps. Yet Becker did not appear on the FBI’s radar during 1938, 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942,

ability to vanish. For all his talents, Becker started out as something of a screwup, his first missions in South America marked by mediocre results and sexual improprieties. Between 1936 and 1939, while spying for the SS in Brazil

girlfriend. For a time he worked for an Argentine firm as an importer of German children’s toys and doll eyes, claiming to be a woodworking expert, when in truth he spent most of his days watching British ships come and go in the harbor and his nights prowling the bars and dance floors of the city, writing the phone numbers of prostitutes and fascist sympathizers in a personal address book. He caused a scandal in Rio de Janeiro by impregnating the wife of a Brazilian cabinet minister. The Nazi ambassador complained to Berlin that

Becker had one essential quality that set him apart from almost everyone else in his corner of the Nazi universe: he was adaptable.

Berlin and managed another five hundred spies in foreign countries. A minority of the spies were actual SS officers like Becker and the rest were considered “V-men” (vertrauensmann is German for “informer”), usually German expatriates and local fascists who wanted to help the cause. There was also a separate German agency, the Abwehr, that sent spies to foreign countries, but the Abwehr predated the

the most valuable possession and its future realization: the blood of the Germanic race, the National Socialist ideology.”

qualifications whatever for intelligence work,” an American interrogator would later conclude. Paeffgen’s previous job with the SS had involved “combating partisans” in Russia, a euphemism for killing Jews. Paeffgen’s deputy was a former Gestapo thug named Kurt Gross, who badgered his spies in South America to send him packages