The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

One of the section’s most talented spies was a Jewish man from Holland named Weinheimer who was working for the SS in the hopes of saving his family from the concentration camps. He had smuggled himself into Chile, posing as an immigrant, and according to Sommer he sent back a number of “highly regarded” and “very accurate”

modify his mission. He was correct. In meetings at the home office, the SS leaders told Becker that he was now their top agent in South America, and he needed to go back to the continent and recruit a team of spies. Berlin gave Becker

Becker arrived in Buenos Aires with the trunk in December 1940 and was intercepted at the German embassy, where the ambassador opened the trunk, saw the bombs, imagined the diplomatic headaches they would cause, and ordered Becker to dump the bombs in the river. At this point, he abandoned the sabotage mission and began building his new spy network in earnest, traveling across the continent, from Argentina to Brazil to Bolivia to Paraguay, trying to convince German colonists to spy for the Führer. Many of the would-be V-men in South America proved hopelessly ineffectual—one was

politics. Becker single-handedly turned this press-clipping service into an actual spy network. He built a courier system to exchange information with Germany, convincing employees of the Condor and LATI airlines to carry spy messages in pouches on their flights to Germany and deposit the pouches at a firm owned by an SS man. He taught Engels how to use book ciphers and codes based on pencil-and-paper grids and turning grilles. And in the

It was difficult to get a reliable signal, and Becker, for all his ability, lacked the technical expertise. He asked the SS to send him a Funkmeister, a radio operator, and in September 1941 the SS dispatched Gustav Utzinger to Rio. Utzinger was the opposite of Becker in many ways: a man of education,

Utzinger in radio—they approached their jobs with the pride of craftsmen. Becker had the contacts and the vision. Utzinger had the technical skill. Soon the Hauptsturmführer and the Funkmeister would prove to be the most dangerous Nazis in the West. In the beginning Elizebeth

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

It appeared that the Nazis had at least three separate clandestine radio stations up and running in South America. Two were in Brazil, on the eastern coast of the continent, and one was in Chile, on the western coast. The Brazilian stations were in Rio de Janeiro and

signature. It was a “crib,” a piece of repeating text that gives the codebreaker a foothold. A British colleague of hers once said, “When you get a man with a nice long name with about twelve syllables, it can be of the greatest help to us.” If Elizebeth could solve for HUMBERTO,

At first the spies in South America were using book ciphers. Elizebeth solved them. She watched these men talk and plot and share

of crops, the number of planes being built in American factories. In September 1941, the agents switched to a grille-like cipher, and Elizebeth penetrated that, too. After she solved a message and the clerks typed the decrypt, Elizebeth and the other codebreakers and translators would perform a preliminary level of intelligence analysis,

the coast guard provided copies of every solution from the South American circuits to FBI headquarters, at the request of J. Edgar Hoover. The bureau’s newly created Special Intelligence Service then circulated the coast guard decrypts

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

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

furnished by the Technical Laboratory, and the intensive investigation by SIS representatives, the persons referred to in the messages were identified, their cover names ascertained, and their associates were established.” This is highly misleading. The decrypts were indeed “furnished” to agents in the field by the FBI Technical Laboratory, after the coast guard had furnished the solutions to the Technical Laboratory. The evidence is on the original documents themselves. Before the coast guard sent the FBI a decrypt, the coast guard clerks typed “SIS Dupe” at the bottom of the sheet, beneath the line that said “CG Translation” and “CG Decryption.”

These once-secret files, located in the National Archives and finally declassified in 2000, prove that the coast guard, not the FBI, solved these Nazi radio circuits. Hoover’s stinginess on these

Hamburg, the messages encrypted with the book cipher based on All This and Heaven Too, which Elizebeth had already broken. What Duquesne didn’t know was that Sebold was secretly working for the FBI as a double agent. Surveillance cameras in the walls of the office were capturing him on film, and the radio transmitter in Long Island

By the summer of 1941 her team had decrypted hundreds of notes exchanged by Duquesne and the other members of the ring. These

After six weeks of sensational testimony by FBI agents and Duquesne himself, all defendants were convicted, and the thirty-three spies were sentenced to three hundred years collectively. The wild success of the “Ducase” had two large and lasting effects on

FBI counterintelligence agent Raymond J. Batvinis. “It launched the popular myth of Hoover as the guardian of ‘the American way of life.’

During the final weeks before Pearl Harbor, October and November 1941, she could feel herself losing control of her code-breaking team. The military was starting to take over civilian functions. On November 1, a day after a Nazi U-boat destroyed an American ship off the coast of Ireland, killing more than one hundred sailors, Roosevelt signed an executive order declaring that the coast guard was no

longer a Treasury agency. Instead, effective immediately, the coast guard was part of the U.S. Navy, and all coast guard personnel were subject to the authority of Navy Secretary Frank Knox. Basically, with a stroke of the presidential pen, Elizebeth and all her colleagues had been drafted into the navy. She had no objection to working for the navy per se, but she was convinced

said, “She has a good organization. Perhaps it is as good as there is in the government, as you know, on cryptanalysis.” He added that Elizebeth “would have some usefulness” if she stayed in Treasury and left the wartime spy-catching work to the army, navy, and FBI. She could help the T-men investigate bank accounts controlled by the Axis powers, for instance. Morgenthau said that whatever happened, he did not want to answer angry

around. The colonels wore a variety of expressions, some red-eyed and worn, others strenuously poker-faced. They heard that two thousand Americans had been killed, maybe more, including 1,177 crewmen aboard the battleship USS Arizona, incinerated by an armor-piercing bomb that had burrowed its way into the forward ammunition hold. Twenty-one ships sunk, almost two hundred planes destroyed. A good portion of the Pacific Fleet lay at the bottom of the ocean. Over

What surprised William on December 7 was not the attack itself but the location. He thought it would happen in Manila, not Pearl Harbor. In the years that followed, William would become obsessed

The crucial MAGIC decrypts had been slow to arrive in Pearl Harbor partly because the military hadn’t given the Pearl Harbor commanders a Purple machine of their own, a direct tap into the MAGIC fire hose. This decision had been made out of a reasonable desire to limit the distribution of Purple machines in order to minimize the chances

“Apparently Hastings found the surprise element of the attack amusing. Nevertheless their friendship continued.” Maybe Hastings was giddy from the stress of the day. Maybe he really did think it was darkly funny that MAGIC, for all its power, couldn’t save

changed American culture. It was a stomach that ingested a large diverse nation and started breaking it down into widgets. Hollywood movies and Disney cartoons were about the war now. Business was about

Just like that, Elizebeth was demoted from Cryptanalyst-in-Charge to mere Cryptanalyst. She was no longer the leader of the team she had

Bill.” FDR had asked his son to help Donovan launch the Office of the Coordinator of Information, the spy organization that would become the OSS and later the CIA. Donovan was starting from zero, in borrowed

Donovan didn’t have any of this, and didn’t know the first thing about codes or ciphers, so James Roosevelt approached Elizebeth to lend her expertise, and Donovan reinforced the demand by sending a letter directly to Henry Morgenthau that requested Elizebeth by name, citing an “urgent need for her services pending the establishment

basis, she spent three and a half weeks creating the first permanent cryptographic section for the proto-OSS and proto-proto-CIA. She built it from scratch, making alphabet strips and other aids to generate ciphers, obtaining hard-to-find cipher devices through navy channels, installing the machines,

feelings between the lines, her horror that an important national function was going to be directed by a man who struck her as foolish and cavalier (Donovan’s OSS would be defined by recklessness). She sent the letter via James Roosevelt to make sure Roosevelt was aware of Donovan’s shortcomings as a guardian of information:

Pearl Harbor, Brazil had declared solidarity with America, and the Nazis responded by going after Brazil, firing torpedoes at Brazilian ships for the first time. The positions of the ships were provided by “Sargo,” “Alfredo,” and their men. Outraged Brazilian authorities moved against German businesses. “Measures against members of the Axis are assuming drastic form,” one spy in Brazil radioed to Germany.

assault on American and British merchant ships carrying war supplies, and “Sargo” and “Alfredo” helped with this effort, too. In three months the ruthless U-boats sent one million tons of material to the bottom of the sea and by summer 1942 the U-boat captains had

As it turned out, Hitler had placed a bounty on the Queen Mary: any U-boat captain that destroyed her would win the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves and one million Reichsmarks. Elizebeth’s decryptions (and similar decryptions provided by other Allied codebreaking units) were quickly shared with the Queen Mary captain, who was able to take evasive maneuvers, sneaking past a U-boat that was lurking