by Jason Fagone
There were people in the U.S. military who didn’t like that Elizebeth was talking about codebreaking in criminal trials and didn’t much care that prosecutors were forcing her to do it. Her testimonies showed that she knew how to break many different kinds of codes, including codes in foreign languages, which “could lead to only one conclusion on the part of espionage agents—decryption of other nation’s codes was in progress behind the scenes,” according to the confidential 1943 memo. After the publication of “The Key Woman of the T-Men,” the army’s inspector general stormed into William’s office and demanded to know why William had been mentioned in the article, as Elizebeth’s husband and as the army’s top codebreaker. Officials at both Treasury and the War Department had reviewed the article before publication and confirmed that it contained no classified information, but the inspector had not been consulted. William had no idea what to say. “I lost my tongue completely,” he wrote, “and failed to ask for permission to sleep in the same room and/or bed with my wife.” Journalists mentioned him in articles about Elizebeth because the two of them were married and shared a profession. If it was a problem for two cryptologists to be married, what was the solution?
The troublesome publicity came to a peak in the first months of 1938, when the buzz from the Reader’s Digest profile dovetailed with a new round of press from a flashy drug trial in Canada. At the request of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Elizebeth flew to Vancouver to analyze messages discovered in a raid of a Chinese merchant’s home and business. Police seized thirteen Luger pistols, four hundred Mauser clips, almost one hundred machine gun drums, numerous cans of opium, and two dozen coded cablegrams in a safe. Working with RCMP translators, Elizebeth solved the messages, exposing a smuggling ring that traded Canadian weapons to Hong Kong in exchange for drugs. The cablegrams were written in English ciphertext, four letters per block, which Elizebeth turned into Arabic numbers, that corresponded to Mandarin characters in a Chinese commercial dictionary, that stood for Mandarin words, that were translated into English words:
(George C. Marshall Research Foundation)
UUOO AMAS ANAG USOG UKUU IUUI AEIY thus became “Cable three thousand select fully Wat list,” Wat Sang Co. being the name of the drug dealer’s Canadian company. She found that the smugglers referred to opium as “ginseng” and “groceries,” and guns and ammunition as “hams,” “presses,” and “tails.”
Her testimony at the Vancouver criminal trial helped convict all five defendants, and a fresh wave of articles and headlines appeared. CANADA SMASHES OPIUM RING WITH U.S. WOMAN’S AID. WOMAN TRANSLATES CODE JARGON. The February 15, 1938, issue of Look magazine included Elizebeth in a feature on “outstanding” women “in careers unusual for their sex,” along with a female deep-sea diver, a female conductor of a symphony orchestra, and a silversmith. She had not provided Look with a photo or an interview, but the magazine somehow got its hands on a gauzy black-and-white photo of Elizebeth in a white robe. Detective Fiction Weekly printed fourteen pages about Elizebeth’s career written by a newspaper editor who moonlighted in gangster fiction. “Lady Manhunter,” he titled the piece, “A True Story.” A telegram arrived in Elizebeth’s office from a magazine writer in New York. “PLEASE COOPERATE BY ANSWERING QUESTIONS BELOW BY RETURN SPECIAL DELIVERY TO ME,” the man wrote. “FOR WHAT DEPARTMENTS DO YOU DECIPHER MESSAGES? HOW MANY HAVE YOU DONE? WHAT TYPES? SENT BY WHOM? HOW DO THEY FALL INTO YOUR HANDS? . . . LIKES, DISLIKES, SUPERSTITIONS HAVE YOU, ANY FURTHER ANECDOTES OF HUMAN INTEREST, HUMOR, OR UNUSUAL EXPERIENCES WOULD BE APPRECIATED.” Across the bottom of the telegram, in large letters, Elizebeth scrawled in disgust, “Ad Absurdum!”
She was now the most famous codebreaker in the world, more famous even than Herbert Yardley, the impresario of the American Black Chamber. And she was more famous than her husband, too—a reversal from the longstanding pattern.
All their lives, William had been the celebrated one, the master, the genius, and she the dutiful wife, supporting him from the shadows. But Elizebeth was now said to be the true genius in the family, the driving force of the duo. A rumor spread that she had taught her husband everything he knew about cryptology. People started to approach William at military functions and regale him with stories about Elizebeth’s adventures, as if he were unaware of them. He thought the inversion of the narrative was hilarious, “a scream”; it had been silly before when everyone thought he was the only genius in the couple, and it was silly now. The Friedmans had always considered each other equals. He didn’t mind the attention swinging to Elizebeth. “When people introduce me and then say that my wife is also etc & is really better at it, I invariably assent, with a real smile,” he told her in a letter. He was proud of her.
Elizebeth, of course, didn’t think she was a genius; actual geniuses never do. Codebreaking to her was about teams, systems, cooperation.
She told people she never wanted to see her name in print again. In the final months of 1938, she got her wish. The U.S. government gave her a new assignment that was every bit as clandestine as her previous missions had been public. Soon the mark of her pencil, once celebrated on front pages, would become one of the most closely held secrets in America.
William left Washington for Hawaii in October 1938 on a secret mission to the Pacific. The army wanted to deploy the cipher machine he had invented, Converter M-134, and start using it to protect “highly secret communications” between its headquarters in Washington and army installations in San Francisco, Hawaii, and the Phillipines. William’s job was to carry two M-134s to each base, install and test them, and train army staff in their operation. He boarded a troopship, the Republic, in New York City, with a trunk containing six bulky cipher machines and some books of essays and poetry, and the ship steamed south to the Panama Canal and passed from there into the Pacific.
He was at sea during the atrocity known as Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass, when Nazi mobs in a thousand German towns murdered at least ninety-one Jews and set fire to synagogues. These were pogroms like the ones in Russia that had terrorized William’s kin. The mobs attacked with stones, bricks, wood poles, and automobiles driven through plate-glass windows, destroying Jewish stores, Jewish hospitals, Jewish nursing homes, Jewish kindergartens, Jewish cemeteries, Jewish Scrolls of Law. On a busy Berlin street a cheering crowd hacked apart a grand piano with hatchets.
In Washington a few weeks later, Elizebeth fell ill. A creeping fatigue glued her to the bed for long periods. Not wanting William to worry, she concealed the details from him, only telling her sister, Edna, who assumed that her sister was simply overworked. Edna didn’t know about Elizebeth’s new mission, and William didn’t, either. He was on the ship, cut off. His airmail letters arrived in Washington within a few days, but they were expensive. Regular-mail letters took weeks; telegrams had to be short. The Republic had a radio transmitter for military use only. William was sometimes able to sneak on and send Elizebeth messages at her Treasury office.
From a few words in her letters and telegrams, he got the sense his wife was struggling, that something was wrong, but she didn’t spell it out. He was sick of these distances and wished they could go back to the time when they were together all day long, solving puzzles side by side. On the ship he daydreamed about Riverbank. “I can almost forsee the time when you and I will be working together again in an office,” he wrote to Elizebeth. “It would be a joy to have you alongside me again—to recapture those days when we worked side by side and stole kisses in the vault at Engledew—such passionate kisses on my part, and sometimes on yours.”
Arriving in Hawaii in late November, William began tests of the cipher machine and bought gifts for his family: hula skirts for Elizebeth and the kids, and a glass vial of Shalimar perfume for Elizebeth. Then he sailed to San Francisco for more tests at a different army facility. He was back on the ship, heading homeward, by Christmas Eve. The crew of the Republic arranged a Christmas dance for passengers. He sat in the smoking room reading a book while other
s danced. After a colonel entered and shot him a dirty look for being a prude, William put the book down and danced a waltz with the daughter of the Cuban minister to Japan, a young beauty with a slight accent, “as brunette as can be.”
He was still thousands of miles from Elizebeth when the new year dawned, and skimming along at fourteen and a half knots. During these first days of January 1939, Japanese pilots dropped bombs on civilians in the Chinese city of Chongqing. The cardinal of Munich praised Hitler’s “simple personal habits.” The Nazis announced the immediate deployment of hundreds of new U-boats, a smaller and swifter generation of submarine. A physics professor in a basement laboratory at Columbia University wrote in his diary, “Believe we have observed new phenomenon of far-reaching consequences”—nuclear fission, the splitting of uranium atoms into lighter elements, achieved with an atom smasher.
The motion of the ship disturbed William and he slept irregularly, conking out for hours in deck chairs at midday, sun cooking his pale skin, then twitching with insomnia at night, wandering the ship alone. He watched Hollywood movies in the evening, above deck, where the ship kept a film projector and passengers gathered in the open air. During Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra, the moon rose fat and white between the mountains near Monterey and the cryptologist’s eyes wandered from the movie screen to the sky. He played shuffleboard with two congressmen. He fretted about the state of his patent applications and the low tide of his bank account. He wondered what was happening with the board game he sent to Milton Bradley. No one had gotten back to him. He learned later the game had stumped the firm’s designers. It was one thing to design a fun code game for a party with friends and quite another to deliver a game in a cardboard box to a stranger.
On the ship he began a letter to Elizebeth that ultimately ran to thirty pages. He wrote on transparent tracing paper because it was thin and he could fit more pages in an envelope, saving on postage. Each day he added to the letter. His cursive handwriting smeared on the delicate clear sheets and the writing on the reverse showed through to the front. “I hope these sheets don’t drive you wild to read,” he wrote. “I wanted to get on as much as possible and use this paper to reduce the weight.” He was trying to express a feeling that seemed too large for a single page or a moment’s thought. He copied love poems by Tennyson and Thackeray from one of the books in his trunk. Thackeray wished to be a violet, plucked by his belle to live for an exalted hour “shelter’d here upon a breast / so gentle and so pure.” He watched a romantic comedy starring Helen Hayes, What Every Woman Knows, about the shrewd wife of a British politician who helps his career behind the scenes, inspiring William to tell Elizebeth, “Well, that wasn’t exactly news to me, my Darling. For I’ve known for a long time that you are the one in back of me and responsible for what little I’ve done. Had it not been for you I’d have been sunk long ago by unsolved infernal conflicts, by windy storms of emotion, by failure to keep up the fight when things seemed not worthwhile. . . . I know how much I owe to you—for love, for wisdom, for courage, and common sense.”
Floating above the blue-black depths soon to be lethalized by German U-boats, he often stood at the top deck’s rail looking out at the miles of ocean. Billions of droplets exchanging secret histories every fraction of a second. Trillions. Actual unbreakable code. One night when it was hot and he couldn’t sleep he drank a glass of cold tomato juice and ate a few crackers and went up to the top deck. The place was deserted except for two or three men in chairs along the rail, smoking. He sat and pulled out the diary, flipping to the next empty page. He was a man on the verge of mental breakdown, writing a letter to his wife, who was also close to collapse, at a moment when the world was rearranging itself, and they would both have to give more of themselves than they had ever given before.
“The ocean,” he said, “is as calm as a bowl of warm milk sitting on a table.”
PART III
THE INVISIBLE WAR
1939–1945
CHAPTER 1
Grandmother Died
Elizebeth Friedman, U.S. Coast Guard
Cryptanalyst-in-Charge, and a junior cryptanalyst,
Robert Gordon, puzzling out a problem together, 1940.
(George C. Marshall Research Foundation)
Lights out ’cause I can see in the dark . . .
—FUGAZI
The Second World War did not begin with a gunshot or a bomb. It began with a feat of deception involving elements long familiar to Elizebeth Friedman—a code phrase, a radio station, and a murder. The men responsible were Nazis, and they belonged to the same part of the Nazi state that would soon attract Elizebeth’s deep attention.
At 4 P.M. on August 31, 1939, in a hotel room in a small Polish town four miles from the German border, a Nazi officer named Alfred Naujocks dialed a number in Berlin. Someone in Berlin picked up. A high-pitched voice said, “Grossmutter gestorben.” “Grandmother died.” Naujocks hung up. He went to gather his team, the six operatives he had brought across the border. “Grandmother died” was the signal to execute a preplanned mission at 8 P.M.
The mission was to provide Germany with an excuse to start a war. Hitler had already decided to attack Poland, to seize his neighbor to the east, but he did not want to appear as the aggressor, so a pretext was needed, a simulated attack on German forces that would allow Hitler to claim he was acting in self-defense and create confusion about where the truth really lay.
This is where Naujocks and his colleagues entered the picture. They would invent the proof of Polish aggression.
They belonged to the SS, the chief instrument of Nazi terror. They were the men in black, the storm troopers, numbering 250,000 by 1939. They wore the death’s-head symbol on their uniforms, the skull and crossbones. As individuals they were like any other large group of humans, containing multitudes: opportunists, idealists, fanatics, scholars, mediocrities, petty crooks. But as a collective they became “the guillotine used by a gang of psychopaths obsessed with racial purity,” in the words of the historian Heinz Höhne. It was SS men who built the concentration camps and managed the ghettoes and trains that herded and transported Jews and other minorities into the camps to be enslaved, tortured, and killed. They were the guards at Dachau and Auschwitz, the murderers of millions. They were the mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen, that swept in behind the advancing German military, shooting resisters and Jews. They were the Gestapo, the ruthless Nazi police. They were the Nazi intelligence men, the ones who spied on their fellow Germans to keep them in line, and they were the spies who worked undercover in other nations, extending the reach of the regime until it encircled the world. And they were not meant to be confronted or understood. One SS leader bragged that the organization was “enveloped in the mysterious aura of the political detective story.” Elizebeth would spend much of the war trying to penetrate this veil.
After the SS men in Poland received the code phrase over the phone on August 31, they waited until just before dusk, then drove two cars through the pine forest toward their objective, a Nazi radio station that transmitted propaganda broadcasts. The plan was to pose as Polish insurgents, take over the station, and broadcast a message denouncing the Führer. They stopped near the station and met a Gestapo captain to pick up what they had been calling “Canned Goods”: the unconscious body of an SS prisoner, a forty-three-year-old Catholic farmer named Franz Honiok. He had been shot, sedated, and dressed in a Polish uniform. His face was smeared with blood. Naujocks carried him to the steps of the station and left him there slipping away from his fatal gunshot wounds, then stormed into the broadcast area with his team, aiming a revolver at the staff: “Hands up!” One of the SS men spoke Polish. He grabbed the emergency microphone used for storm warnings. “Attention, this is Gliwice,” he shouted in Polish, pretending to be an insurgent. “The radio station is in Polish hands.” He called for an uprising. The men fired bullets into the ceiling to simulate an armed struggle.
Thousands of radio listeners heard the gunfire and
the burst of Polish. Two hours later stations in Berlin were spreading news of the “Polish attack.” The BBC in London reported that “Poles forced their way into the studio.” And while diplomats around the world tried to get a fix on the truth, the Nazis were massing at the border. At dawn on September 1, 1939, the morning after the incident in Gliwice, the Wehrmacht sliced into Poland, forty-two divisions all at once, with one and a half million men. It was the middle of the night on the East Coast. President Roosevelt woke to a ringing phone at 2:50 A.M. He picked up the receiver at his bedside and heard the voice of William Bullitt, the U.S. ambassador to France. Bullitt was calling with the news from Warsaw: Germany had invaded Poland. The president sat up. “Well, Bill, it has come at last. God help us all.” He lit a cigarette and started making calls, waking up the cabinet secretaries.
Later that morning Roosevelt called a quick press conference. The first question was, can America stay out of the war? Roosevelt said, “I not only sincerely hope so, but I believe we can.”
He was speaking for most of the country. In the days that followed, as Britain and France declared war on Germany, the U.S. public met the news with relief. Europe would defeat fascism on its own. The fight was across the ocean, far from U.S. shores. Nazis seemed a safe distance away.
In private, though, Roosevelt and his advisers were planning for the worst.
For years now, they had been thinking about the possibility of direct Nazi attacks on the United States. It was obvious that no effective invasion could be launched from Germany itself; ships were too slow, and airplanes couldn’t carry enough fuel to cross the ocean, drop bombs, and return home.
But there was a catch in this argument, an unnerving loophole: What if the Nazis got control of South America?