The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

  South America. It was neutral ground—for now. No government there had declared a position in the war. Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Ecuador were content, for the moment, to sell beef and raw metals to the combatants and to measure the political winds.

  But this would certainly change as the war evolved and politicians cut deals. Hitler had already shown an ability to destabilize foreign governments. That’s how Austria had fallen to the Nazis, and Czechoslovakia, too. And President Roosevelt was convinced that if Nazism took root in South America, even in just a few places, it would pose a clear and present danger to U.S. cities like New York.

  South America was very big: the land mass of Brazil alone was slightly larger than the entire continental United States. South America was also very close: as Roosevelt put it in a 1940 speech to Congress, “Para, Brazil, near the mouth of the Amazon River, is but four flying-hours to Caracas, Venezuela; and Venezuela is but two and one-half hours to Cuba and the Canal Zone; and Cuba and the Canal Zone are two and one-quarter hours to Tampico, Mexico; and Tampico is two and one-quarter hours to St. Louis, Kansas City and Omaha.”

  If Britain fell to Hitler, the thinking went, Nazi ships could move west and set up bases in South America, seizing its rich resources, the metals to make war machines and the food to sustain armies, and then U.S. coastal cities would be within reach of Nazi bombing raids. Some officials dissented from this view, namely at the State Department, which considered a Nazi invasion from South America to be unlikely, but the Reich’s rapid military victories and the erratic behaviors of the Führer had caused many to revise their sense of what was possible.

  There was another sound reason to worry about German influence in South America. Millions of Germans were already living there as colonists. They had emigrated in waves since the late nineteenth century, seeking land and work, 140,000 arriving between 1919 and 1933 alone, many fleeing the same desperate economy that fueled the rise of the Nazis.

  The Germans had left a cold country of worthless currency and sailed into the crystalline seas hugging a warm and open continent. A “bewildering abundance” met them ashore. “Everything is violent—the sun, the light, the colours,” the Austrian exile Stefan Zweig wrote of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s glinting capital. “The glare of the sun is stronger here; the greens are deep and full; the earth tight-packed and red . . . Rather than encouraged, growth has to be fought, so as to prevent its wild power from overwhelming the efforts of mankind.” In Rio the green leaves of palm trees burned white in the midday sun as if radioactive. Men wore suits of white linen that became soaked by sudden downpours and thunderstorms. Women strolled topless on Copacabana Beach. A cream-colored luxury hotel, the Copacabana Palace, faced the beach and the crystalline blue waters of the Guanbara Bay; Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced in the hotel’s ballroom in the 1933 Hollywood musical Flying to Rio.

  Some of the arriving Germans decided to stay in Rio; others filtered into the surrounding Brazilian provinces, sparse rural lands of forest and cattle, and still others scuttled south along the coastline to the fast-growing industrial city of São Paulo, which Zweig likened to Houston, Texas, because of its abrupt rise from nothing: “There are times when one has the sensation of not being in a city, but on some gigantic building site.” Farther south, another great city of the continent beckoned to the Germans: Buenos Aires, Argentina, a polyglot metropolis of four million, a chaos of automobiles and bookshops and neon lights and cobblestone streets where tango music descended from the open windows of brothels. The nation had grown rich from cattle and wheat raised in the Pampas, the flatlands to the west and south of Buenos Aires, where tens of thousands of Germans lived alongside the gauchos and their horses.

  Wherever Germans settled in South America, they built German schools (two hundred in Argentina alone), German businesses, German radio stations, German newspapers, and transportation links back to the homeland. Zeppelins floated people and cargo from Berlin to Rio, and two airlines, Condor and LATI, connected South America and Europe. Condor was owned by Germans, LATI by Italians. A visiting U.S. consul reported “a fair sale for German Bibles” across three Brazilian states and that 20 percent of all residents spoke only German; parts of southern Brazil became known as Greater Germany. “The German spirit is ineradicably grounded in the hearts of these colonists,” wrote a German physician, “and it will undoubtedly bear fruit, perhaps a rich harvest, which will not only prove a blessing to the colonies, but to the Fatherland.” A German visitor to Brazil reported with pride, “Surely to us belongs this part of the world,” and the Nazi ambassador in Buenos Aires, Baron Edmund von Thermann, believed that German Argentines must show “complete subservience” to “the ambitions and desires of the home country. Germans naturally count on these prosperous nuclei to assist eventually in the rebuilding of a new Germany.”

  A small percentage of German immigrants brought fascist politics to South America, starting local Nazi clubs and chanting Nazi songs, but these groups were small and disconnected, stagnant ponds of fascist fervor. The bigger rivers of fascist sympathy in South America coursed through the local populations. It was a time of protests, marches, fantasies of revolution. Right-wing parties and radicals on the continent found inspiration in Nazism. Followers of a Brazilian movement called Integralism raised their hands in Nazi-style salutes, wore uniforms of green (the men were “Green Shirts,” the women “Green Blouses”), and goose-stepped through the streets of Rio. In 1938, a throng of Argentine youths marched into the Jewish quarter of Buenos Aires, chanting anti-Semitic slogans, “stripped to the waist like Mussolini, mustachioed like Hitler,” writes one historian. “When enraged Jews attacked them, police arrested the Jews.”

  Similar movements were gaining followers in Chile, Bolivia, and Paraguay, and powerful local officials poured fuel on the fires. Across the continent, men who dreamed of leading their own regimes had risen to the top of police and military hierarchies; many had gotten their training from German officers. A group of Paraguayan officers formed a secret lodge, the Frente de Guerra, to organize an ultra right-wing revolution; their motto was “Discipline, Hierarchy, Order.” The chief of the Paraguayan national police, wishing to honor the dictators of Germany and Japan, decided to name his son Adolfo Hirohito. In Argentina, a young military instructor with a Cheshire-cat smile, Juan Perón, was studying the leadership styles of Mussolini and Hitler and found much to admire. One Argentine general, Juan Bautista Molina, displayed so much zeal for National Socialism that even Thermann, the Nazi ambassador, found it “embarrassing.”

  Hitler appreciated this wellspring of sympathy in South America. His strongest affinity was for Argentina, which had protected German interests in the First World War while ostensibly remaining neutral. In June 1939, three months before he invaded Poland, Hitler met with Argentina’s ambassador to Germany. Writes the historian Richard McGaha, “Knowing that war was going to break out soon,” the Führer “cryptically stated that he hoped Argentina would stay neutral and that neutrality could be the basis of a closer relationship.” Then Hitler launched into a tirade about America and England, saying that “the U.S. was the worst-governed country in the world,” that Roosevelt wanted war “at the instigation of the Jews, who controlled industry and the press,” and that England was “a paper tiger with its little fleet and meager air force.”

  In his mind the Führer had already added South America to the Nazi column. If he decided not to invade at this time, he would simply annex the continent after defeating Europe. As Baron von Thermann put it, “Once the war were decided in Germany’s favor, her domination of Latin America would follow without much effort.” This was the Nazi attitude, and it meant that the war in South America could not be a hot war, a war of soldiers and sailors in recognizable uniforms, a war of battleships and mortars and planes and bombs. Instead it promised to be a war of languages and secrets, codes and conspiracies, masks and seductions, wireless transmitters and cipher machines—the type of war where
everything depended on the invisible flashes of energy radiating from a radio coil hidden on a farm or beneath the floorboards of an unremarkable house.

  The term of art for an intelligence operation that must remain entirely concealed is “clandestine.” If a clandestine job is successful, no one ever knows it happened. It is invisible. The war in South America would be the Invisible War.

  There was a school in Hamburg where SS intelligence officers trained combatants for this war. Male party members were selected to receive a basic course in espionage tradecraft. They were taught to write letters in secret inks. The SS had developed a disappearing ink that actually looked like ink, bluish in color and carried in a regular ink bottle; a message written with this ink would turn invisible after a few minutes and could only be unmasked with a certain reagent. They learned how to operate a German-invented “microdot” camera that shrunk documents to the size of the dot above an i, allowing espionage reports to be concealed in otherwise innocuous letters, and they were shown different methods of writing messages in cipher, including an ingenious system for exploiting a popular novel, any novel, to generate garbled text.

  For the purposes of spying, this hand technique was often preferable to cipher machines like Enigmas, which were bulky, harder to transport, and more incriminating if discovered. A novel aroused no suspicion. One in common use was All This and Heaven Too, a period potboiler about a French governess falsely accused of murder. Would the unlucky Henriette Desportes manage to clear her name? Or would the conniving Parisian judge dispatch her to the dungeon? German men abroad pressed their noses to the book, eyes wide, turning the pages quickly, underlining words—no, these were not Nazi spies, these were simply readers under the spell of a story, needing to know what happened next.

  The SS instructors taught students how to transmit text in Morse code and how to operate shortwave radio transmitters and receivers. Radio technology had made giant leaps since the heyday of rum-running. A shortwave transmitter of moderate power could now fit in a suitcase. The transmitter was a small metal box with vacuum tubes on the inside and dials affixed to the cover, and the antenna was a long wire looped into a tight coil.

  Portable transmitters in hand, the novice agents were dispatched to begin their espionage careers for the Führer. U-boats delivered some of the spies onto alien shores, and others parachuted from planes or sailed on neutral ships under phony names, sometimes getting caught by customs inspectors or police along the way, their radios confiscated. The SS issued all foreign spies two kinds of suicide drugs to ingest in case of arrest. The first was a tablet that caused death by heart failure within ten minutes, and the second was a powder that resulted in “a slow process of general collapse over a two-week period” when rubbed on the body.

  If a spy managed to arrive at his destination with the radio intact, he unfurled the wire antenna and established contact with the fatherland, tapping out an encrypted message in the dots and dashes of Morse, the signal aimed at a receiving station in Hamburg or Berlin. Sometimes it worked, and the spy could be heard in Germany—there were no atmospheric disturbances, and the signal squeezed through the crowded frequencies—but storms and interference often fuzzed out the radio pings, making it necessary to build more powerful stations, which required a higher level of expertise. A Funkmeister was needed: a technical leader, a radio wizard, able to piece together clandestine radio transmitters in foreign lands. And this is why, in 1941, the Nazi SS dispatched its most capable Funkmeister, Gustav Utzinger, a twenty-six-year-old man with short brown hair and a chemistry Ph.D., to South America.

  Elizebeth Friedman’s next mission for America became the biggest secret of her life. She would never speak in detail about what she did between 1940 and 1945, even as an old woman, and the records of her work, the documents that now make it possible to tell the story, were classified after the war and locked away for a generation, unsealed only after her death. In the 1950s and 1960s, when she gave speeches or interviews about her career, she freely shared anecdotes about various colorful adversaries of the past—the millionaire George Fabyan, the rumrunners, the drug smugglers—but she skipped the Second World War entirely. These were the years when she disappeared into “a vast dome of silence from which I can never return,” she said.

  The one time she seems to have alluded to her wartime mission, briefly and vaguely, was in 1975, during an interview with her husband’s biographer. She uttered a few words and then the transcript cut off.

  “The spy stuff,” she said. “That’s what I did.”

  It wasn’t Elizebeth’s conscious decision to spend the war chasing Nazi spies. It was yet another “pure accident” in her career. This is how it always happened: She put her ear to the ground here and there to learn how the pieces of the world fit together. She figured out how to hear a new sound. Then men in uniform showed up at her side, asking questions, wanting to listen over her shoulder. This had been true at Riverbank two decades earlier, when “the world began to pop and things began to happen,” as she put it once; it was true in the 1920s and ’30s when she shone a floodlight on the American criminal underworld; and it was proving true again now, in early 1940, when she and her team identified a new and sinister set of voices in the intercepts furnished by the listening stations.

  The basic rhythm of her typical weekdays had not changed since the early ’30s. She was still working in her coast guard office at the Treasury Annex building near the White House, serving as chief of the Cryptanalytic Unit that she had founded in 1931 and nurtured ever since. Her three junior codebreakers, Robert Gordon, Vernon Cooley, and Hyman Hurwitz, the ones she had originally recruited and trained, were still with her, and a handful of women clerk-typists had also joined the team as support staff. Elizebeth, Gordon, Cooley, and Hurwitz often worked together at a long table in the office, analyzing the ever-replenishing piles of cryptograms that arrived from the coast guard listening stations, chewing the ends of their pencils, maps of the world pinned to the wall behind them, the clack of the clerks’ typewriters filling the room.

  Outside the door, they could hear the muffled noise of T-men going this way and that, customs men, narcotics men, IRS men, coast guard men. They pressed their foreheads to the intercepts, Elizebeth perhaps wearing a simple white high-collared dress, Gordon smoking a pipe in a suit and vest, chomping on the pipe and frowning at a page. Sometimes Elizebeth would stand up and disturb Gordon’s cloud of smoke as she walked to a shelf to look at a piece of cryptologic literature or to examine one of the cipher machines she kept there in case she should encounter a message that had been generated by one. She had an Enigma machine on the shelf, an old version that had been freely available in the 1920s. She also had a Kryha there, the semicircular German device that William had once mastered.

  Elizebeth reported to the chief of the coast guard communications section, a salty vice admiral named John Farley, and Farley reported to the secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr., an old friend of President Roosevelt from a prominent Jewish family. Morgenthau was the kind of person Elizebeth tended to get along with—polite, educated, pragmatic—although Elizebeth came to dread phone calls from his devoted personal secretary, Henrietta Klotz, who had a habit of calling Elizebeth’s office at 4:28 or 4:29 P.M., one or two minutes before the 4:30 close of the day, and making what Elizebeth called “rapid-fire dictator-sort of requests,” demanding that Elizebeth and her team solve some difficult problem in an impossibly small amount of time. Morgenthau would usually phone Elizebeth the next day and reverse Klotz’s order with bashful apologies.

  Morgenthau needed Elizebeth to be happy. He now depended on her to perform one of the department’s wartime functions. Smuggling wasn’t what it used to be—the war had disrupted the drug networks and made business perilous—so Elizebeth’s Cryptanalytic Unit had shifted its attention to British and German ships. The Treasury was responsible for enforcing U.S. neutrality laws, and foreign ships along the East Coast needed to be monitored for any violations
that might cause diplomatic controversies. At Morgenthau’s request, in 1938, the unit began to analyze the wireless messages of British cruisers and German merchant vessels. Elizebeth broke the codes of Nazi captains as they tested the limits of U.S. neutrality and provoked tense confrontations. In December 1939, a German freighter flying the swastika flag pulled suspiciously close to Florida shores and was chased by U.S. Army planes and a nearby British cruiser, Orion. Elizebeth decrypted the German captain’s panicked messages home. It was the first gunfight of the war in American waters:

  AM TRYING TO RUN INTO AMERICAN HARBOR PORT EVERGLADES OR MIAMI CODE DESTROYED

  THE CRUISER HAS TRAINED HIS GUNS AGAIN HE IS RUNNING SLOWLY FORWARD

  CRUISER NAMED ORION

  THREE AMERICAN ARMY PLANES HOVERING OVER US

  “Exciting, round-the-clock adventures,” she said later about these episodes. But an even more intense mission was yet to come.

  While monitoring these radio signals for her Treasury bosses and solving the puzzles that were given to her, Elizebeth started to detect a new import to the messages. In January 1940, with Hitler preparing to invade Scandinavia, dozens of mysterious encrypted texts piled up in Elizebeth’s office all at once, apparently transmitted by several different unregistered radio stations and intercepted by U.S. listening stations.

  At first, the messages looked similar to the thousands of smuggling messages she had solved before. They used the same kinds of call signs and similar frequencies. But after a brief period of confusion, Elizebeth realized that the messages hadn’t been sent by smugglers at all. The plaintexts were in German. They contained sensitive information about the routes of U.S. and British ships and the capacities of U.S. factories. And according to the bearing fixes, the signals originated from unknown radio stations in Mexico, South America, and the United States.

  It soon became clear that the stations had been built by Nazi spies to share sensitive information with their bosses in Germany, transmitting and receiving dots and dashes of encrypted text at the speed of light. A pair of stations exchanging wireless signals formed a “circuit,” and each circuit was protected by a different code or cipher that had to be broken before the messages could be read.