The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

  They called their organization British Security Co-ordination, an intentionally boring name meant to deflect scrutiny. BSC was really one of the most fantastic associations of men and women ever created. It had one thousand members who worked toward a single goal: ending American isolationism and pushing America into the war, by any means necessary. One BSC recruit had been told, “All I can say is that if you join us, you mustn’t be afraid of forgery, and you mustn’t be afraid of murder.” BSC planted anti-Nazi information in the American press, some of it false, through relationships with columnists like Walter Winchell. BSC staged protests at rallies for isolationist politicians and dug up dirt on their pasts. It used sex to steal information, sending gorgeous female spies to seduce enemy diplomats and swipe documents. And BSC also hoped to apply British radio expertise to catch enemy spies operating in the Western Hemisphere, which put BSC in direct conflict with the formidable American who had already claimed that ground and was not eager to give it up.

  Early on, the British tried to strike a deal with J. Edgar Hoover. Ian Fleming and his superior officer went to FBI headquarters one day in June 1941 and met with the director in his corner office. The white dome of the Capitol was visible from the window, beyond a set of stone columns at the back of the National Archives, the central repository of government records. Fleming and his colleague explained that they wished to partner 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 excuse. 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 it from scratch. And so they did. They planted the seed that eventually grew into the CIA. Behind the scenes, the British argued to U.S. officials that the FBI was ineffective. The FBI had “no conception of offensive intelligence as we know it,” wrote Captain Eddie Hastings, a retired Royal Navy officer, now working for BSC in Washington; according to Hastings, America needed a new agency capable of “offensive” spy maneuvers in foreign countries. In July 1941, Roosevelt established the Office of the Coordinator of Information, a new civilian intelligence organization attached to the White House. The following year, the Office of the COI was renamed the Office of Strategic Services, which was the forerunner of the CIA.

  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 Elizebeth Friedman.

  The British already had a mature radio intelligence agency, the Radio Security Service (RSS), that excelled at the art of wireless interception. But due to sheer geography, the British listening posts couldn’t hear signals from some parts of the globe. The men of 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 its cryptanalytic section “was incomparably better than that of the FBI,” in the British view, because the coast guard’s codebreakers had spent the last decade testing their skills on smugglers, whose networks happened to look a lot like Nazi spy networks. “The whole system” of rum-running had the air of a German spy network in miniature,” BSC historians later wrote. “Hence, on the outbreak of war, the Coast Guard was already experienced in the tricks of the illicit wireless operator.”

  BSC sent a few men to meet with Elizebeth in Washington and chat about the problem of Nazi spies in the Western Hemisphere, and they all hit it off right away. The men had considerable expertise and experience in radio intelligence, particularly a husky, apple-cheeked colonel named F. J. M. Stratton, who had taught astronomy before the war, specializing in studies of supernovas, distant exploding stars that registered as sudden and perplexing balls of light on Stratton’s photographic plates. Before that he served in the radio corps of the British army in the First World War, developing a reputation as the happiest man in the trenches despite sleeping only four hours a night. His fellow soldiers called him “Chubby” on account of his bulk and his jollity. Elizebeth thought he looked like Santa Claus.

  As they 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 intercepts from those stations would fill gaps in the intercepts from the coast guard and the FCC, and vice versa. When the British couldn’t hear something, the coast guard could hear it, and when the coast guard couldn’t hear it, the British could.

  Aside from that, Stratton enjoyed deep connections to Bletchley Park and the already massive codebreaking operation there, where some analysts had been focusing specifically on Nazi spy codes. It might make sense to share knowledge.

  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 “turning grilles” much like the grilles that the Friedmans drew one year in their family Christmas card. The spies wrote letters in holes punched through a piece of paper of certain dimensions according to certain rules, and Elizebeth had to make five or six separate deductive leaps to figure out those rules to determine the exact shape of the piece of paper using only clues derived from the messages themselves.

  Not only did Elizebeth break the codes for the FBI, she made special devices and tools for the G-men so that they could easily solve future intercepts on their own. For instance, when she solved a book cipher, she gave the FBI the name and description of the book, and when she solved a grille system, she made grilles for the FBI Technical Laboratory. In other words, when the FBI was able to solve its own messages, this was only 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 Elizebeth solved these individual puzzles as fast as she could, immersing herself in the gritty details, the larger goal behind it all, preventing a fascist takeover of South America, remained an obsession at the highest levels of U.S. government. On December 29, 1940, in a “Fireside 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 of democracy,” a force to defend and spread freedom abroad. During the 36 minutes and 56 seconds of the speech, he mentioned South America twice and used the word “hemisphere” 10 times. He said, “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 referred to “secret emissaries” of the Axis, fascist spies like the ones Elizebeth was tracking. “The evil forces which have crushed and undermined and corrupted so many others are already within our own gates. Your Government knows much about them and every day is ferreting them out.”

  Hitler responded that England would soon be destroyed along with all other “democratic war criminals” and promised a rapid Nazi victory within the first few months of 1941. On New Year’s Eve, Londoners climbed into the blacked-out streets, over the char
red remains of buildings, and sang “Auld Lang Syne.”

  Elizebeth heard the news four days later, on January 4, 1941. She rushed to Walter Reed General Hospital in northern Washington.

  The main building was majestic, meant to be a comforting sight to wounded warriors: three stories of red brick, with soaring white columns in front. Staff directed Elizebeth to the Neuropsychiatric Section, a separate structure connected to the hospital by an underground tunnel. She found William there, confined to a large, noisy room. It was three and a half months after his team’s breakthrough on the Purple code. Elizebeth counted between sixteen and twenty other psychiatric patients in the room, all men, including some who appeared very disturbed. She was scared and could see that William was scared, too.

  Walter Reed 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 and the fountain whose bowl was ringed by four stone penguins standing atop concrete pedestals. Psychiatry, however, had never been a priority at Walter Reed or in the army as a whole, and in 1940 and early 1941, the energies of army psychiatrists were almost entirely geared toward keeping the mentally ill out of the army, not treating them once they got in.

  Walter Reed’s chief psychiatrist, Colonel William C. Porter, saw the job of the hospital’s Neuropsychiatric Section as one of evaluation and processing rather than healing. The section did offer a range of treatments standard for the time, including chemical sedatives like Amytal, group therapy, and electroshock therapy, but it was too small to provide long-term care, so it functioned instead as a way station, a purgatory. When the section admitted a new patient, doctors and nurses examined him, studied his military records, and observed him for a period of weeks or months before deciding whether he should be discharged from military service. Depending on the decision, the patient was sent back to the army, or home to his family, or in many instances, to a mental asylum.

  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 know what to do with William Friedman when he presented himself. William told the doctors he had collapsed several days earlier and believed he was having a nervous breakdown. A psychiatrist asked a battery of questions about his job, his family, and his career. Without mentioning the Purple project, William said his work had been demanding lately. He felt a constant tension that interfered with his ability to function, and sleep provided little relief when he could manage to sleep at all.

  The doctors assigned the cryptologist to one of the section’s five mental wards. There were three wards for men and two for women, with a maximum capacity of 104 patients. Security guards patrolled the wards. William spent the next two and a half months here, inside the redbrick building, unable to leave until the staff completed their evaluation.

  Elizebeth came to visit most days, taking the train to the 116-acre hospital campus and walking briskly past the main building with its cupola and fountain on her way to the Neuropsychiatric Section. She always wanted to talk to her husband in private during these visits, to see how he was doing, to kiss him and say she loved him, but the setup made it nearly impossible, because the patients were forced to spend their days in the group room, and they all had to share the same psychiatrist, who consulted with each patient within earshot of the others. “In other words, the patient was isolated except for his fellow-patients,” Elizebeth later told William’s biographer, “who could discuss and consult with each other if they felt inclined to do so.”

  The patient. Seeing him there was horrible for Elizebeth, and the hospitalization represented such an obvious threat to his livelihood in the army that she had to find ways to distance them both from what was happening. She 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 to people when he could.

  Meanwhile, at the Munitions Building, his team of cryptologists continued to harvest the fruit of Purple and plant seeds in new places. Having already built one replica of the Japanese machine, the SIS workers built several more, and in January, two of William’s deputies, Abe Sinkov and Leo Rosen, sailed across the Atlantic with two Purple machines, delivering them to grateful British codebreakers at Bletchley Park. Now the British could make their own translations of Japanese messages. It was an important exchange of cryptologic knowledge between America and Britain, one of the first of many during the Second World War, although the British didn’t return the favor yet—they weren’t ready to share what they knew about German Enigma systems.

  In March 1941, the staff of Walter Reed finally made their decision. William Friedman, they believed, should return to army duty. His nervous collapse was an “anxiety reaction” sparked by “prolonged overwork on a top secret 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 that William Friedman was fit for service. It created a trail of medical documents that would chase him for years, popping up and causing havoc at the oddest times. Three weeks after he left Walter Reed, William received a letter from the army notifying him that he had been honorably discharged “by reason of physical disqualification”—no hearing, no chance at a defense. William made a vigorous protest, pointing out that the hospital had pronounced him fit, but the army forced him to retire and continue as a civilian; eventually he would need to sue to get his old rank and pay reinstated. Later, in 1946, checking his personnel file, William discovered that the government had him classified as 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 ridiculousness. The judges recorded their votes on a cipher machine, pronounced him guilty, and presented William with an aluminum medallion that read, “To Wm. F. Friedman for making the intelligible unintelligible and vice versa 1921–1946. Presented by those he has led astray.”

  William’s illness also disrupted the balance of the Friedmans’ marriage. William and Elizebeth had always acted as fierce equals. Modesties and flatteries aside, they lived as if neither was smarter than the other, or stronger, which was the truth. From here on, though, Elizebeth often had to be the stronger one, out of pure necessity. She had to care for William during his depressions and keep her job. They needed two incomes to pay the mortgage and their kids’ private-school tuition. The Friedmans, like so many middle-class Americans who hurt for money and pinch pennies, were determined that their children receive the same educational 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 the coast guard decrypts, in the lower left corner, beneath the letters of the plaintext, the same two words appeared, over and over, on page after page.

  “German Clandestine.”

  CHAPTER 3
r />   The Hauptsturmführer and the Funkmeister

  Johannes Siegfried Becker, the most prolific and effective Nazi spy in the Western Hemisphere during the Second World War.

  (National Archives of the United Kingdom)

  No code is ever completely solved, you know.

  —ELIZEBETH S. FRIEDMAN

  The fact that Johannes Siegfried Becker is an obscure figure today, a man without a Wikipedia page, his name producing a few stray Google hits, is a testament to his skill as a spy and also the skill of the woman who became his nemesis, Elizebeth Smith Friedman. They were two cloaked particles meeting across a void at the speed of light and partially annihilating each other, leaving jets of alphabets, a spray of letters falling to the ground.

  According to the FBI, which was slower than Elizebeth to understand his significance, Johannes Siegfried Becker was “one of the most active as well as the most capable of German agents operating in this hemisphere during this war,” a spy of rare vision and resourcefulness, directing endless funds and resources with a “deft Teutonic hand.” He spoke German, Spanish, Portuguese, and English. He held the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer in the elite Nazi security service, equivalent to a captain, and wore a gold ring carved with the SS’s death’s head symbol, “a sign of our loyalty to the Führer,” Heinrich Himmler wrote in a letter of praise to Becker, and “a warning to be ready at any time to sacrifice our lives as individuals for the life of the 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, and building clandestine radio stations. In mid-1944 the FBI concluded that the activities of 250 Nazi agents in South America and twenty-nine radio stations could be traced back to Becker by direct or indirect steps.