The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

  Yet Becker did not appear on the FBI’s radar during 1938, 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, or 1943, and when the FBI finally began to hunt him, they were too late. He was the Invisible War’s invisible shadow. He escaped every trap, slipped every net—except, at last, the one set by Elizebeth. And even Elizebeth would be astonished by Becker’s 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 and Argentina before the war broke out, he left a trail of irritated German expatriates, men who “disliked his manner” and found him vain. There appeared to be nothing exceptional about Becker. His Nazi Party number was 359,966, marking him as a relatively early convert to the cause of National Socialism but hardly one of its pioneers. He stood five foot ten, with wavy blond hair and a slight paunch, and his face was not overly handsome, leaving his acquaintances wondering how it was that Becker always seemed to have a 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 was risking an international incident. No one in South America had anything good to say about Becker’s personal habits, and all who met him were struck by his grotesquely long fingernails, which curled down like the talons of a predatory bird.

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

  Becker worked for a wide-reaching SS office that placed spies all around the world and communicated with them from a four-story building in Berlin that had once been a Jewish retirement home. Called AMT VI, the SS office employed five hundred people in 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 Nazi movement, and SS leaders thought the Abwehr was insufficiently ruthless and possibly disloyal. They promoted their own AMT VI as the true Nazi foreign intelligence service.

  Not just any Nazi could be selected as an SS intelligence officer, according to an SS handbook. He had to be the purest of Nazis, a man of “absolute loyalty and obedience to the Führer . . . Like the knights of the Holy Grail intelligence officers have the most noble task to protect the most valuable possession and its future realization: the blood of the Germanic race, the National Socialist ideology.”

  In practice, however, this meant that Becker’s organization was riddled with amateurs promoted for their zeal instead of their knowledge. The leader of the South America section of AMT VI, Theodor Paeffgen, was a thirty-one-year-old bureaucrat with “no 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 of cognac, coffee, and silk stockings, and often made lewd comments to the buoyant, brown-haired young woman who managed the section’s files, Hedwig Sommer, who had been forced into working for the SS against her will. (After the war, Sommer gladly told U.S. interrogators everything she knew about the section.)

  These men cared mainly about ideology, not competence, and even when they made a rare exception, they were overruled by other fanatical organs of the Nazi state. 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” reports about political and economic trends in the Western Hemisphere. Then Weinheimer learned that the Gestapo had shipped his mother-in-law to the Bergen-Belsen camp. Kurt Gross asked the Gestapo to make an exception for the spy’s kin, but Gross was unsuccessful, and the spy stopped sending reports. The Nazis lost one of their best agents because they wouldn’t spare his loved ones from the death camps.

  When it came to the nuts and bolts of intelligence, the SS bosses in Berlin didn’t really know what they were doing—and neither did Siegfried Becker at first. But unlike his superiors, he was flexible enough to learn from his mistakes. He was a loyal Nazi but didn’t concern himself with the intricacies of Nazi dogma. Hedwig Sommer liked him. “He was an intelligent person,” she said. “He was sincerely desirous of doing a good job. Added to these attributes was the fact that he was something of an adventurer.”

  After the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, Becker had left South America and sailed to Berlin, guessing that his bosses would want to 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 a trunkful of explosives for blowing up British ships in the harbor. 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 a petty crook who seemed to do nothing but wander along the waterfronts carrying a revolver and scaring passersby—but in Rio de Janeiro, Becker soon met and cultivated a formidable spy named Albrecht Engels, a broad-shouldered German businessman with a thick mustache. Engels was already spying for the Abwehr, which meant that he and Becker were not supposed to work together, but neither man minded. Becker thought Engels was a perfect collaborator: married to a Brazilian woman, owner of a thriving firm in Rio, well liked by all Germans in the community.

  And Engels, who went by the code name “Alfredo,” was impressed by Becker. Ever since Engels started working with the Abwehr, he felt he had been dealing with imbeciles. His Abwehr colleague in São Paulo was a jittery mechanical engineer of Polish ancestry, Josef Starziczny, who went by the code name “Lucas.” Starziczny was an elfin man with large ears who lived with his Brazilian mistress and talked too much. He observed the harbor, radioed reports to Germany with his own transmitter, and didn’t listen to advice. He made Engels nervous. Becker was different, another caliber of spy: “the only real professional” in South America, Engels later told an FBI interrogator.

  Engels’s arrangement with Becker was strictly improvisado—making things work. Until this point, Engels’s duties for the Abwehr had consisted mainly of scouring English newspapers and magazines (Time, Collier’s, Reader’s Digest) for information about U.S. 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 spirit of improvisado, when Allied pressure shut down Condor and LATI flights to Germany in summer 1
941, destroying Becker’s courier service, he found ways to communicate wirelessly with Berlin. At first Becker paid a V-man to set up a small shortwave transmitter on the patio of a German expatriate’s home. When the signal proved too weak, Becker coaxed the captain of a Swiss ship docked in the Rio harbor, the SS Windhuk, to allow the spies to borrow the ship’s radio.

  Becker signed his wireless messages with one of several code names. The main alias was “Sargo.” Engels sent messages under his “Alfredo” alias.

  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, a trained chemist. He went by the code name “Luna.” Clean-cut and athletic, with brown eyes and close-cropped brown hair, he had served in the 1930s as a Funkmeister in the German navy before joining the SS. Later, speaking to an American interrogator, Utzinger claimed that he acted out of “natural patriotic efforts for my Fatherland” and not “the most detestible tendencies of Nazi ideology.” The interrogator didn’t buy this. Still, after speaking with Utzinger for hours, the interrogator concluded that he was essentially an honest and even somewhat idealistic person: “an extremely able and personable young man who was the product of his era and who acted according to his own lights.”

  Becker arranged to meet Utzinger in a café outside of Rio to discuss the urgent need for reliable clandestine radio stations. Utzinger’s first impression of Becker was unfavorable. He saw Becker as a man “with very little education and few moral scruples in pursuit of his ends.” But Utzinger would come to respect Becker over the next several years as the two men worked to spread fascism across South America. In their separate realms of expertise—Becker in espionage, 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 knew the Hauptsturmführer and the Funkmeister only by their aliases, “Sargo” and “Luna.”

  She first encountered these names in the late spring of 1941, at the tail end of William’s hospitalization in the mental ward at Walter Reed. This is when the listening stations of the coast guard and the FCC provided Elizebeth with the first of thousands of intercepts from clandestine transmitters in South America, and she started doing what she had always done: smash the codes, recover the plaintexts, translate them into English, type the translations on fresh sheets of paper (decrypts) ready for study and dissemination, sift the decrypts for clues about the secret identities of the spies, keep immaculate records; build an archive, a library of enemy words.

  The original messages had been written in German, Spanish, and Portuguese, and to recover the plaintexts and translate them, 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 a ship. He spoke eight languages fluently: Czech, German, English, French, Polish, Latin, Italian, Russian. He read dictionaries in his free time, for fun, so of course he and Elizebeth got along, checking in with each other throughout the day, puzzling out bits of language together.

  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 a suburb of São Paulo, about two hundred miles south of Rio. All three stations exchanged wireless messages with either Berlin or Hamburg.

  Elizebeth gave each radio circuit an alphanumeric label to keep them straight, like 2-B or 3-A. The label was typed on the top of every decrypt from that circuit, beneath the word “S E C R E T,” along with the date and time the message was sent, the original language (German, Portuguese), the radio frequency in kilocycles, and sometimes the first few groups of the message’s raw ciphertext. Below the header came the plaintext message itself, in English, followed by three lines at the bottom identifying the decrypt as a coast guard product: “CG Decryption,” “CG Translation,” “CG Typed,” the date it was typed, a serial number unique to the message, and the phrase “German Clandestine.”

  The code names of the suspected Nazi agents were always typed in capital letters, to make them stand out and help everyone on the team get familiar with this strange cast of characters scurrying across the continent next door. You had to get to know your adversary, to see into men’s hearts and predict their behavior from a running conversation of potentially enormous stakes that no one else in the world was watching except you. If Elizebeth picked up an inch-thick stack of decrypts and flipped through them quickly with her thumb, as if shuffling a deck of cards, she could see the names of the Nazi agents flick past, a blur of SARGO SARGO SARGO LUNA UTZ ALFREDO LORENZ LUNA ALFREDO LUCAS ALFREDO LUCAS SARGO SARGO SARGO.

  The number of times a certain name appeared in the messages was a rough indicator of that person’s importance. SARGO appeared again and again on the decrypts. He also seemed to call himself SARGENTO, or JOSE, or JUAN. Elizebeth guessed that he was a Nazi spy chief of some kind. The individual known as LUNA tended to speak about technical issues, the details of radio transmitters; Elizebeth pegged him as a radio expert. He went by UTZ in addition to LUNA.

  There was a third man in the messages, ALFREDO, who often mentioned his dealings with the other two—ALFREDO, a trusted colleague of SARGO and LUNA—as well as some other names, like HUMBERTO. For Elizebeth, seeing a name like HUMBERTO was a piece of luck, because it was longer and contained some less-frequent letters, like M and B, and it repeated across multiple messages as a predictable 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, she was well on her way to breaking the rest of the code.

  At first the spies in South America were using book ciphers. Elizebeth solved them. She watched these men talk and plot and share information: reports of Allied ships in the Rio harbor, political developments in the United States, information about shipments of ores and weapons and beef, the health 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, lightly marking up the decrypt with colored pencils, calling attention to proper names and places with check marks and sometimes stapling a handwritten note explaining who the speakers were, what function they served in the network, and what they seemed to be discussing. Then the decrypts had to be transmitted to other agencies: army intelligence (G-2), navy intelligence (OP-20-G), the State Department, the British. Another line was added at the bottom of the decrypt, sometimes in pencil, indicating its destination.

  Regardless of a message’s content, 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 throughout the hemisphere, sending them to SIS agents on the ground in South America, giving the agents a leg up on their quarry.

  Throughout 1940 and the first half of 1941, the coast guard was pumping solved puzzles to the FBI on a steady basis, dozens per week, hundreds of messages on each clandestine network and ultimately thousands taken all together. Yet this relationship between the coast guard and the FBI only went in one direction. SIS agents in South America nev
er sent useful information or evidence to the coast guard codebreakers. Worse, the FBI systematically obscured all traces of the coast guard’s deep involvement in the spy hunt. When Elizebeth sent them a decrypt, the FBI placed it in their own SIS filing system, with a new four-digit identifying number, and the FBI invented new names for the radio networks that Elizebeth had already named.

  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 relative to these espionage groups was based on information obtained from the messages transmitted to and received by the clandestine stations,” the FBI wrote after the war in a three-volume history of the SIS. “The technical facilities of the Bureau were used to monitor the several German transmitters, and by analysis and coordination of information obtained from the decodes of the messages, 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.”