The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

  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 South American matters was difficult for the coast guard to understand, especially since the coast guard was simultaneously assisting the FBI with a massive spy investigation inside the United States. It centered on a South African man living in New York City, Frederick Joubert Duquesne, a big-game hunter with dark, floppy hair and a grudge against the British dating back to the Great War, when he was arrested carrying a file of newspaper clippings about bomb explosions on ships.

  Bureau personnel called the case “the Ducase,” riffing off the pronunciation of Duquesne. Several times a week during the spring of 1941, Duquesne went to an office on Ninety-second Street in Manhattan and met with another German spy, William Sebold, exchanging sensitive information about U.S. military capabilities and discussing the activities of more than thirty confederates who had been recruited as spies by the two men. Sebold used a clandestine radio station in Long Island to transmit the information to 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. Video cameras in the walls of the office were capturing him on tape, and the radio transmitter in Long Island was controlled by the FBI, which altered the information before sending it to Hamburg.

  The bureau reached out to Elizebeth and the coast guard when the FBI radioman in Long Island received an unexpected request from Hamburg: Could he use the Long Island station to relay messages from Nazi spies in Mexico? The clandestine station there wasn’t powerful enough to transmit all the way to Hamburg. The FBI agreed, but when the messages for relay started to come, they were in an unknown code.

  Elizebeth broke it. The spies in Mexico turned out to be MAX and GLENN, the same agents she had tracked a year earlier.

  She gave these plaintexts to the FBI and kept solving new messages sent from Long Island to Hamburg. By the summer of 1941 her team had decrypted hundreds of notes exchanged by Duquesne and the other members of the ring. These messages not only provided hard evidence against the spies that could be used in court; they also revealed links between the spies in New York and Nazi agents in South America and Mexico, pointing the FBI to suspects they hadn’t known about before. The coast guard’s patient codebreaking, combined with the FBI’s surveillance footage and the cooperation of the double agent William Sebold, led to what J. Edgar Hoover called “the greatest spy roundup” in U.S. history, a series of raids in June 1941 conducted by ninety-three FBI agents and sweeping up Duquesne and thirty-two members of his ring. Nineteen pleaded guilty to espionage charges and the remaining fourteen, including Duquesne, were put on trial three months later in Brooklyn. President Roosevelt followed the trial closely; if the time came for America to declare war, he needed to know there wasn’t an enemy spy network on U.S. soil, able to perform sabotage. 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 America. The first was that it discouraged future Nazi attempts at spying within the borders of the United States. The second was that it made J. Edgar Hoover a legend. Hollywood later filmed a movie about the Duquesne spies, The House on 92nd Street, in close cooperation with Hoover himself. The Ducase “gave birth to the popular cultural belief that the Bureau was the nation’s first line of defense against foreign and domestic espionage,” writes the former FBI counterintelligence agent Raymond J. Batvinis. “It launched the popular myth of Hoover as the guardian of ‘the American way of life.’ ”

  Elizebeth, who received no credit for her contributions to the Ducase, wasn’t nearly as impressed with the FBI’s performance. It bothered her that FBI agents had described the spies’ cryptographic practices in detail at the trial: “The FBI exposed the secret messages and methods without as much as asking a by-your-leave from the Treasury Department where the solutions and systems were achieved,” she wrote later.

  It seemed obvious to her that the FBI was too cavalier about publicity, and just as obvious that she couldn’t do anything about it. The bureau was more powerful than the coast guard. What Hoover wanted, Hoover got, and that fall, as the Nazis marched on Moscow and the U.S. government shifted toward a war footing, Hoover continued to demand the coast guard’s decryptions of spy messages, and Elizebeth’s team continued to provide them.

  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 that moving the team out of Treasury would disrupt their work and harm their effectiveness. Elizebeth complained to a Treasury undersecretary, Herbert Gaston, and Gaston relayed her objection at a Treasury staff meeting on November 5, 1941, in Secretary Henry Morgenthau’s office.

  The group that day consisted of thirteen men and Morgenthau’s secretary, Henrietta Klotz. They gathered around his desk. The Oval Office in the White House was visible through a nearby window. Morgenthau could sometimes see the silhouettes of FDR and visitors moving around, and flashbulbs popping.

  At 10:45 A.M., the men began to talk about income tax rates, agriculture legislation, the price of automobile tires, and the recent federal conviction of Nucky Johnson, the criminal boss of Atlantic City, of tax fraud. When it seemed like every issue had been addressed, every nugget of gossip shared, Morgenthau said, “Anything else?”

  “One matter that doesn’t much belong to me,” Gaston said, “but since I took it up—I mentioned it to you on the phone, so I will mention it again. That is the matter of Mrs. Friedman.”

  Gaston, a birdlike man with wire-rimmed spectacles and a fine suit, explained to the group that Elizebeth wanted to stay at Treasury.

  “She is very discontented about the prospect of having to work for the navy. She is very rebellious and gloomy.”

  No one was sure what to do. Should Morgenthau call up the secretary of the navy, Frank Knox, and ask for Elizebeth back? Should Treasury fight to keep her, or let the navy have her?

  Gaston 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 questions from a very gloomy and rebellious woman. “I just don’t want it to appear that I am taking the initiative.”

  Then Harry Dexter White spoke up. Forty-nine years old and balding, dressed in a three-piece suit and owlish spectacles, White looked every bit the economics professor he used to be, a man of charts and form
ulae. This impression may have been carefully cultivated. Documents unearthed in the 1950s would link White to Russia’s top intelligence agent in Washington. Some historians believe that during the 1930s and ’40s, White was spying for the Kremlin from within Treasury’s innermost sanctum.

  In the meeting, White gave his opinion on the matter of Mrs. Friedman. “I don’t like to butt into this, Mr. Secretary, but I understood that she is one of the best in the country, is that correct?”

  Gaston replied, “She says her husband is very much better than she is, but I think she is very good.”

  Morgenthau ended the meeting with an intention to talk to Elizebeth about the situation. He never did, though, because a month later, on December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor.

  When news of the bombing reached the Friedman home, William started pacing and stammering under his breath that he did not understand. Elizebeth heard him say, “But they knew, they knew, they knew,” over and over.

  He left immediately for the army’s cryptologic bunker inside the Munitions Building. Personnel started to stream in and mill 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 the next few days, more than one codebreaker wrote his will. They witnessed the documents for each other.

  The codebreakers had known for days, if not weeks, that a large Japanese attack was coming. William and the rest of his team had seen the MAGIC intercepts. It was obvious from MAGIC that Japan had been poised to strike; the only mystery was where. 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 with the question of what went wrong. He analyzed thousands of pages of Pearl Harbor documents and wrote a three-volume report that boiled down to this: MAGIC had strongly indicated an attack on December 7, but the decrypts had gotten bottled up through a series of farcical missteps in the dissemination stage of the process, and U.S. leaders weren’t alerted to the danger in time to take action. It was nuanced: 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 of the Japanese learning about the MAGIC secret.

  It was a prime example of the brutal choices that codebreakers must live with. Do you take risks to keep a secret that may save hundreds of thousands of future lives, or do you expose the secret to save a small number of lives right now? William once referred to this broad dilemma as “cryptologic schizophrenia,” adding, “What to do? Thus far, no real psychiatric or psychoanalytic cure has been found for the illness.”

  Cryptologic schizophrenia may have explained an unusual personal interaction that the Friedmans had on the day of the attack, December 7. That evening, after work, Elizebeth and William were at home when they heard the clack-ack-ack of their elephant door knocker. They found a red-faced British man on their doorstep: Captain Eddie Hastings, the BSC officer who had pushed America to create a new spy agency, the Office of the Coordinator of Information. Elizebeth had gotten to know Hastings, and so had William.

  According to a declassified NSA report of a postwar interview with Elizebeth, what Captain Hastings did next would become “one of the most vivid recollections of her life.” Hastings wobbled into the Friedman home and sat down. He mentioned Pearl Harbor. Then he started to laugh. The attack had just been announced a few hours earlier on the radio. Elizebeth looked at him, baffled, as he kept laughing. “Mrs. Friedman was shocked and offended,” reads the NSA report. “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 the American sailors and pilots at Pearl Harbor, that the Americans could almost literally read the minds of Japanese leaders and yet fail to prevent a huge Japanese attack. Elizebeth would never understand the British man’s laughter. It was one of those mysteries in the intelligence profession that leaves you to dangle, that you think about years afterward, that comes back to you in calm moments on a plane or in your bed at night, making you realize that as much as intelligence seems to be about knowing things, about gaining power through knowledge, it is just as much about not knowing them, or getting them wrong, or seeing other people get them wrong, and having to go on living with the uncertainty, with the not knowing, and thinking about what might have been.

  “Yesterday, December 7th, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”

  Less than twenty-four hours after the bombings, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt stood at a podium in Congress, speaking into a bouquet of microphones, asking for a declaration of war. His son, James, stood next to him in his marine uniform. Earlier in the day, James and his father’s aides had fitted his paralytic legs with the three metal braces that were required to support the president when he could not be seen in his wheelchair. Sixty-two million Americans listened to the speech by radio. It lasted seven minutes. Within an hour, Congress had authorized war with Japan. Three days later, Germany declared war on America.

  Before a single regiment of U.S. soldiers set foot on European soil, the war 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 the war. Work was about the war, and school was about the war. It was the only time before or since when Americans became emotionally invested in the idea of self-deprivation and frugality. Third graders roamed their neighborhoods in packs, gathering scrap materials, tires, and paper and cooking fat and old sneakers whose soles could be sacrificed for the rubber. The Big Three automakers stopped making cars and started making planes. Factory workers took secrecy oaths. Everybody had a secret now. The government issued ration stamps for eggs, milk, bread, gasoline, contained in ration books, manila-colored pamphlets. Elizebeth’s ration book listed her height as five foot three and her weight as 120 pounds.

  After Pearl Harbor all government matters were urgent and the military didn’t want civilians in charge of sensitive functions. The coast guard decided to appoint a new chief of the Cryptanalytic Unit, Leonard T. Jones, a young lieutenant who had taken an army training course in cryptanalysis. Just like that, Elizebeth was demoted from Cryptanalyst-in-Charge to mere Cryptanalyst. She was no longer the leader of the team she had invented, staffed, trained, and nurtured.

  This upset her, but she remained the unit’s civilian commander and thought Jones showed promise as a codebreaker, so she didn’t complain, and anyway, it wasn’t like she had a choice. Men told her what to do, and her services were in high demand. Every few days someone was calling up Henry Morgenthau, wanting to borrow Mrs. Friedman for various cryptologic tasks.

  The battle for her attention rose to the highest levels of Washington. She got to know James Roosevelt, FDR’s son, and William Donovan, a tall, irascible former army colonel with a manic personality, whose soldiers used to call him “Wild 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 office space. One of the first things a spy agency needs is a way to commun
icate securely with its people in the field. It needs codes and ciphers, and mechanical aids to generate them, and clerks to write them, and training for the clerks. 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 of our permanent code section” (Morgenthau grumbled at a staff meeting, “He wants Mrs. Friedman”). This became her first mission after Pearl Harbor. Detailed to Donovan’s office on a temporary 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, and customizing them according to the new agency’s needs. She interviewed potential cryptographic staffers and made recommendations to Donovan, which he ignored, treating her the whole time like a servant and failing to appreciate basic principles of communications security. When the job was complete, Elizebeth wrote him a seethingly polite letter that conveyed her 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:

  My experience and observations during my temporary duty with your organization, lead me to make the following recommendations:

  —That the representatives going to the field in every case be required to spend sufficient time to become thoroughly drilled in the systems of communication provided for them. This drill and resulting mastery cannot be accomplished in a few hours. It should extend for a few hours daily over a minimum of five days, and with certain types of mind a longer time will be required.