The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

  —That a general indoctrination in and discussion of and handling of classified information be undertaken throughout your organization. . . . This matter of indoctrination is a long and difficult process. . . .

  She signed the letter “Dr. Elizebeth Smith Friedman” to underscore her credentials. (Her alma mater, Hillsdale College, had awarded her an honorary L.L.D. in 1938.) Then she returned to her own office, to her trusty desk and her fine coast guard colleagues, relieved to be back “home.”

  Fresh piles of intercepts from South America awaited her there, and once again she dug in, eavesdropping on the latest activities of the spies. “Sargo” and “Alfredo” still appeared to be in charge of the network there, synthesizing information from their agents across Brazil and Chile and sending reports to Germany over the radio, but there was a new strain of malevolence in their messages. After Pearl Harbor, Brazil had declared solidarity with America, and the Nazis responded by going after Brazil, firing torpedoes at Brazilian ships for the first time. The positions of the ships were provided by “Sargo,” “Alfredo,” and their men. Outraged Brazilian authorities moved against German businesses. “Measures against members of the Axis are assuming drastic form,” one spy in Brazil radioed to Germany. “Bank deposits already blocked. We are destroying all compromising documents, maintaining radio operation as long as possible. Heil Hitler.” In January 1942 Hitler launched Operation Drumbeat, a coordinated U-boat assault on American and British merchant ships carrying war supplies, and “Sargo” and “Alfredo” helped with this effort, too. In three months the ruthless U-boats sent one million tons of material to the bottom of the sea and by summer 1942 the U-boat captains had murdered five thousand Allied seamen. “All along the Atlantic coast,” writes the historian John Bryden, “Americans could look out and see plumes of smoke by day and red fires by night.” The messages Elizebeth solved were dense with detail about Allied vessels coming and going in South American waters:

  MARCH 14, 1942 AT 0038

  Departed Montevideo: 4th (American SS) F.Q. Barstow to Curacao and (American SS) Western Sword to USA. Departed Rio de Janeiro: 11th (American SS) Ruth to Baltimore; 12th (American SS) Lammot du Pont to Buenos Aires. Arrived Rio de Janeiro: 12th (American SS) Delmar from New Orleans; and 13th (British MS) Devis from Glasgow.

  Elizebeth passed these decrypts along the chain as quickly as she could, knowing that Nazi U-boats might already be hunting any of these U.S. or British ships and hoping that the Allied captains could be warned.

  In the first weeks of March, Elizebeth also solved a sinister series of intercepts given to her by an FCC listening station on the coast of Rhode Island. The messages suggested the Nazis were preparing to destroy a troopship, the RMS Queen Mary, that was carrying 8,398 American servicemen:

  MARCH 7, 1942

  On board Queen Mary, Indians, Americans, Englishmen, tanks, disassembled airplanes. Came from Dutch Indies via South America.

  MARCH 8

  Queen Mary departed on March 8 1800 local time.

  MARCH 12

  The Queen Mary on the 11th at 1800 MEZ was reported by the ship Campeiro on the seas (near) Recife.

  MARCH 13

  The Queen Mary on the 12th at 1500 MEZ was reported near the coast at Ceara in the direction of Belem through Piratiny.

  MARCH 14

  Concerning Queen Mary, the troops of young people of white race number seven to eight thousand men.

  As it turned out, Hitler had placed a bounty on the Queen Mary: any U-boat captain that destroyed her would win the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves and one million Reichsmarks. Elizebeth’s decryptions (and similar decryptions provided by other Allied codebreaking units) were quickly shared with the Queen Mary captain, who was able to take evasive maneuvers, sneaking past a U-boat that was lurking in wait and saving the lives of more than eight thousand U.S. troops and his crew. It was a good example of why these clandestine radio circuits were important: as long as Elizebeth kept solving the messages, she could see danger coming, and America had an edge.

  Which is why she grew increasingly confused in February and March when the spies started talking about being chased by police. Spies in Chile reported that their “hiding place has been searched three times.” The men in São Paulo told Berlin that the temperature was 31 degrees Celsius and “getting worse”—in other words, they were feeling heat from police—then their transmitter went eerily quiet. In Rio, the Abwehr spy chief Albrecht Engels radioed, “Throughout country sharp police action against Germans.” On March 17, 1942, he told Berlin that the docked Swiss ship whose radio they sometimes borrowed, the SS Windhuk, had been raided by Brazilian police, the second officer drowned in a struggle and the rest of the crew imprisoned.

  Elizebeth, noticing this sharp uptick of panic in the messages she solved, guessed that authorities in Brazil and possibly Chile were conducting some kind of spy roundup, arresting Nazi agents and seizing their radio equipment. She couldn’t tell if the FBI was leading the effort, local police, or a combination.

  Whatever the case, it wasn’t good. She and everyone else at the coast guard felt strongly that now was not the right time to move in and make arrests. The codebreakers were learning so much about the larger structure of the Nazi networks, more and more each day, and if the spies figured out that they were being chased because their codes had been broken, they would surely switch to new codes, perhaps stronger ones. And until Elizebeth managed to break the new codes, which could take weeks or months, depending on the level of difficulty, the Allies would be blind to Nazi activities across the continent. All of South America would suddenly go dark. If the spies started targeting another U.S. troopship like the Queen Mary, officials might not be able to warn the ship before a torpedo ripped into its hull.

  A veteran codebreaker like Elizebeth understood these things. But the FBI, new to this line of work, did not, and before Elizebeth could figure out what was going on in South America with the police action and stop it from happening, FBI agents there grabbed the golden goose and cut off its head.

  “Don’t! You’ll blow the house up!”

  Josef Starziczny, a.k.a. “Lucas,” the Abwehr agent in São Paulo, told the Brazilian detective to drop the suitcase. The detective set it down gently.

  It was March 15, 1942. Elpido Reali had come to this house in the suburbs of São Paulo armed with a search warrant, intending to arrest a man he had been told was a Nazi spy. He knocked, entered, and immediately saw a spy camera, telephoto lenses, a darkroom, and a radio receiver. Starziczny’s mistress was here, wearing a dressing gown, a confused look on her face.

  “That suitcase,” Reali said. “You said it will blow the house up.”

  Starziczny shook his head. No, there was no bomb inside.

  Reali popped the latch and saw a portable radio transmitter.

  A Kriegsmarine code book tumbled out. Starziczny had been using the codes to send the coordinates of Allied ships to German U-boats. Seeing the code book, the spy reached for a revolver on a nearby shelf, apparently planning to kill himself—“The Gestapo will never forgive me”—then thought better of it and allowed Reali to take him to the police station.

  Soon after the arrest, in Rio, Albrecht Engels, a.k.a. “Alfredo,” phoned Starziczny’s house in São Paulo. Someone picked up the phone. Engels didn’t recognize the person’s voice. He hung up.

  Engels assumed that Starziczny had been arrested and that he would not hold up under police interrogation (he was correct on both counts), and now Engels activated his emergency plan to protect the spy network he had spent months building under the guidance of Johannes Siegfried Becker, the brilliant SS captain. He arranged to move the radio transmitter in Rio to a new location, gave his code book and $89,000 in cash to a confederate, and fired off a string of wireless messages to Berlin warning them that the network was in danger, the last of these on March 18:

  MEYER CLASEN in Porto Alegre arrested denounced LEO and ARNOLD thereupon ARNOLD arrested in Sao Paulo and transferre
d to Porto Alegre. I fear that MEYER (has) also given away (denounced) the radio procedure therefore I shall lie low until further notice.

  That day Engels was arrested by the Delegacia de Ordem Politica e Social (DOPS), the Brazilian federal police. They took him to one of their prisons, threw him into a dark cell with no toilet, told him to confess, and kept him there for weeks, punishing him with frequent interruptions to his sleep.

  The DOPS took almost ninety members of the spy ring into custody over the next two months, at the insistence of the FBI’s Jack West, the bureau’s top man in Brazil, the head of its SIS operations across the country, and its legal attaché in Rio. West believed that the intensifying torpedo attacks on Allied merchant ships in the Atlantic meant it was time to take action against the spies who had been providing coordinates to the U-boat captains, and the bolder the action, the better. While the DOPS rounded up the spies, a young FCC employee named Robert Linx drove around Rio in an automobile full of direction-finding equipment, telling police where to find the clandestine radio transmitters, which were then seized and impounded.

  According to The Shadow War, a 1986 account by the historians Leslie Rout and John Bratzel, “Jack West’s conclusion was that piecemeal action was useless; a hard, sweeping blow” was the only way to take the Nazi radio stations off the air at once, to put the known spies in prison “and keep them off the airwaves.”

  But while the FBI’s motive was sound, its tactics were questionable. The spies resisted their Brazilian interrogators. A month passed with few confessions. West grew impatient, suspecting that right-wing elements within the Brazilian police were working against him. And that’s when he made the fateful decision to go above their heads. He took copies of the messages that Elizebeth and the coast guard had solved—verbatim copies of the spies’ intercepted and decrypted radio messages—and showed hundreds of these messages to the president of Brazil, the foreign minister, and the air force minister. J. Edgar Hoover later confirmed that Allied agents “delivered the complete information” about the radios and the messages to the Brazilian government.

  The gambit had the desired effect: Brazilian police started to get tougher on the prisoners. The men were stripped naked and questioned. Some police officers showed them pages of decrypts (Elizebeth’s decrypts) and demanded that the prisoners fill in a handful of missing words. At least two men were beaten until unconscious. One had his fingers dislocated. One was repeatedly kneed in the scrotum while naked, and burned with cigarettes. One was interrogated in a six-by-three-foot cell with no bed. Police in São Paulo questioned one naked suspect for two days straight, pouring cold water on his skin and blasting a high-speed fan in his face until he lost control of his mental faculties. A few prisoners resisted. The Abwehr spy Friedrich Kempter went on a hunger strike after being given a plate of food full of rocks; the FBI grew concerned that Kempter would become too weak to talk and finally arranged a meal of steak and french fries. This was a rare occasion when the FBI intervened to stop brutality or torture; the rest of the time they either participated or looked the other way, in a grim foreshadowing of the bureau’s future misadventures in Latin America during the 1970s and ’80s.

  The FBI’s plan didn’t work. The roundup failed. To deliver a deathblow to the Nazi network, to keep the spies off the airwaves, the FBI needed to get all the spies at once. But they didn’t. Becker, the SS captain, remained at large—the FBI knew little about him anyway. Gustav Utzinger, the radio expert, also got away. He airmailed one of the radio transmitters to Paraguay and boarded a Brazilian ship on a phony passport, picking up the transmitter in the Paraguayan capital of Asunción.

  Even worse for the Allies, Albrecht Engels, the Rio businessman-turned-spy, was able to smuggle three long letters out of prison by passing them to the visiting wife of a colleague. In these letters he described the brutality of the police and alerted Berlin that the spies’ codes had been broken and must be changed.

  Berlin sounded the alarm across the clandestine network, telling all stations to interrupt communications with Brazil. “Warning,” they radioed the spies in Chile. “Alfredo arrested. Take all precautionary measures, above all, separate.”

  Engels, trapped in his Rio prison cell, found comfort in the thought that the ones who escaped could now rebuild the network and make it more secure than ever, with new codes. He knew that Utzinger was still out there, somewhere. He wasn’t sure about Becker. Engels asked a fellow prisoner who was about to be freed to go looking for Becker and send Engels a pack of cigarettes if Becker was safe. Soon afterward, a pack of cigarettes arrived at the prison for Engels. He was glad. As long as Becker and Utzinger, the Hauptsturmführer and the Funkmeister, were free, there was hope.

  CHAPTER 4

  Circuit 3-N

  A cipher message from Circuit 3-N, the Nazi clandestine radio link between Argentina and Berlin, solved by Elizebeth’s coast guard unit.

  (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration)

  William Friedman’s depression returned in December 1941, the month of Pearl Harbor. He had trouble sleeping and was besieged by doubts and morbid thoughts. “Flight, fight, or neurosis,” he wrote on a loose sheet of paper years later during a similar period of depression, trying to describe the feeling. “ ‘Floating anxiety’ which attaches itself to anything and everything. Fear that E. despises me for being such a weakling.” It was scary for a man who prided himself on precision and rationality to feel like he was not in control of his mind or his body. He sometimes referred to this unpleasant condition as the “heebeegeebees,” which he abbreviated as “hbgbs” in private notes to himself.

  He did not seek help this time, did not go to a psychiatrist or check himself into a mental hospital—after his experience at the understaffed and punitive mental ward of Walter Reed in January 1941 he was not about to repeat this mistake unless completely desperate—and so, as always, the Friedmans concealed the seriousness of his condition to friends and family, and they continued to work, except for three consecutive days in the spring of 1942 when they stayed home to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. That was the celebration, sleeping in. It was amazing. They were so tired. Elizebeth went to the store and bought a whole chicken and some strawberries and figured she would cook their usual anniversary dinner, a simple feast of roast chicken and strawberry shortcake.

  They hadn’t told their friends about the twenty-five-year milestone but somehow the secret leaked, and that evening, to their delight, colleagues and friends knocked on their door, offering silver-anniversary gifts. Fred and Claire Barkley brought a sterling silver round sandwich tray; Jean Chase Ramsay wore a stunning silver dinner gown; Stub and Enid Perkins appeared with an array of flowers in a glass bowl, yellow and blue and white irises, blue delphinium, flame-colored columbine, white gypsophila. To these Elizebeth added pink and yellow roses she thought to pluck from her own rosebushes, and some white and yellow honeysuckle, too, and by the time the next-door neighbor brought two huge armfuls of his own scarlet roses, the house was dizzy with fragrance.

  All day long, telegrams of congratulations arrived from friends near and far. Two of the telegrams were jokes written by William, notifying Elizebeth that she had been awarded an honorary A.B. degree from the Sorbonne, “Artiste de Boudoir,” and also a D.S.M. from Harvard, “Doctor of Successful Marriage.” In the second telegram he made light of his mental struggles and acknowledged his wife’s patience and kindness during his periods of illness, though of course he did not use those words:

  WHEREAS ELIZEBETH SMITH FRIEDMAN HAS CONDUCTED IMPORTANT SPECIALIZED RESEARCH EXTENDING OVER A PERIOD OF TWENTY FIVE YEARS IN THE VAGARIES AND IDIOSYNCRASIES OF ERRANT HUSBANDS; AND WHEREAS DURING THE CONDUCT OF SUCH RESEARCH SHE HAS BEEN SUBJECTED TO MANY HAZARDS INVOLVING CONSIDERABLE MENTAL ANGUISH, PERSONAL CHAGRIN, DAYS OF ANXIETY, AND NIGHTS OF SLEEPLESSNESS; AND WHEREAS SAID RESEARCH HAS RESULTED IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF ADEQUATE METHODS AND INSTRUMENTALITIES FOR THE CONTROL OF ONE HUSBAND, TO WIT, WILLIAM FREDER
ICK FRIEDMAN, AND HAS MADE HIM LIVABLE WITH . . .

  The children weren’t there to celebrate with their parents. John Ramsay was finishing his sophomore year at prep school in central Pennsylvania, and upon graduation he planned to join the Army Air Corps and head straight to flight school. Barbara was between semesters of college and living in New York City, in an apartment on West Fifty-sixth Street, getting involved in leftist political causes and dating an activist named Hank. “Hank is beautiful,” she wrote to William, “but we’re so utterly different. He lived in the slums and led a gang (because he was the tallest and the biggest) and hated cops and swam in the East River. . . . And now we go to bars and stand at the rail with the workmen and talk about Leninism.”

  William had no interest in Leninism but told his daughter she had a good heart. “I hope you will let nothing interfere with your enthusiasm for helping where help is needed, but don’t let the slow, snail’s-pace progress upward and onward get you down,” he wrote. “Remember always that the dawn of man’s conscience is only 3 or 3½ thousand years behind us.”

  He had always found this a comforting thought, that the age of barbarism was not long past, that if humans failed to be kind it was because they were still children, historically speaking, and the idea rang true to him as he read and disseminated MAGIC intercepts through the spring of 1942, learning secrets about Japanese war strategy in the Pacific and helping to guide the American response. In June 1942, with the two opposing navies speeding toward a fatal clash at the Battle of Midway, William and his codebreakers moved from the Munitions Building to a new location, Arlington Hall, a former private school for girls located on the outskirts of the city. The army had taken over the hundred-acre campus to provide room for an expanded codebreaking operation. Meanwhile, the navy started transferring intelligence personnel to a similar facility, on Nebraska Avenue, also a former private girls’ school, anchored by a five-story building dubbed the Naval Communications Annex.