The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

  Elizebeth and the coast guard had already solved one Enigma, back in 1940, a commercial Enigma whose wiring scheme was already known. Now they were up against an Enigma that would turn out to be a machine of unknown wiring, never before solved. It was the real thing in the wild. She had to find a way in.

  The Argentine sun felt good on his face and warmed his scalp through his thin layer of brown hair. Gustav Utzinger liked living in Buenos Aires. It was a beautiful old city—clean, musical, full of friendly people who did not ask too many questions. At a small shop in the heart of the city, 1511 Calle Donado, not far from the water, he built and repaired radios for legitimate paying clients.

  He was twenty-eight. It did not seem crazy to imagine that he might survive the war, get married, and have children, either here or back in Germany. He had people in Berlin who adored him and worried about him. Utzinger’s girlfriend worked at AMT VI, which gave her access to the radio transmitter, and she often sent him personal messages from her and from Utzinger’s loved ones. She signed the messages “Blue Eye” and called him “Dark Eye.” Sometimes “Blue Eye” transmitted a message written by Utzinger’s grandmother in Berlin, who called herself “the Ahnfrau.” He tried to take care of his grandmother from afar, sending packages of food from South America, tinned meat and coffee. She told him in radio messages that the packages were greatly appreciated and boosted her spirits. “I am sitting with . . . BLUE EYE and with a bottle of wine, celebrating your birthday,” she wrote once. “On the one hand, I should like to have you here, on the other hand, I am proud of your accomplishments . . . received 2 packages this year. Was very pleased and thankful . . . I am well. Most cordial greetings. THE AHNFRAU.” She asked him to remember to brush his teeth.

  If it had been up to Gustav Utzinger, he may have spent the rest of the war running his little radio business there in Buenos Aires, making good money, placing advertisements in newspapers, doing everything on the up-and-up. But he was in the SS, the elite vanguard of the Nazi state, and the SS did not care about his personal dreams and ambitions, which is why, in the shop’s basement, during the final months of 1942, he resumed his “natural patriotic efforts for my Fatherland,” and made himself busy assembling and testing a new generation of clandestine radio sets, at the urgent request of his Nazi superiors.

  It had been eight months since the FBI tried and failed to smash the Nazi network in Brazil. After the arrests, Utzinger had floated around for a while, trying to earn money to support himself. Escaping to Asunción, Paraguay, he got a job as a radio technician for the Paraguayan air force, which was commanded by an energetic fascist named Pablo Stagni. Under Stagni’s wing, Utzinger built transmitters for the military and taught Paraguayan officers the fine points of radio. Sometimes he would see a few of his former Nazi colleagues kicking around Asunción, but all they did was talk—except for one day when they burned the reels of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator in the public square.

  It wasn’t until Utzinger traveled to Buenos Aires that he got pulled back into the clandestine radio game.

  He went there with Stagni, who was trying to convince the Nazi naval attaché, Dietrich Niebuhr, to sell him a gun sight for some ancient Krupp cannon that the Paraguayans had seized from the Bolivians during a previous war. Dietrich Niebuhr was far more interested in Utzinger than the cannon and started to bend the radio wizard’s ear. Niebuhr said he was under extreme pressure from Berlin to build a clandestine radio transmitter here, and he needed Utzinger’s help.

  At this point in the war, Argentina was a far more amenable climate for clandestine radio than Brazil. The Brazilians had leaned toward the Allies as the war developed; Argentinians headed in the opposite direction. An American Jewish novelist named Waldo Frank toured Argentina in the summer of 1942 and noticed “a spawn of little nazi and nationalist papers,” he wrote in an account of his journey. Frank traveled through cities and small towns delivering speeches about the value of democracy, and in every town a pro-Nazi newspaper attacked. He sensed that Argentina’s conservative government, controlled by corrupt landowners, had “a very uncertain grip upon the country” and that fascists had infiltrated the police. By the end of Frank’s tour, the government had declared him persona non grata, and before he could escape, five cops stormed into his hotel and beat him on the skull with truncheons.

  Naturally the Nazis wanted to take advantage of this receptive atmosphere, especially since they were losing friends around the world at a rapid rate. Only two nations in the Western Hemisphere now maintained formal relations with the Reich—Chile and Argentina—and in early 1943, Chile would sever the link, making Argentina the lone holdout. This is why Berlin and Dietrich Niebuhr were desperate for a wireless link. Argentina was one of Germany’s only listening posts in the hemisphere, one of the last places where it was still possible to obtain reliable intelligence about anything happening in the West, including the United States. They had to keep a line open at all costs.

  Niebuhr gave Utzinger a powerful Seimens transmitter he had been keeping at the embassy, and in the fall of 1942, Utzinger took it to a small farm outside the city and began making tests. But as it turned out, Niebuhr wasn’t the only Nazi in Argentina who needed radio assistance. Utzinger was also approached by an Abwehr spy named Hans Harnisch, code name “Boss,” an employee of a German steel firm in Buenos Aires. He also wanted a wireless link to Berlin.

  Then, in January 1943, the most mysterious spy of all suddenly appeared in Buenos Aires: Hauptsturmführer Siegfried Becker, a.k.a. “Sargo.” He had stowed away on a Spanish ship, paying off the crew to smuggle him through customs.

  And in his luggage, all the way from Germany, he had brought an Enigma cipher machine.

  Becker looked the same as always—blond hair, nice clothes, a dirty mustache, bizarrely long fingernails—but Utzinger thought he detected a new gleam in Becker’s eye. He was vibrating with ambition. Becker said that in the months ahead he would need Utzinger to transmit very sensitive information to Berlin. The “embassy crowd” must not be able to read the messages. Whatever Becker had in store for his next chapter, he intended to keep it close.

  Utzinger now found himself in a nearly impossible position. Three men from three rival agencies had asked him for radio assistance: Niebuhr with the German embassy, Harnisch with the Abwehr, and Becker with the SS. In theory, he could create three separate radio stations, but this wasn’t practical given the limitations of his own equipment. One powerful station was preferable to three weak ones. Instead of building three stations, then, Utzinger decided to trick Berlin into thinking that he had. He designed a mythical radio organization that only existed on paper, a “Potemkin network,” so that each agency in Germany would feel it controlled its own station in Argentina. He called this network “Bolivar” and told Berlin that it consisted of three sections, Rot, Gruen, and Blau—Red, Green, and Blue.

  Red was Becker, Utzinger, and their SS collaborators.

  Green was Hans Harnisch and the Abwehr.

  Blue was the “embassy crowd.”

  The ruse gave Utzinger the freedom to run his operation as he saw fit without needing to explain his every technical choice to Berlin. He was determined to avoid the mistakes that had gotten the men arrested in Brazil, and with Becker’s help he got to work. Together they recruited a new team of spies from Buenos Aires and surrounding towns, “42 loyal and seasoned collaborators,” including German immigrants and working-class Argentines who believed in fascism. Utzinger selected new radiomen and drilled them in good security practices. Limit transmissions to short bursts; send decoy messages full of garbage text on prearranged frequencies; transmit at different times each week; never repeat the same message twice.

  “I am teaching my boys tough wireless discipline,” he radioed to Berlin. “The Yankees are copying every dot of our transmission.”

  In addition to the new radio link, the spies carved out another useful channel to Berlin, building a courier system that relied on Spanish sailors
to smuggle packages and luggage on Spanish vessels. These men, paid in pesos and known as “wolves,” allowed Becker and Utzinger to receive shipments of money, pharmaceuticals to sell for cash, and radio parts—items necessary to keep the network afloat. And through the wolf system and other sources, Utzinger also obtained crypto machines. He now had two Enigmas at his disposal, plus a pocket watch–size Kryha device called a Liliput, small and light and easily concealed.

  By the end of February 1943, Utzinger and Becker had everything in place: a new radio system; crypto machines, including Enigmas, the best available, each message a perfect tiny fortress; a team of collaborators. They were ready to transmit reports to Germany in volume. On February 28, Becker hopped on the radio and sent Berlin a cheerful progress update:

  New organization established with LUNA. LUNA has assembled in splendid fashion a circle of co-workers. Spread and prepared so that I am able to start immediately with work according to plan. SARGENTO.

  Berlin replied with glee. “Old boy, now we are off,” they radioed. “Test message. Cordial greetings to all. We are awaiting your blind traffic there on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday at 0200 and 0400.”

  The spies’ SS leaders back home, the officers of AMT VI, could not have been happier to hear that a door was opening in Argentina. The winter months of late 1942 and 1943 had been grim ones in Germany. The Red Army was crushing the Wehrmacht in Stalingrad, and although Nazi censors blocked reports of losses, rumors leaked. In the snow-dusted cities of Germany, it was difficult to find toothbrushes, belts, bicycle tires, and toilet paper. Restaurants complained of patrons stealing glasses. On February 18, at a rally of twenty thousand in Berlin, Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels finally admitted that the Battle of Stalingrad was lost and called for “a war more total and radical than anything that we can even imagine today,” an apocalyptic death struggle against the Allies and against Jewry.

  All in the homeland that season was darkness, danger, frost—and yet in Argentina, Becker and Utzinger reported, it was the height of summer, and they were making interesting friends.

  Becker, for instance, was cultivating a relationship with Juan Domingo Perón, the future three-time president of Argentina, now just a young army colonel with a taste for moral larceny. (He lived with a fourteen-year-old girlfriend whom he called “The Piranha.”) Perón belonged to a secret lodge of military officers, the United Officers’ Group (GOU), that aimed to overthrow the Argentine president, and he was already thinking beyond his own nation. Inspired by Hitler’s domination of Europe, Perón imagined himself at the head of a nationalist movement sweeping across all of South America.

  His ambition exceeded his reach. He didn’t yet have the contacts that a wider revolution would require. But Siegfried Becker did. During his decade with the SS, working in Germany, Brazil, and Argentina, Becker had gotten to know all kinds of influential South Americans: among them lieutenants, generals, diplomats, and police captains. He carried a small notebook with their phone numbers. These contacts—Becker’s little black book of nationalists and fascists—made him an alluring figure to Perón and his friends, and soon the Argentines hashed out an informal deal with the Nazi spies.

  Each side would get something it wanted. The Argentines would share secrets about the United States and protect the spies from the FBI and other Allied law agencies. In exchange, the spies would operate behind the scenes to extend Argentina’s influence across South America, connecting revolutionaries in one country to like-minded men in another. They would plot coups, overthrow governments, and install fascist-friendly regimes.

  The ultimate goal was to assemble a bloc of nations aligned against the United States. “Hitler’s struggle in war and in peace will be our guide,” Perón and his GOU plotters wrote in a covert manifesto. “With Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Chile, it will be easy to pressure Uruguay. Then the five united nations will easily draw in Brazil because of its type of government and its large nucleus of Germans.”

  With Brazil fallen, the “continent will be ours.”

  At her coast guard desk, Elizebeth reached for a fresh sheet of grid paper. Circuit 3-N. Argentina to Berlin. The unknown Enigma machine.

  Twenty-eight unsolved messages from Circuit 3-N now sat in a pile on her desk. She wrote the twenty-eight ciphertexts on the worksheet in pencil, one on top of another, assembling a stack of text so she could solve the messages in depth, like she had done in 1940 to solve the commercial Enigma machine.

  The twenty-eight messages all appeared to use the same key—a huge gift to the codebreakers from their Nazi adversaries. It made things easier and allowed Elizebeth to begin solving the individual messages.

  She made a frequency count of the letters in the columns. The cipher letter H appeared seven times in column no. 2, four times in column no. 3, and so on. This was enough to start guessing at the plaintext letters. Each column was its own MASC, a mono-alphabetic cipher, and she hopped around, penciling plain letters in the columns and guessing at German words across the rows, like bericht (report) and wir hoeren (we hear).

  She was following the path she had blazed in 1940 with the commercial Enigma, using her experience with that old machine to discover “an entering wedge” with this new one, and then hammering the wedge until the damn thing split. The team was still relying on the geometry of patterns. Step one: Line up the messages one on top of another. Step two: Solve the plaintexts in depth. Step three: Use the resulting alphabets to deduce the wheel wiring. Step four: Exploit the wiring knowledge to reveal the new keys whenever the adversary changes them.

  This time, the coast guard had some competition. Across the sea, at Bletchley Park, the secret British codebreaking campus, a unit called Intelligence Service Knox (ISK) was attacking the same Enigma, trying to solve it independently of the coast guard. Bletchley had been breaking spy ciphers since the start of the war. Now the two Allied teams each solved this new Enigma at about the same time, in December 1942, by different methods that ultimately got them to the same place.

  The machine turned out to be a G-model Enigma designed for the Abwehr, similar to the commercial Enigma but with wheels that stepped less regularly. Within the high-security universe of Enigmas, it was a medium-security model, more puzzling than the commercial machine but less so than other Enigmas. Decades later, Elizebeth called the G-model a “less superior Enigma that was used by Germany and her confidential agents—her spies.” At the moment, however, solving the machine felt like victory. “There was much celebration,” an NSA historian reported after the war, in an interview with Elizebeth.

  Now the coast guard could read the messages backward and forward—the old messages already intercepted and the new ones incoming. Looking at the plaintexts, the codebreakers confirmed that the South American end of the circuit was in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

  Also, the names of three colors popped out in the messages: Green, Red, and Blue. The spies were tagging their notes by these color names, and each color seemed to represent a different spy leader using a different code.

  It was as if multiple groups of Nazi agents had converged around Buenos Aires and were sharing this one circuit, pooling resources to make a kind of last stand.

  Having broken into the Green messages, the coast guard codebreakers turned their gaze to the Red traffic, which they already knew was encrypted with a device that the Germans called Lily. “Following messages all enciphered with LILY,” Berlin had radioed in February 1943. It seemed clear to Elizebeth and her coworkers that Lily was short for Liliput, as in a Kryha Liliput, a miniature version of the German cipher device.

  The Liliput was somewhat more complex than earlier Kryha models, but as a rule, Kryhas were less secure than Enigmas. Elizebeth walked to her shelf, picked up a Kryha, and examined it with her colleagues. It was an older model, but the principle was the same. Two concentric alphabet wheels stepped against each other, the stepping regulated by a control wheel set to a certain starting position. After a month of work, the codeb
reakers recovered the key with the help of punch cards, the IBM crunching and tabulating the frequencies of certain juxtapositions of cipher letters that helped them understand how the letters were distributed and offered clues about possible keys that were then tested to see if they produced sensible plaintext.

  Now the coast guard was able to read the bulk of the circuit’s traffic, the Red messages as well as the Green. (They would never solve the Blue messages, but it didn’t matter.)

  And what two names popped out in the plaintexts?

  “Sargo” and “Luna,” Elizebeth’s old friends.

  She recognized the aliases of the spy and the radio wizard. She had first encountered them on the Brazil circuits in 1942, and now, apparently, the duo had reunited in Argentina.

  This alone meant that Circuit 3-N was important—the presence of these two important individuals, “Sargo” and “Luna.” But there was something else that concerned her. The men seemed to be building a completely new wireless organization, bigger than before. They were hiring radio operators and obsessively testing new radio equipment.

  “We have antenna 100 meters long beamed on Berlin,” the spies tapped out to Berlin one day. “Hope you like it.”

  It was clear to Elizebeth that the Nazi network in the West had shifted to Argentina, and that the men were preparing the ground for a significant espionage effort. Something big was about to happen.

  Unfortunately for Elizebeth, right as she was starting to figure this out, the navy forced her to interrupt her work and pack up her office.

  In March 1943, the coast guard codebreakers were ordered to move from their longtime home at the Treasury to the former girls’ school now known as the Naval Communications Annex, the temporary wartime facility on Nebraska Avenue. Elizebeth had to pause her assault on Circuit 3-N while she got settled in the new location. She claimed an office on the second floor and spoke little to anyone outside of her own team. A coast guard employee who worked two doors down from her in the Annex later recalled, “Our work was compartmented. We went as a group for lunch, but the conversation was never about work, but concerned current events—the way the war was going, etc.” Elizebeth worked a little with a few of the SPARS, members of the coast guard women’s auxiliary, and she sometimes interacted with the young WAVES and WACs on a purely social basis, outside of the Naval Annex, inviting them to her home for tea and asking how they were getting along in Washington. One evening, Martha Waller, the codebreaker at Arlington Hall, returned home to her D.C. apartment to find Elizebeth and William Friedman sitting at dinner with five of her roommates. One of the roommates’ father apparently knew William and had set up the dinner. Waller was dumbstruck. The Friedmans, she had heard, were legends. “I think I was mesmerized, and I know I said next to nothing,” Waller recalls. Here is what she remembers about Elizebeth: “She looked, sounded, and behaved like the professor of English she might well have become.”