by Jason Fagone
If there was anything J. Edgar Hoover hated, it was being out of the loop. But he was about to get the bureau back into the picture.
Argentina needed an “out.” It needed a big public display of neutrality, a story to tell about its independence from Nazi influence, and the more spectacular, the better. Well, the FBI was good at telling stories. Perhaps the bureau could provide one.
The story, the “out” chosen by the FBI, was the story of Siegfried Becker.
Becker: a character out of a novel. A Nazi spy with long curling fingernails. A man who carried explosives in trunks and Enigma machines in his luggage. A seducer of the wives of Brazilian politicians. A stowaway on ocean-crossing ships. An SS-Hauptsturmführer who wore the ring of the death’s head, a gift from Himmler. A friend of secret fascists in high places. A plotter of coups. A Johnny Appleseed of pirate radio, the human link between clandestine radio stations that spanned an entire continent.
The FBI had obtained some of this information from earlier coast guard decryptions and much of it from their own interrogations of the spies they arrested in Brazil in 1942. They reasoned that they could share the information with Argentina without exposing the ULTRA secret. The bare facts of Becker’s career were already lurid, and in the FBI’s hands, they could be arranged into a tale of a master spy, a kind of Nazi James Bond.
Francis Crosby, the FBI’s legal attaché in Buenos Aires, made the case in a February 15, 1944, letter to Hoover, accompanied by a memorandum on Becker. “The memorandum was written with a view to furnishing the Argentine government with the material necessary for a spectacular spy story,” Crosby wrote. “Becker would make excellent copy and perhaps provide the Argentines with the ‘out’ they are seeking in the Hellmuth case. The rational[e] which occurred to us is about as follows. Becker had an extremely successful career as an espionage agent in several other neighboring republics. . . . Details about the cases in which he figures would make excellent copy. However, this ‘master spy’ did not fall into the hands of the law until he ran afoul of the extremely astute police of the splendid Republic of Argentina, who immediately upon learning of his activities in Argentina, terminated his brilliant career.” Then came Crosby’s three-page memorandum for the ambassador, a pulpy, magazine-ready narrative:
To the best of our knowledge, the deft, Teutonic hand of Siegfried Becker first appeared on this hemisphere when Becker organized clandestine radio station CEL in Rio de Janeiro. . . . It is possible to follow Becker into clandestine radio station CIT, also in Brazil . . . in Ecuador . . . clandestine radio station PYL in Chile, and a group in Mexico. . . . The hand of Becker is in some instances heavy and immediate, in others light and remote. However, it is possible to demonstrate the connection at all times. . . .
While the FBI circulated the legend of Siegfried Becker through diplomatic channels, they were going after him and his men on the ground in South America. The bureau now had two dozen SIS agents across the continent, covering all the major cities, finally acclimated to their local posts, cozy with local police, and able to get intelligence from confidential informants. Hoover ordered all of the FBI attachés across Latin America to search their files for any information on Becker, “one of the most important German agents in Latin America, who is presently a fugitive and believed to be hiding somewhere in Argentina.” At the same time, SIS agents like Crosby sprang into action on the ground, scoping out bars and restaurants where Becker was said to hang out and interviewing prostitutes he had known.
The FBI also began to close in on the pirate radio stations themselves, the ones Elizebeth had been listening to all along, remotely, from her office in Washington. American agents went climbing over Chilean and Paraguayan mountains with handheld direction-finders, and FCC technicians drove through Buenos Aires and the surrounding countryside with direction-finding automobiles.
Stations were seized, one by one, the radio equipment impounded. This was fun for the FBI agents, this classic police work. They were good at it. It was what they did best. They weren’t codebreakers. They were investigators. They were cops. They built cases from physical evidence and in-person conversations, and they arrested people.
Utzinger wanted to go dark. That was his first instinct. In Argentina, when the SS radio expert heard that the Hellmuth mission had failed in the worst possible way—that the envoy had confessed to the British and the Argentine government was now breaking relations—Utzinger thought the spies should stop using the radio entirely. Something was not right. He needed some time to think.
He was overruled. Berlin insisted that the radio transmissions continue and even be increased, and Becker assured him that the break in relations was a “sham.” According to Becker’s military and political contacts, the Argentine government was just making some noise to appease the Americans. Everything would be fine once the commotion died down.
Having little choice in the matter, Utzinger continued to transmit. But his work with Becker only grew harder throughout the first months of 1944. The two men sensed they were being surveilled, followed. Utzinger took what security precautions he could, moving the transmitter to a friend’s farm outside Buenos Aires and hiding it beneath a chicken coop. The authorities found it anyway. One day in February 1944, when Utzinger and Becker were somewhere else, Argentine cops raided the farm and arrested several of their collaborators, taking the V-men to a police station and applying painful shocks with the picana eléctrica (electric cattle prod) to extract confessions. A prisoner named Gaucho, who may have been Becker’s bodyguard, had his eardrum destroyed. Another, Herbert Jurmann, a Hitler Youth leader, decided to commit suicide rather than confess, throwing himself out of a third-story window. “He fell on February 19,” Utzinger radioed to Berlin, “faithful to his oath, for us a model and obligation.”
Jurmann’s death cast a pall over the work of the spies in Argentina. They were frightened and demoralized. The Reich seemed increasingly distant and German defeat increasingly plausible. No one was sure they wanted to die for National Socialism anymore. The Spanish wolves grew less willing to cooperate; two of the wolves were captured and hanged by the British. Utzinger’s grandmother, “the Ahnfrau,” sent him an ominous message over the radio, asking where he had placed their ancestral papers, the important documents of their family history. She feared that the papers would be destroyed by bombs.
Utzinger still could not shake the feeling that something was very wrong, that the Allies could read his words. But he assumed that the problem was the incompetence and poor security habits of his counterparts in Berlin. Over and over they had demonstrated themselves to be idiots; he had no reason to think that anything more subtle was amiss. So he tried his best to keep the radio network operational while maintaining a self-protective level of paranoid awareness. When looking at the raw intelligence gathered by his V-men, he paid special attention to news about Allied spy hunts, anything that might give him advance warning of a raid and save his skin.
He picked up an intriguing piece of news that he shared with the home office on March 22. According to the U.S. press, a “Mrs. VALERIE DICKINSON, N.Y.” was being charged with treason. (Her first name was actually Velvalee.) She owned a shop in New York that sold dolls and doll clothing. She had sent suspicious letters to an address in Buenos Aires. The letters appeared to concern dolls, but the Americans believed Dickinson was a Japanese spy, communicating in code. The press was calling her the Doll Lady.
Velvalee Dickinson whirled around on the two FBI men and tried to scratch out their eyes. It was January 21, 1944. The agents had staked out the vault at the Bank of New York, waiting for Dickinson to walk in and open her safe-deposit box, and as soon as she did, unlocking a drawer that contained $15,900 in cash, the FBI agents said they had a warrant for her arrest. Dickinson shouted that she didn’t know why. She was fifty years old, a widow, a frail-looking ninety-four pounds, with brunette hair. She made such a kicking commotion that the men had to pick her up by the armpits and carry her away.
> The FBI arrested Dickinson because of five suspicious letters that had been previously intercepted by postal inspectors and forwarded to the bureau. The letters talked about dolls and the condition of dolls, some of which were damaged: “English dolls,” “foreign dolls,” a “doll hospital,” and a “Siamese dancer” doll “tore in middle.” The first of the five letters read in part, “You asked me to tell you about my collection. A month ago I had to give a talk to an art club, so I talked about my dolls and figurines. The only new dolls I have are these three lovely new Irish dolls. One of these three dolls is an old Fishermen with a Net over his back. Another is an old woman with wood on her back and the third is a little boy.” The letter had been addressed to Señora Inéz Lopez Molinari in Buenos Aires. No such person existed; the letter was returned to the address listed on the envelope, the address of one of Dickinson’s customers, a Mrs. Mary E. Wallace in Springfield, Ohio, who was confused to read the letter, as she had not written it.
Dickinson owned a doll shop on Madison Avenue in New York and had developed a reputation for her artistry—she sold dolls for as much as $750 apiece—yet the bureau discovered that she had fallen into debt after the death of her husband, that she was a member of the Japanese-American Society, and she had visited the West Coast in January 1942, immediately after Pearl Harbor. The FBI tested the shapes of ink on the letters against Dickinson’s seized typewriter and confirmed a match; the bureau’s investigation also revealed social ties between Dickinson and Japanese consular officials.
After the agents arrested Dickinson in January 1944, a federal prosecutor took up the case: Edward C. Wallace, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Wallace had worked with Elizebeth in the smuggling days and hoped to get her opinion on the Doll Lady’s letters, but first he called the supervisor of the FBI’s New York office and asked if the bureau had any objection to showing Elizebeth the letters.
Within the FBI, the prosecutor’s request provoked a remarkable exchange of at least eight phone calls, teletype messages, and memos that traveled up the chain from the FBI’s New York office to Washington and ultimately to the desk of J. Edgar Hoover. The gist of these communications was that the prosecutor, Edward Wallace, wanted Elizebeth and spoke highly of her—“According to Mr. Wallace,” an FBI agent in Washington wrote in a memo to Hoover’s deputy, “Mrs. Friedman and her husband, who is a cryptographer for the Army, are recognized as the leading authorities in the country and have written numerous books on the subject”—but FBI agents worried that Elizebeth would siphon publicity from the bureau, stealing its spotlight. The agents seemed reluctant to speak of Elizebeth as an independent analyst separate from her husband. Although no one had ever discussed involving William in the case, the supervisor of the FBI’s New York office fretted that the Friedmans, plural, “might, in the event of a successful espionage prosecution, attempt to lay claim for any work that they might have performed in this connection.”
The New York office sent Hoover a teletype on March 18, 1944: “ADVISE AS TO SUBMISSION QUESTIONED LETTERS TO ELIZABETH FRIEDMAN FOR EXAMINATION.” Hoover responded with a dismissive shrug of a memo: “Concerning the project to submit the documents to Mrs. Friedman. . . . There appears no point is to be gained by multiplying the number of examiners.” But he posed no formal objection, so U.S. Attorney Wallace went ahead and sent Elizebeth the Doll Lady’s letters, and Elizebeth analyzed them and crystallized her thoughts into a five-page letter before traveling to New York at the feds’ expense to discuss the case with Wallace in person.
“My dear Mr. Wallace,” Elizebeth began in her letter, “Within the last two days I have spent a few hours examining the Dickinson letters. I am setting forth here some queries and statements which may be accepted for what they are worth, mindful of your statement on the telephone that you hope to obtain ‘leads,’ and that you understand that the code in the letters is the ‘intangible’ type of method not susceptible to scientific proof.”
After making it clear that this was not the usual sort of cryptanalysis that she did, that this was only her opinion, Elizebeth went on to discuss what the Doll Lady was really talking about when she talked about dolls.
The letters, she said, were a textbook example of “open code,” a way of communicating secretly out in the open, without necessarily arousing suspicion. “Granddaughter’s doll” in one letter might refer to a U.S. ship that had been damaged at Pearl Harbor and was being repaired. “Family” meant the Japanese fleet. “English dolls” meant three classes of English ships, such as a battleship, battle cruiser, or destroyer. Where Dickinson wrote, “One of these three dolls is an old Fishermen with a Net over his back” and “another is an old woman with wood on her back and the third is a little boy,” she probably meant, “One of these three warships is a minesweeper, and another is a warship with superstructure, and the third is a small warship.” (“Destroyer?” Elizebeth guessed. “Torpedo boat? Auxiliary warship?”)
Elizebeth also pointed out that the street number of the address in the five letters—Señora Inéz, O’Higgins Street, Buenos Aires—was given as five different numbers (1414 O’Higgins, 2563 O’Higgins, etc.), suggesting that the messages were never meant to reach their destination and were intended to be intercepted en route, in an airline pouch or a censorship office, by a friendly Axis confederate.
Elizebeth’s letter shows her analytical brilliance; it also shows her native cautiousness, her reluctance to say anything that couldn’t absolutely be proven. Words in an open code can have multiple meanings. She didn’t want to testify in court for this reason. Hoover saw it differently. To him, the vagueness of an open code was an advantage, not a disadvantage, enabling his agents “to give the more extended estimates and alternative possibilities” during cross-examination.
The FBI had gathered other damning evidence against Dickinson, including the unexplained cash and her relations with Japanese officials, and the government charged Dickinson with espionage, as a spy for the imperial Japanese government. The charge carried the death penalty. As far as anyone knew, Dickinson was the first woman to be accused of espionage on American soil since the war’s start. “So far,” wrote the Washington Sunday Star, “on this side of the water, Mrs. Dickinson is the woman spy of this war.” During her first court appearance in New York in May 1944, Dickinson looked subdued, wore a black hat pinned with imitation white flowers, and twisted a handkerchief behind her back with black-gloved hands, glancing around the courtroom at the FBI agents and prosecutors and reporters: “Who are all these people?” she said. When the prosecutor spoke, “She even yawned, decorously behind a hand,” the Washington Times-Herald reported.
Dickinson pleaded guilty. At her sentencing three months later she denied that she was a spy, breaking down in court and swearing that she didn’t know a “battleship from any other ship except that it’s larger.” She ended up with ten years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
All through these proceedings, Elizebeth stayed out of the public eye. When the Doll Lady case was over, the conviction won, the FBI, as always, informed the press of its heroism, feeding the dramatic details of “the War’s No. 1 Woman Spy” to reporters. “What made her become a Japanese spy?” asked the Star. “One FBI man who questioned her advanced the idea that she was an introvert, embittered by life, the frustration of childlessness.” Elizebeth was not mentioned in the coverage. The articles said variously that the code had been cracked by “FBI cryptographers” or “a check with the Navy.” Hoover himself wrote about the Doll Lady in The American Magazine, calling her “one of the cleverest woman operators I have encountered. Cultured, businesslike, cunning, and, despite her 45 years of age, most attractive, she presented one of the most difficult problems in detection the FBI has tackled in this war.”
And while readers learned of the Doll Lady’s treachery from Hoover, the woman who analyzed the Doll Lady’s letters in her spare time, quietly, as a side project, returned to her primary task of hunting Nazi spies.
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nbsp; Through the rest of 1944, as Elizebeth and her coast guard team continued to decrypt Nazi radio messages, she noticed an uptick in paranoia in the plaintexts, a creeping sense of doom. All along, Elizebeth had been watching the Nazis build a spy network, and now, after invisibly undermining that network, she was watching it die—and stepping on its neck when need be.
She tracked the spies as they tried to escape or hide, decrypting their desperate wireless notes. Becker went into seclusion in April 1944. “He is hidden in the center of Buenos Aires,” Utzinger wrote. “He works at night only. Keep your fingers crossed for him. LUNA.”
On August 11, 1944, Utzinger sent one of his final radio messages: “The enemy succeeded in locating two of our stations in 60 days.”
Seven days later, on August 18, 1944, Gustav Utzinger, a.k.a. “Luna,” was arrested by the Argentine federal police along with forty of his associates.
Utzinger later described the scene to an FBI interrogator. On a table at the jail, police arranged items they had taken from Nazi Party members years earlier, including swastika flags, pictures of Hitler, and hunting weapons, and put those next to a resistance coil from the spool of a film projector. Utzinger had managed to destroy his radio equipment before capture, so the police claimed the coil was a “bobina de tanque de un transmisor potente de los espías nazis”—tank-spool of a powerful transmitter of the nazi spies—and photographed the whole cornucopia to release to the press. It was for show; the Argentines were mainly concerned with covering up their own links to the Nazis. Five days after Utzinger’s arrest, Juan Perón himself appeared at the jail and told police that “the investigation was to show merely the breaking up of a great German intelligence machine; and that the mention of contact with any political or military personalities or their foreign colleagues must be suppressed.”