by Jason Fagone
This wasn’t the end of the spy hunt in South America. Siegfried Becker, the wily SS captain, remained at large, the target of a deepening manhunt by FBI agents and police in multiple countries, and Elizebeth would continue decrypting clandestine messages across dozens of Nazi radio circuits for the next thirteen months. But the arrest of Gustav Utzinger in August 1944 marked the beginning of the end of the Invisible War—“the final chapter to any effective espionage activity” carried out by Nazis in the Western Hemisphere, according to Utzinger’s colleague, Hedwig Sommer. Nazi spies would never again pose a threat to America.
Elizebeth had not done it alone. It was a team effort, with strong work from Chubby Stratton and other British officers, the FCC, and the FBI. But in her own piece of the war, Elizebeth was a central figure. She had to smash the codes on the page before anyone else could smash the spy networks on the ground. “Technical advantages played a big role in the undercover struggles,” Rout and Bratzel concluded in 1986’s The Shadow War. “Technical brilliance in cryptography and radio interception plus hard work by field agents proved to be the unbeatable combination which made victory possible.” The two historians credited the FBI for both the fieldwork and the technical brilliance (the coast guard’s files were classified at the time), and authors of more recent books have also praised the bureau for destroying the Nazi networks in South America. But the FBI didn’t intercept the messages. It didn’t monitor the Nazi circuits. It didn’t break the codes. It didn’t solve any Enigma machines. The coast guard did this stuff—the little codebreaking team that Elizebeth created from nothing.
During the Second World War, an American woman figured out how to sweep the globe of undercover Nazis. The proof was on paper: four thousand typed decryptions of clandestine Nazi messages that her team shared with the global intelligence community. She had conquered at least forty-eight different clandestine radio circuits and three Enigma machines to get these plaintexts. The pages found their way to the navy and to the army. To FBI headquarters in Washington and bureaus around the world. To Britain. There was no mistaking their origin. Each sheet said “CG Decryption” at the bottom, in black ink. These pieces of paper saved lives. They almost certainly stopped coups. They put fascist spies in prison. They drove wedges between Germany and other nations that were trying to sustain and prolong Nazi terror. By any measure, Elizebeth was a great heroine of the Second World War.
The British knew it. The navy knew it. The FBI knew it. But the American public never did, because Elizebeth wasn’t allowed to speak. She and every other codebreaker who worked on ULTRA material was bound by oath to keep the ULTRA secret. Even if she had been free to discuss her triumphs, explaining them to the public would have taken some time.
J. Edgar Hoover did not have these constraints. His power allowed him to manipulate the press and disclose secrets without consequence. And because his agents were old-school detectives, not technical wizards like Elizebeth, Hoover was able to frame the Invisible War in terms of instantly familiar images: disappearing inks, saboteurs, hidden cameras, police raids on clandestine radio stations, gumshoes in snap-brim hats.
So this was the picture of the spy hunt that the public ended up receiving. They got Hoover’s story, not Elizebeth’s.
Hoover made sure of it. In the fall of 1944, with the Wehrmacht collapsing across Europe, and the Red Army moving toward Berlin, he launched a publicity blitz to claim credit for winning the Invisible War.
He published a seven-page story in The American Magazine titled “How the Nazi Spy Invasion Was Smashed.” The sub-headline read, “One of the great undercover victories of the war—the defeat of a vast Axis plan to penetrate South America—is revealed here for the first time by the Director of the FBI.” Hoover claimed that his bureau had disrupted seven thousand Axis operations, catching two hundred and fifty spies and seizing twenty-nine radio stations, and that these actions had “stopped Hitler in South America. He needed his men and radio stations to carry out his plans of conquest and sabotage. . . . Without his machine he was lost.” Hoover did not mention Elizebeth or the coast guard, but he did thank the policemen of Brazil and Argentina, a significant number of whom were fascists, torturers, or both.
He also starred in a fifteen-minute film that was shown to U.S. troops abroad, The Battle of the United States, a highlight reel of the Invisible War.
The film, made with the help of beloved Hollywood director Frank Capra, opens with a blast of patriotic music and a waving American flag that fades to a shot of Hoover at his FBI desk, sitting in front of the Stars and Stripes. Hoover wears a pin-striped gray suit and a garish tie. His hair is neatly combed. His hands are clasped on the desk. “I want to talk to you fighting men and women about the Battle of the United States,” he says, looking into the lens.
Cut to a shot of a wooden door marked FBI CONFERENCE ROOM. The door opens and the camera moves inside. Seven FBI agents are gathered around an oversize map of South America. Ominous music. The map expands to fill the entire screen. Animated planes fly above the map and drop bombs on the Panama Canal; radio towers writhe with cartoon electricity; a cartoon Nazi appears, dressed in fatigues, holding a bayonet. He stands on Argentina, facing the United States and growing taller until he lunges and stabs Wyoming.
The film goes on to describe roll-up of the radio networks and the destruction of the Duquesne spy ring as solo feats of FBI tenacity. In the final scene Hoover faces the camera and addresses the intended audience, the troops still fighting overseas in the last months of the war. “The attack against all German and Japanese agents in this country,” he says, music swelling, “was as vigorous and as victorious as the attacks you have made against the enemy.” He ends with a flourish: “We of the FBI feel that we are part of a team, to make America a great and decent place to live. We are on that team, all of us, together.”
In December 1944, around the time U.S. troops were watching Hoover’s film, Elizebeth sat down to write the Friedman family Christmas card. It wasn’t a clever puzzle or a game like in years past. It didn’t contain any pictures of Bill and Elizebeth and the kids, or any secret messages. It was just an old-fashioned letter in plain English. After four years of war, and tens of millions of people killed, writing a letter felt like a good and human thing to do.
She typed
B U L L E T I N ** 1944 ** F R I E D M A N
at the top of a fresh white sheet of paper.
“We keep wondering what has transpired in the lives of our friends, and their families,” Elizebeth continued. “Perhaps they too are wondering about us.”
The director of the FBI had been boasting about catching spies he did not really catch. Elizebeth, who did catch them, bragged about her family.
“Bill, Will, Billy,” she typed, and summed up what was allowed to be said publicly about her husband’s professional activities during the war:
Having been retired from active duty in 1941 for physical disability, he has spent from nine to sixteen hours a day carrying on, doing a terrific war job. (Such things make liars of the Army Medical Service, and who doesn’t know of like instances?) In March of 1944 he was the first man to be awarded the highest distinction given by the War Department: the Exceptional Service Award with gold wreath, equivalent to the Distinguished Service Cross awarded to those persons who in the field of combat, “perform exceptional service over and beyond the call of duty.”
“P.S.,” William added, out of modesty. “I didn’t write this.—Bill.”
As for Elizebeth’s own accomplishments in the year 1944, there was nothing to report. She wrote that she was “just carrying on a routine navy job, in an unglorious fashion, unlike her distinguished husband.”
“P.S.,” William wrote. “Elizebeth always was, is, and continues to be the most fascinatin’ woman I’ve ever known.”
Elizebeth spent the rest of the Christmas letter discussing her clever children. John Ramsay was now manager of the football team at his prep school, chairman of the Dance Committe
e, and president of the Senior Club. Barbara was learning Spanish at her job with the U.S. Office of Censorship in Panama. “There is no rationing in Panama,” the mother reported, “cigarettes are plentiful and eight cents a pack, living expenses are about one third of their cost in the States, and her work, she says, is fascinating.” Elizebeth signed off by wishing all of the Friedmans’ friends and loved ones “a reunited family in 1945.”
It was the spring of incendiary bombs. The Allies lit German cities on fire, one after another, in the first three months of 1945. The quantities of bombs were measured in thousands of tons. The RAF dropped more than thirty thousand tons of bombs on Germany in the month of January alone. On a single night in March, the RAF sent 223 planes above Würzburg, dropping bombs, lighting fires that tore through the beautiful old wooden buildings and sent people fleeing through the blazing streets to the river. A grandmother clutched her grandson to her chest, trying to protect him from the flames. Their bodies were found melted together.
The death marches from Auschwitz began in January 1945 as the Red Army closed in from the east. SS guards led the prisoners away from the camp on desolate roads and forced them to walk until they collapsed, then shot the ones who remained standing. The Allies liberated the Dachau concentration camp on April 29. Hitler killed himself on April 30.
On April 19, 1945, eleven days before Hitler’s suicide, Siegfried Becker, “Sargo,” the greatest Nazi spy in the West, was arrested in Buenos Aires by the Coordinación Federal, the Argentine state police. He had dyed his hair black and was living with a girlfriend named Teresa. There were twenty-six thousand pesos in his pocket, and police confiscated an address book containing the names of more than one hundred associates in Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Bilbao, Rio, São Paulo, Hamburg, and Berlin.
Police took him to Villa Devoto prison, located in a poor neighborhood in northwest Buenos Aires. Becker was outraged. He started to talk. He gave statements about his links with high Argentine officials all the way up to Perón, who was now preparing to run for president.
The statements were quickly doctored, but Becker had made his point: He could hurt Perón if he opened his mouth. Officials responded by treating him as gently as possible. Perón assigned his personal bodyguard, Major Menendez, to look after Becker’s health and well-being, and Becker was allowed to spend much of his day in the warden’s office instead of a cell. At Christmastime, Becker sent “a huge basket of delicacies and champagne” to officials of the Coordinación Federal and arranged for a friend to deliver seven stuffed turkeys to the prison.
Gustav Utzinger, “Luna,” the radio expert of the spy ring, heard about the champagne and turkeys straight from Becker. They happened to be detained in the same prison, Villa Devoto, at the same time, although Utzinger hardly enjoyed Becker’s privileges. Horrified by the corruption and brutality of the prison officials, Utzinger frequently defied them and was punished with solitary confinement and beatings.
In February 1946, Argentine voters elected Perón to his first term as president. He moved into the palace with his second wife, the alluring actress Eva Duarte. He no longer feared what the spies might reveal; he was powerful now, insulated from consequence. So he released them. Utzinger tried to start a radio business but was later re-arrested and deported to postwar Germany. Becker stayed in Buenos Aires and was never heard from again. According to the Argentine journalist Uki Goñi, the Hauptsturmführer used his connections to smuggle Nazi war criminals into Argentina, helping them escape prosecution. It is likely that he lived to be an old man in Buenos Aires and died a natural death there.
Some of Becker’s friends across the continent did not enjoy his luck. On July 21, 1946, an angry mob invaded the presidential palace in La Paz and fatally shot Gualberto Villarroel, who had ruled Bolivia since Becker’s coup. The president’s corpse was thrown from a palace balcony and hung from a lamppost in the public square.
The Friedmans had been tired and stressed for years now. They had continued to function in spite of it, had kept going in to work every day, Elizebeth to the Naval Annex, William to Arlington Hall. But at the start of 1945, when it seemed like the enemy was on the run, and it finally felt permissible to relax ever so slightly, their bodies fell apart in unison. William got bronchitis and limped around the house, wheezing. Elizebeth took care of him and slept a lot on weekends. On George Washington’s birthday, February 22, 1945, they were invited to a dance party with some army friends. Elizebeth realized that it had been years since she had put on nice clothes to go out and have fun, and she allowed herself to spend an extra-long time getting dressed, dabbing Shalimar perfume on her neck, choosing pearl earrings, finding just the right dress, before heading out the door with her hobbling husband, trailing a cloud of warm, luxuriant scent.
President Roosevelt died on April 12, of a brain hemorrhage. Elizebeth was crushed. She had never liked politicians, but Roosevelt was the exception, a man who seemed both decent and brilliant, who believed in democracy, science, equality, and international cooperation, values she held dear, and Elizebeth feared that in his absence, “evil influences” like the Ku Klux Klan would sweep the country: “Our country will go on. But who can say what catastrophic results will come from his going? Or worse, the results, hidden, subversive, that take place with no fanfare, no appearance on the surface, but so quietly, hiddenly evil.”
The next month, a family friend died of a sudden illness: Colonel John McGrail, the army intelligence expert who had sent Elizebeth an Easter corsage of violets when William was away at Bletchley Park. The Friedmans felt that McGrail had worked himself to exhaustion in the war. During the colonel’s burial at Arlington National Cemetery, Elizebeth stood at the side of his widow, Florence, and held her arm as six white horses carried McGrail’s flag-draped casket to the grave.
Elizebeth didn’t think there was any pattern to death. It was random and cruel. She only hoped it would not strike her own loved ones. They were still scattered across the planet, subject to the winds of the war. John Ramsay, in flight school in Alabama, told Elizebeth on the phone that he had been ordered to report to an unknown destination. He said, with trepidation, “I will let you know where I am, when I am.” William kept murmuring in her ear that the U.S. Army was preparing a final mission for him, an assignment that would take him to Europe for weeks or even months. And Barbara was still in Panama, dating young navy officers about to report to the front and worrying they would be killed. Elizebeth tried to prepare her daughter for that possibility: “Remember, darling, my blessed fatalistic philosophy—when the number is up, he goes; whether he is on a davenport in his own home, or firing broadsides at the enemy.” She signed off, “Your getting-to-be-an-old-woman, Mother.”
Maybe it was her physical exhaustion, or her grief, or her ongoing fear for the safety of her family, but when Elizebeth heard on May 8 that the Nazis had formally surrendered to the Allied forces, that the war with Germany was over, it did not feel over. “We have difficulty believing it is really true,” Elizebeth wrote to her daughter in Panama. “New York, we hear, celebrated. But work went on, we didn’t even stop to hear the proclamation.”
The picture from the news was fluid and confusing. Japan had not surrendered. Its diplomats spoke with a new humility but the generals vowed to fight on. Stalin’s Red Army stood poised to occupy defeated territories in the East. Stalin was rumored to be building an atom bomb. The Americans were rumored to be building an atom bomb. Elizebeth wrote to Barbara, “It’s absolutely terrifying.”
The heat of the Washington summer grew brutal. In the master bedroom of 3932 Military Road she slept with the windows open in the vain hope that a draft might blow in. John Ramsay sent her a poem he had written in flight school, describing his desire to live the adventurous life, “to grip the rock-bound cliffs / that jealously guard the house of wisdom.” His mother, delighted by her son’s ambition and proud of his interest in poetry, re-copied the poem in a letter to her daughter.
In early July, Elizebeth
learned that William’s orders had finally come through. He was being sent to Europe for a ninety-day assignment with the Allied forces there. It would be his final mission of the war.
William told his wife he would be conducting research. He made it seem routine. It was not routine. He had been recruited for a mission called TICOM, a joint U.S. and British effort to seize intelligence secrets from former Nazi territories.
One historian has called TICOM, short for Target Intelligence Committee, “the last great secret of World War II.” The aim was to preserve Western dominance in whatever the next war might be: perhaps, it seemed, against the Soviet Union. This meant preventing knowledge and technology from falling into the hands of Joseph Stalin. The Western Front needed to be scoured and picked clean of secrets—any Nazi cryptologic inventions snapped up, any information about MAGIC or ULTRA secured—for the United States and Britain to maintain a codebreaking edge in future battles. And in pursuit of this goal, William Friedman would soon journey into the deepest, most secretive chambers of the Third Reich. He would find himself riding a tram into thin air to reach the Kehlsteinhaus, or Eagle’s Nest: the private mountain lair of Hitler himself.
William and Elizebeth drove to the military air terminal together on July 14, 1945, a warm, clear blue morning in Washington. He wore his dress uniform of a khaki jacket, a khaki cap, khaki pants, and brown boots. She thought he looked handsome and wished the army allowed the men to sew stars on the shoulders. She kissed him goodbye and he boarded a Douglas C-54 transport plane along with twenty-three other passengers: army officers, several scientists, a WAC stewardess. Then Elizebeth went back to the family’s car, which was parked on a little hill, and waited until the C-54 took off, watching it rise into the clouds, shrinking into a speck of silver.