The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

  CHAPTER 6

  Hitler’s Lair

  William Friedman gripped the sides of a jeep as it shook and rumbled up the twisting incline to the laboratory of the Nazi scientist. The codebreaker was in a small town in Bavaria miles from any battlefield, ascending a mountain called Feuerstein. The jeep continued to climb. Looking backward William could see the intact homes and shops of the town below, growing smaller in the distance. Up ahead, the Laboratorium Feuerstein loomed into view. The impression was of reaching a castle on a mountaintop. The building was enormous. Red Cross signs were painted on the roof, a ruse to pass off the institute as a hospital and prevent RAF pilots from dropping bombs.

  Dr. Oskar Vierling, an engineer from a poor family, had run this place. Before the war Vierling specialized in acoustics research, investigating the properties of sound and inventing new kinds of instruments; his “electrochord,” an electrical organ, was a favorite of the Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, who adapted the instrument for party rallies, using it to play forceful blasts of chords at predetermined spots in his speeches. In the late 1930s the Nazis insisted that Vierling focus his activities on war machines, and the Laboratorium Feuerstein, named after the mountain which it crowned, began to fill with scientists and assistants under the Doktor’s direction, as many as two hundred people.

  The Allies wanted to know what Vierling had invented during the war, particularly any devices related to intelligence or cryptology, so they had dispatched William Friedman, along with a dozen colleagues from army intelligence, to make an inventory of the laboratory. Earlier the defeated Nazis had ordered Vierling to destroy all of his inventions, but he had hidden his favorites in a locked room in the basement and was now glad to show them to the Americans.

  The interior of the lab was cavernous, Gothic. William felt like a character in a murder mystery, about to meet an intricate demise. He analyzed Vierling’s prototypes. There was a machine said to encrypt the human voice the way that Enigma encrypted text, and a device for scrambling speech to make it unrecognizable to anyone listening on a wiretap. There was an “acoustic torpedo,” a machine that shot bullets of sound; a coating for submarines that made them invisible to radar; and a “speech stretcher,” an audio playback device that sped or slowed a recording without changing the pitch. It was hard for William to avoid drawing a comparison between Vierling and George Fabyan, the American robber baron who built a deviant temple to science—this place was like a Nazi Riverbank. Inside the Laboratorium Feuerstein, William ate a brief supper of hot dogs, potatoes, coffee, and crushed peaches, and he stayed late into the evening with his American colleagues, the topics of their conversations growing spookier, starting with Albert Einstein and the theory of relativity before veering off to more occult topics like the possibility of extrasensory perception.

  Vierling’s laboratory was only one target of TICOM, the mission to lock down the intelligence secrets of the war. The Allies deployed six TICOM teams to Europe starting in April 1945, each containing eight to fifteen intelligence personnel from both the United States and Britain. William’s team began its work in late July. The mission carried him for hundreds of miles across southern Germany, France, and Czechoslovakia. He took notes. He had spent the war in office buildings. This was his first look at the landscape of physical battle, and it filled him with “a heavy feeling of sadness” difficult to describe. The German countryside was intact, the plots of wheat and rye and barley ripening, the green forests seemingly untouched, but the people were broken, and the machines were broken. The highways between cities were full of what the army called DPs: displaced persons. Mothers and fathers walked along the road with their children, carrying personal belongings on their backs or hauling small quantities of wood in handcarts, to burn for fuel. Wrecked trucks and tanks had been tipped into ditches, and women wept in the backs of clattering wagons.

  He ate a C-ration for the first time, canned meat and beans. It didn’t agree with his stomach. He ate Spam. He stayed at an army installation code-named BARN and thought that if it had been up to him he would have named it something less boring, like LEPIDOPTERA, the scientific name for a butterfly, but then he thought about it some more and realized that LEPIDOPTERA would be more difficult for soldiers to remember and they might end up getting lost. He rode at slow speed through the firebombed cities of the Reich, through Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Aschaffenburg, and Würzburg, feeling like an ant crawling across the body of a dead child. “The destruction to be seen in cities such as these should be noted by anybody who believes in war,” he wrote, “because it can tell more about what happens in modern warfare than reams of literature.” More than once, while scouring an abandoned Nazi garrison, the men on William’s team found copies of his own cryptologic publications from years past, translated into German or French by the Nazis. This was hardly a surprise, given the ubiquity of William’s contributions to the science, and the men got a kick out of it, grinning as they showed him these discoveries—and the bibliophile in William could not resist taking these extremely rare documents as souvenirs and keeping them for his own library—but it was the strangest compliment. Imagine walking into the devil’s library and seeing your book on his shelf.

  William always believed the war was worth fighting. But he saw it as a grim duty, not a crusade, and his experience of fighting the war had permanently destroyed his faith in the way the world was put together. Earlier that year, his daughter asked him in a letter if he believed in Zionism, the project to create a Jewish homeland. He said no. “Zionism is only one of many virulent forms of a detestable disease known as ‘nationalism,’ ” William wrote to Barbara. “The sooner we realize that we are all God’s children regardless of color, race, creed, nationality, etc., the better for all nations and the world as a whole.” He didn’t believe in nations anymore, not even his own. This is what he had tried to tell his daughter. The world is very fragile, more fragile than it is healthy to believe if you want to get out of bed and make it through the day.

  William did not sleep well the night before he visited Hitler’s alpine lair: Kehlsteinhaus, the Eagle’s Nest, a meeting center and getaway built by the party in 1939 and given to the Führer as a gift on his fiftieth birthday. An army friend of William’s made steak sandwiches with raw onion at 1 A.M., and the cryptologist woke to the smell and downed the steak with Scotch. At 8 A.M. he rode in the army staff jeep at the front of a fifty-vehicle convoy to the town of Berchtesgaden, overlooking the Austrian Alps. The path to the lair went straight up a mountain for four and a half miles, no guardrails to prevent an errant car from plummeting several thousand feet to the valley. The driver kept the jeep in first gear all the way.

  The convoy reached a plateau with a parking area at the base of the lair, and William entered a hundred-foot-long tunnel protected by two enormous, heavily ornamented bronze gates. The tunnel was wide enough for three automobiles and brightly lit with electric lamps. At the far end of the tunnel, an elevator shaft the height of a fifteen-story building rose the rest of the way, to the mountain’s pinnacle. The elevator operator was the same German who had worked for Hitler and his deputies all during the war. William talked to him for a bit. “He gave us a little speech in his defense, saying that he was assigned to the job—the Nazis wouldn’t let him get away, etc., etc.”

  The ride to the top took three minutes. Then William and his fellow officers were led through a passageway and into the first chamber of the lair, a small, wood-paneled dining room where Hitler held banquets with visiting world leaders. The Führer didn’t visit often—the long automobile climb made him impatient, and the change in atmospheric pressure disagreed with his constitution—but Goering and Ribbentrop spent a lot of time at the Kehlsteinhaus, and Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun, loved to entertain friends here. She lugged her Scottish terriers up the mountain and let them romp in the thin air. She threw a wedding party for her sister and the groom, an SS captain later shot by Hitler for desertion.

  Beyond the dinin
g room and down a few stairs was an octagonal room with thick granite walls and a 360-degree view of the Alps. From this height the mountains appeared at eye level, jagged triangles of green and blue, like incisors rising from earth’s jaw, “indescribably beautiful,” William thought. A third room contained a fireplace of red marble, a gift from Mussolini. Most of the furniture was intact. The Americans milled around like tourists atop the Empire State Building, unsure what to do with themselves after the first minute or two. William took pictures and wished he had brought a film camera.

  The group descended in the elevator and drove a mile back down the mountain to a level area where the Nazi party had built Hitler a separate residence, a private house. The front of the house was a twenty-five-foot-wide plate-glass window with no glass in it. The building had been almost completely destroyed by an RAF blockbuster bomb and by subsequent visits from American soldiers, who wrecked what was left of the house before the army stopped them. William thought it was a shame. “I think it is too bad that this whole installation was not left absolutely intact to serve as an everlasting and terrible monument to the folly of a people led to perdition by a madman’s lust for power.”

  The floor of Hitler’s house was littered with chunks of rock and marble. William reached down and picked up a piece. When he got home, he decided, he would keep it on his desk, as a reminder. “I shall have it made into a paper-weight.”

  That day, back in the States, Elizebeth was in Michigan, visiting her sister. She stayed at a hotel in Ann Arbor that brought her a bowl of ice in the afternoon. She looked at this simple object, this bowl of smoking ice, the unthinkable luxury of it, in wonder and awe, and remembered that it was not normal for humans to spend their afternoons trapped inside a 100-degree building in Washington, sweating through their clothes, solving puzzles to save the free world. She remembered she was alive.

  One evening she read an issue of The New Yorker straight through.

  Germany was only the first leg of William’s TICOM mission. The second leg took him to Bletchley Park, headquarters of British codebreaking, in late July. He arrived there on July 28, eight days before America dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan.

  As he had done on his previous visit to Bletchley, William kept a detailed diary. One entry described a meeting with Alan Turing: “At 1535 a visit with Dr. Turing. He is leaving GC&CS, to my surprise. Says he’s going into electronic calculating devices and may come to the U.S. for a visit soon. Invited him to visit us if he comes to Washington.” This turned out to be the final encounter of William Friedman and Alan Turing. The two geniuses would never see each other again. In 1952, the British government stripped Turing’s security clearance on grounds that he was a homosexual, and officials coerced him into taking estrogen injections. Turing’s maid later found him dead of an apparent suicide, a half-eaten apple by the side of his bed, traces of cyanide in his blood. A government witch hunt had destroyed one of the war’s greatest heroes.

  William’s goal in England in July 1945 was to learn how the war had looked to his Nazi adversaries, the code and cipher experts employed by the Reich. He read cryptologic materials seized by British intelligence and observed interrogations of Nazi prisoners. Twice he visited a manor in the country village of Beaconsfield, noting that he could “say no more.” This was a POW camp where he encountered at least three high-value German POWs, including two of Nazi Germany’s top cryptologists, Dr. Wilhelm Fricke and Erich Hüttenhain. William didn’t conduct the interrogations but he did observe and suggest questions. After listening to the POWs and analyzing the documents, William concluded that Germany had never lost faith in the security of the Enigma machine. They thought Enigma was unbreakable all the way to the end. He was proud to learn that Nazi codebreakers had never managed to defeat America’s best cipher machine, the SIGABA, which he had invented with Frank Rowlett.

  He had a lot of downtime in England. The pace of things in the codebreaking offices had slowed. The buildings seemed to be emptying out. At night he took Amytals and crawled into bed. One evening a friend took him to a burlesque show in London, the famous Les Folies-Bergère. They sat in two plush seats in the front row. The women wore g-strings and glittery, spangly tops, and William admired the looks of intense concentration on their faces, their cool self-possession. “The girls devote their complete and absorbed attention to their work—not even a glance or a wink at any member of the audience.”

  Once or twice in the slack moments of the days, the British asked him to tell stories about crazy old George Fabyan and his merry band of conspiracy theorists. People seemed to love the Riverbank stories, and William loved to tell them. It was funny how he felt more and more generous toward Fabyan by the year. You get older and want to connect to the people who understand. You try to speak with the young and find that something is wrong with your ears. They use their own slang, their own code, and you start to feel nostalgic about your former enemies, who at least shared the same intense moment on earth and spoke words you could understand. Besides, if not for George Fabyan, William would not now be carrying a piece of Adolf Hitler’s smashed marble floor in his pocket.

  It had all begun in the most bizarre fashion.

  William was in London on August 6, 1945, the first day of the nuclear age. He was asleep and dreaming in his room at the Hunt Hotel when the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima and destroyed it in seconds, its people and its history, like a page torn from a book. A latch opened in the American B-29 at sixteen minutes after midnight, London time, which was 8:16 A.M. Hiroshima time, and the soldiers on the plane became the first humans to see, from a safe distance, what this technology could do to a living city. “Here was a whole damn town nearly as big as Dallas,” the radio operator of the Enola Gay later recalled, “one minute all in good shape and the next minute disappeared and covered with fires and smoke.” Above Japan, the plane peeled away from the mushroom cloud, while in London the cryptologist’s eyeballs darted frantically behind closed eyelids. He was having a sex dream about Enid, the wife of his friend Stub. When he woke in the morning, he felt confused. He had never thought about Enid that way. He wrote in his diary that he would have to tell her. She’d think it was funny.

  It took a while for the news to reach London, and William was busy with his work, so he didn’t hear about Hiroshima until breakfast on the morning of August 7. He went to lunch that day with Eddie Hastings, the Royal Navy captain who had visited the Friedmans’ house on the day of Pearl Harbor, and after drinking a few martinis in befuddled silence, William and Hastings spoke about the bomb. They were in agreement. They didn’t understand why it was necessary to kill so many civilians merely to demonstrate the bomb’s power. Hastings thought “it was [a] serious mistake to drop the first one on a big city—should have stated the case, given warning, dropped 1st one on a vacant area & then make renewed call to surrender,” William recorded in his diary. “I think he is right. Early reports indicate over 350,000* people wiped out in Hiroshima—perfectly ghastly, no matter who the enemy may be.” He added, “We all here agree that this new weapon represents the last call on man to give up war—or else!”

  The second atomic bomb fell two days later, on Nagasaki.

  At home in Washington, waiting for the war to end and for her family to come home, Elizebeth sat on the porch in the evening and wrote letters to the children and William, taking breaks to go upstairs and listen to radio bulletins. The weather turned cool and rainy. Each time she wrote to William she had to use a different address because he seemed to be moving all over the place. She worried he wasn’t getting her letters. His letters reached her after a time lag of seven or eight days, which meant that their letters were crossing midstream.

  On August 7, when the radio carried news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the news didn’t bother Elizebeth as much as it did William. She wrote to her husband that day, “Everyone is saying this will end the war P.D.Q.”—pretty damn quick. “I wonder! Much too good to be true, say I.”

  Th
e morning after the Nagasaki bombing, August 10, William got up in his London hotel, shaved, showered, ate a breakfast of bacon and egg, and took a bus to one of the city offices of his British colleagues. It was a bright day and the sun felt good on his face. After lunch he decided to get out and watch some tennis at a nearby public court, a mixed-doubles match, and he was enjoying the high quality of play when at 1 P.M. a U.S. Army lieutenant came running to tell him the Japanese had accepted surrender terms presented to the emperor. Unofficially, the war was over.

  Word reached Elizebeth at the Naval Annex that day, and at 7:30 P.M. she started a new letter to her husband, writing at the top, “A day we will remember!” She told him she was getting tired of managing everything at home, fixing things around the house, sopping up after a small flood in the basement, getting the car ready for its annual inspection (“the fenders cost $30, the other work $13”), “all chores and no play with my Sweetheart. But maybe if V.J. comes true, we can both go play for a long vacation.”

  “By the time this reaches you,” William wrote four days later, “the end of the war will be a fact.” He said he was sorry she was tired and knew it was hard to be alone. He suggested sweeping the leaves from the sewer inlet on the side of the house to prevent rainwater from backing up and leaking into the basement. William also replied to a warm letter from John Ramsay, who had asked his father which books he should read to educate himself in spare hours at the Army Air Corps barracks. William recommended So Little Time, a war novel by J. P. Marquand (“so good”), and ended the ten-page letter by praising his son’s vocabulary: “You’ve improved remarkably in penmanship and format. You do yourself proud, in fact. I found only one or two orthographic irregularities or aberrations (misspellings, to you!). They are of no consequence. Dad.”

  Japan surrendered unconditionally on August 14. President Truman declared a two-day holiday for federal workers. A crowd of 75,000 gathered at the White House, ringing bells, blowing horns. Elizebeth stayed in and tried to recover from a stomach bug, drinking clear consommé and ginger tea. “Bobbie, darling,” she wrote to her daughter, who was scheduled to return from Panama in September, “I sure am counting days—only 23 more and you will be here! Oh, frabjous, frabjous day!”