The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies
67 pages • 2-hour read
Jason FagoneThe Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3, Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, mental illness, and physical abuse.
Part 3: “The Invisible War”
Part 3, Chapter 1 Summary: “Grandmother Died”
World War II began with a deception orchestrated by the Nazis. On August 31, 1939, SS officer Alfred Naujocks launched a false-flag operation: Naujocks and his team would stage a fake Polish attack on a German radio station to provide Adolf Hitler with a pretext for invasion. News outlets reported a Polish attack, and the Wehrmacht invaded Poland at dawn on September 1. Though President Franklin Delano Roosevelt publicly expressed hope that America could avoid the war, he and his advisers privately worried about Nazi designs on South America.
US strategists feared that if Germany seized control of South American nations, Nazi bombers could strike US coastal cities. Millions of German colonists already lived across the continent, having emigrated since the late 19th century. They built extensive infrastructure—schools, businesses, and airlines—creating enclaves sometimes called “Greater Germany.” Homegrown fascist movements also flourished: Brazilian Integralists marched in green uniforms giving Nazi salutes, while powerful South American officials (such as Juan Perón) openly admired Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
Hitler met Argentina’s ambassador in June 1939, expressing hope for the country’s neutrality while predicting his own dominance over the region. The conflict that followed would be a largely invisible war fought through clandestine means. At a Hamburg training school, SS intelligence officers were taught techniques including secret inks, microdot photography, and hand ciphers based on popular novels. In 1941, the SS dispatched its top radio expert, Gustav Utzinger, to South America.
Elizebeth’s wartime work remained deeply classified until after her death. In a 1975 interview, she alluded only briefly to this period of her professional life, noting that she had worked on espionage. Her involvement began accidentally in early 1940 when her Coast Guard Cryptanalytic Unit at the Treasury Annex identified new voices in radio intercepts. Working with her team of junior codebreakers, Elizebeth operated from a long table surrounded by maps and cipher machines, including an old Enigma and a Kryha device. She reported to Vice Admiral John Farley, who reported to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr.
After the unit shifted focus from smuggling to monitoring foreign ships for neutrality violations, Elizebeth began detecting encrypted messages from unregistered stations in Mexico, South America, and the US. The messages contained intelligence about Allied ship movements and factory capacities. She realized that these were Nazi spy circuits, each protected by different codes that had to be broken without alerting the enemy. This was counterespionage work requiring extreme secrecy.
Elizebeth’s early successes came quickly. She broke book ciphers by identifying frequent number patterns that revealed city names. This allowed her to uncover Nazi agents in Mexico—codenamed “Max” and “Glenn”—who were reporting ship positions to facilitate U-boat attacks. In January 1940, Elizebeth encountered an unknown system later identified as Enigma traffic. By stacking 60 to 70 messages and examining them in depth, she noticed that the operators had mistakenly used identical starting positions for all transmissions. This allowed her to treat each column of letters as a simple substitution cipher. Observing that no letter ever encrypts as itself—a known Enigma limitation—she and her team reverse-engineered the machine’s rotor wiring through pattern analysis. A postwar assessment would call this the first recovery of Enigma wiring in the US. Though the messages turned out to be Swiss army traffic using a commercial Enigma model, the achievement demonstrated Elizebeth’s aptitude for machine ciphers.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, meanwhile, faced a crisis. His 1938 attempt to prosecute Nazi spy Guenther Rumrich ended in embarrassment when agent Leon Turrou tipped off suspects who fled the country. To restore the FBI’s reputation, Hoover convinced Roosevelt in June 1940 to expand FBI jurisdiction throughout South America, creating the Special Intelligence Service (SIS). However, the first SIS agents dispatched in September lacked training and resources. Hoover ordered Elizebeth to train FBI agent W. G. B. Blackburn in cryptanalysis. Though Blackburn established a small FBI cryptographic branch, this proved inadequate. Hoover needed the full capability of Elizebeth’s Coast Guard unit.
Elizebeth harbored doubts about the war. She read pacifist poetry and worried for her 14-year-old son, John Ramsay, who could face conscription. In June 1940, she escaped to Mexico for a week with her daughter, Barbara, and sister, Edna, but the worsening news from Europe—such as Nazi tanks advancing on Paris—made the trip difficult to enjoy. Letters from William suggested that he was struggling; he spent evenings alone writing technical papers that he feared no one would read. By the time Elizebeth returned to DC, the Nazis had entered Paris.
Part 3, Chapter 2 Summary: “Magic”
On a September day in 1940, cryptanalyst Genevieve Grotjan believed that she had found subtle cycles of repetition in the cipher. Deputy Frank Rowlett examined her work and began jumping excitedly, shouting that she had found the breakthrough they needed. William entered, immediately grasped the significance of the patterns, and told the team that this would be a milestone in cryptologic history. His subdued reaction puzzled Rowlett, who later found William sitting alone in his office.
Five days later, on September 25, 1940, the team produced its first complete plaintext. They had reverse-engineered Japan’s complex Purple cipher machine without ever seeing it, a feat comparable to Alan Turing’s Enigma work. The intelligence derived from these decryptions received the codename “Magic.” Magic provided actionable intelligence that shaped key Pacific battles, including Midway, saving countless Allied lives. Breaking Purple represented William’s final major achievement as a hands-on codebreaker. When he returned home that historic day, however, he could say nothing to Elizebeth about the top-secret breakthrough.
The international situation worsened, with German bombers attacking London, Japan invading Vietnam, and the Nazis sealing the Warsaw Ghetto. In America, aviator Charles Lindbergh led the isolationist America First Committee, arguing against war and later making antisemitic claims about American Jews. British intelligence officers arrived in the US on a covert mission to bring the US into the war. The group included Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl, future famous authors who then worked as spies. In June 1941, Fleming and a colleague met with J. Edgar Hoover to propose a partnership, but Hoover refused, citing neutrality laws. The British responded by working behind the scenes to create a rival agency. Captain Eddie Hastings criticized the FBI’s limitations, arguing that the US needed an organization capable of offensive intelligence. These efforts contributed to Roosevelt’s establishment of the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI) in July 1941, the forerunner to the Office of Strategic Services and CIA.
The British also approached Elizebeth. Representatives including Colonel F. J. M. Stratton, a jovial former astronomer nicknamed “Chubby,” met with her to discuss Nazi espionage. They realized that combining British listening posts across Europe with US Coast Guard stations would create comprehensive coverage. Elizebeth and the British struck up an effective partnership, sharing intercepts and knowledge.
Simultaneously, Elizebeth continued to assist the FBI. She broke various spy codes and provided the FBI Technical Laboratory with tools to solve future messages independently. On December 29, 1940, President Roosevelt delivered a Fireside Chat, warning of secret emissaries operating throughout the Western Hemisphere.
On January 4, 1941, Elizebeth rushed to Walter Reed General Hospital’s Neuropsychiatric Section. She found William confined to a large room with other psychiatric patients, including some in acute distress. The hospital’s chief psychiatrist, Colonel William C. Porter, ran the section primarily as an evaluation center for processing soldiers rather than providing long-term treatment. William spent two and a half months there. Elizebeth visited frequently but was frustrated by the lack of privacy—patients had to consult with the psychiatrist within earshot of one another. She minimized the severity of his condition, preferring terms like “mood swings” to “depression.”
While William was hospitalized, his deputies traveled to Bletchley Park with two replica Purple machines, sharing their breakthrough with grateful British codebreakers. In March 1941, William was discharged after doctors diagnosed an “anxiety reaction” caused by prolonged overwork. He returned to duty on April 1, but the hospitalization created lasting problems. The Army honorably discharged him weeks later for physical disqualification, forcing him to continue as a civilian and eventually sue for reinstatement. His illness also altered the marriage dynamic, requiring Elizebeth to be the stronger partner while maintaining her demanding job.
Part 3, Chapter 3 Summary: “The Hauptsturmführer and the Funkmeister”
Though he’s now an obscure historical figure, Johannes Siegfried Becker was one of Nazi Germany’s most effective spies. By mid-1944, the FBI traced activities of 250 agents and 29 radio stations back to Becker, who spoke four languages, used 47 aliases, and wore a gold SS death’s-head ring given to him by Heinrich Himmler. Despite his importance, the FBI never caught him, and he remained invisible. He was Elizebeth’s ultimate adversary.
Becker’s early spy career between 1936 and 1939 was unremarkable and marred by personal scandals, including impregnating a Brazilian cabinet minister’s wife. German expatriates disliked his vanity and grotesquely long fingernails. Yet Becker possessed a crucial quality: adaptability. He worked for AMT VI, the SS foreign-intelligence office employing 500 people in Berlin. The organization’s South American section was led by incompetent ideologues whose fanaticism proved self-defeating. Though a loyal Nazi, Becker was pragmatic and learned from mistakes.
After Poland’s invasion, Becker was appointed top SS agent for South America. Upon arriving in Buenos Aires in December 1940 with explosives, he pivoted to building a spy network after the local ambassador told him to dump his bombs. Becker recruited the capable German businessman Albrecht Engels, codenamed “Alfredo,” who already spied for the rival Abwehr military intelligence service. Engels was impressed by Becker’s professionalism, unlike his other Abwehr colleague Josef Starziczny (“Lucas”), one of many whom he considered to be “imbeciles.”
Becker transformed Engels’s operation into a sophisticated network. He established courier systems using commercial airlines, taught advanced ciphers based on books and grilles, and arranged wireless communication using the radio of the docked Swiss ship SS Windhuk. He adopted the codename “Sargo” and requested a radio expert. In September 1941, the SS sent Gustav Utzinger, a 26-year-old chemist and former navy radio operator using the codename “Luna.” Though initially unimpressed by Becker’s lack of education, Utzinger came to respect his espionage skills. They formed a formidable partnership.
In late spring 1941, Elizebeth first encountered Sargo in South American intercepts. She and her team identified three clandestine stations in Brazil and Chile communicating with Germany. They assigned alphanumeric labels to each circuit and outlined the network’s structure. After the spies switched from book ciphers to grille ciphers in September 1941, she penetrated both systems. The Coast Guard disseminated decrypts to multiple agencies, including the SIS, which used them to aid field agents in South America. However, the relationship was one-sided. The FBI never shared intelligence back and systematically obscured the Coast Guard’s contributions. A postwar FBI history credits its own Technical Laboratory for the solutions, though declassified documents marked “SIS Dupe” clerks indicate otherwise.
Elizebeth’s team also assisted with the Ducase, the FBI’s major investigation of the Duquesne spy ring in New York. The ring included big-game hunter Frederick Joubert Duquesne and double agent William Sebold, who transmitted messages via a Long Island radio station using a cipher based on the novel All This and Heaven Too that Elizebeth previously broke. Her decrypts provided crucial evidence, leading to the June 1941 arrest of Duquesne and 32 associates. All were convicted after a sensational trial, bolstering J. Edgar Hoover’s public reputation as a successful spy catcher. Elizebeth received no credit and was privately angered that the FBI publicly exposed important cryptographic methods.
A day after a Nazi U-boat sank a US ship and killed over 100 sailors, Roosevelt signed an executive order transferring the Coast Guard to the Navy. Elizebeth was unhappy with the disruption. Treasury Secretary Morgenthau planned to discuss the matter with Elizebeth, but Pearl Harbor changed his plans. On December 7, after hearing of the attack, William repeated, “[B]ut they knew, they knew, they knew” (236). Though his “Magic” intercepts had indicated an imminent Japanese strike, intelligence dissemination failures prevented defensive action. This became a long-term obsession for William, who developed the concept of “cryptologic schizophrenia,” referring to the difficult choice between protecting an intelligence source and acting on its information.
The Pearl Harbor attack transformed US society. The Coast Guard appointed Lieutenant Leonard T. Jones as military chief of the Cryptanalytic Unit; Elizebeth was demoted from overall head but remained the unit’s civilian commander. Her expertise remained in high demand. President Roosevelt’s son James Roosevelt and William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the new office of the COI, requested her services. She spent three and a half weeks building the COI’s first cryptographic section from scratch but was appalled by Donovan’s cavalier security practices. Elizebeth wrote a formal, critical letter and returned to the Coast Guard.
Back at her unit, Elizebeth found South American spy messages increasingly malevolent. After Brazil declared solidarity with the US, Nazis targeted Brazilian ships using coordinates provided by Sargo and Alfredo. During Operation Drumbeat, U-boats killed 5,000 Allied seamen. Elizebeth rushed to decrypt ship-movement reports, hoping to provide warnings. In March 1942, she solved intercepts revealing a Nazi plot to sink the troopship RMS Queen Mary. Hitler had offered the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves (a military decoration) and 1 million Reichsmarks to any U-boat captain who destroyed her. Elizebeth’s decrypts warned the captain, who evaded a waiting submarine, saving more than 8,000 lives.
In February and March 1942, Elizebeth noticed panic in the spy messages. The São Paulo transmitter fell silent. Engels reported police raids. Elizebeth realized that a premature roundup was underway that would compromise her intelligence source by alerting the spies that their codes were broken. On March 15, Brazilian detective Elpido Reali arrested Starziczny in São Paulo. Engels activated emergency protocols and sent a final warning before his own arrest on March 18 by Brazilian federal police.
The roundup, directed by FBI agent Jack West with technical help from Federal Communications Commission (FCC) employee Robert Linx, resulted in nearly 90 arrests. To force confessions, West showed hundreds of Elizebeth’s decrypts to Brazil’s president and high officials. This led to the torture of prisoners, including Abwehr spy Friedrich Kempter. The operation ultimately failed because Becker and Utzinger escaped. From prison, Engels smuggled letters to Berlin warning that their codes were compromised. Berlin alerted remaining stations to change systems. When Engels received a secret message—a pack of cigarettes—confirming Becker’s safety, he felt hopeful that the network could be rebuilt with stronger codes.
Part 3, Chapters 1-3 Analysis
The narrative structure of these chapters contrasts the visible devastation of physical combat with the covert landscape of espionage. Against a backdrop of overt military actions like the German blitz on London and the attack on Pearl Harbor, the primary focus is South America as a central theater for an invisible war fought through spy circuits and radio intercepts. This spatial shift from European battlefields to neutral South American republics reframes the stakes of World War II, emphasizing that intelligence work operates independently of formal borders. By detailing the clandestine activities of figures like Becker and Utzinger, the narrative illustrates how ideological expansion relies on hidden infrastructure. This shadow war becomes a framework for understanding cryptology, illustrating how threats to national security can be invisible and require a new paradigm of defensive strategy.
Within this clandestine landscape, Elizebeth and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover are positioned as structural foils, outlining a conflict between different intelligence methodologies. Elizebeth’s approach is characterized by methodical analysis and an understanding that alerting spies to compromised codes destroys the intelligence source. Conversely, Hoover and his bureau represent a more aggressive, publicity-focused approach. The FBI’s premature arrests in Brazil, reliant on Elizebeth’s decrypts, led to the collapse of the surveillance network and the escape of key operatives. This institutional friction highlights a conflict between the patient work of cryptanalysis and the overt tactics of law enforcement, pointing to the idea of Secrecy and the Consolidation of Institutional Power as a recurring issue in Elizebeth’s career. The narrative also underscores how the FBI systematically obscured Elizebeth’s contributions by assigning its own file numbers to her decrypts. By juxtaposing her quiet efficacy with the bureau’s counterproductive operations, the text examines the erasure of female expertise in a male-dominated hierarchy and suggests that institutional ambition can undermine strategic intelligence.
Beyond institutional conflict, the high-stakes intellectual labor of codebreaking carried a profound psychological burden, as shown in the deterioration of William’s mental health. His hospitalization illustrates the human cost of maintaining national secrets. The narrative introduces the concept of “cryptologic schizophrenia” to describe the dissonance that codebreakers experience when they possess life-saving information but are forbidden from acting on it to protect their intelligence sources. This ethical crisis was crystallized during the attack on Pearl Harbor, where William was devastated by the failure to act on warnings from “Magic” intercepts. His recurring utterance that “they knew, they knew, they knew” captures the trauma of foresight without agency (236). Through William’s mental-health crisis, the text’s portrayal of cryptology shifts from that of a purely mathematical exercise to a psychologically perilous endeavor, emphasizing the personal cost of bearing national secrets.
The narrative makes the abstract process of codebreaking more accessible by detailing its methodology in a way that allows the reader to follow along. For example, Elizebeth’s method of solving Enigma intercepts is described as stacking numerous messages and analyzing the columns of letters as individual substitution ciphers. This structural approach transformed seemingly random ciphertext into a pattern that could be mapped and dismantled. Her ability to reconstruct the mechanical wiring of the Enigma machine from textual patterns alone demonstrates cryptanalysis as a form of abstract reverse-engineering. This focus on method highlights the intellectual rigor required to defeat complex cipher machines, showing that success relies not on inspiration alone but on patience and systematic analysis. This approach illustrates how Cryptology Blends Rigorous Science With Creative Intuition and how human intellect deconstructs the rigid, automated systems used by opposing regimes.
The central tension of these chapters culminates in the narrative irony of Elizebeth’s historical erasure. As she pioneered radio intelligence to track Nazi spies, her successes were appropriated by other government agencies, particularly the FBI. The irony lies in the parallel between her operational objective—to remain invisible to her targets—and her subsequent invisibility in the historical record. The FBI’s postwar history, for instance, credits its own Technical Laboratory for solutions derived from her work. The text corrects this record by referencing declassified documents that Coast Guard clerks marked as an “SIS Dupe,” indicating that the FBI had simply copied their findings. This erasure underscores a paradox of counterespionage: The more effective the operative, the more concealed their work must be. Ultimately, the narrative functions as a historical corrective by documenting the paper trail of Elizebeth’s decrypts, critiquing how institutional memory can be manipulated.
Unlock all 67 pages of this Study Guide
Get in-depth, chapter-by-chapter summaries and analysis from our literary experts.
- Grasp challenging concepts with clear, comprehensive explanations
- Revisit key plot points and ideas without rereading the book
- Share impressive insights in classes and book clubs