World War II brought even more complex challenges - pushing William to the mental breaking point. She began with one clerk eventually she gained the title of cryptanalyst-in-charge, U.S. Elizebeth took a two-baby break before joining the Treasury Department in 1925, tasked with intercepting radio traffic of Prohibition rum-runners.Įlizebeth dealt with up to 2,000 messages per month, and she frequently testified in court. Plot foiled.Īt war’s end, William stayed with the military. She did the job: The traffic was from Hindus living in New York who used German funds to send weapons to colleagues in India fighting British rule. One early success by Elizebeth involved messages the British intercepted but could not read. One key to success was finding a pattern in the frequency of letters and making sense of seeming gibberish. But intercepted messages were a “raw block of babble,” which piled code atop code. The advent of radio-transmitted messages, rather than hand-carried communiques, opened a new field of espionage. They joined a new code-breaking unit of the War Department. As Elizebeth put it, she and William were among the “three or at most four persons” in the United States who knew the slightest thing about codes and ciphers. Their shared lives began when they met (and soon married) on the estate of a wealthy - and eccentric - Chicago industrialist who was smitten with the notion that coded messages were embedded in Shakespeare’s plays.Īmerica’s entrance into World War I put an end to such nonsense.

The woman who smashed codes