5

Enigma in the Suitcase

ON SUNDAY, JANUARY 11, 1942, when Churchill had flown back to England, Eleanor Grecay Weis, a trim, soft-spoken twenty-three-year-old who shared a Brooklyn apartment with her school friend, Charlotte Gristed, had spent her morning on her regular task of scanning the New York Times want ads for jobs. As usual there were plenty of vacancies, but she wanted something more exciting than working behind a counter at Macy’s or serving in a restaurant on Third Avenue, like Gristed. Her own present post as a receptionist for a Polish dentist had lost its appeal, the more so as he complained about New York and spoke of Warsaw as the center of Europe, and in between his patients, told her that he was going back there once he’d saved enough money. But the war had stopped that—just as it had ended her dream of going to France to see Paris and, afterward, London. Gristed had shaken her head and said it wouldn’t be safe now to go there because of the war. Besides, New York was getting more exciting with all the émigrés from Europe. Was that why there was no job that would excite her? Weis asked herself.

Earlier that morning she had listened to the radio reporting the departure of the British prime minister back to England and Donovan describing the visit to a radio reporter as “a curtain-raiser to history.” Her uncle had served with Donovan in the First World War, and had taken her to see The Fighting 69th, the movie about Donovan’s regiment in the trenches of Flanders. “A man’s man,” her uncle had said at the end of the movie.

The film had made a sufficient impact on Weis for her to listen whenever Donovan spoke on the radio or in a newsreel. His deep voice had never lost its Irish brogue. She wondered if what seemed a hint of sadness in his voice came from the death of his daughter, Patricia, in a road accident, driving the convertible he had given her to celebrate her college graduation in 1940. But on that Sunday morning in January, Donovan’s tone on the radio in answer to a reporter’s question was positive. “Smart people like Churchill can do the job of winning the war with our help.”

Encouraged by the words, Weis continued to work her way through the Times section advertising jobs. One had caught her eye, for a secretary with administrate skills, ready to work long hours. Applicants were to phone a telephone number and leave their name, details of present work, and a call-back number.

The advertisement had been placed by Allen Dulles, a Wall Street lawyer, the first of a number of attorneys and professional acquaintances Donovan had invited to “come aboard” the OSS.

Dulles was forty-nine years old, smartly dressed, a pipe smoker, and still in a marriage he knew was long over. The son of a Presbyterian clergyman and educated at Princeton, he had traveled around Europe, had served in the State Department, and was on the US delegation to the 1919 Versailles peace conference. Returning to New York, he had become a corporate and international lawyer with an office on Wall Street.

Like Donovan, he had developed connections with lawyers in Europe. They included several in Berlin opposed to the growing threat posed by Hitler’s National Socialism and who were founding members of what became known as the Rote Kapelle, the Red Orchestra, a network with links to Moscow.

Those connections attracted Donovan. He knew that Dulles had served in US embassies in Vienna, Paris, and Bern and had spent six months in the Legation in the Swiss city, which was not far from the border with Germany. Donovan was optimistic that Dulles’s contacts in Bern would still be there. Switzerland was a neutral country in a hostile desert, but Bern offered an ideal listening post to spy on Germany.

Donovan had appointed Dulles as the head of the OSS office in New York, located on the fifth floor at 630 Fifth Avenue, and told him he would once more be attached to the US Legation in Bern as the OSS station chief. He would have a $1 million initial budget in a bank account lodged in his name and would be free to choose his own staff and initiate his operation.

On that Sunday evening Dulles went to his office and listened to the recordings of the latest applicants for the advertisement in that morning’s Times. The only one that attracted him was Eleanor Grecay Weis.

The requisitioned Victoria Hotel where Selwyn Jepson interviewed women for the SOE was a dingy building on Northumberland Avenue in the heart of London. Its windows were boarded up and, apart from the sandbags around the entrance, there was no sign that the building had any connection with the war. The hotel bar and restaurant had been closed, and the lone man stationed at reception checked each woman’s name on a list. After noting the time she arrived, he would take her to the elevator and escort her to the second floor, where Jepson had his office in what had been a bedroom.

The bed had been removed and in its place were a desk and an armchair. Blackout curtains were kept drawn over the window. A ceiling light and a desk lamp lit the room. The walls were without any pictures, but a poster was hung behind the desk to catch the eye of anyone entering the room. It showed a woman seated on a couch in an evening dress. She looked alluring and desirable, as she listened closemouthed to three serviceman gathered around her. The poster was captioned CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES.

Jepson had sent each woman a brief letter requesting them to come to the hotel to discuss “their role in the war.” His letters were written on War Office stationery and sent to their home addresses, which MI5 had provided along with the background checks he had required for potential agents.

A number of the women had come to their interviews dressed in clothes that were both fashionable and respectable. Others came in well-worn dresses he suspected had been in use for some time. Since the start of the war, new clothes were rationed and expensive. Some of the women wore the uniforms of the Auxiliary Territorial Service, ATS, or the Woman’s Auxiliary Air Force, WAAF.

Many were Anglo-French, with British fathers who had married French women after the First World War, and included Jews, Roman Catholics, Buddhists, Protestants, and Quakers. Their mixed parentage and a French upbringing had given them knowledge of French customs. The MI5 checks established that most of the women had come to England before the occupation of France. While some had been aware of the French Resistance, most had no hands-on knowledge of its activities.

Jepson structured each interview to last no longer than an hour, during which he explored a woman’s personality and motives, doing so in the French language to test her fluency. As she entered his office, he “would see if she had the French look—dark hair, olive skin, and medium height.”

There were other qualities Jepson looked for. “Honesty and a sense of purpose and ability to okay instructions and issue orders. Leadership qualities and a total belief in what they were doing was important along with coolness and courage. But courage was not the absence of fear: it was the willingness to carry out actions which required taking a calculated risk while at the same being aware it would also endanger not only her own life but not put other lives in danger.”

To more easily learn about the women who sat opposite him in his office, he conducted interviews more as conversations. He sensed that when they entered his office they were filled with expectation. But apart from the wall poster there was nothing about him in his lounge suit to suggest he was in any way involved in the war. It was a presence he deliberately created to explore the qualities he was looking for: character and inner strength and a readiness to live near the edge of death under the Nazi jackboot.

His first questions explored why she had accepted the invitation to the interview. Background checks had shown that Anglo-French women were equally as loyal to Britain as to France. He discussed their own feelings about the German occupation. Would any relatives there be willing to help the Resistance? Jepson intended the questions would establish how far an interviewee would be committed. The majority answered that they were sure their relatives would join the struggle against the German occupation and the Vichy government.

He noticed many of the women came from either middle-class or slightly upper-class backgrounds, and their linguistic skills convinced him they could pass as native French. Jepson knew that if they completed their training they would be assigned to the SOE’s French Section, where language skills were essential for couriers and wireless operators.

When he was satisfied a woman had shown both her ability to speak French “like a native” and her British patriotism, he asked his key question: Was she willing to return to France after she had been specially trained for a mission where she would learn to kill and would face death at the hands of the Gestapo if captured?

Jepson had discussed with Vera Atkins how far he should go in dealing with the mistreatment a woman agent could expect if captured. They had agreed that how an agent looked and dressed would be an essential part of their clandestine work as couriers to allow them to operate in a world where German soldiers manned road checkpoints and Gestapo officers traveled on trains to check tickets.

At the end of every interview Jepson asked each woman the same question: Did she really want to be trained? If she said she did, he handed her a copy of the Official Secrets Act and reminded her of the penalties of prosecution and jail she faced if she broke it.

With a handshake at the door he said she would hear shortly whether she had been selected for training.

In the two years that Jepson had been the SOE’s recruiting officer, he had interviewed over seventy women. The majority had successfully passed their training. Thirty-nine would be parachuted into France and thirteen dropped into Holland and Belgium.

In New York, Dulles interviewed Eleanor Grecay Weis in his office at 630 Fifth Avenue. The blue-uniformed guard in the lobby telephoned Dulles to confirm her arrival, and he had been waiting to greet her with a friendly smile at the door. There was still the maturity and poise in her voice he had detected on the tape in response to his advertisement. She glanced around to see if there was anything about him or his office that offered a clue to what the job could be. He asked her about her work as a dentist’s receptionist and said working for him would be different. She asked him in what way? He suspected her experience of job hunting had taught her to ask questions at the outset of an interview.

He said her work would involve the war. The OSS had been created to analyze and correlate all information and data relating to national security. Its most secret work was to wage unorthodox war in support of the armed forces and would include sabotage and subversion to assist the French Resistance fighting the Nazis. She asked another question. What did he want her to do?

Dulles explained she would set up a filing system, handle the switchboard, and log all calls. Other women would be recruited; a number would be émigrés who would work with her. Later they would be transferred to other OSS offices in the city once she was satisfied they showed an English language capability in writing reports on the countries they had emigrated from. She was to bring the reports to him before she filed them. Everything she read must be kept secret. Dulles sensed the proposition appealed to her sense of patriotism and taste for adventure.

On the same floor of the building, William Stephenson ran his British intelligence operation. He wore a suit so shapeless it did not appear to be his own. He had adopted the American penchant for informality and would call the OSS, “Oh, So Secret.” In turn Dulles, with whom he had established a close relationship, would call him “Our Friend.” They would exchange messages and documents by pneumatic tubes, which Dulles had installed in their offices. It reminded Weis of how Macy’s staff sent sales details to the accounts department.

In her own office outside Dulles’s suite, she became used to the sound of messages coming from and going to Stephenson’s suite at the far end of the floor. He would regularly stride into her office and, in his soft Canadian accent, tell her it was going to be another long day before opening and closing the door of Dulles’s office behind him.

Often the red button on her phone would flash for her to connect Dulles with OSS headquarters in Washington, and she would put the call through to the deep Irish voice she had heard on the radio that Sunday morning saying “smart people can handle any job.”

Since then she had seen Donovan as he had walked into Dulles’s office. “He had a quiet unassuming manner and I realized that I was working for a man like no other,” she would later recall.

On his visits to New York, Donovan discussed with Dulles the expansion of the OSS in the city. Research and Analysis had an office at 55 West Fifty-Third Street to catalog and assess photographs that could be used in planning subversive operations. Morale Operations was housed on Times Square, where its staff created “black” propaganda against Germany and Japan.

X-2, the Counterintelligence Branch, had its office on the West Side of Manhattan, where a number of women were engaged in building up backgrounds on personalities, various industries, and ongoing political developments in European countries.

At 610 Fifth Avenue was another OSS office that was simply marked at its entrance as UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT. It was the Biographical Records Division.

It had been formed to obtain intelligence, mostly about Germany, from émigrés arriving in New York, among the last to have Nazi exit visas. The majority were Jews. Among the first staff recruited to work in Biographical Records was Emma Crisler Rado, an attractive, dark-haired, Swiss-born wife of a New York psychologist with a busy practice. He knew Donovan and had recommended that his wife could make a good interviewer.

She had become one of the section’s most skilled interviewers, using the methods her husband told her worked with his own patients: “Let the subject talk about himself or herself. It makes them feel good and loosens their tongues. Be a good listener. Don’t take notes; it will intimidate interviewees. Tell them that what they are saying was of interest.” Using those methods, she had learned a great deal about life in Germany.

Over the weeks, men and women were referred by Emma Rado to Biographical Records to be interviewed for jobs in one of the other OSS offices being set up around New York. The candidates would be taken to a waiting room to be called for an interview. A team of linguists who spoke French, Dutch, Italian, and German were seeking those who not only had knowledge of foreign affairs but were suitable to be selected for the training camps that the OSS had opened in Maryland and Virginia. The sixteen-week courses were run by instructors who had been transferred from the SOE’s Camp X in Canada, which had opened on December 6, 1941. They taught how to pick locks, take photographs without being spotted, and piece together small scraps of documents retrieved from trash baskets.

Eloise Page, Donovan’s secretary, was one of the few in OSS headquarters in Washington who knew where he could be reached in an emergency; she would tell other staff wanting to contact him that “he is where he needs to be.” She became known as “Hush-Hush.” At the end of her day she would send him a list of callers.

When Donovan went with Stephenson to London to discuss matters connected with their clandestine collaboration, they first headed to Bermuda. There, Page reserved seats 4 and 5 in first class on the Pan Am 314 Clipper flying boat that made the twenty-two-hour journey from Bermuda to Lisbon. From Lisbon, they flew to London. Donovan traveled under the name of Donald Williams and Stephenson as Michael O’Connell. Page had concluded the seat numbers and aliases were part of the secret lives they both lived.

Part of that secrecy was connected with Bermuda. The island was Britain’s oldest overseas territory, with a long tradition of self-government, and had become a key satellite in Stephenson’s networks since the U-boat campaign in the Atlantic had intensified. The devastating losses from submarine attacks on convoys—twenty-nine ships sunk in one night with vital supplies—was destroying the lifeline that Roosevelt had promised Churchill at their meeting in Washington.

To make their deadly patrols in the Atlantic, U-boats were returning to and going from their bases on the French coast at Brest, Saint-Nazaire, and La Rochelle. By 1941 there were thirty-five short-range submarines and twenty-two newly delivered long-range submarines able to stay at sea for over a week. Château de Pignerolle at Saint-Barthélemy-d’Anjou became their communication center. From there Vice Admiral Karl Dönitz commanded the submarines. With better U-boats equipped with improved torpedoes, his operational plans had increased the number of kills, which had a serious effect on the British economy. On December 11, 1941, following Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States, Dönitz launched his Unternehmen Paukenschlag, Operation Drumbeat, to target merchant ships sailing from the east coast of the United States and Canada. The US Navy, unprepared for antisubmarine warfare, depended on the Royal Navy and the Canadian Navy to prevent shipping losses.

Churchill and Roosevelt knew the vital importance of maintaining control of the sea lanes. The prime minister had told the War Cabinet, “It is the dominating fact of the war. Never for a moment must we forget that everything that happens elsewhere on land, or in the air, depends ultimately on winning the Battle of the Atlantic.”

The entry of the United States into the war had increased the opportunity for U-boats as now there were many more convoys leaving New York and the East Coast of America for Europe. Often mist reduced visibility to a few hundred yards, making it difficult for ships’ lookouts to spot a periscope in the towering waves. The sudden explosion of torpedoes striking, followed by the sinking of a ship and the screams of men drowning in icy water, could be heard in the night. The U-boat crews themselves received news on each convoy via the highly sophisticated cipher machine that every submarine carried. It was called Enigma.

It had a keyboard resembling a typewriter, and the keys were connected in a complex arrangement of wiring to drums inside the machine. If the message included the letter A, a drum would change it to a Z. B would become a Y. The permutation of letters could be endless. Only a U-boat commander knew how to decode the message by adjusting the settings of the drums. The Enigma’s codes were regarded as unbreakable.

The machine was invented after the First World War by Arthur Scherbius, a gifted mathematician in Berlin, who sold it as “a secret writing machine.” In the early 1920s banks and other financial institutions around Europe bought copies; the Vatican used it to communicate in Latin with nuncios, the Holy See’s diplomats stationed around the world. The American ambassador in Berlin sent a machine to Henry Stimson, the new secretary of state in Washington, and received a curt response: “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”

The German Navy was the first military branch to adopt Enigma, introducing it into service in 1926. By 1928 the German army had introduced its own version, the Enigma G, updated in 1930. The addition of a plugboard greatly increased its cryptographic strength, and additional complexity was repeatedly added to the military Enigma machines, making decryption more and more difficult. Each rotor could be set to one of twenty-six possible positions. Codebooks were printed in red, water-soluble ink on pink paper, so they could easily be destroyed if a U-boat was endangered and captured.

But in the summer of 1938, the Polish Army cryptology unit had been working to develop its skill of reading Wehrmacht code traffic, and had found reasons to fear that Hitler planned to invade their country.

In 1938 the Polish Army had not yet been ready to share its secrets on Enigma with British codebreakers. But a well-placed agent inside Warsaw would help.

Betty Pack’s marriage to British diplomat Arthur Pack had suffered a terrible blow when he was transferred to Warsaw. Arthur Pack blamed what he saw as his wife’s personal and political indiscretions in Spain. He had no idea that Betty not only was keeping a succession of love affairs from him but also was reporting back to British Naval Intelligence. She had already come to the attention of the SIS, and Arthur’s transfer to Warsaw might well have been an excuse to move her to an area of Europe that, in the summer of 1937, was fast becoming an important place to have a cool and effective spy. Betty was twenty-seven when she arrived in Warsaw that September, young and vivacious, with a reputation for fun. Her easy manner with men made her disliked by the conservative diplomats and hostesses with whom she mixed in Warsaw, but it would make her an agent of real importance to the SIS. Her work in the Polish capital would have a real effect on the outcome of the war.

On New Year’s Eve 1937, her husband suffered a stroke. Betty nursed him with care, and in February 1938 they visited England, where Arthur would stay to convalesce. Betty returned to Warsaw alone, and within a few weeks her double life of sexual and international intrigue had moved into a new gear.

Living across from the Packs’ apartment in the diplomatic quarter of the city was a handsome young diplomat named Edward Kulikowski who worked at the Polish Foreign Office. Over suppers of caviar, picnics by the Vistula, and nights of passion in Kulikowski’s small apartment, Pack gently questioned her lover about Poland’s foreign policies toward its German neighbor.

One night Kulikowski let slip about a possible Polish agreement with Germany in which Warsaw would receive a small area of Czechoslovakia, known as Teschen, in return for acquiescing to Hitler’s planned annexation of the Sudetenland. The next morning Pack relayed the conversation with the British embassy’s passport control officer, Jack Shelley, who found the information fascinating and instructed her to immediately find out more. Lieutenant Colonel Shelley was the SIS’s senior officer in Poland. From then on Pack received a monthly stipend from the service’s funds.

Suspicious that the vulnerable Poles might be seeking to make further deals with Hitler, Shelley asked her to increase her contacts with senior Polish diplomats and politicians. Very quickly, she made what would be a vital contact at the American embassy when she found herself seated at a sumptuous dinner next to Count Michael Lubienski, the Polish foreign minister’s senior advisor. As the guests moved from the dining room to the glittering ballroom, Pack, realizing that the count had access to the highest levels of secret documents, gave him her undivided attention. He was similarly transfixed, and next morning a bouquet of roses arrived at her apartment. That night Pack made love to the married count.

As the pair became increasingly inseparable, she began to gently inquire about his work. As she later said, she was always surprised at how easy “close-mouthed patriots give away secrets in bed.”

Through her affair with Lubienski, she garnered information about Enigma. The Poles had obtained early commercial versions of Enigma and were by far the most advanced in understanding how it worked. The SIS knew the Germans planned to make Enigma their central method of message transmission and that breaking its cipher would be of utmost importance in a coming conflict. Lubienski’s boss, Foreign Minister Józef Beck, was kept up-to-date with all developments on Enigma, and Lubienski himself had sight of these secret reports. Through her passionate relationship with him, Pack was able to pass Shelley confirmation that the Poles had been able to read some Enigma traffic, the details of the Polish cryptanalysis unit, and the fact that the Poles had been able to manufacture some of the machines.

Pack sensed how enormously important it would be for Polish cryptanalysts to be able to intercept secret messages from within the German High Command to its generals whose troops were beginning to amass close to the Polish border.

She told Shelley that her lover had told her that the Polish cryptanalysts had learned that the Wehrmacht had a machine, called a radiotelegraph, which would encode a typed message to be sent over the airwaves and decoded by a machine at the receiving end.

In his report to London, Shelley wrote, “It means more traffic and codes for your end to break.”

From Britain, where plans were developing to create a code-breaking center in a Buckinghamshire mansion called Bletchley Park, came a priority response: “Send more.”

Pack’s information had reached London months before Polish intelligence officially shared some of its knowledge of Enigma with Britain. While Britain’s cryptanalysts were beginning to consider the information sourced on Enigma from Pack and other intelligence routes, Shelley brought her to the attention of Colin Gubbins. Gubbins, in turn, mentioned her to William Stephenson, who quickly realized he had an effective, if unorthodox, agent right at the heart of the unfolding events in Europe. Instructed to stick close to Lubienski, Pack even went to Berlin with him when he made a trip there on official business in September 1938. Lubienski had orders from Warsaw to travel to Nuremburg, where he was to be the Polish representative at the Nazi Party Day rally. Pack kissed him good-bye in Berlin; she had secret orders of her own.

International events were unfolding rapidly, with Hitler demanding the incorporation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia into Germany, while British and French leaders were advising the Czechs to concede to the Nazi demands. The SIS urgently needed information on how far Germany’s real plans for Czechoslovakia went. One source was the office of Konrad Henlein, of the Sudeten German Party, whose political dominance in that region was partly behind Britain and France’s feeling that Prague should accept its loss. Henlein had met Hitler on September 1 to complete the plans for German accession of the Sudetenland and, by September 14, the day Lubienski sat through the rally in Munich, he had instructed his men to carry out a series of terror attacks. The SIS instructed a local agent in Prague to burgle Henlein’s office and pass documents to Pack to copy. This she did.

On September 29, Germany, Italy, France, and Britain signed the Munich Agreement, designed to trade Sudeten territory for peace. The Czechs were not consulted. German occupation of the area was to be completed by October 10. In the fullness of time, as Pack’s previous lover Kulikowski had predicted during those romantic walks by the Vistula, Poland’s own claims to Teschen would be honored by Germany when it occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia early in 1939.

As tensions mounted, most British diplomats left Poland. Pack wanted to stay, but Beck had become aware of her affair with Lubienski. She would almost certainly be in danger if the foreign minister began to suspect that his chef de cabinet had been sharing secrets with her. It was time for Betty Pack to move on. It hurt her to leave Lubienski but, as she later wrote, this was “the end of my first secret service mission.”

Before she flew out of Warsaw, Jack Shelley told her that “the firm” would be back in touch. In the meantime, Enigma remained a priority in London.

In July 1939 Menzies, concerned about the increasing possibility of war, had asked Gubbins if he would use his contacts in Polish intelligence, which he had developed during his mission to Warsaw six months before, to discover more about Enigma. He had arranged for Alastair Denniston, the senior cryptographer at the Government Code and Cypher School in London, to brief Gubbins on Enigma. He told Gubbins his own network of international cryptologists included three codebreakers working with Poland’s cryptology unit. They were using “reverse engineering and theoretical mathematics” to break the Enigma’s Wehrmacht code.

Gubbins had discussed the situation with his contacts in Polish Intelligence. He was told to reserve rooms for himself and Denniston in Warsaw’s Bristol Hotel, long a favorite stopover for English travelers. Denniston would carry a large leather suitcase, suitably plastered with hotel and ship stickers, which would mark him as a seasoned traveler. Arriving at the hotel they saw in the lobby a suitcase matching Denniston’s in a pile of baggage. While Gubbins distracted a porter with his own luggage, Denniston removed the identical suitcase and placed his own in its place before taking it out of the lobby and getting in a waiting taxi. The driver was a Polish intelligence officer who took him to the airport. The suitcase contained a German Wehrmacht Enigma cipher machine that Polish Intelligence had stolen. In hours Denniston was back in London with it. After meeting with his own intelligence contacts, Gubbins caught the next flight to London.

On August 22, 1939, Denniston drove forty miles out of the city, with the suitcase holding the Enigma encryption machine, to Bletchley Park, the new home of the Government Code and Cypher School. Its staff were at the peak of their careers as mathematicians, linguists, and university professors who had taught Latin and classics. They were assisted by women who had been drafted in from around the country.

Rozanne Colchester was nineteen when she arrived at Bletchley and found herself working in one of its wooden huts helping to decode messages between Luftwaffe bomber pilots during the London Blitz. She would recall, “We girls worked through the night in smoky, claustrophobic quarters and off-duty we amused ourselves with card games and gossip. We were each reminded that if we talked about our work you could be shot. But it was all terribly exciting.”

That excitement increased with the arrival of Denniston and the suitcase. He carried it into hut 8, where day and night a guard was posted. Alan Turing was among the men who inspected the Enigma machine, along with others who would become legends in the code-breaking world of Bletchley: Gordon Welchman, Edward Travis, Hugh Alexander, and, of course, Denniston. A Cambridge University graduate, Joan Clarke, would soon join them in their examination of Enigma. Her work as deputy head of hut 8 would later be key in cracking the code used by the German navy to communicate with its U-boat fleet.

Two days after Denniston had lifted the cipher machine out of the suitcase, Britain signed a Mutual Assistance Treaty with Poland. On September 1, Germany invaded Poland. Two days later Britain and France declared war on Germany and the Chamberlain government appointed Churchill First Lord of the Admiralty, the precursor to him becoming prime minister and forming a coalition government in May 1940.

On the day Britain declared war on Germany, Denniston told Gubbins he would need the “professor of mathematics type” to work with his codebreakers to decode the Enigma machine. He organized a crossword competition in the Daily Telegraph. Winners were discreetly asked if they would like to take part in a “particular type of work as a contribution to the war effort.” Responses came from chess champions, crossword solvers, and an academic who lectured on the esoteric subject of papyrology, turning reeds into writing paper in ancient Egypt. It had been one of the clues in the competition. Those selected were sent to Bletchley Park to work with Team Enigma.

Denniston also chose a number of women whose skills in the crossword competition satisfied him they would make good cryptologists. Within Bletchley Park the newcomers became known as the “Boffins and Debutantes.” The intelligence they would produce would be classified as “Ultra Secret,” higher than the normally highest classification, “Most Secret.” Ultra Secret messages were sent to the intelligence chiefs at the War Office, Air Ministry, Admiralty, and the Foreign Office. On Churchill’s instructions Gubbins also received copies over the teleprinter installed in his office.

The women would also download information transmitted from British embassies or traffic generated across the British Empire by the telecommunications company Cable & Wireless, Britain’s link with the world of business. Since the outbreak of war the company’s traffic was read by MI6 for anything of interest to the war effort.

Traffic that was decided to be “only commercially sensitive” was rerouted to the intended recipients, including banks in the City of London and corporations. Some of the messages were sent to Churchill’s war rooms under the pavement of the Whitehall area of Westminster. Those were read by Colonel Henry Bevan, listed on the bunker’s staff list as controller of deception. How he decided on the fate of those documents remains unknown to this day.

A month after Team Enigma had produced its first encoded messages, Churchill had described the transcripts as his “golden eggs,” and ordered they should be delivered daily to him. A dispatch rider brought them in a buff-colored box whose key Churchill kept on his watch chain. On the cover of the locked box Denniston had written, ONLY TO BE OPENED BY THE PRIME MINISTER IN PERSON. Churchill would read them in bed. In his midsixties Churchill slept little, his moods raced like clouds across his baby face, as he reminded his staff of the pace of Hitler’s victories: Poland in twenty-six days, Norway in twenty-four days, Denmark in twenty days, Holland in five days, and Luxembourg in twelve hours. Then he would smile and read out the Enigma transcripts at a Cabinet meeting. “Now we know his next move. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of his Nazi regime. We will never parley, we will never negotiate. We will never surrender.”

In their huts in Bletchley Park, the growing band of eavesdroppers worked through the night deciphering the meaningless letters and figures. Encouraged by Denniston, others tested all the possible settings on the stolen Enigma as they decoded the steady stream of messages.

Within months Team Enigma began to read messages from Hitler’s generals to their field commanders, reports on the position of U-boats, requests for men and material.

Strategically located a few hundred miles off the coast of the Carolinas, Bermuda had become a base for monitoring U-boats lurking under the sun-glazed surface of the Atlantic. A special liaison unit, SLU, composed of codebreakers from Bletchley, had been posted to the island. It was stationed at the Royal Navy base near the ancient town of Saint George. The unit’s members had arrived with their decoding equipment on board Britain’s latest and most powerful battleship, King George V. The SLU included a number of women cryptologists—in fact, the women outnumbered the men, who were mostly married, middle aged, and absorbed in their work. The women were young, single, and excited at the prospect of serving the war in a sunny climate while unscrambling U-boat radio traffic and plotting their positions. The information was sent to US Army Air Force bases on the East Coast from where USAAF aircraft flew patrols to attack the U-boats. An early success came when two U-boats were located carrying mines to lay in the shipping lanes out of New York. The aircraft spotted them on the surface with their crew manhandling the mines into sea. As the U-boats crash-dove they were sunk.

At their regular monthly meetings in London, Stephenson and Donovan had discussed with Gubbins how the Pan Am Clipper flights from Bermuda to neutral Lisbon could be used to the advantage of the SOE and OSS. The plane carried not only mail from other Caribbean islands but also passengers from South America.

Before the war those passengers had included German ambassadors and their staff returning for home leave and Abwehr agents from missions on the continent. All were protected by the diplomatic immunity of their passports. That protection had been withdrawn at the outbreak of war at the request of MI6 after it was discovered that Canaris had planted spies in British companies in Buenos Aires, Santiago, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, and elsewhere on the continent.

MI6 spies in Argentina learned that its government had been told by the Japanese ambassador that Japan planned to invade the Falkland Islands, long a British territory in the South Atlantic. The islands would be used as a base for the Axis to launch attacks on British merchant ships carrying supplies for Britain. The ambassador promised the occupation of the Falklands would also ensure the return of Argentina’s sovereignty over the islands, and the aircraft carriers from which the attack on Pearl Harbor had been launched would lead the attack.

On hearing the news, Churchill sent seventeen hundred British troops to the Falklands, telling Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, “It will be a serious matter to lose the Falklands to the Japanese.” Navy warships were dispatched from Gibraltar to reinforce the Royal Navy base at Port Stanley, the Falklands’ capital. In Buenos Aires the British ambassador, Esmond Ovey, had delivered a blunt message from London to the government “not to become involved in a matter which would end their neutrality.”

The Japanese threat never materialized.

FBI agents stationed in Bermuda checked the mail bags on Pan Am flights for letters with a suspicious address that could be destined for German intelligence. One of the world’s experts on secret ink, Stanley Collins, was employed by the FBI to examine confiscated envelopes. At his disposal was a 200-power microscope that could reveal if secret ink had been used to address an envelope and if the handwriting on a letter inside the envelope contained an unusual number of punctuation marks—periods and commas. Collins had discovered they could be microdots containing messages. It was a subtle method used by the Abwehr of sending secrets through the mail. Using a method Collins had developed called “hypermicrophotographic,” the microdots could be enlarged and viewed while still inside the envelope. Messages they contained were read before the letters were returned to the mail bags from which they had been removed.

In London, Stephenson, Donovan, and Gubbins had decided how the Pan Am Clipper flight to Lisbon from Bermuda could be used to unmask the clandestine activities in Latin America of citizens working for German intelligence. Their passports identified them as businessmen of various countries flying to Lisbon on business. Often it was to meet with the Reich Ministry for War Production at its offices in Lisbon to sign contracts. Their names were passed to MI5 and FBI officers in Bermuda to be checked against known collaborators. However, there was a limit to what could be done to stop them from using the airline. To go too far could result in a public outcry in their own countries and damage trade with the United States and Britain.

Using his contacts with Pan Am, Donovan arranged for suspected Latin American passengers on the Lisbon flights to be wined and dined in the island’s colonial-style Princess Hotel while the flying boat was being fueled. Their baggage was placed in a storage room and would be taken on board when the flight was called.

Gubbins had agreed a dozen SOE women—who had learned how to pick locks, open sealed envelopes, and use a matchbox-size camera—could be sent to Bermuda. Dressed in airline overalls, they were taken to the baggage storage room and began to open the suitcases and trunks. Once open, a case or trunk was carefully searched and envelopes and documents were photographed with their cameras.

The documents were then replaced in the same position from where they had been taken and the baggage locked without leaving a trace of tampering. The rolls of film were taken to Stanley Collins to develop in his laboratory. In an envelope stamped DIPLOMAT MAIL, the negatives Collins had developed were entrusted to the seaplane’s pilot. At Lisbon he would hand over the envelope to a member of the British embassy. It would be couriered to London by a Queen’s Messenger.

On a late spring day in March 1942, seven Special Duties high-winged Lysanders left Newmarket and flew to their new base at Tempsford. They descended between a gap in the hills and passed over small villages to land on the longest of the runways, which Jasper Maskelyne had disguised as hedges on either side of farm tracks. In the distance were Gibraltar Farm and several other farm buildings. All bore the hallmark of the illusionist’s skills: moldering thatch on roofs, windows with broken glass, barns with gaps in their roof slates. What had been a worker’s cottage had been left with only its gable ends standing.

Wherever the pilots looked as they taxied along the perimeter, the impression was of dereliction everywhere. An old tractor and trailer stood in a field that had been plowed as if ready for sowing. Hay rotted in a loft. Two pig sties stood empty. The only signs of life were ducks on a pond.

Watching them park on their hardstands was a tall young woman in a WAAF uniform. She stood beside a truck with a welcoming smile and said she had come to bring them to their quarters. She pointed out the boxlike Flying Control Tower, standing alone, and the other Nissen huts that housed the necessities of an operational airfield: the equipment store, meteorological section, photographic section, the parachute packers hut, aircraft maintenance where the ground staff worked, the sick bay, the canteen, the officers’ mess, and the quarters for the other ranks. Finally she pointed to the derelict-looking farmhouse. “Gibraltar Farm. Everything you will do starts inside there. It’s the Ops Block.”

With another smile she climbed back behind the wheel to drive them to their quarters.

On a sunny afternoon in April 1942, Selwyn Jepson walked across the lobby and past the sandbagged guard post at the entrance to SOE headquarters in Baker Street. His FANY driver waited with his car. In his briefcase were the latest files he had collected from Gubbins’s office of the women who had told him he was satisfied they were ready to be sent behind enemy lines.

Between them they would liaise with the French Resistance and recruit and build networks across occupied France, and teach the members of the Resistance how to carry out sabotage operations. The women agents would use their wireless sets to arrange parachute drops of weapons and ammunition and act as couriers, passing messages from one group to another.

They all had their cover stories and had demonstrated their mental and physical fitness, their linguistic ability, and all they had learned about the L-pill, the suicide pill they each could carry. The capsule’s skin was insoluble and if swallowed would pass through the body without causing harm. Only when crushed between the teeth would the pill release the potassium cyanide, bringing instant death.

Jepson had sent copies of the files to Vera Atkins to review. She had an encyclopedic knowledge of wartime France, about travel, curfews, food, and fuel rationing and a multitude of other restrictions that would govern the agents’ day-to-day lives. Her information had helped to forge documents for their cover stories.

Atkins also used it in the lectures she gave to recruits at the training camps and the finishing school at Beaulieu. At the end of each lecture she would collect from trainees credentials they still had: visiting cards, Metro tickets, family photos, French matches. They would be added to cover stories, giving them more credibility if they were stopped and searched by a German patrol.

After attending her lecture, Jepson saw Atkins had a magnetism that he had seen in only some of the women he had interviewed. On that sunny afternoon he told his driver he would walk to Orchard Court, the apartment block where the SOE had provided Atkins with an apartment on the second floor. It had three bedrooms: one for Atkins, one that had been converted into her office, and one for her butler, Andrew Park, who spoke fluent French, wore a dark suit, and kept the apartment spotless. He used Vera’s ration book to do her shopping and prepared afternoon tea for his employer and her visitors.

Jepson used the elevator to the second floor at Orchard Court and walked down the corridor to a door at the end. It was opened by Park, who said that Madam was waiting in her office and led the way down the hall, knocked, and opened a door announcing, “Major Jepson is here, Madam.” Jepson had decided Park had the quiet efficiency of Jeeves and only ever heard him call Atkins “Madam” or “Miss Atkins.”

She motioned Jepson to sit in an armchair that matched the one behind her desk, on which the files Jepson had sent her were neatly stacked.

Atkins reached for a cigarette in a silver box on the desk and lit it with a lighter beside the box. Both were gifts from Buckmaster after she had been appointed as the French Section Intelligence Officer. Drawing on the cigarette until its ash glowed, she placed it between her first and second finger, stained with nicotine on her right hand, and nodded at the cigarette box as if to offer Jepson one. He shook his head; he had given up smoking months ago. Atkins smiled. It was a running issue between them how long he could abstain. She admired determination.

What followed could well have reminded Jepson of one of the stage plays he had written. Atkins said it was time for tea and stood up and clapped her hands. Almost on cue the door opened and Park entered carrying a butler’s tray holding a teapot and two cups, a milk jug, and a plate of jam on toast. With a deferential nod to Atkins he left the room.