Quotes from Jason Fagone

the Renaissance scholar Erasmus, who "believed in one aristocracy—the aristocracy of intellect," she wrote in a paper. "He had one faith—faith in the power of thought, in the supremacy of ideas.

He paid the codebreakers and scientists tiny salaries but promised to take care of them in all other ways. Food, lodging, recreation: they would live like the "minor idle rich" as long as they stayed under his wing at Riverbank.

Until 1930, almost all codebreaking for the U.S. government's planetary war against smuggling was handled by these two tired and perpetually overworked women, Elizebeth and her clerk

warm, spacious drawing room. The walls were lined with double-paned casement windows

He had always found this a comforting thought, that the age of barbarism was not long past, that if humans failed to be kind it was because they were still children, historically speaking

The Axis was growing bolder in the final months of 1940. Japan invaded Vietnam, expanding its empire in East Asia. The Nazis confiscated the private radios and telephones of Jewish families and cordoned off the Warsaw Ghetto with barbed wire, trapping 400,000 adults and children, most of them Polish Jews.

The British were afraid. They knew they didn't have the money, the people, or the weaponry to sustain a long fight against the Nazis. They needed America to join the war. Their survival as a nation depended on it.

The codebreakers had known for days, if not weeks, that a large Japanese attack was coming. William and the rest of his team had seen the MAGIC intercepts. It was obvious from MAGIC that Japan had been poised to strike; the only mystery was where. What surprised William on December 7 was not the attack itself but the location. He thought it would happen in Manila, not Pearl Harbor.

So this is where the CIA began— with J. Edgar Hoover telling the British to go to hell, and the British not appreciating it. This was also when the British began making friendly advances toward Elizebeth Friedman.

MAGIC secret. It was a prime example of the brutal choices that codebreakers must live with. Do you take risks to keep a secret that may save hundreds of thousands of future lives, or do you expose the secret to save a small number of lives right now? William once referred to this broad dilemma as "cryptologic schizophrenia," adding, "What to do? Thus far, no real psychiatric or psychoanalytic cure has been found for the illness.

The articles said variously that the code had been cracked by "FBI cryptographers" or "a check with the Navy." Hoover himself wrote about the Doll Lady in The American Magazine, calling her "one of the cleverest woman operators I have encountered. Cultured, businesslike, cunning, and, despite her 45 years of age, most attractive

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

It was the only time before or since when Americans became emotionally invested in the idea of self-deprivation and frugality. Third graders roamed their neighborhoods in packs, gathering scrap materials, tires, and paper and cooking fat and old sneakers whose soles could be sacrificed for the rubber. The Big Three automakers stopped making cars and started making planes. Factory workers took secrecy oaths. Everybody had a secret now.

doubted that men would give up their power without a vicious fight.

The common saying about cryptologists, as William phrased it, was that "it is not necessary" to be insane, "but it helps.

a quote from Henry Ford: "THINKING ALWAYS AHEAD, THINKING ALWAYS OF TRYING TO DO MORE, BRINGS A STATE OF MIND IN WHICH NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE.

He didn't care about the answers so much as the questions. He enjoyed science because it was an interesting way of being alive.

During the Second World War, an American woman figured out how to sweep the globe of undercover Nazis.

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.

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.

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.

The world is made of stuff and that stuff behaves in certain predictable ways; if you master the rules, you master the stuff.

the U.S. was the worst-governed country in the world," that Roosevelt wanted war "at the instigation of the Jews, who controlled industry and the press," and that England was "a paper tiger with its little fleet and meager air force.

The aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh argued in popular radio speeches that it would be foolish and hypocritical to fight Germany. He said America had no standing to accuse the Nazis of aggression and barbarism because America had sometimes been aggressive and barbaric itself. Later he argued that American Jews were a "danger to this country" on account of their "ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.