The Woman All Spies Fear: Chapters 1–5

The FBI remained leery. They staked out the doll shop, and they examined Dickinson’s bank account and safe-deposit box.

But when he asked the FBI if he could put her onto the case, the FBI balked.

There was usually a certain amount of guesswork involved, and that would make the case a challenge to prosecute. Yet her analysis was shrewd and hard-hitting.

If the Nazis ever learned how good she was at code breaking, it would hamper her efforts to bring their spies down.

Like the open code in Dickinson’s letters, Elizebeth could appear ordinary on the surface. Even now, she is easily underestimated. To get her true measure, you must delve deeper, the way a code breaker would, searching for the truth that lies just out of sight.

Elizebeth did not have an easy start in life. Yet she rose to become one of the most formidable code breakers in the world, the scourge of gangsters and spies.

Elizebeth did not have an easy start in life. Yet she rose to become one of the most formidable code breakers in the world, the scourge of gangsters and spies.

There was nothing she could do about her surname—the “odious name of Smith,” as she put it in her college diary.

A staunch Republican, he was also elected to local office.

But she knew that her father came from Quaker stock, and that he was proud of his forebears. If she could get into a Quaker college, she hoped his pride would prompt him to help pay her costs.

It was such a dismal year that she tried to erase it from her memory, pretending it had never happened.

She scorned pretense, and she believed in plain speaking.

But young women who spoke their minds were not always welcome, even at college, and at times she found herself seething with frustration.

He called her Betty and sent her French sonnets, as well as ardent lines about midnight meetings, written in a bold, dashing hand.

At the time, however, the rift with Van made Elizebeth feel desolate.

Brash skyscrapers, towering high above the city’s busy markets and railroads, made almost anything seem possible.

“Will you go out to Riverbank and spend the night with me?” he demanded.
Elizebeth was “knocked kind of breathless” by the brazen request.

Elizebeth realized he thought she was “a demure little nobody.”

Recovering her poise, she said firmly to Fabyan, “That remains, Sir, for you to find out.”

Was Elizebeth any good at cracking ciphers and codes?

Sometimes Elizebeth also worked as a cryptographer, which meant that she was the one coming up with ways of obscuring the plaintext. For the most part, however, she focused on taking cryptograms apart.

After seeing other tycoons grow bored with their lavish art collections and swanky mansions, Fabyan had invested his own millions in a private brain trust.

Yet many scholars denounced Gallup as a crackpot, and she wanted to prove them wrong.

Yet the project intrigued her.

The gist of the job was simple enough. Elizebeth and the rest of the team had to search for two distinct typefaces, or fonts, on pages from the First Folio.

In this example, the differences in the letters are easy enough to spot, but Elizebeth had to detect something much subtler.
A little twist in the tail of a “y.”
A slightly thinner “i.”
A tiny loop on the crossbar of a letter “t.”

Soon she became a valued member of the team, often chosen to explain the work to Riverbank’s eminent guests.

She noticed that Gallup wasn’t always consistent about how she identified typefaces. It also seemed strange that not even the best workers could reproduce her results.

Elizebeth began to have qualms. “[M]y admiration...turned to uneasy questioning, and then to agonizing doubt.”

Dark-haired and quick-witted, William had charming manners, hazel eyes, and a “strongly intellectual face.” He made an indelible impression on Elizebeth.

Even worse, Christian mobs were killing and maiming Jews in brutal pogroms and riots.

Frederick came first, quickly followed by Rosa and the children, who traveled in steerage.

The daughter of a well-to-do wine merchant, Rosa toiled in Pittsburgh as a peddler for a clothing firm.

With their scant budget pushed to the breaking point, the Friedmans were always in debt.

As he was well aware, however, the study of genes had a dark side. This was the pseudoscience of eugenics, whose many followers believed they could improve the human species through careful breeding. Convinced that some people were inferior, they tried to stop them from having children.

To say so, however, might mean losing their jobs. Loath to take that risk, they spoke only to each other about their concerns, and the secret brought them closer.

As she confided in her diary, the breakup of her previous engagement had left her “mangled and torn and castigated and macerated in soul.”

As she confided in her diary, the breakup of her previous engagement had left her “mangled and torn and castigated and macerated in soul.”

Elizebeth was still wary of entanglement, but sparks began to fly between them—a “Flame which we kindled together.”

Neither of them relished the idea of telling elderly, kindhearted Gallup that her decades of effort were pointless.