But the FBI didn’t intercept the messages. It didn’t monitor the Nazi circuits. It didn’t break the codes. It didn’t solve any Enigma machines. The coast guard did this stuff – the little codebreaking team that Elizebeth created from nothing.

Codebreakers train themselves to see more deeply.

It’s not quite true that history is written by the winners. It’s written by the best publicists on the winning team.

It was anti-Nazi Google.

It made them feel, as all good books do, less alone.

Cryptographers are professional paranoids.

There were possibly three or at most four persons” in the whole United States who knew the slightest thing about codes.

America First,” a campaign slogan of Woodrow Wilson, had been adopted by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

One way of thinking about science is that it’s a check against the natural human tendency to see patterns that might not be there. It’s a way of knowing when a pattern is real and when it’s a trick of your mind.

If you would like to imagine the birth of the mighty National Security Agency, please visualize two men in a small room, one with a pug nose, pecking at a typewriter, the other a dandy in a suit and bow tie, smoking a pipe, wondering what his wife was up to at home, and if she was missing him.