Cribs, Codes and Cairo | Historical
42:34 Share

incoming transmission welcome this is true spies the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time week by week you'll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in true spies you'll meet the people who live life undercover what do they know

What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? This is True Spies. The process of codebreaking is really about seeing patterns and repetitions. And it involves feats of almost unimaginable mental gymnastics that most people would just not be able to do in a million years. I'm Sophia DiMartino, and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios. Cribs, codes and Cairo.

The British Broadcasting Corporation's headquarters, London, 1961. In a radio studio deep within the building, one of the corporation's foremost classical music shows is set to go on air. Across from the programme's presenter sits this week's guest, an elderly woman who has translated and published the complete letters of Beethoven, all alongside her day job as a foreign office civil servant.

The show goes live and the guest discusses her new book, already considered a masterpiece in modern musicology. The interview, if you listen to it carefully, is extraordinary. The presenter asks his guest how exactly she managed to read Beethoven's handwriting, known to be some of the most unintelligible in the world.

She talks about figuring out the handwriting of Beethoven, how she looked at him and she studied it again and again and again and you wonder what that letter is and then you think, ah, it could be this. And then you use that letter as a crib. A crib. Regular True Spies listeners might know that a crib is a code-breaking technique. Had this elderly musicologist just outed herself as a cryptologist on national radio?

She uses words like flash. It comes in a flash. Flash. That's another code-breaking term. She actually tells the world in that BBC interview exactly what she was doing all those years. She gives, for the first and only time, an indication of the processes she used in code-breaking. Within a year, she was dead. She left behind no partner or children. She didn't even have a funeral.

Her final wish was for her remains to be cremated and scattered with no one present. So in other words, every single shred of her life disappeared in one fell swoop. To those who knew only Emily Anderson, the musicologist, the fact that she vanished without a trace may seem curious. But to those who knew Emily Anderson, the codebreaker, it may not have been surprising at all.

She lived by the code of secrecy, the code that says never speak, never reveal what you've been doing. For that same handful of people who knew her full life story, she was one of the most extraordinary individuals they'd ever met.

And yet the details of that extraordinary life are only now being revealed. You sign the Official Secrets Act and you keep your mouth shut in perpetuity. And that's exactly what she did. The only problem with that, of course, is that's the reason why nobody has heard of her. Her name should be widely known. Please God, it will now going forward, there will be more recognition of who this remarkable woman was. Ireland, 2017.

Jackie Ikiana, lecturer in history at the University of Galway, is ensconced in the library, researching her new book. And it has nothing to do with Emily Anderson, an academic she knew only the folklore of. Up until that point, everybody felt that she had, and the official record, even if you Google her today, it'll say that she left in 1920 to join the Foreign Office. Everybody in Galway accepted that. But in fact, she didn't.

Flicking through piles of dusty records, Jackie stumbles across a strange document. "Purely by accident." It is by Emily Anderson, a professor at the university a century prior.

A famous daughter of Galway, a city on the west coast of Ireland, Anderson was feted for her works on classical musicology. The first letter she wrote was a very standard, "I wish to resign my position as professor of German." But it's a second letter that catches Jackie in its grip. She wrote to her friend in the college who was the college registrar and she said, "I'm just letting you know I'm not really going to work in the Foreign Office."

"I've been recruited to military intelligence," Emily writes. When I read that, I just thought, "What?" She went military intelligence? Where is that on the record? Nobody knows about that. Captivated, Jackie shelves her original project to focus on Emily Anderson instead.

Despite having no experience studying intelligence history, she must know more about this woman. So I went hunting for her. And what she discovered was even more than she could have ever hoped for. It's acknowledged at the highest levels of British intelligence, even today, that she was by far and away the best ever of the female codebreakers. Which was just as well.

For early in the Second World War, Emily Anderson was sent to crack codes in a crucial strategic region for both sides of the conflict: the Middle East.

For the codebreakers, living in Cairo must have been something of a surreal experience because on the one hand there were swimming pools and country clubs etc. But at one point like Rommel and his Panzer divisions were about seven miles from Cairo so they were in danger of being overrun at all parts of the war. From an early age, Emily Anderson led an unusual existence.

She was the daughter of a university president. She grew up in the college, Cradrangle, in the University of Galway in the west of Ireland. And so she was, in many respects, living literally within the confines of the university. It was a cloistered, claustrophobic life.

She didn't really mix with too many other people because nobody was really her social equal. So she grew up a kind of an isolated, self-reliant person and was facilitated by her family to learn languages and learn mathematics and physics and music. After graduating with special distinction in French and German from the University of Galway, Emily followed her father into academia, finding a teaching post in the Caribbean.

Before long, though, world events conspired to bring her back to Ireland. Her brother was flying with the Royal Flying Corps and his plane was shot down by the Germans in December of 1916. He was taken as a prisoner of war. That family trauma would later change the trajectory of Emily's life.

She was very much pro the war, very much in favour of doing everything she could to get her brother and every other prisoner at war and every other soldier fighting at the front back to their families. Back in Galway, supporting her parents, Emily spotted an opportunity. The position had come up as professor of German. After cruising through the interview process, Emily Anderson got the job.

Unbeknownst to her, though, she would soon be called to take a position with very different stakes. Two years prior, back in 1914, only a few hours after Britain had declared war on Germany, the British ship CS Alert departed Dover and headed into the English Channel. At 3:15 a.m., it arrived at its destination.

But that news confused the men on board, for this destination was the middle of the channel, near nothing and no one. The ship's commanding officer ordered his men to drop a large grappling hook to the seabed and begin dragging. When the men pulled the grapple up, it brought with it several cables. The commanding officer ordered his men to cut five lines he singled out.

In an instant, all German telegraph cable communication to the outside world was severed, marking one of the first hostile acts of World War I. So the Germans in turn adopted a new form of communication.

The wireless. And that meant that, of course, if it's wireless, anybody can intercept it, which meant that messages had to be encoded from all sides. Now faced with a torrent of coded enemy communication, the British had to move quickly, setting up two cryptanalysis units.

The first was for the army, which was Military Intelligence 1B, as it was known, MI1B. The second was the naval cryptographic institute called Room 40. And both of these needed the best minds in the country if they were to crack the enemy's new codes. And the people who were best at doing that were like linguists, people who had a very good ear and an eye for linguistic patterns and repetitions.

In 1914, military intelligence was still very much a man's world.

But not for long. Because of the war effort and because men were at the front, there was very few people there who could do that work by the time we got to 1916, 1917. So at that point, women were needed urgently in all efforts of the war. And Emily Anderson was a perfect match for the job. Because of her linguistic skills in German and French. Even now, it's unclear how Emily was approached for this line of work.

known as SIGINT, Signals Intelligence. Even Jackie couldn't quite get to the bottom of how she was recruited. But it's very likely it was through her father's connections with Cambridge. And many of the women recruited for Signals Intelligent or SIGINT work were recruited via Cambridge and Oxford, the universities who had produced women language graduates. Emily was offered a job at MI1B, the Army's cryptanalysis unit based in London.

And she was one of only very few women who were recruited for that job. But in accepting the role, Emily had some stipulations of her own. She, at that point, was not in any way of the view that she wanted to give up her academic work. She was, after all, at this stage, a professor of German. But she did say she would go and serve for the duration of the war. And that's where the real adventure began, I suppose. MUSIC

Working in shifts around the clock, Emily and her colleagues attacked the enemy's diplomatic messages. In other words, she was listening in to the embassies and the ambassadors and the politicians talking to each other about strategies and intentions and ambitions. But it wasn't quite as simple as that. While you could hear these messages over the wireless, they were heavily encoded, to the point where it often wasn't even clear which language they were originally in.

But if you are skilled in looking at patterns and repetitions, it's much easier to recognize firstly what language you're decoding. Because if you get a message, it comes in blocks of five numbers and letters, and a skilled cryptographer would look at that page and say, "Okay, that's looking like it's a verb. It's a German verb. Most German verbs end in an 'en.'

If I'm seeing on the page where a verb is likely to be and it looks like it's 'en' but in the form of 'qr', then that's very likely to be a German code. These patterns are known as a 'crib', a key into the code's broader structure. For example, a message might include the phrase 'nothing to report' in encrypted form.

Guessing where this phrase likely was, if indeed it was in an encrypted message, provided a key to unlock the code. But finding a way into the code was only the start for a mind like Emily's. The next phase involved a process called book building.

And book builders are not just those who were given a page of Morse code and are asked to break it and make sense of it. She started looking at patterns of building blocks for the codes in whatever language it was. She's going back to how the original cryptanalysts would have created that code by breaking it down and reverse engineering it in one way.

A book builder like Emily would compile all these cribs, systemizing all these keys into a template. A template that could then be applied to each language of code. And that's what book building was about. It was about finding the keys, the ways to get into those codes. Soon Emily was known to be the best book builder in all of British intelligence.

She was so good at it that she was the one who trained others in book building. And one of those she taught said that her method of book building was neat and ruthlessly methodical. And that pretty much sums up Emily Anderson, neat and ruthlessly methodical. In the first years of the war, not everyone in the British government was a fan of code breaking. Some saw it as a distraction from the real business of fighting.

But that all changed in early 1917, when the British intercepted a message from the German foreign minister to his ambassador in Washington, D.C. The foreign minister, one Arthur Zimmerman, instructed the ambassador to approach Mexico with a deal

Wage war on America and Germany will reward you with the U.S. territories of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. The Zimmerman Telegram, as it's now known, was used by the British to entice America into the war, marking one of the first times signals intelligence influenced world events. You can learn more about the telegram in the True Spies episode of the same name.

Within 18 months, the war was over. The Allies had won. But even with the advent of peace, demand for top codebreakers like Emily remained. It was realized by both the Army and the Navy that there was going to be a need for cryptanalysis going forward. There was likely to be another war and there was a need for people to keep an eye on our supposed neighbors, but in fact those who may potentially be our enemies.

The Army and the Navy's cryptography units, MI-1B and Room 40, merged shortly after the war's end, forming the Government Code and Cipher School, or

GC&CS. GC&CS was by far and away the best code-breaking bureau in the world. They had incredible ability, they had an incredible core crew. And Emily Anderson, who had only agreed to stay on till the war's end, was at the top of its want list.

Because she was so good, she was streets ahead of most other codebreakers working for either the Army or the Navy cryptanalytic bureaus. She was extremely, extremely fast and for that reason they wanted her to stay on. But Emily was torn. She had a decision to make. Does she stay on?

give up her position as a professor of German? Or does she decide, no, I'm going to give up this work and I'm going to actually take a career within the code-breaking world? Leaving her academic career behind was no small matter, which Emily made plain to her government suitors.

She didn't accept a job with the government code and cipher school until they'd met the criteria that she set. Which in 1918 included groundbreaking demands.

She wanted a full-time permanent position, something that had never happened to women before. Women were never given positions that they could be promoted from within the civil service. But that's not all Emily insisted on. She wanted a salary that equated with her male counterparts because she was every bit as good as most of them and far better than a lot of them. So she didn't accept the role as codebreaker until such time as they gave her the money that she felt she deserved.

And sure enough, Emily got her wish. So she was at one point, remarkably, the highest ranked woman within the British Civil Service and the best paid woman within the British service. By the early 1920s, Emily was a full-time codebreaker at the Government Code and Cipher School. Having proved to possess one of the most brilliant minds in the service, she was highly respected by all her, nearly all male, colleagues.

But she had no intention of merely coasting through her life and work. She just wanted to get better and better all the time. And while she was already an expert in French and German, Emily spotted an opening that would stretch her skill set.

She knew that there was a shortage of Italian codebreakers. So she decided that she'd fill that gap and she'd hone her skills for that task. But simply turning to Italian textbooks and tutors was not what she had in mind. Emily Anderson always took things to the extreme. So what she decided to do was to translate a life, a biography of the German philosopher and poet Goethe

written by an Italian, just to hone her Italian translation skills so that she could become an Italian codebreaker. It was an extraordinary thing to do. She took on all this extra work just to get better at her job and keep her mind active. Italian may have been her fourth language, but soon Emily was head of the Italian Diplomatic or Diplo section at GC&CS.

And the positive feedback on her translation of Goethe's biography spurred Emily on to further academic pursuits outside the world of espionage. Her next challenge would be huge in both scope and significance: translating the letters of Mozart.

And in a way, yet another remarkable thing about this woman is that she used the skills that she'd actually acquired as a codebreaker in her musicological work. In fact, Mozart's letters were the perfect subject matter for a codebreaker.

The great composer himself had even used simple ciphers substitutions of certain letters for others after falling foul of the Archbishop of Salzburg. As his patron, the Archbishop expected loyalty from subjects like Mozart, who wasn't prepared to give it, instead railing against the parochialism and disdain of his master.

Indeed, the Archbishop came to regularly checking Mozart's mail before allowing it to reach its ultimate recipient.

And she started seeing patterns and repetitions, and she was able to use the skills she's honed as a codebreaker to decrypt effectively, to break the code. Emily's work entailed extensive travel throughout Europe, tracking down correspondence in obscure university libraries and private collections. All the more reason to keep her day job secret.

If you think about it, she's going to places like Berlin, Bonn, Salzburg. She's going to places where she can access musical archives. Had anybody even remotely suspected that she herself was a codebreaker, there's no way she would have been received in those circles. Nonetheless, as the 1930s marched on, travel across the continent was becoming more and more dangerous.

People like Emily Anderson knew before anybody else that a new war was likely because they were listening in to the embassies and the ambassadors and the politicians talking to each other about strategies and intentions and ambitions. They knew that the Germans were definitely planning another war.

So, in September 1938, the true spies of the British government took action. Hello, true spies listener. This episode is made possible with the support of June's Journey, a riveting little caper of a game which you can play right now on your phone. Since you're listening to this show, it's safe to assume you love a good mystery, some compelling detective work...

and a larger-than-life character or two. You can find all of those things in abundance in June's Journey. In the game, you'll play as June Parker, a plucky amateur detective trying to get to the bottom of her sister's murder. It's all set during the roaring 1920s.

And I absolutely love all the little period details packed into this world. I don't want to give too much away because the real fun of June's journey is seeing where this adventure will take you. But I've just reached a part of the story that's set in Paris.

And I'm so excited to get back to it. Like I said, if you love a salacious little mystery, then give it a go. Discover your inner detective when you download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android. Hello, listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read.

They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page-turner to help them escape the stresses of work, or a book that they've been reading for years.

school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for What Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more. In September 1938, a group of some 150 men and women descended on a country estate.

Handpicked by British intelligence, these were some of the greatest linguists and mathematicians in the country. And while the estate itself was far enough from London to be safe from bombing, it was still a commutable distance to the capital. They needed to do a dry run to see could they set up a massive code-breaking centre in the UK, which would be able to handle all this massive amount of traffic they knew they were going to have to deal with. The estate's name? Bletchley Park.

They chose Bletchley because it was on the inter-varsity line between Oxford and Cambridge, so they knew that they'd be drawing a lot of talent from those places. But simply turning up to build an intelligence operation wasn't exactly subtle. So the codebreakers came undercover. They decided to run what they called Captain Ridley's shooting party. But Captain Ridley was in fact an MI6 officer.

And while he and his 150 guests spent the weekend ostensibly hunting and drinking... In reality, what it was, was a dry run to see how quickly could they get people there. And it was tremendously successful. It was a brilliant idea. It gave people an idea of how logistically people could be moved from London to the countryside, how they would be accommodated, how quickly they could get there, what the telecommunications requirements would be.

But Emily Anderson was not one of the shooting party. Remember, she was head of the Italian diplomatic section. The work she was doing at that point was so important that they couldn't spare her for this practice session, if you like. She was desperately needed in London to keep listening in to the Italians because their intentions was top priority at that time.

Would the Italians ally with the Germans against the British? Would they begin attacking targets in the Mediterranean? Emily Anderson was in charge of finding out. People defer to her. They regard her as the queen of Diplo. They know that nobody but nobody is better as her because she knows the nuances of that language. When the war began, a year after Captain Ridley's shooting party, Emily Anderson did decamp to Bletchley.

She was billeted in a really, really nice house, the Manor House in Swanbourne, about seven miles from Bletchley. It was a very prestigious billet because she was one of the most senior staff there. But Emily didn't stay there long. And only 80 years later did Dr Jackie Ikeana find out why. By the time she got there, she had already begun a relationship with a fellow codebreaker, a woman called Dorothy Brooks.

Dorothy was much younger than Emily. She was about 25 at the time they met, and Emily would have by this stage been in her late 40s. But they really obviously clicked. A relationship developed between them. But her hosts were not impressed by her sexuality.

And so she left. She wasn't prepared to have somebody judging her, making decisions about what she could and couldn't do. So she moved to another billet. And what happened at that billet was to change the course of British wartime intelligence.

It was with a family called Bartley. And Charles Bartley had a daughter called Patricia. And Patricia was still alive until a few years ago when I actually interviewed her for my research on Emily Anderson. And she was able to tell me she remembered Emily arriving

Almost immediately, Emily spotted something in this young woman. She had spent her childhood and her youth in France, being educated in a convent school there, so she had fluent German and French. She should be at Bletchley. Emily knew it.

And Patricia Bartley was recruited to Bletchley Park on foot of Emily's recommendation and subsequently, within a year, was head of German diplomatic section at the age of just 25. It's an astonishing, astonishing story. And the Bartley family overlooked Emily's and her partner Dorothy's sexuality.

They were very happy together, walking, driving in Emily's car, playing music together. All of those little things that made her time at Bletchley a very, very happy time. But much like the First World War did some 25 years earlier, the Second was about to upend her life too.

Emily was at Bletchley for just under a year. She was working hard there, listening in to the Italian embassies, and she knew what was happening in North Africa and East Africa was going to be critical to the war. It was clear to both sides that whoever controlled North Africa would likely win the war in Europe. It was the perfect location for launching bombing campaigns against enemy shipping in the Mediterranean, therefore gaining control of supply lines to much of the continent.

But to win North Africa, one had to win East Africa first. Because of course it flanked the sea route between the Gulf of Aden and Suez. Crucial for the transport of fuel from the Middle East. And not only that, the Italians had colonial control of the Ethiopian Empire in East Africa, stationing a quarter of a million troops there.

And the British identified this as something they would have to win before they took North Africa, because it meant that the Italians would be effectively taken out of the war. And they were absolutely right in that regard. But Emily's work attacking Italian diplomatic code was beginning to be hampered. Increasingly, as the Italians were gaining stronger in North and East Africa, her traffic was being intercepted. She wasn't getting the same feed of messages.

Emily insisted on going to Africa herself, to be closer to the source of the intelligence. Now that in itself was astonishing because she could just as easily have sat out the war at Bletchley and did what she was doing there quite comfortably. But she was so determined that she was going to make a difference and that the Italians needed to be defeated if Germany was to be defeated, that she insisted on being sent

But Emily wasn't about to leave her partner and fellow codebreaker Dorothy behind. It was agreed that it was essential to get a team of codebreakers on the ground, particularly Italian codebreakers, on the ground in Cairo intercepting traffic so that the Italians could be defeated. And that prompted this remarkable move from Bletchley to Cairo.

With the direct aerial route to Egypt cut off, Emily, Dorothy and the rest of the team had to go the long way round. What they had to do was take a ship from Liverpool to the Cape, to Durban, in the very most southern part of the African continent, and then make their way up through the entire length of Africa to Cairo.

It was a journey that took about three and a half weeks and it involved planes, trains and automobiles and anything you care to mention to try and get from the tip of Africa to Cairo. But they did it. Once there, Emily helped set up a code-breaking base. Known as the Combined Bureau Middle East, CBNE.

But the focus was not on diplomatic intelligence. Emily's specialism. The traffic she was going to be intercepting in Cairo was military traffic.

So Emily gave up her job as head of the Italian diplomatic section to run the Italian military section, focusing on the East Africa campaign. And that again was another groundbreaking thing for Emily Anderson. She was the first woman to be appointed to a position in theatre like that. But Cairo wasn't just another theatre of battle in late 1940.

It was near the epicentre of the entire war at that time. At one point, like, Rommel and his panzer divisions were about seven miles from Cairo, so they were in danger of being overrun at all parts of the war. It was always a constant danger that they might have to move. There's descriptions of people arriving into cocktail parties covered in sand, having just come from fighting in the desert. One of Emily's female colleagues was even trained in using a machine gun.

If she had to leave Cairo under duress, if the Italians or the Germans were approaching, she could whip out her machine gun from the back of her car and use it. So it wasn't an easy situation to be under because they were so close to the fighting line. Despite the personal danger Emily and her team were in, they had little time to think.

The East Africa campaign saw the Cairo codebreakers flooded with signals intelligence.

The volume of traffic that they had to intercept and had to interpret was phenomenal. It was absolutely incredible. The pressures they were under, it was day and night. Some of them slept under their desks at the office. Slept under their desk physically because they just were so tired they needed to sleep. But also because they were afraid of air raids and they were told to be safer under their desks. They had to really react very, very quickly. And react, Emily did.

They managed to intercept messages being dispatched by the Italian military almost as soon as they were dispatched.

So they were literally aware of every single step the Italians were making almost as soon as they made them. And that, in a sense, meant that it was the perfect example of the cryptographers' war. Because never before in the history of warfare has any military commander been so well served by military intelligence as they were during the East Africa campaign. That's what the commander-in-chief of the Middle East said.

And the consequences of Emily's work were hard to overstate. The campaign itself was waged between June 1940 and November 1941, and it could be argued was probably the most significant victory of World War II because it effectively demolished the Italians in East Africa. Victory at the Battle of Amber Alargi in 1941 proved decisive for the Allies when the Italian army accepted defeat.

It cost them an army of 220,000 men and it cost them an empire in East Africa. And within a few months of them actually exiting the war, they are now under attack by the Germans on their home territory. So it really was a critical change because it meant not only had they taken the Italians out of the conflict, but it also meant that now the Germans had to then worry about subduing the Italians in Italy and that...

diversified their forces, obviously. So it was very strategically important. With the Italians' surrender, Emily Anderson and her team were no longer needed in Cairo. But there's no time for celebrations. The war continued in mainland Europe and the talents and the skills of Emily and Dorothy and the other codebreakers at Cairo were needed back home. So they were airlifted back on a flying boat

Back in England, Emily received the Order of the British Empire Award for her work in Cairo. Even though it was top secret, Emily's contribution was considered so important that her superiors insisted on the honour, even if the official reason given was for vague foreign office work. Despite the accolade, Emily wasn't going to rest on her laurels. Again, another saying in her career, she began to break Hungarian codes.

Hungarian was known in the service to be the hardest European language to learn, let alone crack. But as the war drew to an end, Emily saw the importance of mastering it.

And Hungarian codes were critical because of course the rise of the Soviets and Hungarian-Soviet relations were very, very strategically important in knowing what was happening in the minds of the Russians. By the end of the conflict, Emily Anderson had perfected code breaking in a fifth language. To the point that she became the expert on Hungarian codes within GCNCS. But her success didn't end there.

Remember Patricia Bartley, the young woman who Emily recruited to Bletchley? Well, Emily's eye for talent proved instrumental there too. The Germans had two major codes during the Second World War. The first was their German military code, which was Enigma. And the second was their German diplomatic code, which was Floridora.

Now, most people will know that Enigma, of course, was broken at Bletchley using Enigma breaking machines. But the remarkable thing about Floridora was that it was broken single-handedly, almost single-handedly, by Patricia Barclay using pencil and paper. Dr Jackie Ikiana even met Patricia shortly before she died in 2021 to ask her how she did it.

She said to me that they made a mistake. They repeated something, which you should never do in writing a code. Remember cribs, the keys into a coded message? Often the most effective way of getting these keys was through guessing what was in the original message. And if you know the same words keep coming up, then that drastically reduces the number of permutations in the code you had to find the key for.

Jackie on Patricia Bartley again. In her description of the process, it was a group of German sailors who were basically complaining about the quality of the food that they were getting, that they were getting the same old, same old food every day. And of course, that meant repeating the menus. And she spotted this and that gave her the crib that enabled her to break into Floridora.

Jackie asked Patricia what that meant exactly. And she said to me, it meant that I was reading messages meant for Hitler before he read them. They didn't think it was possible for anybody to break it. And yet she did it as a young 25-year-old, 26-year-old, on her own, pencil and paper, spotting a repetition that nobody else had spotted. To Emily, though, the success of her protégé would have come as no surprise.

After the war, Emily stayed on at the GCNCS for several years, while also returning to her musicology. This time, her subject was Beethoven. Beethoven's handwriting was almost illegible to anybody reading it, his later letters in particular. But here's a professional codebreaker. So she spends 15 years looking at these garbled letters that nobody else could read, and she started seeing patterns and repetitions

And she was able to use the skills she's honed as a codebreaker to decrypt effectively, to break the code of Beethoven's bizarre handwriting. And that is a feat that nobody else could ever have been able to do. Shortly before she died, Emily Anderson's two lives as a codebreaker and a musicologist had an ironic encounter.

In 1961, the president of West Germany presented her with the Order of Merit First Class for her work reading and translating Beethoven's letters. And the Germans have absolutely no idea that she had actually been spying on them through two world wars and the interwar period. For Jackie, the scene encapsulates everything about Emily Anderson.

I think that's the key to understanding Emily Anderson. She knew that if she didn't keep a low profile, if she didn't keep her professional life secret, she couldn't have lived the other life. But it was very clear to me talking to intelligence historians within GCHQ that as soon as I mentioned her name, they said, oh, thank goodness somebody is finally working on Anderson because we know that she's the best. We always knew she was the best.

And after six years, in 2023, Jackie's work culminated in a book on Emily Anderson titled Queen of Codes, The Secret Life of Emily Anderson, Britain's Greatest Female Codebreaker. You can find it wherever you get your books. Next time on True Spies, meet Agent Sonia, housewife, mother, and communist spy.