Carey

“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.

next few days, more than one codebreaker wrote his

In the years that followed, William would become obsessed with the question of what went wrong. He analyzed thousands of pages of Pearl Harbor documents and wrote a three-volume report that boiled down to this: MAGIC had strongly indicated an attack on December 7, but the decrypts had gotten bottled up through a series of farcical missteps in the dissemination stage of the process, and U.S. leaders weren't alerted to the danger in time to take action. It was nuanced: The crucial MAGIC decrypts had been slow to arrive in Pearl Harbor partly because the military hadn't given the Pearl Harbor commanders a Purple machine of their own, a direct tap into the MAGIC fire hose. This decision had been made out of a reasonable desire to limit the distribution of Purple machines in order to minimize the chances of the Japanese learning about the 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”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies

“Throughout the exchange Rackley glared at Mark with a ong, confident look, as if to say, "I have billions and you don't. I'm superior in all respects so accept it."

One benefit of practicing street law without a license was that * had chipped away all traces of reticence. As Mark and Todd had beazenly gone about their business in the D.C. courts, they had grown accustomed to pretending to be people they were not. If they could stand before judges and use fake names and assume the roles of lawyers, they could certainly sit across from Hinds Rackley and act like journalists.”
― John Grisham, The Rooster Bar

“I hope you will let nothing interfere with your enthusiasm for helping where help is needed, but don't let the slow, snails pace progress upward and onward gets you down. Remember always at the dawn of man's conscience is only three or three and a half thousand years behind us.' he had always found the comforting thought, that the age of barbarism was not long past, that if humans feel to be kind it was because they were still children, historically speaking and the idea ran true to him”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies

“Elizebeth never experienced a catharsis like soldiers do on a battle-field, a decisive moment when she got to stand over her fallen enemy with a sword and plunge a killing stroke into his heart. Rather, all through the war, she dissected fascists in the dark. If you were her adversary you never felt the blade go in. You bled slowly, painlessly, for months or for years, from tiny internal wounds, and then sometimes there was a terrible morning when you woke up groggy and confused, and your kidney was sitting in a bowl of ice on the counter.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies