The great Agnes Driscoll by now had also been sidelined. In 1937 she had suffered a car crash that broke her leg badly, as well as both jaws. It took her a year to recover, and in some ways she never did. Many people felt her personality changed following her ordeal. In 1940, before Pearl Harbor, Miss Aggie had been taken off JN-25 and put in charge of an independent U.S. solution of the Enigma. It was not a good match. She seems to have suffered from an excess of pride; at one point the British made early overtures of cooperation but she rebuffed them, apparently wanting to succeed on her own. After more than twenty years as a cryptanalyst, Agnes Driscoll now occupied a strange position, revered by many in the Navy yet also marginalized. The Navy did not seem to know what to do with her. Military men willing to brave enemy fire were wary of crossing her; she seems to have been treated with a poisonous combination of deference and dismissal.
“I never felt that I should go tell her that the world had fallen, times had changed,” said Prescott Currier, a young officer assigned to work with her. Driscoll had recruited her sister to help her and “had two cronies, Mrs. Talley and Mrs. Clark,” both “mediocre office-type clerks,” as Currier described them, taking her frequency counts.
Code breakers, like poets and mathematicians, often do their best work when they are young. Even the great ones, like William Friedman, at some point go off the boil. In later interviews, the men described Agnes Driscoll as resorting to extreme measures to retain her authority, enforcing a rule of silence in her office, hoarding intercepts so no one could track her progress. It’s possible that Agnes Driscoll by now was past her mental prime. But it’s also possible that secreting intercepts and surrounding herself with loyal henchwomen was her way of preserving authority as the world around her was becoming bigger, more competitive, and more male. With a war on, her civilian status was more of a liability than ever. “She became fearful that she wouldn’t be able to do things,” Howard Campaigne, another newcomer, later reflected. Even the most junior officer was her superior. “As an officer, I fitted into the organization better.” This much certainly can be said: She was not as gently treated as William Friedman.
The order was changing. The Navy was bringing in male graduate students and college professors, reservists who provided fresh expertise and thinking. Many were mathematicians, like Driscoll, but unlike her they had enjoyed the benefit of attending institutions like Yale, Princeton, and MIT, which would never have admitted her. They were big men—literally—and several took one look at her and thought: “witch.” Their oral histories, taken years later, obsessively use this one word to describe her. Before her accident, “she was a very strikingly beautiful woman in her early forties,” one of them, Frank Raven, said. “When she came out she looked like a witch in her seventies who could only walk with a cane and with her sister holding her arm.”
It was Raven who did Agnes Driscoll in. Frank Raven was a smug Yale graduate who seems to have arrived spoiling for a fight. He was a brilliant cryptanalyst; it was Raven who figured out how to predict the daily key settings for the Purple machine. But he was also a malcontent and an instigator. Raven felt the old Navy admirals were in thrall to Driscoll and decided to do something about it. “You can’t visualize the climate around Aggie,” he told historians. “There wasn’t a regular Navy officer except Safford who had the guts to say boo to that gal.” In the early months of 1942, Raven was directing a unit of twenty men working in a room next door to hers, assigned to “German Navy miscellaneous,” a term for any German messages that weren’t U-boat. But he was eager to get his hands on some real Enigma intercepts. So Raven decided to pillage Agnes Driscoll’s safe, which he had the keys to. During an overnight watch he rifled her papers and saw some from England; this convinced him the British had their own Enigma solution. Hers seemed to be a laborious paper model, which to succeed would have required what he called “a trial of exhaustion.”
Subsequent historians have discerned that Miss Aggie’s Enigma solution might have worked, but only with the kind of supercomputers that came along much later. Raven figured it would take a whole war to get one message. He claimed later that she set the U.S. Enigma project back by three or four months, because the mathematicians who were being brought in to work in earnest on the four-rotor Enigma had to tiptoe around her. Driscoll was the “curse of the Enigma effort well up into 1944,” he said. “The old Navy considered Aggie as sort of a god, some sort of a goddess.”
Raven didn’t just despise Agnes Driscoll; he despised many of the people he was working with. It was a tense atmosphere in the downtown naval code-breaking offices, full of politics and subcurrents. There was a strong caste system: Career naval men distrusted the new, educated reservists; reservists thought they were smarter than careerists; everybody looked down on civilians. If you were a woman, you had three strikes against you. One of the officers had a hair-raising collection of graphic pornography, which he kept in a drawer and which the security guards liked to come look at.
Raven managed to engineer Miss Aggie’s downfall. As the war went on, Agnes tended to be given projects that seemed hopeless—busywork—and at one point was assigned to work on a machine-generated Japanese naval attaché cipher. Naval attachés are military men whose time-honored duty is to serve as spies under a kind of flimsy cover, hanging out affably in foreign embassies, reporting back on the weapons of other countries. During a lull in his own work, Raven returned to his old habits. He opened Agnes’s safe, “bootlegged copies” of her naval attaché intercepts, and solved them. He had a machine built to decipher them, and he tapped Agnes’s intercept line so he could get incoming traffic. He tried to hide the machine from her, but Driscoll eventually saw it, whereupon, Raven said, she “demanded that I be court-martialed.” But he had solved the machine, and she had not, and that did Agnes in. She was not fired, but she was put out to pasture.
After the war, Raven claimed that he saw her downfall as one of the tragedies of the war and believed she should never have been readmitted after the car accident. “In retrospect I am convinced that Aggie Driscoll is one of the world’s greatest cryptanalysts,” he added. “I am convinced that the same accident that moved her from a beautiful woman to a hag affected her mind and that when she came back she couldn’t solve a monoalphabetic substitution.”
Nobody knows how Agnes Driscoll felt. Nobody bothered to take an oral history from one of the greatest cryptanalysts in the world.