The doll spy Velvalee Dickinson
The spy Velvalee Dickinson disguised reports about warships as information about dolls. Can my readers help me find out more about this story?
Yesterday I gave a lecture on “The Ciphers of Spies” at the Spy Museum in Berlin. To my delight, there were also a few Cipherbrain readers in the audience.
Quelle/Source: Schmeh
Velvalee Dickinson
During a lecture on this topic, one of the most curious codes ever used by a spy was of course not to be missed: the steganographic doll code of the US-American Velvalee Dickinson. She spied for Japan during the Second World War.
Quelle/Source: Wikimedia Commons
Dickinson was a doll collector and restorer who ran a store in New York. She maintained friendships with Japanese and in this context was recruited as a spy during World War II. Her job was primarily to look for warships in U.S. port cities and report their location and condition to her agent handlers.
Because mail was censored in the U.S. during World War II, Japanese intelligence developed a steganographic code specifically for Dickinson. Each important type of ship was coded in it as a dummy. Here is an example of a text Dickinson wrote:
Doll in a hula skirt is in the hospital and doctors are working around the clock.
The plain language is:
Light cruiser ‘USS Honolulu’ is heavily damaged and undergoing round-the-clock repairs in Seattle.
Dickinson sent letters with such content to cover addresses abroad, where they were received by the Japanese secret service. I was able to find three (undated) letter excerpts on the Internet. Here is the first one:
Quelle/Source: FBI
Number two:
Quelle/Source: FBI
Number three:
Quelle/Source: FBI
Exposure
Unfortunately, it is not known whether the code worked as planned and whether the Japanese were able to do anything with the information. What is clear, however, is that the US censors did not initially suspect anything.
However, the Japanese made a mistake. One of the cover addresses abroad was wrong or did not exist. Therefore, the letters came back. Obviously, the censors took a closer look at these returns and sounded the alarm.
The FBI investigated the suspicions. Elizebeth Friedman (William Friedman’s wife), mentioned many times on this blog, examined the wording and confirmed that it was a code.
Quelle/Source: NSA Museum
Meanwhile, the investigators discovered that all the conspicuous letters supposedly came from doll collectors who, however, credibly assured that they had nothing to do with the matter. However, since a certain Velvalee Dickinson was acquainted with all of them, the true author was quickly found.
In 1942, Dickinson was arrested. She was now facing the death penalty, but she was lucky. Her defense was able to reach an agreement with the court on a “plea bargain” after the defendant was convicted not of espionage but only of violating censorship regulations. For this she received a ten-year prison sentence, from which she was released early. Few spies got off so lightly back then.
Who knows more?
The story of Velvalee Dickonson is well known and told on Wikipedia, among other places. I myself have reported about it in Telepolis. Of course, my book “Versteckte Botschaften – Die faszinierende Geschichte der Steganografie” also contains a few pages about it. The book “The Woman All Spies Fear” by Amy Butler Greenfield even starts with this story.
However, in preparing for my talk at the Spy Museum, I again found that there is relatively little in the literature about the Dickinson case. In particular, the following things are not clear to me:
- Other than the three undated letter fragments shown above, I know of no others. In particular, I have never seen a complete list of the letters. Does any reader know of any others?
- I have never seen a reasonably complete description of the doll code. Is there such a thing?
- Also, little is known about the work of Elizebeth Friedman in solving the code. Is there more detailed information on this?
Does any reader know more about these questions?
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