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I loved literature before I loved medicine, and as a medical student, I often found that my textbooks left me cold, their medical jargon somehow missing the point of profound diseases able to rewrite a person’s life and identity. I was born, I decided, a century too late: I found the stories I craved, not in contemporary textbooks, but in outdated case reports, 18th- and 19-century descriptions of how the diseases I was studying might shape the life of a single patient.
These reports were alive with vivid details: how someone’s vision loss affected their golf game or their smoking habit, their work or their love life. They were all tragedies: Each ended with an autopsy, a patient’s brain dissected to discover where, exactly, the problem lay, to inch closer to an understanding of the geography of the soul. To write these case studies, neurologists awaited the deaths and brains of living patients, robbing their subjects of the ability to choose what would become of their own bodies—the ability to write the endings of their own stories—after they had already been sapped of agency by their illnesses.
Among these case reports was one from a forbidding state hospital in the north of Moscow: the story of a 19th-century Russian journalist referred to simply as “a learned man.” The journalist suffered a type of alcoholic dementia because of the brandy he often drank to cure his writer’s block and he developed a profound amnesia. He could not remember where he was or why. He could win a game of checkers but would forget that he had even played the minute the game ended. In the place of these lost memories, the journalist’s imagination spun elaborate narratives; he believed he had written an article when in fact he had barely begun to conceive it before he became sick, would describe the prior day’s visit to a far-off place when in actuality he had been too weak to get out of bed, and maintained that some of his possessions—kept in a hospital safe—had been taken from him as part of an elaborate heist.
Sacks’ journals suggest he injected his own experiences into the stories of his patients.
In the years since I first read about the journalist, I have become a neurologist, well versed in the medical jargon that describes symptoms like his: confabulation, a gap in memory filled with a story that feels entirely true to the person telling it. Confabulations can be fantastical or banal, grounded in memory or imagination, but confabulations share one essential feature: Confabulators experience their own stories as the truth. A confabulation is not a conscious lie, but rather an unconscious repair.
Neurologist Oliver Sacks, who died in 2015, was perhaps the most prolific chronicler of symptoms like confabulation, filling the pages of his books with detailed descriptions of his own patients’ wounds and blindnesses. I first read Sacks as a college student studying cognitive science and again as a neurology resident steeped in the strangeness and wonder of wounded brains. In his foreword to Awakenings, the stories of patients who had survived the “sleeping sickness” epidemic of the 1920s, alive but lethargic and permanently immobilized, Sacks wrote that the book was possible in large part because of the Bronx hospital where he practiced, which he called “a chronic hospital, an asylum,” where his patients resided for decades.
Sacks bore witness to “situations virtually unknown, almost unimaginable, to the general public and, indeed, to many of my colleagues.” Years after I first read Awakenings, I wrote my own book, The Mind Electric, informed in part by my own experiences at a city safety-net hospital in Boston, where I now practice neurology. I admired Sacks because he found inspiration in places others had not thought to look, because he centered stories from the margins that had previously gone untold. I wanted to do the same.
Among the chapters of Sacks’ 1985 The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a collection of medical tales, is a case study titled “A Matter of Identity.” It’s the story of William Thompson, an ex-grocer struggling with a form of dementia born of longstanding alcoholism. Thompson, Sacks wrote, could not remember that he lived in a hospital. When Sacks visited him in a white doctor’s coat, Thompson imagined that he was a customer at his deli, then a kosher butcher, then an old gambling buddy, and then a Mobil station mechanic. Thompson, Sacks wrote, suffered a sort of “narrative frenzy … He must seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness, the chaos that yawns continually beneath him.”
In a New Yorker article published last month, journalist Rachel Aviv dissects Sacks’ own desperate quest for meaning, reporting on unpublished journals suggesting that Sacks invented patient narratives, sometimes injecting parts of his own experiences into the stories of his patients. In Awakenings, Sacks wrote that his patient, Leonard, likened his frozen body to a caged panther in a Rainer Maria Rilke poem. In fact, Sacks’ letters and notes suggest, it was Sacks, not Leonard, who identified with the poem, writing to a friend that the experience of writing his first book, Migraine, made him feel like “Rilke’s image of the caged panther, stupefied, dying, behind bars.” In a chapter of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Sacks wrote about a woman he called Rebecca, who blossomed despite her cognitive limitations after the death of her grandmother. In the book, Sacks reported that she joined a theater group and emerged from her grief as “a complete person.” Sacks’ journals, filled with transcriptions of his conversations with Rebecca, suggest that the reality was messier: Rebecca never joined a theater group but rather succumbed to her grief, telling Sacks that she wished she’d never been born.
What emerges from Aviv’s deeply reported work is not conscious deception, but the gravitational pull of confabulation, a tidy narrative mistaken for truth. Aviv quotes a letter Sacks wrote to his brother, Marcus, enclosed with a copy of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In the letter, Sacks calls the book a collection of “fairy tales,” explaining “these odd Narratives—half-report, half-imagined, half-science, half-fable, but with a fidelity of their own—are what I do, basically, to keep MY demons of boredom and loneliness and despair away.” In fact, Sacks writes, Marcus would likely call them “confabulations.”
Science has a long tradition of using neurological wounds like confabulation as windows, opportunities to catch a glimpse of the complex ways our brains work when they are whole. We understand something about the biological basis of communication from studying people bereft of language, about the underpinnings of human perception from studying people who have experienced blindness, and about the neural pathways that generate movement from studying people suffering paralysis. Even the most esoteric-seeming neurological injuries speak to universal features of our brains.
For patients like Thompson and the 19th-century Russian journalist with amnesia, confabulation bridges a discontinuity, stepping in when memory fails. For Sacks, deeply closeted until his 80s, Aviv suggests confabulation served a different, more poignant purpose: His stories offered a place to put those parts of his own identity that he had been forced to sublimate. In his journals, Sacks wrote that he gave the patients in his books “some of my own powers, and some of my phantasies too.” He gave his patients his own inner monologues, his own desires, projections of his own insecurities. “I write out symbolic versions of myself,” he wrote.
As a doctor, I, too, traffic in stories, hunger for coherence rather than chaos.
I have always loved Sacks best when he wrote, not about his patients’ symptoms, but his own. His early experiments with psychotropics are catalogued in Hallucinations, the symptoms of his own visual auras in Migraine, and his alienation from his own body in A Leg to Stand On, the story of how he tore his quadriceps while mountain-climbing in Norway and found himself unable to move the leg, even after a surgery to repair muscle. Sacks describes the leg as “foreign,” a part of himself that he cannot relate to.
Four years before Sacks died, he wrote about his own body in The Mind’s Eye, meditating on the childhood eye cancer that would eventually kill him alongside the stories of other artists and scientists who found themselves unable, in some essential way, to see. In a deeply personal chapter titled “Face-Blind,” Sacks revealed his own blindness: prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize even the most intimately familiar faces. Sacks remembered failing to recognize his own therapist five minutes after leaving an appointment and birthday parties at which he asked friends to wear name tags. Sometimes, he wrote, he apologized to his own reflection in the mirror, unable to recognize even himself. Still, he was oblivious to his prosopagnosia until late in his life, when he visited his brother in Australia for the first time in decades and recognized his own deficiency in his brother’s face-blindness.
For all Sacks knew about the ways that brains are able to hide their wounds, he had failed to acknowledge his own.
The genius of Sacks was that he insisted on centering people rather than illnesses, stories rather than jargon. His patients find ways to repair their reality rather than succumbing to their illnesses. As an epigraph to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Sacks chose to focus not on science, but rather fables: “To talk of diseases is a sort of Arabian Nights entertainment.” The quote is attributed to William Osler, the 19th-century internist who founded the hospital where I would train a century later.
I loved The Arabian Nights as a child because it felt fantastical. I read of caliphs and sorcerers, of jinn born of fire and of seas peopled with merfolk. The Arabian Nights is a strange, protean text, a shapeshifting, Russian-doll narrative of stories nested within stories to which tales have been added, subtracted, mutated over centuries and continents. The fables themselves are framed by the story of Scheherazade, the latest bride of a monstrous king who weds a new woman each night only to have her beheaded the following dawn. The night of their wedding, the resourceful and brilliant Scheherazade begs to be allowed to say goodbye to her beloved younger sister, Dunyazad, for whom she begins to weave a marvelous bedtime story while the king lies awake and listens. When dawn breaks, the tale remains unfinished, and the king, anxious for a resolution, spares Scheherazade’s life for one more night. The next night, and the next night, and the next, Scheherazade spins a web of endless stories that enthrall the king, always ending on a cliff-hanger so that he will keep her alive. From Scheherazade, I learned that stories keep us alive. But stories can also mislead.
When I was a medical student, reading the old case reports, I wondered whether writers were particularly prone to confabulation, primed to search for a coherent plot. Since becoming a physician, I have wondered even more whether doctors are particularly prone to confabulation. Medical students are taught to imagine a binary: doctor and patient, science and faith, objective truth and subjective report, us and them. Our morning rounds are an exercise in telling and retelling patients’ stories in a way that explains their illnesses, cloaked in the sense of objectivity offered by a white coat. But the stories told on these rounds are just as prone to false truths as the reports of an amnesia patient, subconsciously shaped by our priors, our communities, our own narratives. On rounds, a woman’s pain might be recast as anxiety, for instance, while a vitamin deficiency born of alcohol use might be regarded as a deserved punishment.
As a doctor, I, too, traffic in stories, hunger for coherence rather than the chaos and uncertainty that medicine and bodies often offer. In medicine, we arbitrate which stories are important and which don’t matter, which are true and which are false, as if we were omniscient rather than subjective beings, as if our training somehow excises the humanity, the personal, from our practice. In my own writing as in my medical practice, I remind myself to always leave room for uncertainty, for that which I cannot possibly know about someone else’s body, about their story.
I loved Sacks for his unflinching desire to bear witness to the complexity of illness, and it pained me to read that he sometimes put his own story ahead of his patients’ realities. Hospitals are places of both ruin and miracles, heartache and wonder, the narratives they contain as spellbinding as they are messy. Sacks knew this better than any writer. And so, for all that feels profoundly, universally human about his vulnerabilities, I struggle to understand his impulse to confabulate on the page when the unvarnished truth would have been more compelling.
But Aviv’s article also left me with an unsettling revelation that transcends Sacks’ writing: not simply that Sacks revised reality, but that we all do. Confabulation is powerful precisely because it slips beneath consciousness, beneath the attention of even the keenest observers. Surrounded by a chaotic world, deluged with sights, sounds, and sensations, our brains instinctively search for narrative order, telling stories to explain away that which we cannot understand and that which we fear. All of us narrate our way through gaps, often mistaking the satisfaction of a tidy story for the truth. For all his flaws, perhaps despite himself, Sacks continues to illuminate the frailties of the human condition. 
Lead image: Torley / Flickr
Great read.
The other day I was asked to update the visual design of radio buttons in a web app at work. I figured it couldn't be that complicated. It's just a radio button right?
<input type="radio" name="beverage" value="coffee" />Boom! Done. Radio buttons are a built-in HTML element. They've been around for 30 years. The browser makes it easy. Time for a coffee.
Enter Shadcn
I dug into our codebase and realized we were using two React components from
Shadcn to power our radio buttons: <RadioGroup> and
<RadioGroupItem>.
For those unfamiliar with Shadcn, it's a UI framework that provides a bunch of
prebuilt UI components for use in your websites. Unlike traditional UI
frameworks like Bootstrap, you don't import it with a script tag or
npm install. Instead you run a command that copies the components into your
codebase.
Here's the code that was exported from Shadcn into our project:
"use client";
import * as React from "react";
import * as RadioGroupPrimitive from "@radix-ui/react-radio-group";
import { CircleIcon } from "lucide-react";
import { cn } from "@/lib/utils";
function RadioGroup({
className,
...props
}: React.ComponentProps<typeof RadioGroupPrimitive.Root>) {
return (
<RadioGroupPrimitive.Root
data-slot="radio-group"
className={cn("grid gap-3", className)}
{...props}
/>
);
}
function RadioGroupItem({
className,
...props
}: React.ComponentProps<typeof RadioGroupPrimitive.Item>) {
return (
<RadioGroupPrimitive.Item
data-slot="radio-group-item"
className={cn(
"border-input text-primary focus-visible:border-ring focus-visible:ring-ring/50 aria-invalid:ring-destructive/20 dark:aria-invalid:ring-destructive/40 aria-invalid:border-destructive dark:bg-input/30 aspect-square size-4 shrink-0 rounded-full border shadow-xs transition-[color,box-shadow] outline-none focus-visible:ring-[3px] disabled:cursor-not-allowed disabled:opacity-50",
className,
)}
{...props}
>
<RadioGroupPrimitive.Indicator
data-slot="radio-group-indicator"
className="relative flex items-center justify-center"
>
<CircleIcon className="fill-primary absolute top-1/2 left-1/2 size-2 -translate-x-1/2 -translate-y-1/2" />
</RadioGroupPrimitive.Indicator>
</RadioGroupPrimitive.Item>
);
}
export { RadioGroup, RadioGroupItem };Woof... 3 imports and 45 lines of code. And it's importing a third party icon
library just to render a circle. (Who needs CSS border-radius or the SVG
<circle> element when you can add a third party dependency instead?)
All of the styling is done by the 30 different Tailwind classes in the markup. I should probably just tweak those to fix the styling issues.
But now I'm distracted, annoyed, and curious. Where's the actual <input>?
What's the point of all this? Let's dig a little deeper.
Enter Radix
The Shadcn components import components from another library called Radix. For those unfamiliar with Radix, it's a UI framework that provides a bunch of prebuilt UI components...
Wait a second! Isn't that what I just said about Shadcn? What gives? Why do we need both? Let's see what the Radix docs say:
Radix Primitives is a low-level UI component library with a focus on accessibility, customization and developer experience. You can use these components either as the base layer of your design system, or adopt them incrementally.
So Radix provides unstyled components, and then Shadcn adds styles on top of that. How does Radix work? You can see for yourself on GitHub: https://github.com/radix-ui/...
This is getting even more complicated: 215 lines of React code importing 7 other files. But what does it actually do?
Taking a look in the browser
Let's look in the browser dev tools to see if we can tell what's going on.
Okay, instead of a radio input it's rendering a button with an SVG circle inside it? Weird.
It's also using ARIA attributes to tell screen readers and other assistive tools that the button is actually a radio button.
ARIA attributes allow you to change the semantic meaning of HTML elements. For example, you can say that a button is actually a radio button. (If you wanted to do that for some strange reason.)
Interestingly, here's the First Rule of ARIA use:
If you can use a native HTML element or attribute with the semantics and behavior you require already built in, instead of re-purposing an element and adding an ARIA role, state or property to make it accessible, then do so.
Despite that, Radix is repurposing an element and adding an ARIA role instead of using a native HTML element.
Finally, the component also includes a hidden <input type="radio"> but only if
it's used inside of a <form> element. Weird!
This is getting pretty complicated to just render a radio button. Why would you want to do this?
Styling radio buttons is hard (Wait, is it?)
My best guess is that Radix rebuilds the radio button from scratch in order to make it easier to style. Radio buttons used to be difficult to style consistently across browsers. But for several years we've been able to style radio buttons however we want using a few CSS tools:
appearance: noneremoves the radio button's default styling allowing us to do whatever we want.- We can use the
::beforepseudo-element to render a "dot" inside of the unstyled radio button. - We can use the
:checkedpseudo-class to show and hide that dot depending on whether the radio button is checked. border-radius: 50%makes things round.
Here's an example implementation:
input[type="radio"] {
appearance: none;
margin: 0;
border: 1px solid black;
background: white;
border-radius: 50%;
display: inline-grid;
place-content: center;
&::before {
content: "";
width: 0.75rem;
height: 0.75rem;
border-radius: 50%;
}
&:checked::before {
background: black;
}
}This doesn't require any dependencies, JavaScript, or ARIA roles. It's just an input element with some styles. (You can do the same thing with Tailwind if that's your jam.)
It does require knowledge of CSS but this isn't some arcane secret. Googling "how to style a radio button" shows several blog posts explaining these techniques. You may say this is a lot of CSS, but the Shadcn component we were using had 30 Tailwind classes!
I'm not trying to convince you to write your own component styles
Look, I get it. You've got a lot going on. You're not big on CSS. You just want to grab some prebuilt components so you can focus on the actual problem you're solving.
I totally understand why people reach for component libraries like Shadcn and I don't blame them at all. But I wish these component libraries would keep things simple and reuse the built-in browser elements where possible.
Who cares?
Web development is hard. There's inherent complexity in building quality sites that solve problems and work well across a wide range of devices and browsers.
But some things don't have to be hard. Browsers make things like radio buttons easy. Let's not overcomplicate it.
To understand how our radio buttons work I need to understand two separate component libraries and hundreds of lines of React.
Website visitors need to wait for JavaScript to load, parse, and run in order to be able to toggle a radio button. (In my testing, just adding these components added several KB of JS to a basic app.)
It's just a radio button
Why am I making such a big deal out of this? It's just a radio button.
But these small decisions add up to more complexity, more cognitive load, more bugs, and worse website performance.
We have strayed so far from the light
Look at it. It's beautiful:
<input type="radio" name="beverage" value="coffee" />Fancy a game?
Play my free daily word puzzle, Tiled Words!
We have strayed so far from the light!
I’ve had some challenging conversations this week.
Lately, my calendar has been filled with calls from developers reaching out for advice because layoffs were just announced at their company.
Having been in their shoes myself, I could really empathise with their anxiety.
The thing is though, when we’d dig into why there was such anxiety, a common confession surfaced. It often boiled down to something like this:
“I got comfortable. I stopped learning. I haven’t touched a new framework or built anything serious in two years because things were okay.”
They were enjoying “Peace Time.”
I like to think of life in two modes: War Mode and Peace Time.
- War Mode is chaotic. The house is on fire. You just lost your job, or your project was cancelled. Stress is high, money is tight, and uncertainty is the only certainty.
- Peace Time is stable. The pay cheque hits every few weeks. The boss is happy. The weekends are free.
The deadly mistake most developers make is waiting for War Mode before they start training.
They wait until the severance package arrives to finally decide, “Okay, time to really learn Python/FastAPI/Cloud.”
It’s a recipe for disaster. Trying to learn complex engineering skills when you’re terrified about paying the mortgage is almost impossible. You’re just too stressed. You can’t focus which means you can’t dive into the deep building necessary to learn.
You absolutely have to train and skill up during Peace Time.
When things are boring and stable, that’s the exact moment you should be aggressive about your growth.
That’s when you have the mental bandwidth to struggle through a hard coding problem without the threat of redundancy hanging over your head. It’s the perfect time to sharpen the saw.
If you’re currently in a stable job, you’re in Peace Time. Don’t waste it.
Here’s what you need to do:
- Look at your schedule this week. Identify the “comfort blocks” (the times you’re coasting because you aren’t currently threatened).
- Take 5 hours of that time this week and dedicate it to growth. This is your War Mode preparation. Build something that pushes you outside of your comfort zone. Go and learn the tool that intimidates you the most!
- If crisis hits six months from now, you won’t be the one panicking. You’ll be the one who is ready.
Does this resonate with you? Are you guilty of coasting during Peace Time?
I know I’ve been there! (I often think back and wonder where I’d be now had I not spent so much time coasting through my life’s peaceful periods!)
Let’s get you back on track. Fill out this Portfolio Assessment form we’ve created to help you formulate your goals and ideas. We read every submission, Pybites Portfolio Assessment Tool.
Julian
This note was originally sent to our email list. Join here: https://pybit.es/newsletter
Good advice.
Just over one hundred years ago, the British carried out one of the most audacious acts in the history of codebreaking. So audacious, in fact, that they had to convince the Americans they hadn’t done it at all…
The Admiralty
Running, Lieutenant Nigel De Grey decided as he narrowly avoided colliding with another paper-laden trolley, was not something that the corridors of the Admiralty Old Building had been designed for.
Nor was it something that the Royal Navy approved of from its junior officers, apparently. This was clear from the angry shouts of the people he dodged as he raced down the building’s narrow back corridors.
Right now though De Grey didn’t care. It was 17th January 1917 and Europe had been locked in a bloody stalemate for almost three years, but the scrap of paper he held in his hand might well change the outcome of the Great War.
The dormouse
Although he now spent his days in London, was more than familiar with the horrors happening on the Western Front. The son of a reverend, De Grey had worked at a publishing company before the war where he’d been nicknamed “dormouse” by his colleagues due to his shyness. At the same time he had been a member of the Royal Naval Reserve. He was called up early and, as a result, had been in combat in Belgium during the early days of the war.
In 1915, however, De Grey’s fluency in both German and French, his quick mind and his love of a good puzzle had been noticed by the powers that be. Without warning, he was ordered back to London to join a mysterious Naval department known as ‘Room 40.’
The Room
Room 40 had only existed for a few short months when De Grey joined, although plans had existed for such an organisation should war break out since 1911. That it existed at all was because the world of warfare — or more importantly the way that people communicated in war — was changing. Radio, telegraph and telephony were now viable forms of communication, and so were also potentially vital sources of intelligence too. The arrival of war brought with it a myriad of opportunities for such intelligence gathering. In August 1914, for example, a Russian attaché gave the Admiralty a copy of a German codebook taken from the beached German cruiser SS Magdeburg. In a spare room (you can guess the number) at the back of the old Admiralty building, a small group of officers and civilians were given a new job — break and read German communications. De Grey joined soon after. It was here that he discovered what he would later describe as his ‘higher calling’ — he became a codebreaker.
The Research Group
In fact, De Grey was soon assigned to an even smaller, more mysterious team within Room 40 — the ‘Research Group’. A secret department within a secret department, its innocuous name was cover for work which was anything but. For whilst trying to read your enemy’s message traffic was considered acceptable (if unsporting) behaviour during wartime, doing the same thing to neutral powers was seriously frowned upon. Yet this was exactly what the Research Group had been created to do.
That such an opportunity existed was due to the way transatlantic communication worked at the time. Radio was getting more advanced and powerful, but it was not yet good enough to provide worldwide coverage. This meant that most diplomatic traffic still circulated in telegraph form, sent across vast distances by cable.
For the Entente powers in the First World War this wasn’t really a problem. Britain and France were both at the height of their imperial power and their telegraph networks spanned the globe. Germany, however, did not have that luxury. Its cables — particularly those stretching across the Atlantic — lay well outside its zone of military control.
This situation was not lost on the Entente. Almost as soon as war was declared, much of Germany’s overseas cable network went dark. It didn’t take an expert to know why — the Royal Navy had cut most of the cables, and Germany realised those that which remained suspiciously uncut should probably be considered compromised.
The Neutral
Robbed of the ability to communicate with their embassies throughout the world, the Germans protested. They complained that this was as an outrageous violation of diplomatic protocol — even during war.
Unsurprisingly, their complaints fell on deaf ears within the Entente itself. Luckily for the Germans, however, there was one major power who agreed with them — the United States of America. America was staunchly neutral at the time, the only ‘great power’ not involved in the war and its President, Woodrow Wilson, believed that if the the US were to have any hope of mediating an end to the war in Europe, then German diplomats in the US and beyond needed to be able to talk freely to their government.
It was a noble goal, and so to further it the US State Department granted Germany permission to use the American transatlantic cable, via Copenhagen, for diplomatic telegraph traffic.
Both Germany and the US believed these messages to be entirely secure. German intelligence had sufficiently penetrated the State Department to know that the Americans weren’t interested in breaking Germany’s codes. More importantly though, both powers believed that the British would not tap into US traffic — to do so would cause an enormous diplomatic incident. Not that it mattered anyway — even if they were tempted, the Germans thought they were safe. They understood that the US cable was entirely submarine, and thus safe from tampering.
The Germans were right on the first account, Unfortunately were wrong on both the latter.
The interception
Whatever the thoughts of the British Foreign Office might be, the Admiralty had its own opinions on what was, and wasn’t, fair game when it came to intelligence gathering. If the Americans were going to transmit coded German messages for them, then as far as Captain Reginald “Blinker” Hall, the Director of Naval Intelligence and ultimate head of Room 40 was concerned, American diplomatic traffic was absolutely fair game.
Again, had the Germans been correct about the American submarine cable then this still wouldn’t have been a problem, but they weren’t. In fact, US telegraph traffic came ashore on Britain via a relay station just north of Newcastle and then travelled across the country to Cornwall. From there it was then transmitted onward to Washington. This presented multiple opportunities for the messages to be intercepted by the British, and the Research Group was born. Every day they would receive copies of the traffic sent across the line. Their job was to crack the codes and read every diplomatic message the Americans and the Germans sent.
It was a decrypt of one of those diplomatic messages that De Grey now clutched in his hand as he raced down the Admiralty’s narrow oak halls. Sent the night before, it was pure luck that it had been decrypted so quickly. It was only a short message, which had been sent by Arthur Zimmermann, the German Foreign Minister, to the German ambassador in Mexico. As such, it was considered low-level diplomatic traffic and had been marked as low-priority for breaking and decryption. By chance, however, when it had arrived at Room 40 the pneumatic Tube system had dumped it on the desk of one of the department’s other rising stars, Alfred Dillwyn Knox.
The genius
A Classics scholar and papyrologist at Cambridge before the war, “Dilly” had joined Room 40 in 1914. There he swiftly demonstrated an unquestionable genius for codebreaking. Indeed Dilly Knox remains one of the greatest codebreakers Britain has ever produced. After the end of the First World War, he would become one of the founding fathers of the Government Code and Cypher School — GCHQ, which remains Britain’s primary cryptographic line of defence to this day. Nor does his influence end there. In 1925 in Vienna, he became the first British Intelligence officer to acquire an Enigma machine. Then in Warsaw, in 1938, it was to Dilly that the Poles were prepared to turnover their own Enigma codebreaking efforts. It was also Dilly who oversaw the transfer of that information — and a number of Polish codebreakers who managed to escape the Nazi invasion of Poland — to a new codebreaking institution he had helped set up back in Britain — Bletchley Park.
What many people don’t realise is that ‘Enigma’ wasn’t one code — it was many. The most complex of these (thanks to an extra rotor on the machine) was the German Naval code. The honour for breaking that rightly belongs to Alan Turing, but he was not the only man working on Enigmas. Dilly himself broke not one, but three of the other key codes — those of Spanish Intelligence, the German Army and the Italian Navy. To take full advantage of these, he then fought for the right to form a unique codebreaking outfit at Bletchley — “Intelligence Service Knox” (ISK). Under Knox, ISK became the only codebreaking department at Bletchley entirely staffed by women.
The ‘Dilly Girls’
Dilly had spotted that whilst women were considered a vital cog in the Bletchley codebreaking machine, they were almost exclusively confined to ‘support’ roles — Bombe operators, transcribers, translators and beyond. Dilly saw this as a waste of good minds, based solely on flawed preconceptions about gender, at a time when Britain needed good minds the most.
The formation of ISK was not without controversy. Rumours soon circulated that Dilly had wandered round the huts pointing at the prettiest girls for his ‘eastern harem’, and they were soon being referred to by the derogatory nickname ‘Dilly’s Girls’.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. Once permission had been given to form ISK, Dilly had immediately approached the head of the Women’s section, who interviewed all of the female staff sent to Bletchley and managed them once they’d arrived. He asked her to reassign those she considered most wasted in their current roles to ISK and the results soon spoke for themselves. ISK became one of the most successful codebreaking teams at Bletchley, contributing critical decryptions that would help win the naval war in the Mediterranean and ensure the success of the D-Day landings. Indeed ISK’s contributions outlived Dilly himself (who died suddenly of cancer in 1943), with the department proudly adopting and subverting the ‘Dilly’s Girls’ moniker until the end of the war.
The revelation
In 1917, of course, all this was in the future. Right now Dilly’s efforts were focused firmly on finding new ways into German naval codes. Unusually, Dilly was not particularly mathematical. What he was good at, however, was spotting patterns and looking at things from unusual angles, in part the result of his experience rebuilding and translating Greek manuscripts from mere fragments before the war. He also had a near-uncanny ability to put himself in the mind of the people at the other end of the line. In 1915 he had broken the German Admiralty’s flag code by spotting — and exploiting — one particular German telegraph operator’s love of romantic poetry. These efforts had put Dilly on the Research Group’s radar, and though he was not officially a member of the team he had been quietly called in to help with their work from time to time.
Indeed this was perhaps why this particular intercept had dropped from the Admiralty’s pneumatic tube system onto Dilly’s desk on the night of the 16th January. With the rest of the Research Group busy that night, it might have been that Dilly was seen as an overflow for the low-level traffic. Whatever the reason, something about this particular message caught Dilly’s eye. Rather than leaving it at the bottom of his pile, he worked on trying to break it right through the night.
By morning, he had begun to make inroads into the telegram. Dilly didn’t speak German, but he recognised words such as “Submarine”, “Mexico” and “Arizona”. He became increasingly convinced that the telegram was important and so, when De Grey arrived at work the next morning, Dilly roped him in to help. The two men had worked as a decryption team before with considerable success — De Grey’s fluent German and experience as an editor meshing well with Dilly’s own skills. Together they worked on the telegram right through the morning. The more they decrypted, the more both men became astonished at what they were reading — indeed they could barely believe it. By lunchtime, however, they had decrypted enough to know that they weren’t wrong. They agreed the Captain needed to see this immediately.
Normally athletics wouldn’t have been necessary. Officially, everyone in Room 40 reported to Sir Alfred Ewing, who himself then reported to “Blinker” Hall. Sometime before, however, the Captain himself had quietly pulled De Grey and the other men of the Research Group aside. Ewing, Hall told them, was a bit of a chatterbox in the corridors of power and Hall didn’t trust him to keep a really big secret. If the Research Group’s work ever yielded something particularly sensitive or explosive, then they were ordered to bypass Ewing completely and only reveal what they had found to Hall himself. So this was where De Grey was headed.
The Captain
De Grey entered the Captain’s outer office at a sprint, bursting into the Hall’s office before his personal secretary could object. Luckily, the Captain was in.
“Do you want to bring America into the war sir?” De Grey burst out breathlessly.
“Yes, why?” Replied the slightly bemused Hall. He had long since stopped expecting any semblance of military decorum or normality from his codebreakers.
“I’ve got a telegram that will bring them in if you give it to them.” De Grey blurted out, thrusting the results of his own and Dilly’s efforts towards the Captain.
Hall took the decrypt and read it, silently, as De Grey explained who it was from, for and how they had broken it. For the very first time, a senior member of British Intelligence held in his hands a copy of what would become known to history as the ‘Zimmermann Telegram.’
We intend to begin on the first of February unrestricted submarine warfare. We shall endeavour in spite of this to keep the United States of America neutral. In the event of this not succeeding, we make Mexico a proposal of alliance on the following basis: make war together, make peace together, generous financial support and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The settlement in detail is left to you. You will inform the President of the above most secretly as soon as the outbreak of war with the United States of America is certain and add the suggestion that he should, on his own initiative, invite Japan to immediate adherence and at the same time mediate between Japan and ourselves. Please call the President’s attention to the fact that the ruthless employment of our submarines now offers the prospect of compelling England in a few months to make peace.
Signed, ZIMMERMANN
The telegram
Hall listened patiently as De Grey outlined both what they new for certain and what were guesses at length. By the time De Grey had finished, Hall was happy to accept what he was saying was true. At this stage, they had not fully decrypted the message (the above is the full, final text), but it was more than enough for Captain Hall to grasp that De Grey wasn’t exaggerating. This wasn’t just confirmation that Germany were preparing to conduct unrestricted submarine warfare — it was incitement to Mexico to declare war on the United States.
Whilst Zimmermann has been cast in history as something of a naive operator, the truth is anything but. Zimmermann was one of the architects of Germany’s successful policy of funnelling money and support to rebellions and rivals of the Entente powers. This had caused enormous problems for them, forcing them to spread their forces thinner across the world. Indeed at that very moment this approach was yielding enormous results in Russia, who would be forced out of the war entirely before the year was out.
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Zimmermann’s telegram was intended to lay the groundwork for the same approach to be taken across the Atlantic, in the event that the declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare be enough to tip the balance of US government into intervening.
Not only were the Germans suggesting Mexico declare war on the United States (with German backing) but, even more incredibly, they were using the using US State Department’s own telegraph network to do it.
The problem
If unrestricted submarine warfare itself didn’t drag the US into the war, then Hall realised that De Grey and Dilly were right — this telegram (and the outrageous way it had been sent) could well be enough to do so.
Hall, however, was fully aware that he had a problem. Indeed the mother of all intelligence problems. One of the regular problems with good intelligence was working out how to use it without ‘burning’ the source — because revealing it might inadvertently reveal to the enemy how you got it, cutting you off from all future intelligence by the same method.
Hall’s problem here was even worse. Not only would revealing the existence of the telegram burn the source, as the Germans would know the US cable was compromised, but that source was, effectively, the US State Department itself.
“Hello chaps, we’ve been reading your mail, and there’s some things in here you really should see…” Was a line that was hardly likely to go over well with the Americans. Indeed they may be more than outraged enough about that to eclipse any horror at the telegram itself.
Hall’s solution
Recognising the explosiveness of the situation, Hall and De Grey briefly discussed their options. Realising that whatever he did, he should probably lock things down until they had a plan.
Claude Serocold, Hall’s personal assistant was inducted into the secret and the men then pitched around more ideas as to how they could get the telegram into the hands of the Americans without blowing the source. In the end, it was Hall himself who had the brainwave that led to the solution.
Looking at the intercept, he realised that although the final destination of the telegram was the German Ambassador in Mexico, it hadn’t been sent to him directly. It was routed via Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, the German Ambassador to the US. Although the British didn’t know it at the time, this was because the arrangement between the US State Department and the German Foreign Office was that they could send diplomatic communications down the main US cable to Washington but no further. At that point, the Germans would have to make their own arrangements for onward transmission.
Whatever the reasons, Hall realised that this presented an opportunity. Von Bernstorff would have to retransmit the message at the American end. The German Embassy, Room 40 knew, had a commercial relationship with Western Union in the United States, so this was likely how von Bernstorff would do it.
Room 40 also knew that he would also have to decrypt and then re-encrypt the message before doing so, as the Germans never used their own, high-level codes on commercial networks. Doing so risked opening them up too much to codebreaking efforts. Based on previous experience, the men posited that the whole process of receipt in New York, handover from the State Department to the Germans, decryption, re-encryption and transmission over Western Union would take about five days.
Hall realised this whole process offered an opportunity they could exploit. The Western Union message would be in a lower code, transcribed by the Germans themselves. If they could get hold of that, at the Mexican end, then they could claim this was the source instead.
The Mexican connection
Until now, Room 40 had generally ignored the Western Union traffic as a potential source of high-value intelligence. Any kind of operation across the Atlantic would have involved not just stepping on American toes but smashing a large boot down on them repeatedly. Given the perceived low value of the traffic, it simply wasn’t worth the risk.
Hall pointed out though that right now they didn’t need everything that Germany was sending over Western Union. They didn’t even need a tap on the line. They just needed a copy of this specific telegram. They knew who it was going to, who it was from and — roughly — when it was likely to be sent. They just needed someone who could get hold of a copy from the Western Union office in Mexico City, no questions asked.
Hall made discreet inquiries with the British Embassy in Mexico. They confirmed that they had a source in the Western Union office in Mexico City — a clerk who, for the right price, would occasionally lift telegrams for them from Western Union’s files. Hall told them what to watch out for and when, although he refused to tell them why. Nonetheless, they agreed that they would try.
It was an inspired idea. A few days later, courtesy of the British Embassy in Mexico, a copy of the telegram, lifted directly from the files of the Mexico City office of Western Union, was delivered to Captain Hall’s desk by the Foreign Office.
The ambassador
On 19th February 1917, Captain Hall found himself standing in the offices of the US Ambassador to Britain in the heart of London.
19 days before, on the exact day indicated in the Zimmermann Telegram had indicated, Germany had begun waging unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic. It had caused outrage and the breaking of diplomatic relations between Germany and the United States. Yet the US had remained neutral.
On 5th February — two weeks after De Grey and Dilly had first decrypted it — ‘Blinker’ Hall finally informed the British Foreign Office that the Zimmermann Telegram existed.
As Hall expected, the Foreign Office demanded to know the source. Hall was able to present them with the Western Union telegram, describing — with a straight face — how the message had been a ‘lucky intercept’ in Mexico, that had fallen into the hands of the British Embassy. They’d suspected it was significant, so had passed it on to Room 40, where it had been decrypted.
This was actually a lie on both accounts. Whilst it was clearly the same telegram as the one in the original “high” code that they had broken, somewhat ironically the “lesser” code that von Bernstorff had used (Diplomatic Code 13040) was one which the British hadn’t previously bothered trying to break. Luckily, another of the Room 40 codebreakers had spotted that it was similar to another naval code that they had broken elsewhere, and this had led to a partial decryption. Enough, at least, to fill in the gaps left in Dilly’s work on the original interception and confirm beyond a doubt that they were the same message.
On 18th February 1917, the Foreign Office had discreetly informed the US Ambassador, Walter Hines Page of the telegram’s existence, but Page was naturally suspicious. Whatever the state of US / German relations, he found it hard to believe that such an incredible telegram existed, let alone that the British would somehow have managed to obtain a copy. He told his personal secretary, Edward Bell, that he wanted more proof. Only then would he present this information to President Wilson.
This was why Captain Hall was standing in front of Edward Bell in the US Embassy now. He had been dispatched by the Foreign Office to meet with Bell and satisfy the Ambassador’s demands. The two men chatted cordially and the Captain told Bell the Mexico story and offered up his copy of the Western Union telegram as evidence. Bell agreed that it was compelling, but he still wanted more.
“I want to see it decrypted. In person.” Bell told the Captain.
Captain Hall smiled and sent for Nigel De Grey.
The final bluff
De Grey arrived soon after, clutching his notes on Diplomatic Code 13040. Captain Hall introduced him to Edward Bell and, with a relaxed smile, told De Grey what he was to do — decrypt the telegram while Bell watched.
On his part, De Grey couldn’t understand why the Captain was so relaxed, because internally De Grey himself was screaming. Hall had made an uncharacteristic mistake — he seemed to have forgotten that they hadn’t solved the Mexican version of the telegram. They only had a partial decrypt, largely based off the naval code it had been a close match for. Worse, De Grey hadn’t even bothered to write down all of the keys they had discovered in his own notes. There hadn’t seemed to be much point once they’d done enough to fill in the gaps on the original.
As he began to decode the telegram, under Bell’s watchful eye, De Grey realised he was going to have to improvise.
“If I stopped and fetched another book,” De Grey said later, “he would suspect at once that we’d faked it up for his benefit. If I let him see that I was writing it down out of my head, he would not believe me. If he did not believe me, we should fail and lose the greatest opportunity ever presented to us. Several seconds of bloody sweat. Then I bluffed. I showed him all the groups when they had been written in my book and passed quickly over those that were not, writing the words into the copy of the telegram by heart.”
“Edward Bell, the most charming man, was thoroughly convinced — the more easily I think in that he wanted to be convinced anyhow and regarded the whole thing as black magic.”
On the 20th February 1917, Bell handed over Hall’s copy of the Zimmermann telegram to Ambassador Page, telling him he agreed it was genuine, and suggesting they get Western Union to confirm that it was genuine. By the end of the month, the company had done so and a copy of Room 40’s decrypted version was in the hands of the President. On the 28th February 1917, Wilson handed it over to the American press.
The result
The United States of America declared war on Germany on the 5th April 1917, just over a month after the Zimmermann telegram had been handed over to the US Government. It is possible that unrestricted submarine warfare would have been enough to tip the US into intervention, eventually. The Zimmermann telegram, however, almost certainly made that inevitable. Few documents, in the entire history of information warfare, can be said to have had such an impact world history.
For the men of Room 40, it was a spectacular triumph, albeit one that none of the key players could talk about for considerable time to come. Indeed so good was Captain Hall’s cover story that it remained, for a long time, the official version of events. This suited ‘Blinker’ very well indeed. The Admiralty continued to read US Diplomatic traffic right up to — and indeed beyond — the end of the First World War.
“He was a perfectly marvellous person” Edward Bell later said of Captain Hall, “but the coldest-hearted proposition that ever was — he’d eat a man’s heart and hand it back to him.”
Both Dilly and De Grey were happy to keep the secret. They were codebreakers, and accepted that public acknowledgement rarely came with the job.
One of ‘Dilly’s Girls’ would later recall that, having been told the real story from the man himself at Bletchley, she asked him if either he, or De Grey, had received any kind of recognition.
“Gosh no!” Dilly replied, with a laugh. “But I believe Nigel did get an official telling off for running in the corridor!”
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Want a thorough and detailed account of Room 40 and its impact? Then buy Inside Room 40 by Paul Gannon.
Update!!!!
To everyone who said they wanted to know more about Dilly and the ‘Dilly Girls’ in WW2 — if we reach our Patreon target, then I will write up the remarkable tale of how Dilly, the women of the ISK, Prince Philip, a golfing British Admiral and an amorous Italian Ambassador all played a part in the last, great naval battle in the history of warfare.
Click here to go see the bonus panel!
Hovertext:
At first they fear that the antenna is a probe, but after about thirty minutes they wish it was merely probe day.
Today's News:
Good one! Antennas are hard.
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