The key word was always the name of a state. There were forty-eight of them, which made sufficient variety, and they could be referred to with relative innocence and ease. Of course, against any sophisticated enemy the constant use of the name of a state would have been dangerous, but those were simple days.
Pedro managed to slip into camp one night — always a very risky thing. He was hot on the trail of Villa and had pinned him down, he thought, to a particular region. This region he intended to penetrate, and if he could — and stay alive — he might be able to send back a message by a trusted ally, provided he stayed alive. The few American soldiers who worked with Pedro — and my friend Wingate was the youngest of them — discussed possible ways of trapping Villa, if he were where Pedro thought he was, but it was clear that everything depended on just which valley he was in at the moment, and this was what Pedro had to find out.
It was only after Pedro had slipped out of camp as dawn was approaching that the soldiers realized he had not given them the key word for his next, all-important message. He might be able to send them the usual roundabout indication, but he might not. He should have told them while he was right there. After some agonized recrimination, it fell to Wingate, as junior man, to take out in pursuit of Pedro and get the information without blowing his cover.
Wingate took off with two enlisted men and, choosing the one decent path in the direction in which Pedro was going, they overtook him on his burro. Pedro looked at them in the dim light with considerable hostility. That hostility probably did not have to be assumed. Any contact with the Yanquis would give grounds for suspicion to anyone who might witness the event from the surrounding hills.
Wingate realized this and asked his questions brusquely, as a soldier might of a peon. In his broken Spanish he asked as to the neighboring villages and if there were armed men in the vicinity and if government armies had passed through and whether some key route might exist through the mountains. Some key route, he said, and the word “key” was scarcely emphasized.
Pedro answered sullenly, professing ignorance of even the simplest matters, as a peon might when addressing soldiers. Shrugging, he said, “I do not know how best to go through the mountains. There are many paths, and I stay at home, you understand. I have been told the paths are all straight on every side. I have heard the northernmost of these might be what you want, but I do not know for myself.”
Wingate, satisfied, wheeled about and returned to camp. There, he repeated the elliptical utterance.
What Pedro said made no sense, of course, unless you knew what Wingate was after. Pedro spoke in that way with the clear intention of keeping any significance away from any unauthorized eavesdropper. To Wingate and his colleagues, however, it was clear. The key that Pedro intended to use was a state whose boundaries were all straight lines. That meant that any state that was bounded even in part by an ocean or a river or the ridge of a mountain chain was eliminated. When a map was consulted, it was at once clear that forty-five states were thus eliminated. There were only three states all of whose boundaries were straight lines: Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. Of these three states, Wyoming was the northernmost, and so they all agreed that was the key.
Eventually a message arrived from Pedro — a longer one than usual. Everyone was certain that it must contain explicit details on Villa’s whereabouts and on the best route to take in order to block his retreat and to trap him.
Pedro himself never returned, nor was his body ever found. The natural assumption was that he had trusted one Mexican too many, had been betrayed, and shot.
At the time the message arrived, however, Wingate and the others didn’t know Pedro would never return. If they had had some presentiment of this, moreover, they would have shrugged it off, human nature being what it is. Pedro had known the risks; he was running them for his country; and it was the message that was all-important and that had been delivered. A life was a regrettable but not too high price to pay for it.
That is, if the message had been of use. As you’ve probably guessed, since you know the Americans never caught Villa, it proved of no use. Wyoming had been taken as the key, but it was quickly obvious that all it delivered was gibberish.
There was enormous dismay, as you can imagine. Naturally, there was a strong suspicion that Wingate’s Spanish did not enable him to tell “northernmost” from “easternmost” or “westernmost.” Colorado was the easternmost of the three and Utah was westernmost. They were both tried and both failed. All three gave different decipherings, but they were only three varieties of gibberish.
Then some pointed out that Arizona and New Mexico were new states that had entered the Union only four years earlier. Pedro might not be quite certain of their boundaries. Both had mostly straight lines as boundaries. Arizona was bounded on the west by the Colorado River, and New Mexico, the better bet, was almost entirely straight lines except for one tiny stretch of the Rio Grande.
Both were tried. Nothing. Nevada was mostly straight lines, too, except for a bit of the Colorado in the southeast, so that was tried. Again nothing.
Wingate, feeling his career hung in the balance, was the only one who didn’t give up after that. He made up a written dictionary of the various ciphers keyed in to each letter of the alphabet. That was against the rules, but he didn’t want to lose out by making a mistake in that respect. He then tried the six states already tested and went on to try all the remaining states as well. Nothing in every case.
That was Wingate’s story that hot summer evening in 1943, and when he concluded he said, “I won’t say that ended my career, because it obviously didn’t, but it certainly slowed my advance. Someone had to be blamed and I was the obvious candidate. It took me several years to live down that blot on what proved to be an otherwise distinguished career. I did live it down and I am doing well, so I can’t really complain. Still, I wish I knew what went wrong. Could Pedro have made a mistake in the ciphering? He never had at any other time. Could the message have been intercepted and a false message substituted? Somehow I don’t see Villa possessing that subtle a sense of humor. His methods might have been effective, but they were always crude.
“But what went wrong, then? I tried every state. In fact, I felt that for the final climactic message he would choose a very unusual key, just to make sure it wouldn’t be broken if intercepted. Once that occurred to me in later years, I even tried some U.S. territories — Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Samoa, Guam, the Canal Zone. Nothing worked. I expect that until I die I’ll wake up at night still worrying about it.”
I had listened to the story attentively. I was only an apprentice in my mid-twenties and Wingate was one of the great men in the field. When he finished, I said diffidently, Do you still have the message? And the list of substitutions for each letter?”
“Oh, yes,” said Wingate bitterly. “I’ve kept it on hand as a grim reminder of the fact that disasters wait around every comer. And every once in a while I gaze at it in the hope that illumination will suddenly blaze up within me. — It never has.”
“In that case,” I said even more diffidently, “I might be able to read it for you.”
“What!” he said. “Are you mad?”
“I hope not, sir,” I said.
“Are you trying to tell me that I’ve been worrying over this for over a quarter of a century and you’ve got the answer after hearing the story once?”
“It’s possible, sir. Let me tell you something about Pedro that you haven’t told me, and if I’m right I’ll tell you what I think is the key to the message.”