I worked in the same building where the Room 40 codebreakers had worked during World War I — the Old Building of the Admiralty in London. In WWII, we were a combined British-American operation working on German and Italian naval codes. I had a degree in mathematics from Cambridge — rare for women in 1940 — and I used it to break a cipher system that the Italians thought was unbreakable. We called it 'the Admiral's system.' In 1941, my work contributed to the intelligence that helped sink the Italian fleet at Taranto. That raid was the model for Pearl Harbor. Sometimes I think about that — the ...