TheCodeBreakers
disguised as hundreds of periods in telegraph blanks, love letters,
business communications, family missives, or sometimes as a strip of the
tiny film hidden under a stamp. The very first discovered, and the most
frightening, was one in which a spy was asked to discover "Where are
being made tests with uranium?" at a time when the United States was
fighting to keep secret its development of the atom bomb. The "Mexican
microdot ring," which operated from a suburb of Mexico City,
microphotographed trade and technical publications that were barred
from international channels—a favorite was Iron Age, with statistics on
American steel production—and sent them to cover addresses in Europe
on a wholesale basis, with as many as twenty pats in a single letter.
Technical drawings also went by microdot. Other microdots talked of
blowing up seized Axis ships in southern harbors, the deficient condition
of one of the Panama Canal locks, and so on. Censorship discovered