Spy story

Patricia Barry: WWII decoder cracked spy messages called ‘indecipherables’

As part of an elite unit of decoders, Patricia Barry spent most of the Second World War deciphering messages from spies operating in France, Belgium, Norway, Poland and other parts of Nazi-occupied Europe. Mrs. Barry, who has died in Port Credit, Ont., at the age of 94, belonged to a group nicknamed “the indecipherables,” which meant they read garbled messages from agents who had either forgotten the secret code or were so nervous about being caught that they made errors, rendering their messages all but impossible to read.

After leading a life involving espionage and secrecy, Mrs. Barry was always reticent about revealing the details of her wartime experiences. She lived a quiet domestic life, the last half of it in Canada, where she moved with her family in 1963. She spent many years as the assistant to the headmaster at Lower Canada College (LCC), a private boys’ school in Montreal.