The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

At different points in their careers, Elizebeth and William were asked to make codes, and they were good at this task, but their most significant feats involved codebreaking. They snuck into vaults of text, sometimes alone, sometimes together, feeling for the click of the bolt. Their lives became a series of increasingly spectacular and improbable heists. They used science to steal truth.

Toward the end of the conversation, Elizebeth asked if she had thought to tell the story of how she ended up at Riverbank in the first place, working for the man who built it, a man named George Fabyan. It was a story she had told a few times over the years, a memory outlined in black. Valaki said no, Elizebeth hadn’t already told this part. “Well, I better give you that,” Elizebeth said. “It’s not only very, very amusing, but it’s actually true syllable by syllable.”

Fabyan never claimed to be an altruist. “I ain’t no angel,” he said once, “and there are no angels in the New England cotton textile business, and if there are, they will all be broke.”

And all through the tour, Fabyan kept circling back to the primary mission of the laboratories, the glimmering idea at the bottom of it all: immortality. Extending human life. Each person could live to be one hundred or more, he said. The thinkers of Riverbank had sequestered themselves in this lush, remote location to learn how not to die.

He was good at blurring the line between fantasy and reality because he didn’t believe any such line existed. As he once told William Friedman, I have seen impractical and improbable things accomplished. All it took to achieve improbable things was an optimistic attitude and a refusal to give up.

To believe Mrs. Gallup’s theory, you had to believe that the plays, these warm-blooded, ravishing beasts, had been conceived almost as an afterthought, as mere envelopes for a stilted memoir about a guy whose mom was the queen. It made no sense. It would be like God creating a galaxy simply to tell a knock-knock joke to some distant deity, enciphered in the shapes of stars.

With each successive letter deciphered she had a choice—limited but definite—of possibilities; and so, as she went on, there would be a kind of collaboration between the decipherer and the text, each influencing the other. Hence perhaps the curious maundering wordy character of the extracted messages, very like the communications of the spirit world: with some sense but no real mind behind them, just a sort of drifting intention, taking occasional sudden whimsical turns when the text momentarily mastered the decipherer.

William and some of his high school classmates fell under the spell of the “back-to-the-soil” movement, a homespun brand of Zionism that encouraged Jewish kids in America to resist anti-Semitism by tilling the land, making themselves strong and self-sufficient. William took this idea seriously enough to enroll in some courses at a Michigan agricultural college. When he actually tried farming, he realized that everything about it, from the physical labor to the grit in his clothes, made him miserable.He went to Cornell instead.

Codebreaking required more drastic measures. Now Elizebeth had to shake the words until they spilled their letters. To rip, rupture, puncture, chisel, scissor, smash, and scoop up the rubble in her arms. To chip off flakes from the smooth rock of the message and place them in piles and ask questions about them. It involved a kind of hard-hearted analytic violence that she had never contemplated before. It was reaching into the red body of the text until the hands dripped with blood.

The prose gets somewhat overwrought....

He had placed a picture of her next to an oil lamp and each time he struck a match to light the lamp he looked at the picture and said, out loud, “Hello, you darling! Hello, Rita Bita Girl,” then lit the flame and started to write, imagining he was back in bed with her at Riverbank, stroking her hair, talking in baby talk. He fantasized about spanking her. “Do you miss your Biwy Boy, my darling? Have you been naughty? Do you need to be spanked? You little ‘imp.’ ” He said that was as far as he dared to go, with the censor reading every word, and promised that someday he would cable her “some real stuff which may burn the insulation of the wires.”

William asked Hebern how he happened to think of this elegant concept of a wired rotor. Hebern replied, “Well, you see, I was in jail.” William asked what for. Hebern said, “Horse thievery.” William asked if he was guilty. Hebern said, “The jury thought so.”

“The number of permutations and combinations which a given machine affords, like the birdies that sing in the spring, often have nothing or little to do with the case.”

William Friedman was apparently a Gilbert and Sullivan fan.

Captain Joe Rochefort, one of the navy’s top codebreakers from 1925 until the end of the Second World War, suffered from ulcers. A slender, high-strung man, Rochefort recalled later that he would come from work three days out of four and lie in bed for two hours, unable to eat, because he felt so much pressure. The pressure didn’t come from superior officers, or even from the urgencies of war; it came from within. “Here is a bunch of messages and I can’t read them,” Rochefort said. “Now what’s wrong? It was this sort of a thing, you see. And this was sort of standard. You’ll find people like this who maybe go into a trance, what looks like a trance when you’re talking to them, and the first thing you notice is that they are not paying any attention to you at all, and their mind is on this other problem which they brought home from the office.” Rochefort had to stop breaking codes for two years in the late 1920s for health reasons, but the navy pressed him back into duty. He knew William Friedman well. “There is no one that could compare with Friedman,” Rochefort said, “no one at all.”

He described going for an evening walk with the attractive wife of a friend, an outing cut short by clouds of mosquitoes. Elizebeth wrote back, “My dear, I’m proud of you! If fate had only been gentle with you and spared the chiggers, what a nice Memory you would have.” She added, “Hold as many hands as you can! Life grows short!” In another letter she asked, “Am I wicked to be glad you are missing me?”

They took these games further by organizing live puzzle-solving events that were famous in their social group throughout the 1930s. Some of these “cipher parties” were scavenger hunts that sent guests winging through the city. Elizebeth handed you a small white envelope. You tore it open to find a cryptogram. The solution was the address of a restaurant. When you arrived, you ate the salad course, then solved a second cryptogram to discover the location of the entrée. Other parties were hosted at the Friedmans’ home with food cooked by Elizebeth. A shy army wife arrived at 3932 Military Road one evening with her husband and panicked when the Friedmans handed her a menu in code. “The first item was a series of dots done with a blue pen,” she later recalled. “The ‘brains’ at the party worked over the number of dots in a group when it occurred to me it had to be ‘blue points’—oysters—and it was! I had done my bit, and from then on I was quiet.”

They took their home library seriously enough to follow the practices of professional librarians. William made his own children sign a checkout slip if they wanted to carry a book from one floor of the house to another, and whenever the Friedmans acquired a book, they pasted a custom bookplate inside the cover, a rectangle of card stock designed by a professor friend who studied Mayan writing. The illustration on the bookplate showed a crimson warrior swinging an axe down upon the skull of a human.

Yardley’s colleague later said that the story of the blue-eyed blonde was a “damned lie,” and that the only things taken from the office were a couple of bottles of booze. “It was my booze and I think [Yardley] took it himself.” As for Madame de Victorica, she did exist, but Yardley embellished her biography. He admitted to friends that he fictionalized parts of the book. He compressed time, invented dialogue, added “bunk” and “hooey,” and made no apologies: “To write saleable stuff one must dramatise.”

he began to write his own alternate history of the events and concepts Yardley had described, inside Yardley’s book, in the margins: “A lie! Which can be so proved to be. See papers attached. Exhibit 1.” He attached exhibits to another man’s book. He underlined sentences, bracketed paragraphs, tagged words with asterisks, spangled pages with exclamation marks. Revenge by annotation.

“Well, that wasn’t exactly news to me, my Darling. For I’ve known for a long time that you are the one in back of me and responsible for what little I’ve done. Had it not been for you I’d have been sunk long ago by unsolved infernal conflicts, by windy storms of emotion, by failure to keep up the fight when things seemed not worthwhile. . . . I know how much I owe to you—for love, for wisdom, for courage, and common sense.”

“J. Edgar Hoover is a man of great singleness of purpose, and his purpose is the welfare of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” a group of British operatives later wrote. “It was once remarked of a well-known Oxford scholar that, while he had no enemies, he was hated by all his friends. Something of the same kind would express the feelings towards the FBI of its fellow U.S. agencies.”

Friedman sat quietly for a few moments. Everyone was looking at him, waiting for his reaction. He turned to the codebreakers. “The recovery of this machine will go down as a milestone in cryptologic history,” he said in a formal, distant voice. Then he left the room.

This was how William Friedman reacted when his team broke the Purple cipher.

on the day he and his team broke Purple, a historic achievement that had required all of his battered brain, all he had learned in his unexpected life of exploration with the woman who meant everything, he said nothing about it to her when he came home. He did not seem different to her than he did on any other evening. He said hello and asked what was for dinner.

She refused to admit that her husband might have a serious mental illness. She thought the word “depression” was “too strong a term” and preferred “mood swings” or “downswings.” At home she answered his personal mail, explaining that William was ill and would get back to people when he could.

Berlin gave Becker a trunkful of explosives for blowing up British ships in the harbor. Becker arrived in Buenos Aires with the trunk in December 1940 and was intercepted at the German embassy, where the ambassador opened the trunk, saw the bombs, imagined the diplomatic headaches they would cause, and ordered Becker to dump the bombs in the river.

In three months the ruthless U-boats sent one million tons of material to the bottom of the sea and by summer 1942 the U-boat captains had murdered five thousand Allied seamen.

Murdered is a misleading word here.

He had trouble sleeping and was besieged by doubts and morbid thoughts. “Flight, fight, or neurosis,” he wrote on a loose sheet of paper years later during a similar period of depression, trying to describe the feeling. “ ‘Floating anxiety’ which attaches itself to anything and everything. Fear that E. despises me for being such a weakling.” It was scary for a man who prided himself on precision and rationality to feel like he was not in control of his mind or his body. He sometimes referred to this unpleasant condition as the “heebeegeebees,” which he abbreviated as “hbgbs” in private notes to himself.

All day long, telegrams of congratulations arrived from friends near and far. Two of the telegrams were jokes written by William, notifying Elizebeth that she had been awarded an honorary A.B. degree from the Sorbonne, “Artiste de Boudoir,” and also a D.S.M. from Harvard, “Doctor of Successful Marriage.”

Barbara was between semesters of college and living in New York City, in an apartment on West Fifty-sixth Street, getting involved in leftist political causes and dating an activist named Hank. “Hank is beautiful,” she wrote to William, “but we’re so utterly different. He lived in the slums and led a gang (because he was the tallest and the biggest) and hated cops and swam in the East River. . . . And now we go to bars and stand at the rail with the workmen and talk about Leninism.”

Elizebeth, Lieutenant Jones, and their coast guard teammates watched in frustration as new circuits lit up throughout the summer and fall of 1942—two, then five, then fifteen—each using a different and yet-unbroken code. It was as if the FBI had tried to destroy an approaching asteroid with a single huge bomb but instead just blasted the rock into dozens of sentient fragments able to regenerate and spread wreckage over a wider swath of earth.

Final objective is said to be formation of a bloc of South American countries, which would itself protect its interests, without tutelage of others who pretend to do this. Bolivia must not only be freed from USA influence, but also establish social justice.

This was the goal that the nazi spies in Argentina were working towards.

As for Elizebeth’s own accomplishments in the year 1944, there was nothing to report. She wrote that she was “just carrying on a routine navy job, in an unglorious fashion, unlike her distinguished husband.”

Up ahead, the Laboratorium Feuerstein loomed into view. The impression was of reaching a castle on a mountaintop. The building was enormous. Red Cross signs were painted on the roof, a ruse to pass off the institute as a hospital and prevent RAF pilots from dropping bombs.

The convoy reached a plateau with a parking area at the base of the lair, and William entered a hundred-foot-long tunnel protected by two enormous, heavily ornamented bronze gates. The tunnel was wide enough for three automobiles and brightly lit with electric lamps. At the far end of the tunnel, an elevator shaft the height of a fifteen-story building rose the rest of the way, to the mountain’s pinnacle. The elevator operator was the same German who had worked for Hitler and his deputies all during the war. William talked to him for a bit. “He gave us a little speech in his defense, saying that he was assigned to the job—the Nazis wouldn’t let him get away, etc., etc.”