The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

“We call a lot of things luck that are but the outcome of our own bad endeavor,” she wrote in the diary, “but there is undoubtedly something outside ourselves that sometimes wins for us, or loses, irrespective of ourselves. What is it? Is it God?”

a boarding school adjacent to the Riverbank property, the Illinois State Training School for Delinquent and Dependent Girls at Geneva, really a low-security juvenile prison in the countryside, a place where judges across Illinois sent “wayward girls” deemed mentally deficient or sexually promiscuous. The founder of the Training School ordered the girls beaten with rawhide whips and thought society should force them to be sterilized: “When they begin to grow and attain some size the blood that runs in their veins will begin to tell and the incorrigible girl is the result.”

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His insight was that all letters of the alphabet can be represented with only two letters, if the two letters are combined in different permutations of five-letter blocks. The letters i and j, and u and v, were interchangeable in Bacon’s time, so, choosing a and b for the two letters that represent all the rest, the new alphabet looks like this: A B C D E F aaaaa aaaab aaaba aaabb aabaa aabab G H I, J K L M aabba aabbb abaaa abaab ababa ababb N O P Q R S abbaa abbab abbba abbbb baaaa baaab T U, V W X Y Z baaba baabb babaa babab babba babbb Each letter becomes five, so a word like Riverbank, written in this cipher, grows five times as long: baaaa abaaa baabb aabaa baaaa aaaab aaaaa abbaa abaab. This is exactly like binary code, the language at the root of computers, and Morse code as well. In all of these systems, just two symbols, arranged in different combinations, can stand for many others. Binary code uses 0s and 1s, Morse code dots and dashes. Francis Bacon discovered the basic principle in 1623.

“a group of two operators, working harmoniously as a unit, can accomplish more than four operators working singly. Different minds, centered on the same problem, will supplement and check each other; errors will be found quickly; interchange of ideas will bring results rapidly. In short, two minds, ‘with but a single thought,’ bring to bear upon a given subject that concentration of effort and facility of treatment which is not possible for one mind alone.”

For the first eight months of the war, as incredible as it sounds, William and Elizebeth, and their team at Riverbank, did all of the codebreaking for every part of the U.S. government: for the State Department, the War Department (army), the navy, and the Department of Justice.

No solution was given. “The meaning of the cipher which now follows will never be solved by any one,” the author wrote, concluding that the lock “has now closed and firmly shut its fastenings.” Naturally, William grabbed a pencil and began trying to pick the lock. “Well,” Elizebeth writes, when William “met up with that message, he took the challenge and set his teeth into the tough nut with a snap. And would you believe it, he deciphered the message, short as it was, and the key, in 15 minutes!” The key relied on a single repeated word: “courage.” The plaintext read: “He who fears is half dead.” It’s a convincing piece of testimony to his greatness: William Friedman, the smartest man who ever lived. But instead of ending the story here, Elizebeth goes on: “Of course, when I learned that, I too had to try my hand” at the cryptogram. “I unlocked the forever-to-be-hidden secret in 17 minutes.”

When William was growing up, Pittsburgh’s Jewish Criterion weekly newspaper made the case against intermarriage in repeated articles and editorials: The glacial undercurrents of racial antipathy between Jew and non-Jew cannot be tepified by even the hottest fiercest rays of the sun of love! Statistics and the divorce courts prove this. A part cannot become merged into a whole without ceasing to be a part. The Jews don’t want to merge. WILL THE JEWS COMMIT SUICIDE THROUGH MIXED MARRIAGES?

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Shannon, who would later work with William Friedman and other cryptologists on secret NSA projects, also enjoyed thinking about codes and ciphers. While employed at Bell Labs, he came up with the insight that the problem of communicating through a noisy system, like a phone wire, is almost identical to the process of enciphering and deciphering a message. In other words, according to Shannon, making yourself understood to another person is essentially a problem of cryptology. You reduce the noise of the channel between you (instead of noise, Shannon called it “information entropy”) in a way that can be quantified. And the method for reducing the noise—for recovering messages that would otherwise be lost or garbled—is decryption. Viewed through Shannon’s theory, intimate communication is a cryptologic process. When you fall in love, you develop a compact encoding to share mental states more efficiently, cut noise, and bring your beloved closer. All lovers, in this light, are codebreakers.

Elizebeth designed a menu that listed one of the courses as “An Indecipherable Cipher.” A guest wondered if this meant “hash,” a cryptographic term for a string of text that gets scrambled once and never unscrambled, like a door that locks forever behind you (today hashes are used to protect Internet passwords). The guest was delighted when Elizebeth arrived from the kitchen carrying a steaming plate of meat-and-potato hash.

Super cute

And Hoover was a chauvinist of the old school. When he first took charge of the bureau in 1922, there had been three female agents. He got rid of them. The next two female agents wouldn’t join the bureau until after his death in 1972. He argued that women weren’t agent material because they couldn’t be taught to shoot guns. Female clerks and secretaries at the bureau had to wear skirts and weren’t allowed to smoke at their desks as the men could.

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In the early summer of 1940, British officers began to arrive in America on a covert mission. Some went to Washington, making the rounds of embassy cocktails and dinner parties, looking for all the world like bright young chaps out for a good time, and others worked in the heart of New York, in a Fifth Avenue skyscraper, the thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth floors of Rockefeller Center. The group included Ian Fleming, a handsome lieutenant with blue eyes and a smart blue naval officer’s jacket, and twenty-three-year-old Roald Dahl, a tall, elegant Royal Air Force fighter pilot who looked a bit like Gary Cooper. These guys would both become famous fiction writers after the war; Fleming invented the character of James Bond, and Dahl wrote children’s books about chocolate factories, flying peaches the size of zeppelins, and foxes who outwit monstrous humans. For now, though, Fleming and Dahl were spies. Dahl was a particularly good spy. He seduced actresses and heiresses in Washington, gathering gossip in bed, and he charmed the president and the first lady, becoming a regular guest at their Hyde Park, New York, home, where they spoke so freely with the young pilot that he had difficulty maintaining his composure: “I would do my best to appear calm and chatty,” he later wrote, “though actually I was trembling at the realization that the most powerful man in the world was telling me these mighty secrets.”

“I hope you will let nothing interfere with your enthusiasm for helping where help is needed, but don’t let the slow, snail’s-pace progress upward and onward get you down,” he wrote. “Remember always that the dawn of man’s conscience is only 3 or 3½ thousand years behind us.” He had always found this a comforting thought, that the age of barbarism was not long past, that if humans failed to be kind it was because they were still children, historically speaking, and the idea rang true to him as he read and disseminated MAGIC intercepts through the spring of 1942, learning secrets about Japanese war strategy in the Pacific and helping to guide the American response.

These two campuses soon evolved into an American version of Bletchley Park, deeply secret compounds where workers solved puzzles behind barbed wire and never spoke about what they did. Many were women. It’s where the machine era of cryptology began, the era of brute force, women operating machines the size of rooms, American bombes and some of the first IBM punch-card computers.

The two historians credited the FBI for both the fieldwork and the technical brilliance (the coast guard’s files were classified at the time), and authors of more recent books have also praised the bureau for destroying the Nazi networks in South America. But the FBI didn’t intercept the messages. It didn’t monitor the Nazi circuits. It didn’t break the codes. It didn’t solve any Enigma machines. The coast guard did this stuff—the little codebreaking team that Elizebeth created from nothing.

During the Second World War, an American woman figured out how to sweep the globe of undercover Nazis. The proof was on paper: four thousand typed decryptions of clandestine Nazi messages that her team shared with the global intelligence community. She had conquered at least forty-eight different clandestine radio circuits and three Enigma machines to get these plaintexts. The pages found their way to the navy and to the army. To FBI headquarters in Washington and bureaus around the world. To Britain. There was no mistaking their origin. Each sheet said “CG Decryption” at the bottom, in black ink. These pieces of paper saved lives. They almost certainly stopped coups. They put fascist spies in prison. They drove wedges between Germany and other nations that were trying to sustain and prolong Nazi terror. By any measure, Elizebeth was a great heroine of the Second World War. The British knew it. The navy knew it. The FBI knew it. But the American public never did, because Elizebeth wasn’t allowed to speak. She and every other codebreaker who worked on ULTRA material was bound by oath to keep the ULTRA secret. Even if she had been free to discuss her triumphs, explaining them to the public would have taken some time.

And together, researching and writing, they galloped back through the past, weighing the arguments of Baconians and cutting them to pieces. In their hands The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined became a story about the drug of self-delusion and the joy of truth. One section analyzed the cipher system of a French general that had revealed the secret phrase IF HE SHALL PUBLISH. The Friedmans showed that the cipher could just as easily have produced the text IN HER DAMP PUBES.