The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

decipherments, Francis Bacon wasn’t just the great genius of his age. He was a secret king: the bastard son of Queen Elizabeth, known for her indiscretions, and the Earl of Leicester. During his own lifetime, Bacon was afraid that if he claimed his royal blood, he would be killed to suppress a

Using the cipher, Bacon and the Rosicrucians were able to exchange dangerous knowledge without fear of discovery and design technologically advanced machines. Her work unleashed

said Mrs. Gallup must be imagining them; she savaged her critics in icy pamphlets and letters to the editor, writing that her style of analysis was “impossible to those who are not possessed of an eyesight of the keenest and most perfect accuracy of vision in distinguishing

of all her supporters, no one had more faith than George Fabyan. He invited Mrs. Gallup and her sister to Riverbank in 1912 and gave them carte blanche to pursue their investigation to its ultimate end.

Elizebeth knew nothing about secret writing at this point. She had never studied codes and ciphers. She had never even been particularly fond of puzzles. She was as fresh to the whole subject as any person off the street. But Mrs. Gallup had given her the rules of the game, and now she tried to follow them.

Gallup pressed her eye to her looking glass, made some sharp pencil marks on Elizebeth’s sheet, and handed it back. Impressed, Elizebeth always asked Mrs. Gallup how she succeeded when Elizebeth failed—had she modified the list of a- and b-forms,

Women had the stamina and patience to look at text all day, and complained less. “Our experience at Riverbank,” Fabyan wrote, “has demonstrated that women are particularly adapted for this kind of work.” After a few weeks Elizebeth fell

did not mean to imply anything salacious. “I mean, there was absolutely no carousing, no parties, no nothing. Fabyan had use for only one kind of worker, and that was one that knew his business and worked at it damned hard.” He paid the codebreakers and scientists tiny salaries but promised to take care of them in all other ways. Food,

At twenty-five he was one of the younger male scientists, closest to her own age, so it felt natural to spend time with him. She appreciated his shy, precise way of speaking, his soft, halting voice that seemed to encode its own refutation, as if he were constantly checking a mental ticker tape of his words for correctness. One day he showed her where he lived on the estate. It was a working windmill—not

some microscopes and work shelves. An interior door led to the greenhouse that William managed, which is where Fabyan had him breeding new strains of crops and flowers, violets and wheat, and a type of corn with no cob. Upstairs,

another, getting them to exchange their codes. The size and scope of Riverbank was dawning on her. What had appeared on her first visit to be a sparsely populated stretch of land now

Elizebeth realized that everything that appeared so hallucinatory to her about Riverbank must seem perfectly normal to these children. It was normal for them to live where two monkeys roamed outdoors wearing red diapers, one a kleptomaniac with a habit of stealing

Fabyan told her that the modest white and gray dresses she liked to wear were inadequate and she needed to buy a new wardrobe at Marshall Field’s in Chicago. Frugal by nature, Elizebeth resisted paying a premium for a name brand, but when she raised her voice to complain, Fabyan told her to hush. “That’s so typically Fabyan,” Elizebeth recalled: if you told him he was wrong, “[t]he next thing you know

cannon fired a ceremonial ball into the prairie dusk. The staff called him “Colonel” or “the Colonel.” Elizebeth was told to address Fabyan as “Colonel Fabyan,” and she did, assuming he must have served in the military; it was only later when she learned the truth, that the title

tree next to his villa. Elizebeth heard people call it the “hell chair” and soon understood why. If Fabyan was angry at an employee or a guest, he brought that person over to the hell chair and sat there, screaming

He may have been a monster. But he was no idiot. To underestimate his intelligence was dangerous, Elizebeth sensed. She considered him to be, despite his lack of formal education, “a very bright man” with a cunning mind and a proven ability to predict how people

Elizebeth never saw him read anything longer than a newspaper headline. But he had been blessed with a near-photographic memory, and whatever his scientists told him, he could repeat back verbatim. This skill for mimicry, combined with his innate abilities as a salesman, made

Of all the investigations at Riverbank, Fabyan sold the Bacon cipher project the hardest. Though he gave every visitor at least a taste of the cipher work, presenting it as one element of the general package of wonders, he organized separate junkets to persuade hesitant or openly hostile academics that Riverbank had found the answer. In

had already realized that when she spoke, even though she was only twenty-four, people listened to her—her good looks caught the eye of men and her precision and earnest intelligence held attention. He started to let her know that Professor So-and-So from Such-and-Such

the cipher was such a fact; that it had passed careful tests; that no one at Riverbank was making any money from these investigations; and that they were doing it for the benefit of humanity, committed to sharing their discoveries with the world. Who could object? The combination of his gravelly voice in the shadows and the delicate letters on the wall tended to disorient the guest and lull him into a state

forgot it. “Oh, my! That was too much to take. Ahhh!” But there was substance to what he and other skeptics were saying, a stubborn logic that tugged at the hem. Mrs. Gallup’s technique depended on discerning small yet consistent fluctuations in letterforms in books made long ago, with the technology of a more primitive era. It strained credulity to think that the printers, setting the type by hand in 1623, could have duplicated these minute fluctuations across hundreds of copies of the First Folio, and in fact the

Mrs. Gallup must have been altering the rules of her method to fit the desired result, changing the all-important assignment of letters to the two baskets

declare that she was right and everyone else was wrong? Was it her vanity telling her that? How would she prove her case if she did speak up? Would she lose her job? Would anyone stick up for her? She was twenty-four. She was a nobody here. She was a nobody anywhere. During conversations

profitable.” There were hints in this exchange that Fabyan would be difficult to work with. William, cautious by nature, asked about salary. Fabyan responded with a vague, long-winded riff: “I want to get some practical level-headed fellows that will carry themselves,

too. Popular American magazines portrayed Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe as a “Jewish Invasion,” a threat to the jobs of whites, with the Russian Jew said to be especially conniving thanks to his “nervous, restless ambition.” Concerned and wanting

Elizebeth felt like she could see the rough carpentry of their thoughts, the joints and tenons that never quite fit, but with William, ideas emerged smooth and whole, as if from a workshop. And he was so playful about it all, unlike Fabyan and Mrs. Gallup. Science

way of being alive. He had a feel for ciphers thanks to his work with Mrs. Gallup, and also a youthful fascination with Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Gold-Bug.” The plot of the story revolves around a cryptogram whose solution points to a buried treasure chest full of diamonds,

But Elizebeth’s mind wouldn’t let it rest, and eventually, she asked what he thought. Wasn’t it strange how Mrs. Gallup could see these things that no one else could see? To her enormous relief, William said he had been wondering the same. Sometimes a thought floated to the front of his mind, the deepest heresy at Riverbank: There are no hidden messages in Shakespeare.

“Good Lord!” The telegram had been sent from Germany to Mexico on January 16, traveling by three separate telegraph routes and encoded as a series of number blocks: 130 13042 13401 8501 115 3528 416 17214. The British had intercepted the message, and a small team of civilian codebreakers toiled for a month

Zimmermann, the telegram proposed an alliance between Germany and Mexico: “We intend to begin unrestricted submarine warfare on the first of February. We shall endeavor in spite of this to keep the United States neutral. In the event of this not succeeding, we make Mexico a proposal of alliance on the following basis: make war together, make peace

Elizebeth returned to Riverbank, seized by a new impatience. She had no desire to spend any more time on the Bacon ciphers. Life was too short to waste on fruitless quests. When she reunited with William, he said he felt the same. They both agreed they had to remove themselves from the project. The question was how. Confronting Mrs. Gallup seemed a little cruel. She had

conduct infantry drills complete with live mortar rounds. And Fabyan had told officials in Washington that if they needed help with codebreaking, Riverbank stood ready to serve. “Gentlemen,” he wrote to Washington on March 15, 1917, “I offer

So to protect their secrets, armies had begun encrypting their wireless messages before sending them over the wireless in Morse. This simple fact transformed codebreakers

spies. Thousands upon thousands of puzzles zipping through the atmosphere, any one of which, if decrypted, might win or lose a battle, wipe out a regiment, sink a ship. In this new world, a competent codebreaker was suddenly a person of the highest military value—a savior, a warrior, a destroyer of worlds. And yet, as Elizebeth would

were possibly three or at most four persons” in the whole United States who knew the slightest thing about codes and ciphers. She was one of them, William another. The

Superficially, the office looked like the picture in Fabyan’s imagination, the pitch he had sold to Washington. It looked like a codebreaking agency on the prairie. There

and patriotic offer of assistance,” and soon encrypted messages started arriving at Riverbank from Washington. They came in the mail and by telegram, sent by different parts of the government:

Riverbank would become ground zero for military codebreaking in America, a de facto government agency. He had drafted Elizebeth and William into the war, assuming they would be able to handle what was coming. But when they looked at the messages, the fresh piles of gobbledygook spilling from the mail sacks onto their desks, they weren’t sure that he was right. A woman and

grabbing on to certain patterns in the text. This is the essence of codebreaking, finding patterns, and because

One of the more cunning and effective codebreakers of the seventeenth century was a Belgian countess named Alexandrine, who upon the death of her husband in 1628 took over the management of an influential post office, the Chamber of the Thurn and Taxis, which routed mail all throughout Europe. The countess had a taste for espionage and transformed the Chamber into a brazen spy organization, employing a team of agents, scribes, forgers, and codebreakers who melted the wax seals of letters, copied their contents, broke any codes, and resealed the letters. This was an early example of what the

contents?” one diplomat wrote in panic to another. “God knows what she is capable of doing to us!” The two most prominent codebreakers in America when Elizebeth and William started were a married couple, Parker Hitt and

cowboy. She also studied cryptology, eventually becoming chief of the code operation for the War Department’s Southern Division, based in San Antonio. “This is a man’s size job,” she wrote to her mother-in-law, “but I seem to be getting away with it, and I am going to see it through. . . . I am getting a great deal out of it, discipline, concentration (for it takes concentration, and a lot of it, to do this work, with machines pounding away on every side of you and two or three men talking at once).” Parker supported Genevieve and was proud of her: “Good work, old girl,” he wrote to her in one letter. Parker was the only American to have written a serious book about cryptology.

cipher. Today a computer could do any of these steps in picoseconds, but in 1917 it all had to be done by hand, with a pencil and paper. The first step was usually very simple: count the letters in the cryptogram. In English,

reveal if the plaintext was written in English, German, French, Spanish, or some other language, because the frequency of letters in a language is like a unique signature. The most common six letters in German, starting with the most common, are E, N, I, R, T, S. In French, E, A, N, R, S, I. In Spanish, E, A, O, R, S, N. It’s

Now you have some grip on the puzzle. You can begin to peel back the skin of the message, to see familiar shapes in the strangeness. Like with a crossword puzzle, there’s no direct, guaranteed route to solving a cryptogram. The solver has to make educated guesses, plug in letters and see if they lead to recognizable words, backtrack and erase if a guess is wrong, try a new letter. Elizebeth quickly got the hang of it, plowing through messages and counting

Be-LIEVE me, than in HALF the CREEDS. But before, she had gone no further than chopping lines into meters. She left the words in their boxes, intact. Codebreaking required more drastic measures. Now Elizebeth had to shake the words until they

Ahhhh! The first few messages she broke, real military messages, had been intercepted from the Mexican army. Like most military cipher messages, they were written in blocks of five letters, like TZYTV RGFQF

fully explained. Here the method was sharp and clear, a series of small and logical steps that built toward a goal. “The thrill of your life,” Elizebeth said later, describing how it felt to solve a message. “The skeletons of words leap out, and make you jump.” And

The paper they used was graph paper with a grid of quarter-inch squares. One letter per square. They never threw anything out. “Work sheets SHOULD NOT BE DESTROYED,” the pair would soon write in one of several scientific papers about their discoveries. Worksheets “form a necessary part of the record pertaining to the solution

way of thinking about science is that it’s a check against the natural human tendency to see patterns that might not be there. It’s a way of knowing when a pattern is real and when it’s a trick of your mind. Elizebeth and William had begun at Riverbank by looking for the false patterns of Mrs. Gallup. But now, over the next several years, they