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the swamps of an undiscovered continent. Between 1917 and 1920, George Fabyan used Riverbank’s vanity press to publish eight pamphlets that described new kinds of codebreaking strategies. These were little books with unassuming titles on plain white covers. Today they are considered to be the foundation stones of the modern science of cryptology. Known as the Riverbank Publications, they “rise up like a landmark in the history of cryptology,” writes the historian David Kahn. “Nearly all of them broke new ground, and mastery of the information they first set forth is still regarded as the
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They worked as a team in most matters and the soon-to-be-legendary papers were no different. In a 1918 letter to Elizebeth, William referred to the early Riverbank Publications as “our pamphlets”—
were “a piece of work that was done by the staff,” Elizebeth said later. “No one person was mentioned as the sole conqueror or anything like that. Everybody worked together.” This is as far as she ever went in claiming a piece of the credit. Today it’s hard to know exactly what
It was hard enough for William—a credentialed scientist, a genetics Ph.D.—to get credit for the work. He and Elizebeth may have decided it would be doubly hard to convince Fabyan to share credit with her, too. Whatever
The likely truth: it only looked improbable in retrospect. At the time they didn’t know what was supposed to be hard, and there was no one around to tell them. They didn’t see themselves inventing a new science. They were playing the game day-to-day as best they could, as Fabyan always said. They were just trying to solve messages as they poured in and not get stuck. The mail from Washington contained a frothy mix of messages from
One day in early 1917 a heavyset man showed up at Riverbank on a mission all the way from Scotland Yard, the police headquarters in London. He had been referred to Riverbank by the U.S. Department of Justice. Fabyan barked an introduction at Elizebeth and William, and the detective opened a briefcase. Stacks of messages spilled out. He said
2. This was a clue that the conspirators were using a specific, yet-unknown book to encrypt their messages and that the book had two columns of type, like a dictionary. The numbers likely pointed to words at certain locations in this mysterious book. For instance, in a sequence like 97-2-14, 97 meant the page number, 2 meant the right-hand column, and 14 meant the fourteenth word in the column. Applying similar logic to the third set of numbers in the detective’s
they wrote down all the numbers in order, searched for repetitions, thought about it some more, and found a foothold. A Harvard professor had recently counted the words in a long English text, and the prairie codebreakers read his study. Of 100,000 total words, only 10,161 were unique, and just 10 words accounted for 26,677 of the 100,000: “the,” “of,” “and,” “to,” “a,” “in,” “that,” “it,” “is,” “I.” “You can’t convey much intelligence using only these words,” William wrote, “and yet you can’t construct a long, intelligible, unambiguous message without using them over and over again.” Turning
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letters, and reverse-engineering the text of the book as they went. Whenever they discovered a new letter of plaintext, it told them more about the content of the book, and whenever they pieced together
young codebreakers ended up solving the whole trunkful of messages for Scotland Yard, revealing an intricate separatist plot by Hindu activists living in New York to ship weapons and bombs to India with the help of German funds and assistance: dates, times, places, names. Several conspirators were charged in San Francisco, and prosecutors
chest. He yelled a single word—“Traitor!” Then a U.S. marshal fired at the gunman over the heads of the shocked spectators, killing him. The shooter apparently thought the defendant had snitched to the government, betraying his friends by revealing the code. He didn’t know about William, Elizebeth, and the science of codebreaking.
with others. It had long been known that the frequencies of letters in a cryptogram provide clues to its solution. Knowing this, cryptographers had invented many ways of obscuring the letter frequencies, making messages harder for adversaries to break. It was possible to encrypt a message
Then they wrote the scientific papers, the Riverbank Publications, documenting exactly how they did it, and how other people could do it, too, if they followed the same steps. This part was crucial. The test of a scientific discovery is if others can replicate it and get
repeated and will produce identical results.” To drive home this point, William even invented a new word: “cryptanalysis,” synonymous with “codebreaking.” The new Riverbank methods were not magic but a species of analysis, similar to the analysis performed by a chemist or an astronomer or an engineer designing a bridge. Serendipity
anyway. On several occasions he told me that if he had had more of a mathematical background, he might not have been able to solve some of the things he did.” If William had been older or better trained, “he could have been ruined. His definition of a cryptogram was simply a secret message that was meant to be solved, just that.” To
army officer from Virginia, J. Rives Childs, met William and Elizebeth at Riverbank in November 1917; they taught him the science of codebreaking, and he went on to serve with distinction in the war. Childs found it impossible to tell if William was smarter than Elizebeth or if it was the other way around: “I was never able to decide which was the superior.” Elizebeth
The messages had been encrypted with a small hand-operated device recently invented by the British army to make their field communications more secure. The device was a kind of cipher disc, with two alphabets printed on rings that rotated with respect to each other, but with a twist: while the outer ring had the usual 26 letters, the inner ring had 27. The extra letter introduced a degree of irregularity, making it harder for a codebreaker to visualize the alphabets sliding against each other. The device also allowed the cryptographer to change the alphabets quickly and easily. The British had
that people often make when trying to communicate securely. The strength of a cryptographic system usually has less to do with its design than with the way people tend to use it. Humans are the weak link. Instead of changing keys or passwords at regular intervals, we use the same ones over and over, for weeks or months or years. We repeat the same words (such as “secret”) at the start of multiple messages, or repeat entire messages multiple times, giving codebreakers a foothold. We choose key phrases that are easy to guess: words related
struck William that the Washington official, in preparing this important test of a cryptographic device, might have used key words related to the practice of cryptography. So William tried words like “cipher,” “alphabet,” “indecipherable,” “solution,” “system,” and “method.” After two hours of intense focus, he was able to piece together what he thought was the alphabet on the outer disc, which
you know, a thing apart.” He appears to have made a joke about sex as
her lipstick and made a few passes with it.” Imagine laughter. To hear Elizebeth tell it, William was the brighter one. Before they were married and before they were a courting couple, she was already starting to praise his abilities in a way that minimized or overlooked her own, setting the pattern for the rest of her life, the
Once, in a dusty 1896 issue of the literary magazine Pall Mall, William and Elizebeth discovered an article about ciphers used by anarchist opponents of the old Russian czars. The article included a brief cryptogram at the end. In general, the shorter the cryptogram, the harder it is to solve, the same way a song is harder to identify by three notes of its melody instead of twenty. This “Nihilist” cryptogram
don’t want to merge. WILL THE JEWS COMMIT SUICIDE THROUGH MIXED MARRIAGES? He feared what his people would say. But desire trampled the fear. Soon enough, but not yet, he would tell Elizebeth
flame. “You’re lots smarter than I am in ciphers. You can soar away into the clouds and still remain planted firmly upon solid ground and reason. You can dream and be practical.” He would tell her, over and over, that he couldn’t express what was in his heart: “Oh Divine Fire Mine, I adore you, how futile are words!” Divine Fire. A nod
develop, with this person you love, assuming this person loves you back, a shorthand of glances and gestures. At first it seems like your beloved is “speaking in code”; later, maybe, it’s like the two of you are sharing a secret code. This feeling may have a deep scientific explanation.
invented, a young scientist from rural Michigan named Claude Shannon wrote two papers that were like magic beans for the computing revolution, growing the great beanstalks of IBM, Apple, Silicon Valley,
He didn’t create the first computer, but he was one of the first to grasp the immensity of what digital computers could do. Shannon,
codebreakers. And with America going to war, the two young codebreakers at Riverbank were about to become lovers.
at Riverbank, telling him—what? I don’t love you but “I miss you infinitely.” I am not sure I love-you love you but “I shall work for you” if you ask. I have dreamed about you but I don’t remember what the dream was. “Anyway, Billy Boy, like me just a little bit always. I want you for the dear good friend you are, if nothing more. I want, oh, so much, for us both to
“I wish you cared as I.” She wasn’t sure what to do when he started talking about marriage in early 1917. The ice cracked on the Fox River, spring picked the lock of winter, the water moved, and William Friedman spoke to her about the pros and cons of a potential union, obstacles and advantages, in a careful, unemotional tone, as if discussing a job opportunity. (He confessed later that he was simply trying to hold back the flood of his feelings, lest the dam burst and he embarrass himself.) He did not get down on his knees and propose, and his hesitation
William to change into more casual clothes to match. “It just didn’t go down to be treated like chattels,” Elizebeth said. “We were sick and tired of Fabyan’s scheming and dishonesty. Fabyan always came out ahead, and we always came out at the other end.” Fundamentally
it was holding them back, and they sensed that if they were ever going to escape, they needed to do it together. On a cool, rainy Monday in May 1917, they went missing from Riverbank. It wasn’t like them to skip work. The hours ticked away without them, the cows eating grass in the
performed the ceremony. The wedding announcement ran on the front page of the May 23 Geneva Republican, next to a story about a Selective Service bill just passed by Congress, requiring men ages twenty-one to thirty-one to register for the military draft. “Mr. Friedman came to Riverbank soon after his graduation from Cornell University and was employed for some time on experimental work in the Riverbank greenhouses,” the paper wrote of William. “He later took up the work in connection with the Bacon
schools and clubs.” The article didn’t mention that Elizebeth was instrumental in convincing him to “take
home briefly to tell his parents, his mother collapsed at the news that her son had married a shiksa. He told Elizebeth about it in a wire to Riverbank.She read it and felt sick. “I am cast into a whirl of remorse, pain, and sorrow for you,” Elizebeth wrote to him. “Oh, Billy, Billy, what have we done?” She told her family in later years that when she visited her in-laws in Pittsburgh, William’s mother would sit and weep. “You would have thought that Bill had committed murder,” Max Friedman,
anyone who spoke of peace should be shot as a traitor. At the end of the speech, a boy from Elgin stood and walked to the recruiting tent. The crowd cheered, and more boys stood and followed him. A bit later, Fabyan invited the guests to tour his model trenches for a fee of twenty-five cents per person, to
down. Children ventured inside and played in the mud. William did not volunteer for the army that day, but he was starting to think about it, partly out of guilt—he was a healthy male in wartime—but also out of concern for himself and Elizebeth, their future together. He wondered if he could use his codebreaking skills to get commissioned as an officer.
section. William said he wanted to go to France and apply his code and cipher knowledge closer to the fighting. Fabyan always waved him off. William was needed in his present position. He should forget about the army and concentrate on his work. Frustrated, William
Months passed. Nothing. It wasn’t until later that the Friedmans learned the truth. They heard it from Mauborgne and others who had been desperately trying to reach them the whole time. Fabyan was intercepting the Friedmans’ mail. He had taken the job offers that arrived for them from Washington, put them in a drawer, and responded himself, informing Washington that the Friedmans were unavailable. Also, one army officer who visited Riverbank for cryptologic
anything. It would have been pointless. The only logical explanation was that Fabyan had been spying on the Friedmans, in order to anticipate their movements and prevent them from ever leaving his Garden of Eden. It’s made honest bees out of them, this constant supervision: Fabyan was surveilling his young employees as if they were two honeybees in his colony, under glass. A tiny slip of paper fluttered down to Elizebeth.
hell chair. It turned out that the War Department had recently launched a codebreaking unit of its own, under the command of a twenty-eight-year-old lieutenant named Herbert O. Yardley, a scrawny Indiana native who had become entranced with cryptology after reading library books that told about the old black chambers of Europe. “Why did America have no bureau for the reading of secret diplomatic code and cipher telegrams of foreign governments?” Yardley asked himself. “Perhaps I too, like the foreign cryptographer, could open the secrets of the capitals of the world.” Fearless
Known officially as MI-8, and based at the Army War College in Washington, Yardley’s bureau had shattered Fabyan’s near monopoly on American codebreaking. Fabyan, aware that he was losing influence and power
He knew the military needed many more codebreakers than it could locate and train quickly, both to work for Yardley’s Washington bureau and for the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in France. America needed a codebreaking school, and here was Riverbank, already set up as a university of sorts. He invited the army to send men to Riverbank for training. The army took him up on it. The first
were, as an NSA historian would later say, “as dumb as anyone just off the street.” Fabyan asked Elizebeth and William to teach them. The
much sweeter. It was like being stationed in paradise. Fabyan provided the students with daily box lunches with fresh food from the farm, organized outings into the countryside, and threw parties where the single men could mingle with local girls,
heads 45 degrees to either side, some looking straight on. The significance of this curious feature of the photograph escaped almost all who viewed it at the time: Each person stood for a letter of ciphertext in the biliteral cipher. The ones looking to the side were
condition he return to Riverbank when the war was over. He entered the army as a first lieutenant in the signal corps, an officer but a low-ranking one. He was headed to France to ply his code and cipher abilities with the AEF. An army
of Chaumont, France. Elizebeth wanted to go with him. She saw no reason why she should not be allowed to serve in France as an AEF cryptologist. But the army told Elizebeth that “I, a mere woman, could not follow to pursue my ‘trade,’ ” so she stayed behind at Riverbank, continuing to break codes in the Lodge with the other brain workers of the estate. In her diary she wrote original poems about war, exploring “the heartache of separation from the Dear One overseas”
speculation upon, no guiding generalizations, except the most vague and unreliable—Oh, I tell you Honey, it’s going to be an awfully hard task to make good.” At
commander, Frank Moorman, and William made it a point to tell Elizebeth that Moorman admired the Riverbank Publications, hoping she would feel proud of her work on them. “Love-girl,” he wrote, “yesterday at conference Major M passed around our R.K. pamphlet”—Riverbank No. 16, Methods for the Solution of Running-Key
