The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

always regretted, losing money each time he played. The Midas of codes had no talent for reading human faces. In this he was the opposite of Herbert Yardley, leader of the MI-8 codebreaking unit in Washington, who also spent time in France

thousand miles from home, William became tormented by feelings of inferiority and romantic inadequacy that would never completely go away, gnawing at him for the rest of his life. He worried he was too

not.” Against these anxieties and regrets William possessed only one weapon: language, wordplay. Every day he felt he was losing a little more of his wife and every day he felt he must fight to win her back, so he labored over his letters, making corrections, emendations, fixing rare grammatical mistakes, turning the pages 90 degrees and adding sentences at right angles in the margins, trying to find the magic incantation of symbols to crush the globe

questions she asked that he answered. A frequent topic was their future at Riverbank. Should they stay there or leave? What should they do about George Fabyan? The man was relentless; all through William’s deployment, Fabyan had been writing him in Chaumont, asking that he return to Riverbank at the soonest opportunity. The Friedmans

that he would do such a thing after all we have done.” Elizebeth later confided to friends that Fabyan made sexual advances while William was in France. William encouraged

As a child he had seen his mother exhausted by her cleaning duties. “Home does not entail a spotless kitchen and a faultless parlor,” William wrote. “Home does entail the presence of hearts that beat in unison—whether the shelter be a hovel or a palace.” He was offering her the same freedom to pursue her intellectual ambitions that she had always extended to him—but did she really mean that? In her private heart did Elizebeth wish that her husband had more of a bank account and less of a brain? “Elsbeth, my Dearest, when you say that you want

He then broke some bad news: The army wasn’t releasing him yet. He had to stay in Chaumont to write a secret history of the code and cipher work as a technical reference for future army use. He might be there for months. This is when Elizebeth finally decided to leave Riverbank. She packed a bag in stealth without telling Fabyan and slipped onto a train for Indiana, reasoning that

To pass the time in Huntington, she got a temporary job in the local library, a two-story building of limestone with a special room of materials about railroad engineering. She helped farmers find books and opened letters from the men in her life. Some of these letters were job offers, eager replies to inquiries she had already sent. The Office of Naval

effusive and insecure as ever. He asked her if she knew how small an electron is, using that as the basis of an extended riff about the incomprehensible size of his love for her. He said he had gotten her a piece of lingerie in Paris, a silk teddy, custom sewn, with the help of an army captain who told him what measurements to use (“Can’t two

William wrote. “I think that whole business would be an excellent experiment for a psychologist. . . . Furthermore, I shall keep you away from it too. Nothing but unhappiness, and accusations, and unfruitfulness have ever come out of the whole business. Aside from our deep, and perfect love, the greatest

been long enough to suit you.” He liked to sign his name in a flourish of blue colored pencil, making the widest line possible, the tip round and blunt. Elizebeth didn’t understand how anyone could bear writing with an unsharp pencil. It was barbarism. He

wrote. Finally, he tried being reasonable, addressing the Friedmans as a couple, through Elizebeth. “I am an old man going down hill; you are young people climbing up and it is for you to decide whether your opportunity lies at Riverbank or elsewhere.” He said he wanted to talk it over with Elizebeth in person, in Chicago, given the “rather unsatisfactory” and slow nature of mail. Elizebeth shot back in a letter, “I am inclined to agree with you that in most cases, correspondence is rather unsatisfactory. But with you I confess it has some advantages—for, you see, in conversation you insist on doing all the talking! Now I suppose you are going to retort, ‘This, from a woman?’ ” She

entertaining, but to her, the man was a scoundrel. As for William, he didn’t want to be in the military anymore. He hated knowing that the army could send him anywhere in the world on a whim, separating him once again from his wife. The little he had seen of war convinced him there was no glory in it, once telling Elizebeth in a letter, “The War will not make better men or women out of us.” If he could choose his own path, he confessed, he would unwind the last few years of his professional life and return

now and where has it been hiding?’ ” Strangely, however, no company offered William a job. Wherever the Friedmans went, a telegram would arrive from Fabyan, commanding them to give up the search: “Come back to Riverbank, your salary is still going on.” The only way he could have known their whereabouts was if he had dispatched a spy. It was logical to conclude that Fabyan was threatening William’s potential employers. “He had us followed,” Elizebeth said. “He opened our mail.” Feeling defeated and not seeing any other options, the Friedmans told the Colonel they would return to Riverbank if he let them live in their own house

Fabyan didn’t keep his promises. The raises never materialized. He continued to ignore and even suppress criticism of the Bacon Ciphers. When a famous type designer wrote a report showing how Mrs. Gallup misunderstood the printing practices of Shakespeare’s era, Fabyan shoved the report into a drawer,

on q. William discovered that the frequency of this “coincidence” could be measured, and it was distinct for each language, a kind of signature. In English, a coincidence happens exactly 6.67 percent of the time. Seven columns out of 100 contain an alignment. This insight married modern statistics with cryptology

War. Instead of putting William’s name on the cover, Fabyan had the paper published first in France; people got the idea that a French cryptologist was the author. William and Elizebeth were enraged by “Fabyan’s skullduggery”—Elizebeth scrawled this and other angry phrases in the margins of Fabyan’s letters to William, annotating his duplicity, keeping a file of his lies—and

tricky as Fabyan. So together the Friedmans planned a clandestine operation: “our secret plot to be able to get away without getting our throats cut,” Elizebeth called it. One morning they loaded all of their possessions into a car they had managed to borrow, cleaned

Fabyan smiled and wished them well. It was so out of character that William assumed he must have already decided to seek his revenge at a future moment of his choosing. There would be time to worry about that later. For now, they were giddy as they traveled east to Washington.

possibly keep up, and she figured that no one in Washington would expect her to match him. There was relief in that. As she put it later, “By the end of the war I was more or less known as a military cipher expert, but I was better known as the wife of my husband,” who had “made a reputation so startling that I regarded the task of catching up to him

believed she would never again rival her husband, she was wrong. In the nation’s capital, she was about to carve her own path, her own name, with a set of blades that would one day turn out to be just the right shape for dismembering the plans of Nazis.

The problem was twofold: speed and security. Old pencil-and-paper methods of generating cipher messages were too slow compared to the speed with which dots and dashes of Morse code could travel by radio. “Military, naval, air, and diplomatic cryptographic communications had to be sped up.” And because more vital messages

out of,” Elizebeth later said. “They were all playing with machines.” This epiphany marked the dawn of a peacetime arms race that would draw the battle lines of the next world war, and the Friedmans were plunged into the heart of it as soon as they arrived in Washington in the last days of 1920, fresh from their traumas at Riverbank, with no time to relax and take a breath. Elizebeth

The chief of the signal corps was Joseph Mauborgne, the kindly cryptologist, and the Friedmans now became his junior colleagues. It

And they were finally in a real city, which the young couple thought was just as nice as getting paid. They could see friends, go to the theater, movies, the orchestra. Their first Washington apartment was a piano studio above a bakery. They woke each morning to the smell of fresh bread, and when they left for work, the owner of the apartment taught piano students there. Some evenings, when it was warm, Joe Mauborgne visited with his cello, and the three of them opened

The world of American cryptology was still tiny. There were only three codebreaking units in government, with fewer than fifty employees among them. The largest and best-funded unit, with two dozen people, was run by the former army lieutenant Herbert Yardley. After the war he had won funding from the State Department to launch a codebreaking bureau in New York City, in a four-story town house off Lexington Avenue. He considered it a modern version of

offices where clandestine agents melted the wax seals of letters—an American black chamber. Yardley and his wife, Hazel, lived in an apartment on the top floor, and Herbert and his employees worked on floors below, reading the mail of foreign diplomats. They dealt in paper ciphers, and had some successes breaking the messages of Japanese diplomats, though Herbert wasn’t skilled enough to go further, into

from a distance, the couple’s bodies like churches poking out of the haze. Together they produced the first scientifically constructed set of pencil-and-paper codes and ciphers in army history. There was still a place for “hand” or “paper” ciphers as opposed to machine ciphers. The best paper system was more secure than a weak machine, or a strong machine improperly handled, which is why inventors of cipher machines in the 1920s were struggling to make their prototypes easy to use, almost idiot-proof. At the request of the army, William

“You can start from here and go to the end of the world and never have a repetition,” Elizebeth said. In theory, the only way to read a message was to know the starting configuration of the machine’s internal parts—the “key”—which only the sender and recipient would possess. What’s more, the machines were designed to survive capture and study. Even if you got your hands on a copy and took it apart like a broken clock, examining each gear for as long as you pleased, you would still not be able to read messages produced by another such machine. Many inventors of cipher machines were private citizens, and a quirky bunch

guilty. Hebern said, “The jury thought so.” Hebern believed his machine was unbreakable and was trying to sell it to the navy. William placed the machine on his desk and thought about it. He stared at the small box for six straight weeks in 1923. He told Elizebeth he was “discouraged to the point of blackout.” Then the solution occurred to him one night when he and Elizebeth were getting dressed for a party: “As I was tying my black tie, it suddenly came to me.” It was the first-ever solution of a wired rotor

William was returning the device. “P.S.,” he scrawled at the bottom of the letter, “I busted a beautiful ‘indecipherable cipher’ machine recently and it is extremely important in many respects. . . . Gave the Navy an awful jolt! Best piece of analysis I ever did. B.” In

After busting the Hebern machine, William moved on to the next supposedly unbreakable device, invented in 1924 by a German named Alexander von Kryha, who committed suicide in 1955. The Kryha cipher machine was shaped like a half-moon and contained two discs of alphabets, one a fixed semicircle, the second a circle that rotated against it. According to the inventor, it could encipher a message in 2.29 x 1082 ways, a number larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe. William was not impressed: “The number

William conquered the Kryha and later demonstrated his mastery by solving a two-hundred-word message prepared by a lawyer in New York who believed the Kryha was unbreakable. William found the solution in a mere three hours and thirty-one minutes, including a fifty-minute lunch break. In this

The common saying about cryptologists, as William phrased it, was that “it is not necessary” to be insane, “but it helps.” There was uncomfortable truth in the joke. To operate at the highest level of the field seemed to require the kind of pitiless attention and focus that turned some otherwise pleasant and well-adjusted people into zombies who stumbled down the stairs. Mental breakdown was a hazard of the job. During the coming war, several American cryptologists would crack under the strain. Captain Joe Rochefort, one of the

There was one other cipher machine that William studied briefly: Enigma, invented by a young German engineer in 1918 and available at that time on the open market. It looked a bit like a typewriter. Under the cover of the Enigma were three rotors, wired wheels similar to the ones in the Hebern machine but invented independently and capable of more intricate movements, the electrical current crossing and doubling back in mazes. William

Elizebeth would conquer multiple Enigmas with pencil and paper. By this point, she had quit her job. She wasn’t working as a cryptologist anymore. After about a year at the army, Elizebeth resigned in the

write some books.” William had encouraged her to quit. For one thing, he was excited about her books—he admired good writers and thought highly of her as a prose stylist—and in another sense it was just the path of least resistance, the expected arrangement, for a young Washington wife to stay home. The decision seemed to clear the way for Elizebeth’s ambitions and for the couple to start raising children. But as soon as she quit, William missed her at the office, complaining to a friend that Elizebeth was home “and I am all alone.” Then she left Washington for a five-week vacation through the

She mentioned that a certain midwestern stranger had been following her to social events, expressing romantic intentions. William tried to make her jealous in his replies. 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

William rode the trolley to the Munitions Building in the morning, an hour spent in his head, thinking about alphabets. After Elizebeth resigned, the army had given him an assistant, a former boxer with cauliflower ears. The man’s only skill was typing. If you would like to imagine the birth of the mighty National Security Agency, please visualize two men in a small room, one with a pug nose, pecking at a typewriter, the other a dandy in a suit and bow tie, smoking a pipe, wondering what his wife was up to at home, and if she was missing

either.” Sitting with her typewriter by a crackling fire, Elizebeth worked on a book about codebreaking aimed at teens and curious adults, a “little book” to “afford you some amusement for leisure moments.” The idea

Elizebeth walked readers through sample problems and cheered them along: “You’re just eating ’em up.” “Bravo!” Meanwhile, she wrote a draft of a second book, a children’s history of the alphabet, illustrated with her own drawings of hieroglyphs and cuneiform tablets. She had begun working on it at Riverbank. The alphabet, part of the backdrop of our lives, like the sky or electricity or advertising, but the one tool that makes all the others possible—she wanted kids to

interference). He consulted on criminal investigations. A man sent a bomb to Huey Long, the Louisiana politician, along with a note full of hieroglyphic markings. William solved it. The warden of an Ohio penitentiary sent him a cryptogram smuggled into prison by the mother of a bank robber. William sent back the plaintext, which revealed a plot to help the inmate escape by placing bombs along a prison wall and exploding them on a Sunday during

Top officials in the Warren Harding administration had taken cash from oil tycoons—the “Teapot Dome” affair, the biggest corruption scandal in U.S. history. His testimony caught the eye of a twenty-eight-year-old J. Edgar Hoover, then an FBI agent working the Teapot Dome case, and in the years that followed, after Hoover was named director, he asked

own. It had to rely on outside experts. When Hoover’s agents arrested several of John Dillinger’s gang members, notes scrawled with code were found in the pockets of the machine gunners. Hoover sent the notes to William. He solved them. A wealthy businessman, Washington Post owner Edward McLean, hired William in 1924 to design a code

veterans. And McLean stiffed William on his fee. Elizebeth urged her husband to protest, but he let the matter drop, fearing the stereotype of the “money-grubbing Jew.” America was growing more anti-Semitic in the 1920s, the successes of Jewish immigrants provoking ugly responses. The president of Harvard changed admissions rules to keep Jews out. Henry Ford launched an anti-Semitic weekly newspaper with a declaration that “the

only so much of him to go around, and requests for his time spilled over to Elizebeth. “When they couldn’t get him, I’d be offered a job,” she said later. “That’s the story of my life. Somebody asks for my husband and they can’t get him, so they take me.” On the one hand, she found this insulting. It was like

less than warm. She had watched her mother, Sopha, raise nine kids, exhausting herself in the process and dying of cancer, suppressing her own desires

response, she destroyed. When children finally arrived, Elizebeth didn’t put aside her ambitions, although the delivery of Barbara was a difficult one, leaving the mother laid up in bed for months with spinal pain. William made the mistake of mentioning Elizebeth’s pain in a

at top volume on the Victrola. She took a hands-off approach to parenting, hewing to a doctrine of no doctrines, in agreement with William. The Friedmans were determined not to consciously teach their kids anything or tell them what

imitation.” She copied Barbara’s ejections verbatim and analyzed the text with a codebreaker’s curiosity. Pfnr-pfnh-hnwhwp. It seemed clandestine. There was structure in it, a pattern at the edge of legibility: pfnr-pfnh-hnwhwp. What did it mean? IDONTKNOW. After two