The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

time. The coast guard was responsible for patrolling American waters, trying to catch the nimble “rum-running” boats that flouted Prohibition law and smuggled bootleg liquor from sea to shore. It was a cat-and-mouse game that the mice were winning. From the start of Prohibition, the coast guard’s task had been laughably difficult—they owned just 203 slow small patrol boats to police five thousand miles of coastline—but recently the rumrunners had deployed shortwave radios

The coast guard happened to be years ahead of other government agencies in radio prowess. It had built several large radio towers along the East Coast to aid in search-and-rescue operations at sea, to help save boats and sailors in storms, and these same posts were able to intercept radio messages sent by the bootleggers. Still, no one in his office knew how to break the codes in the intercepted messages,

the badge, picked up an envelope of unsolved puzzles, took the envelope home, solved the puzzles, returned the answers to Treasury, and picked up a fresh envelope. A

its south side by a bronze statue of Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father who designed America’s system of money and gave birth to the forerunner of the coast guard in 1790 by launching

Hoover, it was the T-men of the Treasury, more often than not, who made the cases. Treasury was the center of the fight against organized crime. It was T-men who eventually nailed Al Capone for tax fraud. It was T-men who caught the kidnappers of the Lindbergh

The rum kings of 1925 were not gentlemen. The gentlemen had already been driven out of the game. During the first few years of Prohibition, it had been possible for independent sea captains to make a living by racing crates of booze from the Bahamas

the cash and the thrill of it, but those days were over. The men in charge of the liquor rackets now were mobsters, killers, associates of killers, and shadowy corporations with intentionally understated names, such as the Consolidated Exporters Corporation of Vancouver, whose rum fleet would have been the envy

plaintext letters without much effort, revealing a note telling the rum captain to anchor near a New Jersey lighthouse. PROCEED ONE

The rum codes of the bigger operators were more secure than any military codes she had encountered during the Great War, demonstrating “a complexity never even attempted by any government for its most secret communications,” particularly the codes of the Consolidated Exporters Corporation.

because Elizebeth was the only senior cryptanalyst in Treasury, the only one who knew how to break codes, she became a link between people in law enforcement who didn’t usually talk to each other. She communicated

come. She kept in constant touch with T-men in the field who gave her lists of ships as they came and went in U.S. ports. She sketched maps of the naval routes and

traffic. She helped train T-men to use direction-finding machines that they loaded in the back of pickup trucks, driving up and down the coasts to find hidden pirate

Francisco about gangsters running rum boats off the coast. She exposed a ship called the Holmwood, which was sailing up the Hudson River with 20,000 cases of liquor, disguised as an oil tanker called the Texas Ranger; the ship was halfway to Albany, New York, its destination, when the coast guard and customs seized it on the strength of Elizebeth’s

There was a fleet of rum ships on the West Coast controlled by two Canadian brothers named Hobbs. A California gangster named Tony “The Hat” Cornero owned some of the Hobbs boats. Their rival,

Henry Reifel and sons George and Harry, hotel magnates in Vancouver. The Reifels also had an American investor, a colorful Bostonian named Joseph P. Kennedy—the father of John F. Kennedy, future president of the United States. Elizebeth noted in one report that in 1928 the Hobbs brothers appeared to sell their interests “to Joseph Kennedy, Ltd., of Vancouver, large holders of stock in the Consolidated Exporters Corporation.” Elizebeth wasn’t afraid of these men, and she didn’t

clerk-typist, a woman. Despite these meager resources, Elizebeth reported to her superiors in 1930 that she had solved twelve thousand rum messages in the previous three years,

government’s planetary war against smuggling was handled by these two tired and perpetually overworked women, Elizebeth and her clerk, but that year Elizebeth decided she’d had enough and wrote a seven-page memo to coast guard commanders, proposing that they create a “central unit” for codebreaking. It wouldn’t do to stumble along with two people anymore; there needed to be a

While she waited and hoped for help to arrive, Elizebeth did her best with the meager resources at her disposal. To build an archive of the smugglers’ words and stay on top of any shifts in the codes, she made a carbon copy of every solved message, and when the stack of copies grew to be an inch thick, her clerk-typist bound the plaintexts into a volume, a book.

hidden kings. Elizebeth and William still had a chance to work together in these years. The collaboration flowed in one direction only, from her to him. William’s army work was too secret now. She got the sense that her husband found the smuggling puzzles to be a refuge from problems facing him at work; for him the rum war was a lark. They passed messages and worksheets back and forth, drawing cipher letters in the

periphery that fit two to a room. As part of the deal she got a pay raise, too, from $2,400 to $3,800 per year, and a fine new title: Cryptanalyst-in-Charge, U.S. Coast Guard. It was the first unit of its kind in Treasury history, and the only codebreaking unit in America ever to be run by a woman—another pioneering moment for Elizebeth. The first thing she did was hire and train a staff. There

other’s quirks and strengths, dividing up tasks as a team. Asking if Elizebeth experienced sexism was like asking if Marie Curie did. Cryptology was a young field. It hadn’t yet sorted itself into rigid roles by gender. And Elizebeth was exceptional. She deployed overwhelming mental firepower against

pound for pound the best radio intelligence organization in America. They knew how to extract information from clandestine radio networks, map the hidden structure of the transmitters, and hunt the people using them. This set of skills would later make Elizebeth an important figure in the quest to destroy the clandestine networks of Nazi spies. Her fight against smugglers was like target practice for the coming fight against fascism. Americans weren’t yet afraid of Nazis. They were too worried about scraping up money for food. By 1933

the role of “ardent worker.” Eighteen days later, in Germany, in a vacant gunpowder factory northwest of Munich, the Nazis opened the first concentration camp, Dachau. The occasion

Elizebeth, and her solutions exposed the ribs of the scheme: the names of the rum ships (Concord, Corozal, Fisher Lassie, Rosita, Mavis Barbara); their system of sneaking crates of liquor into lonely bayou towns on small boats called luggers and then unloading the crates onto freight trains, covered in sawdust. The government considered it “the greatest rum-running conspiracy since Prohibition,” and now Elizebeth had been summoned to this federal courtroom in New Orleans to explain her methods

defendants sat together like a sports team on a sideline, in suits; the previous day in court they had been quietly switching seats to make it more difficult for witnesses to identify any one of them. The accused ringleader was Albert Morrison, a rawboned

enforce Prohibition was to bring “a steady attack” against major crime syndicates and leave the small-time moonshiners alone. Big fish, not little fish. Consolidated was the whale. Woodcock

Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. “I believe I am asked my opinion of the reading of this message?” Elizebeth said, turning to the judge. “This is not a matter of opinion. There are very few people in the United States, not many it is true, who understand the principle of this science. Any other experts in the United States would find, after proper study, the exact readings I have given these.” “I

for letters in a cipher that stood for letters in a code. To solve it, Elizebeth had to rewind each step. A message that looked like GD (HX) gm ga HX (GD) R gm OB BT HR

Four days after her testimony, the jury convicted five of the syndicate’s ringleaders, including Albert Morrison, who received two years in prison. Woodcock gave credit to Elizebeth, telling her superiors that she “made an unusual impression on the

testify in the convicts’ appeal. Facing off against Edwin Grace, Capone’s attorney, Elizebeth grew impatient with his attacks on the validity of her science and told the judge she could settle the issue quickly if she had a blackboard. A bailiff found a blackboard in storage and wheeled it into the court. Elizebeth stood with a piece of chalk and diagrammed the rum ring’s codes on the board until the jurors were nodding their heads and Grace was muttering that this was highly irregular. “CLASS IN CRYPTOLOGY,” one newspaper blared the next day. The headline made her queasy. She had

said. The two cryptologists were so connected, so attuned to the slightest crease of an eyebrow or curl of a lip, that their faces had a

that came around his mouth.” What she didn’t know at the time, and didn’t learn until after the war, is that the army had asked William to break a series of ciphers used by Japanese officials to encrypt their diplomatic communications, an enormous undertaking that would come to define his career and consume the next

Henry Stimson. A former artillery officer in the Great War, Stimson thought the idea of reading other nation’s messages in peacetime was immoral, and upon learning that the State Department was paying codebreakers in New York to read the mail of foreign diplomats—Yardley and his American black chamber—the secretary was appalled. “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” he was supposed

empire. Worried about being left in the dark, the army turned to William, and in 1930 he launched a new army codebreaking unit that would later become the nucleus of the National Security Agency. William called his new organization the Signal Intelligence Service, or SIS. The first three people he hired for the new unit were male mathematicians in

He switched on three wall-mounted fans, turned to his young employees, and said, with gravity, “Welcome, gentlemen, to the secret archives of the American Black Chamber.” Yardley’s files. The cabinets from his bolted bureau.

transmitting in 1930: Angooki Taipu A, meaning “type A cipher machine” in romanji, the romanized form of Japanese that was used for transmitting messages. The name Angooki Taipu A was the codebreakers’ sole piece of information about the machine.

a nickname, “Red.” Later, in 1938, the Japanese replaced Red with a more sophisticated machine, a significant upgrade: Angooki Taipu B. This one the SIS codebreakers called “Purple.” Red and Purple were used by Japanese diplomats

the American codebreakers needed to build their own bootleg versions of the Japanese machines, reverse-engineering them based on nothing but educated guesses from analyzing the garbled messages

would become an enduring frustration for William. As hard as he tried to earn money on the side, security concerns always got in the way. Thanks to powerful brainstorms from Frank Rowlett, the M-134 eventually evolved into the SIGABA, an Egyptian Sphinx of a cipher machine with fifteen rotors and an ingenious mechanism that Rowlett called a “stepping maze.” Up to four rotors might

War. President Roosevelt used SIGABAs to communicate from his Hyde Park home and when he traveled on the presidential train. The SIGABA was like an American Enigma machine or Purple machine, only inviolate. No enemy codebreaker, whether German, Italian, or Japanese, would ever manage to break it, despite strenous efforts; the Nazis ultimately stopped intercepting SIGABA

resist sharing the dramatic details of their work. No: “My husband never never opened his mouth about anything.” She had to guess at the mind of her husband by watching changes in his behavior. He came home in the evening and said little. He opened a silver snuff box and inhaled the black tobacco dust. He was almost never cross, only withdrawn.

and refused to call it mental illness, a rational choice given the wide stigma against the mentally ill and the poor treatment options (no antidepressants). The chief psychiatrist at the city’s preeminent hospital, Dr. Walter Freeman of George Washington University, was an early adopter of electroshock therapy and the inventor of the ice pick lobotomy, a cruel and unwarranted procedure that involved jamming a sharp metal stick through the back

sure enough, eventually, William did). So Elizebeth did her best in the 1930s to cover for her husband in public and shore him up in private, lending her strength to a person who seemed unwell without letting on to friends that he was unwell, out of loyalty to her lover and also a simpler

one of her own limbs. The closest she ever came to explaining the politics

Immortal Wife, about a real American couple from the nineteenth century, Jessie and John Frémont. John was an army colonel who mapped the wilds of California, Jessie the feisty daughter of a senator, and they collaborated all their lives, Jessie believing that “to be a good wife a woman must stand shoulder

marry they cease to be purely themselves but step into a new and expanded character, the character of their marriage. . . . She used every art and guile known to the heart of woman to nurse him to health. As they rode . . . spirited horses through the forests she challenged him to race with her, complimented him on how beautifully he sat the horse. Sitting before the warmth and bright

psychological morass that was pretty deep and distressing.” The Friedmans connected with the tale of the Frémonts, this pair of American explorers menaced by the whims of the army and the nuances

cryptology to reach out to people, to resist the isolation that their cryptologic careers enforced. They began with their own children, teaching them simple ciphers when they were seven or eight: A=B, B=C, C=D. Barbara wrote letters in this cipher from sleepaway camp. “EFBS NPUIFS BOE EFBS EBEEZ . . . Dear Mother and Dear Daddy. We went on a canoe trip. We went about 12 or 14 miles. We did it in 1 day too. I paddled 1/2 the way. Love, Barbara.” William and Elizebeth replied, “XF BSF QMFBTFE . . . We are pleased to know that you can handle a canoe. It is lots of fun. You will be surprised to learn that Pinklepurr had her kittens on

they sent a holiday card in the form of a puzzle. In 1928, it was a “turning grille,” a square of red paper perforated with circular holes, its four sides numbered 1 through 4, with a single left-facing

the Friedmans.” 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