The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

when the Friedmans handed her a menu in code. “The first item was a series of dots done with a blue pen,” she later recalled. “The ‘brains’ at the party worked over the number of dots in a group when it occurred to me it had to be ‘blue points’—oysters—and it was! I had done my bit, and from then on I was

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

couldn’t he bake some of the same ideas into a mass-marketed board game? In a heat of inspiration he tried to design a Monopoly of codes and ciphers. The Crypto-Set Headquarters Army Game was a folding piece of cardboard with a red spinning wheel; players had to solve puzzles to advance tokens from the start line to the finish. A second

“codebreaker,” trading secret messages. He thought Kriptor had commercial potential and sent it to Milton Bradley, makers of Battleship and the Game of Life. In the hands of the Friedmans, cryptograms were

have been the simplest. They built a library. Soon after moving to Washington, Elizebeth and William began to collect books and papers about all things related to secret writing, including documents that touched on their own lives in cryptology and that were not classified or restricted to government vaults. They stored objects on bookshelves

into work,” William recalled later, “and he whispered, ‘They’re burning things today.’ And I said, ‘Such as?’ And he showed me these books.” They were a complete set of Union army cipher books, precious items that William rescued from destruction. Some of the most important items in the library were books

through their hands. The Friedmans weren’t necessarily doing this to document the history of American intelligence and tell a renegade story about its birth, although this would

be the ultimate, magnificent result. Rather, the Friedmans built an archive because that’s what

the best intelligence professionals do. They become librarians. It’s no accident that J. Edgar Hoover got his start in government as an eighteen-year-old Library of Congress clerk, a job that gave him “an excellent foundation for my work in the FBI,” he later said, “where it has been necessary to collate information and evidence.” The FBI was a library of human fingerprints and human deeds. Elizebeth’s thirty bound volumes of rum messages were a library of the outlaw seas. The files of Herbert Yardley’s American black chamber, now controlled by William, were a library of diplomatic intrigues from many nations, and William’s SIS unit at the army was f...

They were showing their reverence for knowledge. Knowledge is power, as Francis Bacon once said and as George Fabyan and Mrs. Gallup taught them years ago. The Friedmans had taken this precept to an extreme, structuring their whole lives around it—an attitude of sharp curiosity and ruthless self-honesty that defined them. They had carried that little kernel of Bacon’s philosophy along with them when

skepticism. As the Friedmans climbed onward to brilliant careers in Washington, Mrs. Gallup remained in a cottage at Riverbank, peering through

a looking glass at old books, expenses paid by Fabyan, until her death in 1934. She died believing she was correct, that Bacon was Shakespeare, that she had discovered proof, that history would vindicate her. As for Fabyan, he never quite said the Bacon cipher

signing off, “Always the same old, GF.” George Fabyan died two years after Mrs. Gallup, in 1936, at the age of sixty-nine. The Friedmans heard the news in a letter from an old Riverbank

the Villa that hung from chains, the bed swinging to and fro with the violence of his coughing. He said that when he died he wanted his employees to shut off the light in the lighthouse, the one that flashed two white lights and three red lights in a continual pattern every night, the coded message saying keep out, keep out, keep out. It went dark according to his wish. Fabyan left behind far less money than anyone would have guessed. The Great Depression, along with his lavish expenditures on the laboratories and their

crossed the Geneva tracks. County officials purchased the estate for $70,500 and added it to the local forest preserve. Riverbank was public property, the once-mighty kingdom now an empty set

library: his own personal papers and also the voluminous files of the Riverbank Department of Ciphers. In Fabyan’s last letter to William before he died, he had mentioned destroying “a lot of old correspondence on ciphers because I did not know whose hands it might fall into.” Now William wrote to his widow, Nelle. What was to be done with the files of the Department of Ciphers? These records were part of the Friedmans’ own history and America’s history too, and the Friedmans wanted to make sure they were preserved. The reply came that Fabyan, as one of his last wishes,

A dying man had burned some papers about cryptology. Cryptology is a profession of secrets. Secrets staying secret is the norm. Officials only get riled up when the opposite happens—when secrets are leaked, published, disclosed. And by now, the Friedmans and their colleagues were struggling

decided to spill his secrets, for money and revenge. He published a book, The American Black Chamber, in the summer of 1931, which became a bestseller and international sensation. It also hit the U.S. government like an exploding volcano, hurling rock and lava into the stunned surroundings and forcing

there was no harm in revealing its activities. There was enough truth in the book to scandalize U.S. officials. Yardley disclosed, for instance, how his country had been reading the diplomatic traffic of Japanese ambassadors, information that Japanese readers were surprised to learn; the book sold 33,119 copies there. He also tantalized with anecdotes of sex and deception. “A lovely girl dances with the Secretary of an Embassy,” Yardley wrote in the book’s introduction, promising more details within. “She flatters him. They become confidential. He is indiscreet.” He devoted a full chapter to a bewitching female spy named Madame de Victorica, “the beautiful blonde woman of Antwerp,” who worked for the British and French during the Great War and employed ciphers and invisible ink. Yardley claimed that an unknown enemy once enlisted a blonde spy to seduce him at a New York speakeasy: “It did seem to

intolerable. Truth was truth and anything else was fuckery. He also disagreed with Yardley’s assertion that there was no harm in telling old stories. William thought that some of Yardley’s revelations might startle adversaries into boosting the security of their communications, particularly Japan, thereby making the jobs of American codebreakers more difficult. In the end, though, William resented that Yardley

William wanted to tell himself. William had always been a stifled writer, unable to publish what he would have liked. At Riverbank the obstacle was the ego of a rich man, George Fabyan, who insisted on taking credit for William’s work, and now the reason was national security. He couldn’t tell stories of his army feats because, unlike Yardley, he wasn’t willing to violate his promise to keep America’s secrets.

handwriting, a chorus of jeers and boos. William created a numbered key in the front of the book so that future readers could keep track of the different voices. The fallout from the publication of Yardley’s book

movies. In 1933, Congress passed a law specifically to prevent Yardley from publishing a book of codebreaking yarns focused on Japan; the new law, called “An Act For the Protection of Government Records” and derided by Yardley as the “Secrets Act,” declared it a crime to reveal secrets about cryptologic information. But stories about codes and ciphers only increased after Yardley opened the gates. He had proven that there was a market for them, particularly yarns about Yardleyesque women who dealt in secrets, and when editors looked around for such a woman, they did not have to look far. Elizebeth Friedman was attractive. She was a mother. She

the news value of such stories,” went a confidential memo later circulated by the U.S. Navy to warn about the dangers of cryptologic publicity. “Consequently, when in 1934 magazine and newspaper accounts broke concerning Mrs.

In 1934 she launched a series of interviews with “First Ladies of the Capitol,” mostly socialites and the wives of congressmen, and in May she asked Elizebeth to speak about her career on a national NBC broadcast. Elizebeth brought her children to the NBC radio studio in Washington; commercial radio was less than a decade old, still slightly wondrous, and she thought the kids might enjoy seeing the technology. Barbara was ten, John Ramsay was seven. The NBC staff let the kids watch their mother from the glassed-in control room adjacent to the sound booth, analog indicator needles twitching back and forth as Santry peppered Elizebeth with questions. “Does the habit of thinking in code ever creep into

unbearable, and altogether the articles and radio shows represented a real threat to her livelihood. Codebreaking is a secret profession. Its practitioners aren’t generally supposed to talk about how they do what they do, as demonstrated by the shock at Herbert Yardley’s disclosures. Elizebeth

wasn’t anything like Yardley; he was motivated by money, and she was motivated by doing the job that the government was asking her to do. Elizebeth only discussed active cases in public when a prosecutor called her to testify in court, and at all other times she limited her comments to closed cases, and then only with the full authorization of the Treasury publicity office. She testified for a reason: to put bad guys in prison. Yet Elizebeth was so talented at this task, and the trials so spectacular, that the resulting waves of publicity threatened to wash away her career, in an era when government was growing concerned about the

and stakes of her cases. When Prohibition was repealed in 1934, destroying the market for bootleg liquor, several of the rum rings made a nimble transition to smuggling drugs, mainly opium and the

essential—the only reliable way to discover the drugs was to swipe the details of their location from the smuggler’s own lips. The drug networks were global in scope, spanning more

with translators to read encrypted notes in Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Mandarin. She was able to take messages written in blocks of letters or numbers and trace these figures back to specific Mandarin words in commercial code books designed for Chinese merchants. Reporters and readers seemed amazed that she could break a code in a language she did not speak, but that was the power of having a system, a science. “The whole deciphering science is based on what we call the mechanics of language,” she explained on NBC radio, making it seem easy. “There are certain fixed ways in which language operates,

arrive at a result that usually does the trick.” Global heroin rings went up at the stroke of her pencil. Smuggling ships were skimmed off the ocean like fat from a simmering pot of soup stock. Each new feat startled loose a flock of news articles that sang about Elizebeth’s previous feats and added one more verse to the ballad of her growing legend. She decrypted a stack of intercepted letters and telegrams exchanged between a member of Shanghai’s fearsome Green Gang of criminal warlords and two brothers in San Francisco, Isaac and

in prison. EZRA GANG FALLS IN TRAP OF WOMAN EXPERT AT PUZZLES, went a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle. SOLVED BY WOMAN. The press had a way of praising Elizebeth and condescending to her at the

trail of a story.” Nothing worked. She had chosen a profession that continually immersed her in lurid realities. “She is entrusted with more secrets of the crime world and of federal detection activities than any woman in history,” reported Reader’s Digest in 1937, in a five-page feature that declared Elizebeth “Key Woman of the T-Men” and was mailed to more than a million subscribers. “When one of the Treasury Department’s enforcement agencies gets the scent of a new international enterprise in smuggling, dope running . . . there is one unofficial order that sticks in every agent’s mind: ‘Get some of the gang’s correspondence and send for Mrs. Friedman.’ ” There were people in the U.S. military who didn’t

care that prosecutors were forcing her to do it. Her testimonies showed that she knew how to break many different kinds of codes, including codes in foreign languages, which “could lead to only one conclusion on the part of espionage agents—decryption of other nation’s codes was in progress behind

what was the solution? The troublesome publicity came to a peak in the first months of 1938, when the buzz from the Reader’s Digest profile dovetailed with a new round of press from a flashy drug trial in Canada. At the request of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Elizebeth flew to Vancouver to analyze messages discovered in a raid of a Chinese merchant’s home and business. Police seized thirteen Luger pistols, four hundred Mauser clips, almost one hundred machine gun drums, numerous cans of opium, and two dozen coded cablegrams in a safe. Working with RCMP translators, Elizebeth solved the messages, exposing a smuggling ring that traded Canadian weapons to Hong Kong in exchange for drugs.

helped convict all five defendants, and a fresh wave of articles and headlines appeared. CANADA SMASHES OPIUM RING WITH U.S. WOMAN’S AID. WOMAN TRANSLATES CODE JARGON. The February 15, 1938, issue of Look magazine included Elizebeth in a feature on “outstanding” women “in careers unusual for their sex,” along with a female deep-sea diver,

Absurdum!” She was now the most famous codebreaker in the world, more famous even than Herbert Yardley, the impresario of the American Black Chamber. And she was more famous than her husband, too—a reversal from the longstanding pattern. All their lives, William had been the celebrated one,

Elizebeth’s adventures, as if he were unaware of them. He thought the inversion of the narrative was hilarious, “a scream”; it had been silly before when everyone thought he was the only genius in the couple,

letter. He was proud of her. Elizebeth, of course, didn’t think she was a genius; actual geniuses never do. Codebreaking to her was about teams, systems, cooperation. She told people she never wanted to see her name

and test them, and train army staff in their operation. He boarded a troopship, the Republic, in New York City, with a trunk containing six bulky cipher machines and some books of essays and poetry, and the ship steamed south to the Panama Canal and

hatchets. In Washington a few weeks later, Elizebeth fell ill. A creeping fatigue glued her to the bed for long periods. Not wanting William to worry, she concealed the details from him, only telling her sister,

Then he sailed to San Francisco for more tests at a different army facility. He was back on the ship, heading homeward, by Christmas Eve. The crew of the Republic arranged a Christmas dance for passengers. He sat in the smoking room reading a book while others danced. After a colonel entered and shot him a dirty look for being a prude, William put

dawned, and skimming along at fourteen and a half knots. During these first days of January 1939, Japanese pilots dropped bombs on civilians in the Chinese city of Chongqing. The cardinal of Munich praised Hitler’s “simple personal habits.” The Nazis announced the immediate deployment of hundreds of new U-boats, a smaller and swifter

Milton Bradley. No one had gotten back to him. He learned later the game had stumped the firm’s designers. It was one thing to design a fun code game for a party with friends and quite another to deliver a game in a cardboard box to a stranger. On the ship he began a letter to Elizebeth that ultimately

William to tell Elizebeth, “Well, that wasn’t exactly news to me, my Darling. For I’ve known for a long time that you are the one in back of me and responsible for what little I’ve done. Had it not been for you I’d have been sunk long ago by unsolved infernal

love, for wisdom, for courage, and common sense.” Floating above the blue-black depths soon to be lethalized by German U-boats, he often stood at the top deck’s rail looking out at the miles of ocean. Billions of droplets exchanging secret histories every fraction of a second. Trillions. Actual unbreakable code. One night when it was hot and he

deception involving elements long familiar to Elizebeth Friedman—a code phrase, a radio station, and a murder. The men responsible were Nazis, and they belonged to the same part of the Nazi state that would soon attract Elizebeth’s deep attention. At 4 P.M. on August 31, 1939, in a hotel room in a

he did not want to appear as the aggressor, so a pretext was needed, a simulated attack on German forces that would allow Hitler to claim he was acting in self-defense and create confusion about where the truth really lay. This is where Naujocks and his colleagues entered

were not meant to be confronted or understood. One SS leader bragged that the organization was “enveloped in the mysterious aura of the political detective story.” Elizebeth would spend much of the war trying to penetrate this veil. After the SS men in Poland

away from his fatal gunshot wounds, then stormed into the broadcast area with his team, aiming a revolver at the staff: “Hands up!” One of the SS men spoke Polish. He grabbed the emergency microphone used for storm warnings. “Attention, this