The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

The eight Riverbank Publications are commonly attributed to William alone,

other Riverbank workers contributed as well: men and women,

Mrs. Friedman had a tendency to see that the record made little or no mention of her contribution

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.

there was always a time crunch, someone demanding a quick answer. Invention under pressure.

prosecutors summoned William to testify in open court about how he broke the codes. Elizebeth wasn’t asked.

For the first eight months of the war, as incredible as it sounds, William and Elizebeth, and their team at Riverbank, did all of the codebreaking for every part of the U.S. government:

no demonstration, however good, can take the place of experiments which can be repeated and will produce identical results.”

Intuition, to them, was like a hard-earned internal compass, a grooved-in sense of how to move forward that came from patience, skill, and experience. It could be cultivated.

Elizebeth and William sometimes played into the stereotype that he was the mechanical male thinker and she the sensitive female thinker. It was a helpful shorthand for explaining the inexplicable.

A couple of human mistakes can bring the safest cryptographic system in the world to its knees.

guess,

you can't just know HOW to do it

she had him “skinned to a frazzle” in the brains department.

strike the flint of her thoughts against different rocks, against history and math and logic and against William, too, shooting out sparks, ribbons of flame.

One of the mysteries of falling in love is that it makes you inarticulate and eloquent at the same time.

making yourself understood to another person is essentially a problem of cryptology.

When you fall in love, you develop a compact encoding to share mental states more efficiently, cut noise, and bring your beloved closer.

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 ‘achieve.’ ”

There was a time when for my love I did not care The hot wooing, the passionate kisses left me cold. I yielded to him because he was good to me. And compassion led me to return his kisses when his longing eyes and eager heart spoke, “I wish you cared as I.”

spring picked the lock of winter,

to wish passionately day after day only to die . . . and then to be brought, by a miracle, to a new place—to

Is it possible I am to have them after all—Youth and Love, and Life?

The captain said that anyone who spoke of peace should be shot as a traitor.

We planned it all—cheek to cheek—facing the swelling power of the new moon—

“OH SPIRIT WITHOUT and Within, keep me sweet! Keep me working on & on & keep me well—keep the Fire Burning!”

There was nothing to do but to do it. “What was taught was taught,” Elizebeth later recalled, “and we taught it with what we had.”

“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

Elizebeth didn’t understand how anyone could bear writing with an unsharp pencil. It was barbarism.

the war had inflated William’s renown to the point where she couldn’t possibly keep up,

Security and intelligence are two sides of the same coin. Without one, the other is no good.

This epiphany marked the dawn of a peacetime arms race

The best paper system was more secure than a weak machine,

a subject which forms the basis of material which is exchanged every hour of the day over the whole face of the globe, under its waters, and through its ether—material that touches directly or indirectly every human

2.29 x 1082 ways, a number larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe.

In this new era of machines, William was showing that the human was still king.

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

They were like a binary star system in a void, twin suns

war.

She wanted to!

The president of Harvard changed admissions rules to keep Jews out. Henry Ford launched an anti-Semitic weekly newspaper with a declaration that “the Jew is the world’s enigma.”

Somebody asks for my husband and they can’t get him, so they take me.”

It was like people were trying to use William’s brain “second-hand” by hiring the woman who presumably enjoyed intimate access to it.

“Our love will only be complete when there is a third—flesh and blood of yours and mine.”

The Friedmans were determined not to consciously teach their kids anything

3932 Military Road in northwest Washington,

And although the G-men of the FBI tended to get the glory when famous gangsters went down, thanks to the publicity genius of J. Edgar Hoover, it was the T-men of the Treasury,

“If I may capture a goodly number of your messages,” she wrote, “even though I have never seen your code book, I may read your thoughts.”