The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

Elizebeth is treated as the dutiful, slightly colorful wife of a great man, a digression from the main narrative, if not a footnote. Her victories are all but forgotten.

“We try to tell people that Elizebeth’s stuff is amazing,” the archivist said, but usually researchers want to see William’s papers.

What was she doing in the Second World War? No one seemed to know. It took me almost two years to find the answer. She spent the war catching Nazi spies, among other little-known feats. Working with an elite codebreaking unit that she founded

in 1931 and collaborating closely with both British and U.S. intelligence, Elizebeth became a secret detective, a Sherlock Holmes on the trail of fascist agents infiltrating the Western Hemisphere. She tracked and exposed them, smashing the spy rings, ruining Nazi dreams.

In a broader sense, she filled gaps in agencies that weren’t prepared for the battle of wits that now faced them, a pattern that repeated throughout her entire career. The FBI, the CIA, the NSA—to different degrees Elizebeth pressed her thumb into the clay of all these agencies when the clay was still wet. She helped to shape them and she battled them, too, a woman hammering herself into the history of what we now...

In 1945, Elizebeth’s spy files were stamped with classification tags and entombed in government archives, and officials made her swear an oath of secrecy about her work in the war. So she had to sit silent and watch others seize ...

It’s not quite true that history is written by the winners. It’s written by the best publicists on the winning team.

Hoover was almost certainly aware of Elizebeth Friedman. But he would not yet have had many chances to cross her path. She wasn’t allowed to eat in the gentlemen’s dining room at Harvey’s. There were a lot of male enclaves like this in the city, inaccessible to her. And Hoover was a chauvinist of the old school. When he first took charge of the bureau in 1922, there had been three female agents. He got rid of them. The next two female agents wouldn’t join the bureau until after his death in 1972.

The two historians credited the FBI for both the fieldwork and the technical brilliance (the coast guard’s files were classified at the time), and authors of more recent books have also praised the bureau for destroying the Nazi networks in South America. But the FBI didn’t intercept the messages. It didn’t monitor the Nazi circuits. It didn’t break the codes. It didn’t solve any Enigma machines. The coast guard did this stuff—the little codebreaking team that Elizebeth created from nothing.

During the Second World War, an American woman figured out how to sweep the globe of undercover Nazis. The proof was on paper: four thousand typed decryptions of clandestine Nazi messages that her team shared with the global intelligence community. She had conquered at least forty-eight different clandestine radio circuits and three Enigma machines to get these plaintexts. The pages found their way to the navy and to the army. To FBI headquarters in Washington and bureaus around the world. To Britain. There was no mistaking their origin. Each sheet said “CG Decryption” at the bottom, in black ink. These pieces of paper saved lives. They almost certainly stopped coups. They put fascist spies in prison. They drove wedges between Germany and other nations that were trying to sustain and prolong Nazi terror. By any measure, Elizebeth was a great heroine of the Second World War. The British knew it. The navy knew it. The FBI knew it. But the American public never did, because Elizebeth wasn’t allowed to speak. She and every other codebreaker who worked on ULTRA material was bound by oath to keep the ULTRA secret. Even if she had been free to discuss her triumphs, explaining them to the public would have taken some time. J. Edgar Hoover did not have these constraints.

So this was the picture of the spy hunt that the public ended up receiving. They got Hoover’s story, not Elizebeth’s. Hoover made sure of it. In the fall of 1944, with the Wehrmacht collapsing across Europe, and the Red Army moving toward Berlin, he launched a publicity blitz to claim credit for winning the Invisible War. He published a seven-page story in The American Magazine titled “How the Nazi Spy Invasion Was Smashed.” The sub-headline read, “One of the great undercover victories of the war—the defeat of a vast Axis plan to penetrate South America—is revealed here for the first time by the Director of the FBI.” Hoover claimed that his bureau had disrupted seven thousand Axis operations, catching two hundred and fifty spies and seizing twenty-nine radio stations, and that these actions had “stopped Hitler in South America. He needed his men and radio stations to carry out his plans of conquest and sabotage. . . . Without his machine he was lost.” Hoover did not mention Elizebeth or the coast guard, but he did thank the policemen of Brazil and Argentina, a significant number of whom were fascists, torturers, or both.

President Roosevelt died on April 12, of a brain hemorrhage. Elizebeth was crushed. She had never liked politicians, but Roosevelt was the exception, a man who seemed both decent and brilliant, who believed in democracy, science, equality, and international cooperation, values she held dear, and Elizebeth feared that in his absence, “evil influences” like the Ku Klux Klan would sweep the country: “Our country will go on. But who can say what catastrophic results will come from his going? Or worse, the results, hidden, subversive, that take place with no fanfare, no appearance on the surface, but so quietly, hiddenly evil.”

William always believed the war was worth fighting. But he saw it as a grim duty, not a crusade, and his experience of fighting the war had permanently destroyed his faith in the way the world was put together.

asked him in a letter if he believed in Zionism, the project to create a Jewish homeland. He said no. “Zionism is only one of many virulent forms of a detestable disease known as ‘nationalism,’ ” William wrote to Barbara. “The sooner we realize that we are all God’s children regardless of color, race, creed, nationality, etc., the better for all nations and the world as a whole.”

The group descended in the elevator and drove a mile back down the mountain to a level area where the Nazi party had built Hitler a separate residence, a private house. The front of the house was a twenty-five-foot-wide plate-glass window with no glass in it. The building had been almost completely destroyed by an RAF blockbuster bomb and by subsequent visits from American soldiers, who wrecked what was left of the house before the army stopped them. William thought it was a shame. “I think it is too bad that this whole installation was not left absolutely intact to serve as an everlasting and terrible monument to the folly of a people led to perdition by a madman’s lust for power.”

As he had done on his previous visit to Bletchley, William kept a detailed diary. One entry described a meeting with Alan Turing: “At 1535 a visit with Dr. Turing. He is leaving GC&CS, to my surprise. Says he’s going into electronic calculating devices and may come to the U.S. for a visit soon. Invited him to visit us if he comes to Washington.” This turned out to be the final encounter of William Friedman and Alan Turing. The two geniuses would never see each other again. In 1952, the British government stripped Turing’s security clearance on grounds that he was a homosexual, and officials coerced him into taking estrogen injections. Turing’s maid later found him dead of an apparent suicide, a half-eaten apple by the side of his bed, traces of cyanide in his blood. A government witch hunt had destroyed one of the war’s greatest heroes.

Nazi codebreakers had never managed to defeat America’s best cipher machine, the SIGABA, which he had invented with Frank Rowlett.

They didn’t understand why it was necessary to kill so many civilians merely to demonstrate the bomb’s power. Hastings thought “it was [a] serious mistake to drop the first one on a big city—should have stated the case, given warning, dropped 1st one on a vacant area & then make renewed call to surrender,” William recorded in his diary. “I think he is right.

Elizebeth heard Truman say on the radio, “It is our responsibility—ours, the living—to see to it that this victory shall be a monument worthy of the dead who died to win it.” She agreed that there was no point in having fought a war to preserve freedom if people used that freedom to start more wars.

They transported their own precious books and papers to the new house, reassembling their private library in the den of the second floor, and rehung the axe on the wall as a warning to potential book thieves. And together, researching and writing, they galloped back through the past, weighing the arguments of Baconians and cutting them to pieces. In their hands The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined became a story about the drug of self-delusion and the joy of truth. One section analyzed the cipher system of a French general that had revealed the secret phrase IF HE SHALL PUBLISH. The Friedmans showed that the cipher could just as easily have produced the text IN HER DAMP PUBES. George Fabyan received the full brunt of their scrutiny. The Friedmans wrote that while Fabyan possessed “great natural gifts of energy and dynamism,” he was a salesman, not a scientist, and suppressed facts he didn’t like. As for Mrs. Gallup, “a sincere and honourable woman, and no fraud,” she “found in her texts what she wanted to find” and “was therefore at the mercy of the promptings of her expectant mind.”

“Vile creature that he was in many ways, George Fabyan really launched two or three things that were of vital importance to this country,” which was true. For all his malice and superstition, Fabyan threw enough money at actual scientists to accelerate the discovery of actual knowledge.

She stayed active in the League of Women Voters, researching the legal status of women, international relations, finance, and the urgent need for D.C. statehood. “At the drop of a hat,” she wrote, “I will turn on a spigot labeled SUFFRAGE FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA!”

And as the NSA grew larger and stronger, it began to use that strength in ways that made William uncomfortable. It scooped up enormous quantities of signals seemingly because it could, towering haystacks of intelligence that would make it difficult to find the needles, and it continued to conceal and classify more and more kinds of documents that William thought should be publicly available.

As his disillusionment with the NSA intensified into full-blown paranoia, he reconsidered his long intent to donate his papers to the Library of Congress. He couldn’t bear to hand over the contents of his private library, his proudest possession, to the same government that had sent men to raid it. After some thought he decided instead to bestow his archive to the George C. Marshall Foundation, a private institution at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia.

In years that followed, researchers journeyed to the Marshall Library and used the Friedman files to write books that wouldn’t have been possible before. The author James Bamford relied partly on William’s collection to piece together his 1981 book, The Puzzle Palace, the first popular history of the NSA, whose publication the agency tried and failed to stop. The NSA sent representatives to the library twice, in 1979 and 1983, each time removing an unknown number of William’s items, but the Friedmans had done such a careful job of indexing that a sharp-eyed professor at Virginia Military Institute, Rose Mary Sheldon, noticed that about 200 of the 3,002 index cards were missing. Sheldon submitted a series of Freedom of Information Act requests that eventually prodded the NSA to release 7,000 additional

Friedman documents. In the last two decades the agency has gotten more comfortable telling its history—today it holds public cryptologic history conferences and operates a museum—but it took a while, and in the meantime, the Friedmans had created this alternate archive, beyond U.S. government control, where anyone could learn about U.S. codebreaking.

Even so, the attention of researchers fell lopsidedly on one Friedman and not the other. Elizebeth’s papers at the library, unindexed and therefore mysterious, largely gathered dust while people explored William’s. The world forgot about...

It took a while for people to rediscover Elizebeth. Bit by bit, people went looking. Mostly women. They suspected there was more to her story than had been told, and they were right.

historian at the Department of Justice, Barbara Osteika, located records of Elizebeth’s old smuggling cases and came to see Elizebeth as a “beacon of hope” for women in federal law enforcement, a trailblazer. An FBI cryptanalyst, Jeanne Anderson, who solves the handwritten code and cipher notes of suspected criminals, found transcripts of Elizebeth’s trials from the 1930s and studied them for guidance on speaking to juries. And although Elizebeth had never worked there, she also won fans at the NSA, where female cryptanalysts rose to distinction after the war, including Juanita Morris Moody, who briefed U.S. leaders during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Ann Caracristi, who became the agency’s number-two official.

In the 1990s the NSA renamed its auditorium. The William F. Friedman Memorial Auditorium is now the William F. Friedman and Elizebeth S. Friedman Memorial Auditorium. As of 2014 there is a second auditorium in the Washington area bearing her name, at a Justice Department building, thanks to a campaign launched by Barbara Osteika. A...

The ghost also cried out from unexpected places. Three of the index cards in William’s collection contain brief, verifiably true comments about how J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI took credit for feats of spycatching actually performed by Elizebeth and the coast guard. These comments were obviously written by Elizebeth—William wasn’t in a position to know. Each card is a knife slipped between the ribs of Hoover, Elizebeth’s patient revenge.