The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

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.”