The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

  At first she didn’t worry that she struggled with Mrs. Gallup’s system. Elizebeth awoke each morning in a dreamland. She had arrived to begin her new job during Riverbank’s sweetest season, the moment of peak summer pleasure, the colors and smells dialed all the way up, the food most plentiful: breakfasts of fresh eggs from the chickens on the farm, dinners of meats and fruits prepared by the nimble Danish and Swedish cooks. She took walks along the river. Wild orchids grew on the banks. Shapes of sunlight twitched on the water like spinning coins. Ragtime music played from somewhere. She turned her head searching for the source. Fabyan had installed a series of loudspeakers across the property, operable from a single control panel in the Villa, so that he and Nelle might listen to music at any spot on the estate, and the songs changed throughout the day, switching directions, coming now from the garden and now from the veranda, ragtime shifting to jazz, then to a Beethoven symphony, the boss, intense and restless, wanting to hear every kind of music all at once and never getting his fill.

  Fabyan assigned her a bedroom in a two-story building called Engledew Cottage, named after a local florist and friend of the Fabyans’, one of the larger of the many cottages spread across the estate where “brain workers” lived. Engledew stood down the road from the Lodge a few hundred yards to the south, next to the farm with its big barn and Nelle Fabyan’s prize cows. There were shared work areas in Engledew Cottage as well as the Lodge, and during the day men and women walked back and forth between the cottages along the highway, carrying papers and books, as horse-drawn carriages and automobiles drove past.

  Elizebeth wasn’t the only young woman assigned to cipher research at Riverbank. When she arrived there were at least two others, sisters from Chicago, barely out of high school. Fabyan tended to hire women out of clerical pools because it was convenient, but he had come to believe that in many ways they were better than men at analyzing ciphers. Women had the stamina and patience to look at text all day, and complained less. “Our experience at Riverbank,” Fabyan wrote, “has demonstrated that women are particularly adapted for this kind of work.”

  After a few weeks Elizebeth fell into a routine, adjusting to the rhythm of her new job. Mrs. Gallup often worked with her assistants in the Lodge’s spacious living room, with its tall casement windows that looked east across the highway, toward the Villa and the river. The work atmosphere in the Lodge was a bit like how she imagined a museum of natural history or a lepidopterist’s lab to be, a place where people analyzed delicate objects, pinning dead butterflies to pages, drawing pictures. Mrs. Gallup sat at a handsome wooden desk, peering through an oblong looking glass at photo enlargements of pages from old books. The enlargements were made by William Friedman, the geneticist with the white buck shoes who had caught Elizebeth’s eye at her first dinner in the Lodge. Because William happened to be handy with a camera and a darkroom, Fabyan had roped him into the cipher project, even though it wasn’t his job, and he often visited the Lodge to drop off new prints for Mrs. Gallup.

  The woman would raise the looking glass, lower it, write a few words in a notebook, raise it and lower it again, and write some more, hour after hour. When Elizebeth asked the other girls what Mrs. Gallup was doing, they said she was attempting to complete Bacon’s unfinished science fiction novel The New Atlantis, to recover the remainder of the text, which Mrs. Gallup believed was woven throughout Bacon’s works.

  The cursive line of her pen was exceedingly fine. Each page of her notebook resembled a piece of art. She kept images of Bacon close at hand, for inspiration: an engraving of Bacon in his prime, a handsome youth with curls and a ruff; a picture of Gorhambury House, Bacon’s mansion outside London. She filled small wooden boxes with news clippings about her own research and that of her competitors, ultimately pasting the clips into scrapbooks.

  The women worked long hours, into the evening, sun dipping low, flies swarming on the porch. “We lived hard and fast,” Elizebeth later recalled to the NSA’s Valaki, then paused, embarrassed. No, she did not mean to imply anything salacious. “I mean, there was absolutely no carousing, no parties, no nothing. Fabyan had use for only one kind of worker, and that was one that knew his business and worked at it damned hard.” He paid the codebreakers and scientists tiny salaries but promised to take care of them in all other ways. Food, lodging, recreation: they would live like the “minor idle rich” as long as they stayed under his wing at Riverbank.

  And who would ever want to leave? On weekends Elizebeth put on her bathing suit, skidded down the hill to the river’s edge, and walked across the bridge to the island, which Fabyan called “Isle of View” because he liked that it sounded similar to “I love you.” The lighthouse rose above the northern bank of the island, and the southern bank was crowned with tall trees and a magnificent swimming pool built by Fabyan for the enjoyment of his staff, lit at night by floodlamps and lined with soaring Roman columns. Swimming there made Elizebeth feel like an Italian princess or an actress in a movie. The cool water licked off the sweat and she dried herself in the sun, talking and laughing with Mrs. Gallup’s other female assistants.

  In August 1916 she turned twenty-four.

  The men of Riverbank noticed Elizebeth early on, particularly the brain workers. They smoked pipes stuffed with cheap tobacco. They asked around about her story, tried to figure out if she was single, looked for ways to get her attention. Bert Eisenhour, the carpenter and engineer, pulled strings to borrow Fabyan’s Stutz Bearcat, a roadster with a four-stroke engine, and invited Elizebeth to climb in; seconds later she was ripping along the Lincoln Highway at 60 or 70 miles per hour with the top off. In an era when most roads were dirt and gravel, the highway was paved, a result of cooperation between Fabyan and other local business owners; as a result, “no billiard ball on the smoothest billiard table ever made could have more pleasure in motion than that enjoyed by the ordinary Illinoisan skimming in a powerful car over that gleaming, winding stretch of concrete,” a visitor once wrote. In the passenger seat of the Bearcat, Elizebeth raced past barns and silos, her body inches from the ground, wind plastering her curls to her head, engine roaring in her ears. She didn’t know if her head would blow off.

  Another man who crossed her path during free hours was William Friedman, the geneticist and Mrs. Gallup’s photo assistant. He didn’t like to swim, because he was afraid he’d catch cold, but he enjoyed bicycling, and he and Elizebeth took leisurely rides together around the estate, stopping to picnic on the grass, sandhill cranes and red hawks circling above.

  At twenty-five he was one of the younger male scientists, closest to her own age, so it felt natural to spend time with him. She appreciated his shy, precise way of speaking, his soft, halting voice that seemed to encode its own refutation, as if he were constantly checking a mental ticker tape of his words for correctness. One day he showed her where he lived on the estate. It was a working windmill—not the big showy Dutch contraption on the other side of the river but a smaller windmill on the same side of the road as the Lodge and the ordnance lab. It was two stories tall. William opened the door and she walked into an old, creaky structure, damp and warm, with a powerful smell of soil. She saw that the ground floor contained some microscopes and work shelves. An interior door led to the greenhouse that William managed, which is where Fabyan had him breeding new strains of crops and flowers, violets and wheat, and a type of corn with no cob.

  Upstairs, he said, was his sleeping quarters, and down here was a little laboratory where he ran genetics experiments with living fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster. Elizebeth could see his bottles full of the teensy-weensy flies. Each bottle was about the size of a coffee mug, only thinner, and was smeared with some overripe banana that the flies ate. William explained that geneticists like to use fruit flies in experiments because they reproduce very quickly, then die. If you marry a normal fruit fly with a fly that has yellow eyes, say—a genetic mutation, an alteration in the biological code—they will produce children in three weeks, and you can look
at the children to see if they have yellow eyes, showing they inherited the yellow-eye gene. There was something incongruous and surreal about seeing this good-looking young man in a crisply pressed white shirt and bow tie working in a rustic prairie windmill that smelled of banana and the sweetish decay of plant matter. Elizebeth used to watch him there, mating the flies, carefully pouring one bottle of flies into another, getting them to exchange their codes.

  The size and scope of Riverbank was dawning on her. What had appeared on her first visit to be a sparsely populated stretch of land now revealed itself to be a small self-contained village, a community of 150 workers, some of whom had been with Fabyan for more than decade: the caretaker of the Japanese garden, Susumu Kobayashi; the boathouse manager, Jack “the Sailor” Wilhelmson, a happy and well-built Norwegian; Fabyan’s personal secretary, Belle Cumming, originally from Scotland, who kept Riverbank’s financial records in black folders and hurled torrents of profanity at guests she felt were overstepping their bounds; Silvio Silvestri, Fabyan’s personal sculptor. Fabyan hired them on whims. He trusted his own impressions of people instead of their accomplishments or educations. He brought people to Riverbank if he decided they were spectacular. He was always saying that to Elizebeth and everyone else: “Achieve success! Be spectacular! Then things break your way.”

  To entice spectacular individuals to stay, he welcomed their spouses and children. Every child born on the estate received a sum of money from Fabyan, placed in a bank account to grow and pay for future schooling. This was another aspect of the place that made Elizebeth marvel: there were families here, boys and girls growing up at Riverbank. Fabyan seemed to genuinely love children. He handed out shiny dimes he kept in his coat pocket. He stopped whatever he was doing to answer their questions about Riverbank’s zoo creatures and explain the curious behaviors of the animals, to remove a snake from a cage with his own hands and demonstrate how a snake was able to disengage its jaw in order to swallow an egg.

  Elizebeth realized that everything that appeared so hallucinatory to her about Riverbank must seem perfectly normal to these children. It was normal for them to live where two monkeys roamed outdoors wearing red diapers, one a kleptomaniac with a habit of stealing men’s keys. It was normal for Jack the Sailor to sing sea shanties to the children, dance the jig on their command, and teach them how to tie knots. It was normal to be outside playing and see a famous actress walk by, or Teddy Roosevelt, who liked to stroll the grounds with Fabyan and talk about crops, genetics, and Francis Bacon. In summer Jack the Sailor always wove a gigantic spiderweb out of rope that spanned two elm trees; squirrels climbed it, and children tried, and so did Lillie Langtry, a stage and vaudeville actress and an adventurous horsewoman. Other celebrities vacationed at Riverbank: the curly-haired actress and pilot Billie Dove; the aviator and polar explorer Richard Byrd; Broadway producer Flo Ziegfeld and his actress wife, the elegant Billie Burke, who would later play the role of Glenda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz; the titans of the Chicago Stock Exchange, of which Fabyan was a member. They ate dinner with the Fabyans, George and Nelle, then drank and smoked around a campfire.

  Elizebeth wasn’t impressed by the celebrities. She met and talked with Lillie Langtry, one of the most famous women in America at the time, and only mentioned it later in passing. Elizebeth was proud not to be “afflicted with the star-complex and hero-worship,” she would write later. “Whatever quality it is which is possessed by those who love the adulation and star worship seems to be, in my case, supplanted by an intense reach for freedom from observation—and for privacy.”

  This is one reason Elizebeth became wary of George Fabyan almost immediately after starting her job: He seemed interested in prying into every part of her life. Soon after she arrived and settled in, Fabyan told her that the modest white and gray dresses she liked to wear were inadequate and she needed to buy a new wardrobe at Marshall Field’s in Chicago. Frugal by nature, Elizebeth resisted paying a premium for a name brand, but when she raised her voice to complain, Fabyan told her to hush. “That’s so typically Fabyan,” Elizebeth recalled: if you told him he was wrong, “[t]he next thing you know there’ll be a gun rammed down your throat.” He sent her into the city with one of his secretaries, who accompanied her to the department store and made sure she bought Fabyan-approved items.

  She figured out within a week or two that she was dealing with a half-crazy individual of unlimited funds and a split personality.

  There was a side of him that was authoritarian, that craved order and ceremony, which explained the bugler who played reveille in the morning and taps at night, and the American flag that was raised each morning and lowered in the evening, folded into a triangle as a cannon fired a ceremonial ball into the prairie dusk. The staff called him “Colonel” or “the Colonel.” Elizebeth was told to address Fabyan as “Colonel Fabyan,” and she did, assuming he must have served in the military; it was only later when she learned the truth, that the title of Colonel was an honorary one, bestowed by the governor out of gratitude after Fabyan allowed the Illinois National Guard to use the estate as a training ground. The governor even named a group of cavalry scouts the Fabyan Scouts. Chest leaping with pride, Fabyan recruited some local farmhands to join a militia he called the Fox Valley Guards, as if he aimed to build a personal army.

  He liked to sit in the wicker chair that hung on chains from the tree next to his villa. Elizebeth heard people call it the “hell chair” and soon understood why. If Fabyan was angry at an employee or a guest, he brought that person over to the hell chair and sat there, screaming at the offender, giving them hell, while he swung to and fro, chains creaking. He sat there at night sometimes, in the hell chair, stoking the coals of a campfire in the dark.

  The other side of Fabyan loved chaos and ripped through the days under power of impulse and inspiration. He had a habit of buying supplies sight unseen from train boxcars—a skyscraper’s worth of steel I-beams; seventy-five plows—and storing them in a warehouse next to the Dutch windmill that he called the Temple de Junk. He seemed to glory in randomness to the point of mocking the foundations of his world. He published a book, What I Know About the Future of Cotton and Domestic Goods, by George Fabyan, and kept copies in his office. Visitors grabbed the book with sweaty hands and flipped through, hoping for a stock tip from a wealthy cotton magnate. Inside were one hundred blank pages. It was Fabyan’s joke about the riddle of commerce, the arbitrary American system that kinged him with enough money that he didn’t have to care about money anymore.

  He liked to dress up as a horseman or hunter, in riding coats and knee-high boots, but no one ever saw him riding a horse or shooting wild game, and he liked to dress up as a yachtsman, in a white sweater and jaunty blue cap, but no one ever saw him sailing a boat. He spilled across his kingdom on foot, thundering from place to place, dropping heavy ideas and moving on, letting others do the lifting. One day he walked past the swimming pool and saw a little girl, Sumiko Kobayashi, the daughter of his head gardener, resisting her first swimming lesson, crying because she was afraid of the water. Fabyan commanded an adult to throw her in the pool and let her learn by doing. He watched the terrified girl thrash for her life in the water, then walked away, satisfied with his solution, while the adults dove in and saved poor Sumiko from drowning.

  He may have been a monster. But he was no idiot. To underestimate his intelligence was dangerous, Elizebeth sensed. She considered him to be, despite his lack of formal education, “a very bright man” with a cunning mind and a proven ability to predict how people and institutions would react to moments of stress and crisis. He could get anyone to listen to him. He didn’t read scientific papers; Elizebeth never saw him read anything longer than a newspaper headline. But he had been blessed with a near-photographic memory, and whatever his scientists told him, he could repeat back verbatim. This skill for mimicry, combined with his innate abilities as a salesman, made Fabyan seem like a credible prophet of science even when he was talking about th
ings that science said were impossible. He pursued schemes for perpetual motion, infinite energy from nothing, and once showed Elizebeth a prototype of a perpetual-motion machine that he kept behind one of the labs. She was unimpressed: “I remember going, looking at it for quite a while, and it just seemed to me like a great, huge, metal something-or-other.” He argued that common human ailments could be traced to the fact that our primate ancestors crawled on their stomachs and humans have never properly learned to walk. And he wasn’t selling these ideas cynically; he really believed them. He was good at blurring the line between fantasy and reality because he didn’t believe any such line existed. As he once told William Friedman, I have seen impractical and improbable things accomplished. All it took to achieve improbable things was an optimistic attitude and a refusal to give up.

  “We play the game day-to-day as best we can,” he was fond of saying.

  Of all the investigations at Riverbank, Fabyan sold the Bacon cipher project the hardest. Though he gave every visitor at least a taste of the cipher work, presenting it as one element of the general package of wonders, he organized separate junkets to persuade hesitant or openly hostile academics that Riverbank had found the answer.