The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

  Shannon, who would later work with William Friedman and other cryptologists on secret NSA projects, also enjoyed thinking about codes and ciphers. While employed at Bell Labs, he came up with the insight that the problem of communicating through a noisy system, like a phone wire, is almost identical to the process of enciphering and deciphering a message. In other words, according to Shannon, making yourself understood to another person is essentially a problem of cryptology. You reduce the noise of the channel between you (instead of noise, Shannon called it “information entropy”) in a way that can be quantified. And the method for reducing the noise—for recovering messages that would otherwise be lost or garbled—is decryption.

  Viewed through Shannon’s theory, intimate communication is a cryptologic process. When you fall in love, you develop a compact encoding to share mental states more efficiently, cut noise, and bring your beloved closer. All lovers, in this light, are codebreakers. And with America going to war, the two young codebreakers at Riverbank were about to become lovers.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Escape Plot

  Elizebeth with William in his army lieutenant’s uniform, around 1918.

  (George C. Marshall Research Foundation)

  To be your North Star—Billy Boy—I’d like to be!”

  She wrote “North Star” on the page of the letter without knowing what it meant or how she wanted him to respond. It was just a pair of words that captured a tug of attraction toward William Friedman, a chemistry that made her curious: a small, persistent tilt in his direction, like a plant bending toward a patch of sun.

  Elizebeth first noticed it when she was home in Indiana watching her mother die, and writing to him at Riverbank, telling him—what? I don’t love you but “I miss you infinitely.” I am not sure I love-you love you but “I shall work for you” if you ask. I have dreamed about you but I don’t remember what the dream was. “Anyway, Billy Boy, 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.’ ”

  Before any feelings of passion, this is what Elizebeth expressed to William: a vague desire for the both of them to win. “Work hard on the letter tests—for my sake! You must win—because I want you to!” She saw his talent and was starting to understand the size of her own abilities. She sensed that the two of them were more powerful together than they were alone. That excited her, if not the thought of romance, a relationship, making love. When they kissed for the first time it didn’t do much for her, as she would recall later in a poem:

  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.”

  She wasn’t sure what to do when he started talking about marriage in early 1917. The ice cracked on the Fox River, spring picked the lock of winter, the water moved, and William Friedman spoke to her about the pros and cons of a potential union, obstacles and advantages, in a careful, unemotional tone, as if discussing a job opportunity. (He confessed later that he was simply trying to hold back the flood of his feelings, lest the dam burst and he embarrass himself.) He did not get down on his knees and propose, and his hesitation gave her the room to respond in kind, to examine the idea with detachment, to let the possibility of marrying him drift past at a distance like a harmless puff of cloud.

  She could see a case for marrying him and a case against. If she did choose to marry, her family and neighbors back home would likely be confused—nice Quaker girls didn’t marry Jewish boys in Indiana—but she had made more of a break with her family than William had. She had fought hard for the freedom to choose her own path.

  Most of the time, talking it over that spring, Elizebeth and William agreed that getting married would be silly. There were too many barriers: family differences, religion, money. Incredibly, Fabyan was still paying them both the same salary as when they started, thirty dollars a month, despite their massive new responsibilities, and some months he didn’t pay at all. If they did decide to get married, where would they live? In William’s windmill? The prospect of being a married couple at Riverbank seemed absurd to both of them, as much of a fantasy as the perpetual motion machine and the messages from Bacon’s ghost.

  At the same time, they weren’t sure they wanted to stay at Riverbank anyway.

  The longer they lived here, the more concerned Elizebeth and William became about Fabyan’s dark side, his need to control the people around him. He seemed to take special pleasure in humiliating William. Once, while both men were traveling in Washington, Fabyan demanded that William fetch a newspaper from a street vendor. William pointed out that papers were available at the hotel desk; Fabyan bellowed that he wanted one from the street. William obliged. Later, when William showed up to dinner in a freshly pressed evening suit, Fabyan, who was dressed shabbily, forced William to change into more casual clothes to match. “It just didn’t go down to be treated like chattels,” Elizebeth said. “We were sick and tired of Fabyan’s scheming and dishonesty. Fabyan always came out ahead, and we always came out at the other end.”

  Fundamentally Elizebeth and William were two ambitious people. Why should something with a risk in it give me an exuberant feeling? She wanted to live a daring life, and he wanted to “make a mark in something,” he told her. “Perhaps it will be Genetics.” He expressed to Elizebeth “my ambition to know one little thing better than any other person, to be a pioneer in that field and to blaze new trails for the rest to follow. Why I feel that way, I don’t know—it’s just in me and will have to come out in some form or other.” Riverbank had launched them on an incredible adventure, but now it was holding them back, and they sensed that if they were ever going to escape, they needed to do it together.

  On a cool, rainy Monday in May 1917, they went missing from Riverbank.

  It wasn’t like them to skip work. The hours ticked away without them, the cows eating grass in the field, the fruit flies multiplying in jars. When the pair returned that evening, William was dressed in a dark blazer, light-colored striped pants, and a striped tie, and Elizebeth wore a simple gown of white lace. Colleagues gathered around and the couple shared the happy news: They had gone to Chicago and gotten married. A rabbi named Hersh performed the ceremony.

  The wedding announcement ran on the front page of the May 23 Geneva Republican, next to a story about a Selective Service bill just passed by Congress, requiring men ages twenty-one to thirty-one to register for the military draft. “Mr. Friedman came to Riverbank soon after his graduation from Cornell University and was employed for some time on experimental work in the Riverbank greenhouses,” the paper wrote of William. “He later took up the work in connection with the Bacon research studies.” As for Elizebeth: “Miss Smith’s home is in Indiana. She is a college graduate and a splendid reader. She and Mr. Friedman have lectured on the Bacon cipher before colleges, schools and clubs.” The article didn’t mention that Elizebeth was instrumental in convincing him to “take up the work.”

  She married him without being in love. She admitted this later in her diary, after picking up a novel called The Prairie Wife and reading the opening line of the book’s woman narrator: “Splash! . . . That’s me falling plump into the pool of matrimony before I’ve had time to fall in love!” Elizebeth recognized that sentence as one “I might myself have spoken.” She married William because he was a good person, and he wanted it with such overwhelming intensity, and she trusted that the rest would come soon, certainly soon, because so much had already happened in the shortest time. It had been almost exactly a year since the Colonel met Elizebeth in Chicago and whisked her off to this patch of prairie. “I am learning to take things as they come,” she wrote in the diary soon after the marriage ceremony, taking stock
of how her life had been transformed in a flash:

  To be mangled and torn and castigated and macerated in soul—to wish passionately day after day only to die . . . and then to be brought, by a miracle, to a new place—to work that is absorbing, fascinating—to a place where I forget and find peace, glorious peace—and oh, miracle of miracles, to Love! Ah, Heaven is good! Truly, truth is stranger than fiction! I could not have believed it possible, but here am I. Is it possible I am to have them after all—Youth and Love, and Life?

  The reaction to their marriage in Pittsburgh was just as they had feared. When William traveled back home briefly to tell his parents, his mother collapsed at the news that her son had married a shiksa. He told Elizebeth about it in a wire to Riverbank.She read it and felt sick. “I am cast into a whirl of remorse, pain, and sorrow for you,” Elizebeth wrote to him. “Oh, Billy, Billy, what have we done?” She told her family in later years that when she visited her in-laws in Pittsburgh, William’s mother would sit and weep. “You would have thought that Bill had committed murder,” Max Friedman, one of William’s brothers, later recalled. “If he had still been living in Pittsburgh he would have been ostracized.”

  But William didn’t live in Pittsburgh anymore. He lived in Illinois, in a rich man’s windmill. And now Elizebeth did, too. She moved from Engledew Cottage into the windmill. He made room for her journals and papers and books and brought her up the steps to the second floor. It was humid and cramped, and it smelled of soil, but it was theirs.

  That summer the military was sending teams around the country to recruit volunteers. Fabyan invited the army to Riverbank in July. He ordered his employees to build a wooden stage at the highest point of the lawn next to the Villa, and a recruiting tent next to the stage. Three thousand people came from Geneva and surrounding towns, clogging the roads with horse-drawn buggies and automobiles, a prairie traffic jam.

  A U.S. Army captain stood on the stage, tall and clean-shaven, with a hank of brown hair gelled to a stiff peak, wearing a uniform of olive drab wool with gold piping and black dress shoes. “Better to go and die than not to go,” he cried. “Women, plead with your sons and brothers and sweethearts.” The captain said that anyone who spoke of peace should be shot as a traitor. At the end of the speech, a boy from Elgin stood and walked to the recruiting tent. The crowd cheered, and more boys stood and followed him. A bit later, Fabyan invited the guests to tour his model trenches for a fee of twenty-five cents per person, to be donated to the Red Cross. He raised more than three hundred and fifty dollars. Men in bowler hats and women holding parasols stood at the edge of the trenches, peering down. Children ventured inside and played in the mud.

  William did not volunteer for the army that day, but he was starting to think about it, partly out of guilt—he was a healthy male in wartime—but also out of concern for himself and Elizebeth, their future together. He wondered if he could use his codebreaking skills to get commissioned as an officer. The army paid more than Fabyan. It laid out clear paths to promotion. And there were army bases all over the country and the world. When the time came for the couple to leave Riverbank, they could leave with good prospects.

  He began to pester Fabyan about it, asking the boss to reach out to his contacts in Washington and recommend him to the Army Signal Corps, Joseph Mauborgne’s section. William said he wanted to go to France and apply his code and cipher knowledge closer to the fighting. Fabyan always waved him off. William was needed in his present position. He should forget about the army and concentrate on his work.

  Frustrated, William took matters into his own hands, writing to Joseph Mauborgne and asking if the army had any use for his abilities. At the same time Elizebeth wrote to the navy to inquire about codebreaking positions. They waited for replies. Months passed. Nothing.

  It wasn’t until later that the Friedmans learned the truth. They heard it from Mauborgne and others who had been desperately trying to reach them the whole time. Fabyan was intercepting the Friedmans’ mail. He had taken the job offers that arrived for them from Washington, put them in a drawer, and responded himself, informing Washington that the Friedmans were unavailable.

  Also, one army officer who visited Riverbank for cryptologic training told William he discovered secret listening devices in the classrooms. Bugs. It seemed obvious that Fabyan didn’t place the bugs to spy on the students. The students didn’t know anything. It would have been pointless. The only logical explanation was that Fabyan had been spying on the Friedmans, in order to anticipate their movements and prevent them from ever leaving his Garden of Eden. It’s made honest bees out of them, this constant supervision: Fabyan was surveilling his young employees as if they were two honeybees in his colony, under glass.

  A tiny slip of paper fluttered down to Elizebeth. She was outdoors at Riverbank with William and Mr. Powell, the gentle University of Chicago publicity agent, the three of them working in the grass, the fresh air. She picked up the paper and saw a line of cursive written in light pencil. It was from William. “My dearest, I sit here studying your features. You are perfectly beautiful!! B.B.” Billy Boy. She hid the note so Mr. Powell wouldn’t see it, later pressing it between two pages of her diary. “My heart sang,” she wrote there, “carolling bursts of ecstasy.”

  She wasn’t pretending anymore or yielding to William out of kindness. She was the one throwing her arms around him in the cottage when Mrs. Gallup wasn’t looking and pulling him into a kiss. “My Lover-Husband,” she called him now:

  TONIGHT MY LOVER-HUSBAND and I made a tryst with the future.

  THE GOAL IS set; will we win? We planned it all—cheek to cheek—facing the swelling power of the new moon—

  “WONDER-GIRL,” HE SAID, “It shall be all for You—only for You!”

  AS I HELD him close and caught my breath in the intensity of hope, he said—“Dear Heart! You are not crying?”

  AND I REPLIED—“NO dear, only praying.” And this was my prayer:

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

  Their work started to dry up in the summer and fall of 1917. Each new parcel from Washington was lighter, containing fewer intercepted messages to solve. Something had changed. Fabyan paced and fretted. He raged in the hell chair.

  It turned out that the War Department had recently launched a codebreaking unit of its own, under the command of a twenty-eight-year-old lieutenant named Herbert O. Yardley, a scrawny Indiana native who had become entranced with cryptology after reading library books that told about the old black chambers of Europe. “Why did America have no bureau for the reading of secret diplomatic code and cipher telegrams of foreign governments?” Yardley asked himself. “Perhaps I too, like the foreign cryptographer, could open the secrets of the capitals of the world.”

  Fearless and charming, and a shark at poker, Yardley considered his new bureau to be an American black chamber, and he had no trouble convincing the War Department to let him solve messages that would have otherwise been shipped to Riverbank, seven hundred miles away. Known officially as MI-8, and based at the Army War College in Washington, Yardley’s bureau had shattered Fabyan’s near monopoly on American codebreaking.

  Fabyan, aware that he was losing influence and power by the day, now came up with a plan to win it back. He knew the military needed many more codebreakers than it could locate and train quickly, both to work for Yardley’s Washington bureau and for the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in France. America needed a codebreaking school, and here was Riverbank, already set up as a university of sorts. He invited the army to send men to Riverbank for training. The army took him up on it.

  The first students arrived in November 1917, four young lieutenants destined for the war front. They knew nothing about codes and ciphers. They were, as an NSA historian would later say, “as dumb as anyone just off the street.” Fabyan asked Elizebeth and William to teach them.

  The Friedmans had never taught a class before. The
y had no lesson plans and a grand total of one year of codebreaking experience. 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.”

  The first four students soon became eighty young officers in training sent from the Army War College, many accompanied by their wives. There wasn’t enough space to house the visitors at Riverbank, so the Colonel booked the largest hotel in the nearby town of Aurora, and William and Elizebeth taught class there every day, lecturing in the morning and correcting problem sets in the afternoon. They started with the biliteral cipher of Francis Bacon and moved on to more contemporary methods of encryption and decryption, using actual messages from the Spanish-American War and German intercepts from the first two years of the Great War. Mrs. Gallup sat off to the side during the classes, observing but not teaching.

  The students knew that after graduating, many of them would be going straight to war, deployed to France as code and cipher officers with the AEF, and others would be assigned to similar work in Washington. This awareness of ordeals ahead made Riverbank seem that much sweeter. It was like being stationed in paradise. Fabyan provided the students with daily box lunches with fresh food from the farm, organized outings into the countryside, and threw parties where the single men could mingle with local girls, including a lavish military ball that ushered the golden-haired daughters of Geneva into the arms of the uniformed officers. At least four of the officers’ wives took the classes and completed the course. The Colonel commended the women for their “excellent work” in a letter to the War Department, though he did not list their own names but instead the names of their husbands.

  On the last day of the course, in late February 1918, the students and instructors gathered outside the hotel for a photo, lining up in two rows that stretched from one end of the building to the other. In the photo, William, Elizebeth, and Fabyan sit front and center, William looking off to the right; the army men take stiff poses, some of them angling their heads 45 degrees to either side, some looking straight on. The significance of this curious feature of the photograph escaped almost all who viewed it at the time: Each person stood for a letter of ciphertext in the biliteral cipher. The ones looking to the side were the b-form of the cipher. The ones looking straight on were the a-form. United they spelled out the motto of Francis Bacon, the phrase chiseled into stone by the Colonel above the Acoustics Lab door: KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.