The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

  For the rest of his years, William would keep an enlargement of this photo beneath the glass surface of his work desk, glancing at it most every day of his life. It was a reminder of a more innocent moment, a time before two dark and interrelated forces began to draw boxes around his days, shaping his path and Elizebeth’s, too. War was one. Justifiable paranoia the other.

  William finally raised enough of a stink with Fabyan that the boss said he could leave Riverbank on the condition he return to Riverbank when the war was over. He entered the army as a first lieutenant in the signal corps, an officer but a low-ranking one. He was headed to France to ply his code and cipher abilities with the AEF. An army photographer snapped his official portrait in a darkened room with a lamp to the left, illuminating the left half of his face and body. In the picture, he looks serious and delicately handsome. His ears seem to stick out more than usual. He liked it and gave Elizebeth a framed copy as a gift. In May 1918 they said goodbye, Elizebeth smiling through her tears, and Lieutenant Friedman boarded a train to Chicago on the way to his destination, American General Headquarters (GHQ), in the farming town of Chaumont, France.

  Elizebeth wanted to go with him. She saw no reason why she should not be allowed to serve in France as an AEF cryptologist. But the army told Elizebeth that “I, a mere woman, could not follow to pursue my ‘trade,’ ” so she stayed behind at Riverbank, continuing to break codes in the Lodge with the other brain workers of the estate. In her diary she wrote original poems about war, exploring “the heartache of separation from the Dear One overseas” and recognizing that she needed to take care of herself, to preserve an inner mental space that was solid and clear (“a calm Whole, a unified peace”), and all the while reading the time-lagged stream of letters that arrived from William weeks or even months after he sent them, the envelopes stamped with the red mark of the AEF censor before crossing the ocean to the prairie.

  She could tell from his letters that he missed being able to talk to her about a puzzle when he got stuck. For security reasons, he had to speak vaguely and omit all technical details. “The work is so hard,” he wrote, “and the results so very, very meagre. Sometimes I fear that I haven’t got it in me at all. I cannot explain to you—but just imagine yourself at work absolutely in the dark, up against the most baffling problem, with no data to base speculation upon, no guiding generalizations, except the most vague and unreliable—Oh, I tell you Honey, it’s going to be an awfully hard task to make good.”

  At the same time it was clear from the letters that William’s reputation was growing in the army, that some days solutions appeared to him “out of the clear blue,” startling his colleagues. “On Saturday Col. M brought around a visitor, some Col—I don’t remember his name. When he came to my desk he introduced me and said, ‘He is our wizard on Code.’ Dearest, I was quite embarrassed, and didn’t know what to say.” Col. M was his commander, Frank Moorman, and William made it a point to tell Elizebeth that Moorman admired the Riverbank Publications, hoping she would feel proud of her work on them. “Love-girl,” he wrote, “yesterday at conference Major M passed around our R.K. pamphlet”—Riverbank No. 16, Methods for the Solution of Running-Key Ciphers—“and said that he went through it with much interest and that it was the best thing he had seen on the subject.”

  William told her not to worry about his physical safety. Chaumont was far enough from the trenches and the firefights that he felt there was no danger of needing the .45 pistol that he carried on his hip.

  Like the other officers, William lived in a billet, the private home of a French woman he called Madame. It was so dark in the French countryside at night that during his first weeks he had trouble finding his billet and had to use cigarettes as torches. In the day he worked in a building behind GHQ known as the Glass House, surrounded by the other AEF codebreakers and radio operators. The Germans used a field cipher based on six letters: A, D, F, G, V, and X. A message might look like FAXDF ADDDS DGFFF, or DDFAX SDGVV AFAFX. William spent a lot of time fiddling with these six-letter nonsense messages, groping for the light cord in the darkened room of the cryptograms. The men in his section preferred to work alone, which he found baffling. “You know how much ‘group work’ counts in our business,” he wrote to Elizebeth. “What can one person alone accomplish?”

  He tried drinking French wine and didn’t care for the taste. Lemonade was more to his liking. At the officers’ club he kept to himself, nursing highballs in a plush chair in front of a roaring fire, except when the men dragged him into a poker game, which he always regretted, losing money each time he played. The Midas of codes had no talent for reading human faces. In this he was the opposite of Herbert Yardley, leader of the MI-8 codebreaking unit in Washington, who also spent time in France during the war. William met Yardley there for the first time and thought he seemed fake. “I must confess to considerable distaste for Y. Frankly, I didn’t like him at all,” he wrote to Elizebeth. “He acted like a wooden Indian.”

  Feeling lost and out of place, and wishing the army had permitted his wife to serve in Chaumont, he walked back to his billet in the dark at the end of the night and spent hours writing to her. He had placed a picture of her next to an oil lamp and each time he struck a match to light the lamp he looked at the picture and said, out loud, “Hello, you darling! Hello, Rita Bita Girl,” then lit the flame and started to write, imagining he was back in bed with her at Riverbank, stroking her hair, talking in baby talk. He fantasized about spanking her. “Do you miss your Biwy Boy, my darling? Have you been naughty? Do you need to be spanked? You little ‘imp.’ ” He said that was as far as he dared to go, with the censor reading every word, and promised that someday he would cable her “some real stuff which may burn the insulation of the wires.”

  During these months in Chaumont, four thousand miles from home, William became tormented by feelings of inferiority and romantic inadequacy that would never completely go away, gnawing at him for the rest of his life. He worried he was too unprosperous for Elizebeth, too interested in science instead of money, too effeminate. He apologized for “the many imperfections in my makeup.” He asked for reassurance that he was a “good lover”: “You have told me that, haven’t you?” One day he happened to meet Colonel Parker Hitt, the Texas codebreaker now posted to France, and needed to crane his neck up to look at him: “He actually towered above me.” He went to sleep at night with the windows open and often dreamed of his wife, a recurring dream where she was leaving him because she didn’t love him anymore, then he woke up in a sweat and lunged for his pen and a piece of paper to copy it down: “You didn’t yike me at all,” he wrote, baby talking, “and I was all broken up.” He begged her forgiveness for leaving her alone at Riverbank with “no money and a lot of debts” and promised to pay more attention to her happiness. “When we were together,” he wrote, “I was particularly mean not to take you out more often, even though we couldn’t ‘afford’ it, or even though there was lots of work to do. The Spring Time of love was ours—and I failed to make it all that it should have been for you. I owe it to you—and you shall have it all a thousandfold over when we are together once again. ‘Afford it’ or not.”

  Against these anxieties and regrets William possessed only one weapon: language, wordplay. Every day he felt he was losing a little more of his wife and every day he felt he must fight to win her back, so he labored over his letters, making corrections, emendations, fixing rare grammatical mistakes, turning the pages 90 degrees and adding sentences at right angles in the margins, trying to find the magic incantation of symbols to crush the globe flat and cheat the distance between them. He filled the pages with encoded messages of devotion he had every reason to believe she would understand. “This cable will read apparently harmless—but each letter and punctuation mark on it is but a group standing for a whole phrase which I wish I had the power to vary—but have not. The phrase is ‘I love you!’ It has two alternates—‘I adore you!’ and ‘I worship you!’ So if those tiny flashes of elec
tricity can talk to you they will whisper to you over and over again, with an infinite permutation of expression my message of love for you.” It was a lover’s code:

  A = I love you! / I adore you! / I worship you!

  B = I love you! / I adore you! / I worship you!

  C = I love you! / I adore you! / I worship you!

  ! = I love you! / I adore you! / I worship you!

  . = I love you! / I adore you! / I worship you!

  Elizebeth wrote long letters back to him. In one envelope she enclosed a lock of her hair.

  Her letters don’t exist today. It’s likely she destroyed them after the war. Still, they left traces in William’s: sentences of hers that he quoted, questions she asked that he answered.

  A frequent topic was their future at Riverbank. Should they stay there or leave? What should they do about George Fabyan? The man was relentless; all through William’s deployment, Fabyan had been writing him in Chaumont, asking that he return to Riverbank at the soonest opportunity. The Friedmans discussed this issue with caution, abbreviating Riverbank as R., George Fabyan as G.F., and the Bacon Cipher project as B.C. It occurred to them that Fabyan might have friends in the censor’s office and they didn’t want the rich man prying into the conversation any more than he already had.

  Elizebeth tried to tell William in her letters that she no longer felt safe at Riverbank. She made a vague reference to Fabyan’s “excesses,” causing William to say he didn’t understand: “How and where did you learn of these?” When William told Elizebeth he wanted to have children with her, she replied that it wasn’t safe to have children at Riverbank. “You are perfectly right,” he agreed. “When we are ‘safe,’ the children.”

  On September 21, 1918, she revealed something to him in a letter. All that survives is William’s reaction: “Honey, I could have committed several crimes after reading what it had to say about that old nameless rascal. I was upset all day as a result. To think that he would do such a thing after all we have done.” Elizebeth later confided to friends that Fabyan made sexual advances while William was in France.

  William encouraged her to leave Riverbank if she was unhappy: “Honey, don’t be afraid to take a step. You have ability and more brains than any other woman I’ve known. You can fill any job a woman can and many jobs that men fill.”

  The German lines collapsed in October 1918, British and American troops advancing and seizing territory. The roads around Chaumont began to fill with convoys of emaciated German prisoners of war. On November 10 at GHQ, a group of American soldiers huddled around a newspaper, laughing and shouting: The Kaiser had abdicated his throne. The war was over, the Allies had won. Three miles away the men of the AEF Gas Defense School blew up bombs and fired rockets in celebration, thunderclaps disturbing the sky. The dazed citizens of Chaumont wandered into the street and hung lanterns in their windows.

  As William’s colleagues drank and sang, he stayed indoors at his billet and wrote to Elizebeth, vomiting a great pent-up mass of insecurities and dreams onto the page. “Dearest Woman in the Universe,” he began, “This is surely a fateful day.” Then he made a series of promises, talking about what their lives would be like when he got home. He said he didn’t want her to be consumed by housework. As a child he had seen his mother exhausted by her cleaning duties. “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 the shelter be a hovel or a palace.” He was offering her the same freedom to pursue her intellectual ambitions that she had always extended to him—but did she really mean that? In her private heart did Elizebeth wish that her husband had more of a bank account and less of a brain? “Elsbeth, my Dearest, when you say that you want me to go on with my research work—blaze the trail and all that—do you realize that those chaps, poor fortunate-unfortunates, are usually not bank presidents? I should be happy, I think, with a fair share of the comforts and goods of this world, if I could continue with my studies, and unless I am seriously mistaken—and I don’t think I am—you are not the woman to be hankering after life’s luxuries and fineries. If you were, we would never have been attracted to one another.”

  That night, after 11 P.M., the oil in his lamp burned out and he went to bed. In the morning he learned of the Armistice and added a line to the bottom of the letter: “Honey, it’s all over now.”

  At Riverbank she heard it from the news well before she received his letter, and she began a letter of her own, which William then quoted back to her. “The signing of the Armistice had one result—my indulging in thoughts, last night . . . dear, intimate things that burn one up with a fire of longing and ache of wanting you,” Elizebeth wrote. “I must not again.”

  William replied, “What shall I say of the thrills that took possession of me on reading those words? I, too, have indulged in thoughts. . . . Ah, Dear One, when shall we too live them over again?”

  He then broke some bad news: The army wasn’t releasing him yet. He had to stay in Chaumont to write a secret history of the code and cipher work as a technical reference for future army use. He might be there for months.

  This is when Elizebeth finally decided to leave Riverbank. She packed a bag in stealth without telling Fabyan and slipped onto a train for Indiana, reasoning that with the war over and no urgent messages to decipher, Fabyan could do without her for a bit, whether he liked it or not.

  To pass the time in Huntington, she got a temporary job in the local library, a two-story building of limestone with a special room of materials about railroad engineering. She helped farmers find books and opened letters from the men in her life.

  Some of these letters were job offers, eager replies to inquiries she had already sent. The Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington wanted Elizebeth to join its Code and Signal Section. Also, an officer in the War Department thought her Riverbank training would be “of the greatest value” in the MID; he was none other than John Manly, the Chaucer expert who used to argue with Elizebeth about the Bacon Ciphers and once shoved her on the shoulder. Manly now worked with Herbert Yardley. “Most of the work handled here necessitates a thorough knowledge of Spanish or German,” Manly wrote. “Women who can think in either of these languages are needed as cryptographers at $1400 per annum.”

  William wrote to her, of course. He seemed as effusive and insecure as ever. He asked her if she knew how small an electron is, using that as the basis of an extended riff about the incomprehensible size of his love for her. He said he had gotten her a piece of lingerie in Paris, a silk teddy, custom sewn, with the help of an army captain who told him what measurements to use (“Can’t two perfectly ’spectable married men get together on designing a perfectly proper—even if private—piece of woman’s apparel?”), and he ruminated on their postwar future. Fabyan had demanded that William return to Riverbank at once: “You have had a long enough vacation,” Fabyan wrote, “your salary has been going on and I do want you to get back at the earliest possible moment.” But William worried that if he and Elizebeth did resume working at the estate, and Fabyan forced them to continue probing the Bacon Ciphers, it would destroy their credibility as cryptologists and make it hard to find other jobs. “I refuse to have anything to do with the B.C.,” William wrote. “I think that whole business would be an excellent experiment for a psychologist. . . . Furthermore, I shall keep you away from it too. Nothing but unhappiness, and accusations, and unfruitfulness have ever come out of the whole business. Aside from our deep, and perfect love, the greatest treasure which life holds, we have found little else at R. but heartache, and argument, and unhappiness.”

  By the end of the letter he came around to the idea that they should leave Riverbank forever. “I don’t want to flatter ourselves, but [Fabyan] is going to have one fine time trying to replace the Friedman Combination!” He signed off one letter with a love note in cipher, written using a type of transposition cipher called a “rail fence”:

  (George C. Marshall Res
earch Foundation)

  To find the hidden message, start on the upper left, with I. Read down that column, ILOVE, then start at the bottom of the next column to the right and read up, YOUVE, and then down again, up again, down, up.

  George Fabyan also sent Elizebeth letters while she was in Indiana. She dug her nail into the wax and his black words uncoiled.

  “I am wondering how you are and what you are doing,” he wrote with a strained politeness that barely masked his fury, “and if your vacation has not been long enough to suit you.” He liked to sign his name in a flourish of blue colored pencil, making the widest line possible, the tip round and blunt. Elizebeth didn’t understand how anyone could bear writing with an unsharp pencil. It was barbarism.

  He asked her in several different ways to come back, alternating charm with threats. He attempted a strategy of divide-and-conquer, suggesting that if Elizebeth committed to returning to Riverbank, it wouldn’t necessarily bind William to do the same. (When Elizebeth relayed this to her husband in France, William was enraged: “Does he suppose you’d live at R. and I at Chicago!! . . . any man who attempts to sow dissension and create unharmony between man and wife, in that manner, is a scoundrel.”) He tried to impress Elizebeth with his power, recounting a recent conversation with the head of MID in Washington, who had offered to hire all the women codebreakers at Riverbank, including her. “I told him that I would see them in hell before any girl whom I was interested in went to Washington under existing conditions,” Fabyan wrote.