by Jason Fagone
Finally, he tried being reasonable, addressing the Friedmans as a couple, through Elizebeth. “I am an old man going down hill; you are young people climbing up and it is for you to decide whether your opportunity lies at Riverbank or elsewhere.” He said he wanted to talk it over with Elizebeth in person, in Chicago, given the “rather unsatisfactory” and slow nature of mail.
Elizebeth shot back in a letter, “I am inclined to agree with you that in most cases, correspondence is rather unsatisfactory. But with you I confess it has some advantages—for, you see, in conversation you insist on doing all the talking! Now I suppose you are going to retort, ‘This, from a woman?’ ”
She finally got the letter she’d been waiting for in early February 1919: William was coming home. The army was done with him in France. “Won’t our reunion be better than any honeymoon you can think of? I love you! I love you! I love you, love you love you!!”
He arrived in New York City two months later, in April, on a ship with other returning troops. Elizebeth went to New York to meet him, and they saw each other for the first time in a year.
They stayed in the East for a few weeks in rented rooms, thinking about what to do next.
Elizebeth knew she couldn’t go back to Riverbank. Her husband, for reasons she didn’t quite understand, had always found Fabyan at least slightly entertaining, but to her, the man was a scoundrel. As for William, he didn’t want to be in the military anymore. He hated knowing that the army could send him anywhere in the world on a whim, separating him once again from his wife. The little he had seen of war convinced him there was no glory in it, once telling Elizebeth in a letter, “The War will not make better men or women out of us.” If he could choose his own path, he confessed, he would unwind the last few years of his professional life and return to his first love, genetics. Maybe he could continue his plant and fruit-fly experiments at a university, or failing that, join a corporation and make some money.
Elizebeth agreed that William’s “extraordinary gift of scientific analysis” should be properly appreciated and rewarded, and she encouraged him to get his discharge from the army, in April. After that they traveled so William could meet with potential employers. Elizebeth figured she would find work of her own wherever he landed. She noticed that the corporate executives who interviewed him were invariably amazed at his knowledge of codes and ciphers: “Everybody said, ‘But where has this been all these years? Here we have this wonderful science all opened up for us now and where has it been hiding?’ ”
Strangely, however, no company offered William a job. Wherever the Friedmans went, a telegram would arrive from Fabyan, commanding them to give up the search: “Come back to Riverbank, your salary is still going on.” The only way he could have known their whereabouts was if he had dispatched a spy. It was logical to conclude that Fabyan was threatening William’s potential employers. “He had us followed,” Elizebeth said. “He opened our mail.”
Feeling defeated and not seeing any other options, the Friedmans told the Colonel they would return to Riverbank if he let them live in their own house in Geneva, gave them both a raise, and allowed them to question Mrs. Gallup’s theory based on hard evidence. He agreed and welcomed them back home.
Fabyan didn’t keep his promises. The raises never materialized. He continued to ignore and even suppress criticism of the Bacon Ciphers. When a famous type designer wrote a report showing how Mrs. Gallup misunderstood the printing practices of Shakespeare’s era, Fabyan shoved the report into a drawer, even though he himself had paid for it to be written. (The Friedmans stumbled across the mothballed report years later in the Library of Congress.) Worst of all, he maneuvered to deny William credit for a crowning scientific achievement, his paper “The Index of Coincidence and Its Applications in Cryptography,” written in 1920.
William had noticed that in any piece of English text, a letter sometimes appears directly atop the same letter in the line below—d on top of d, w on w, q on q. William discovered that the frequency of this “coincidence” could be measured, and it was distinct for each language, a kind of signature. In English, a coincidence happens exactly 6.67 percent of the time. Seven columns out of 100 contain an alignment. This insight married modern statistics with cryptology for the first time, and by doing so, kicked open a door that couldn’t be closed. “The Index of Coincidence” and its offspring would lead directly to important feats of codebreaking in the Second World War. Instead of putting William’s name on the cover, Fabyan had the paper published first in France; people got the idea that a French cryptologist was the author.
William and Elizebeth were enraged by “Fabyan’s skullduggery”—Elizebeth scrawled this and other angry phrases in the margins of Fabyan’s letters to William, annotating his duplicity, keeping a file of his lies—and within a year of returning to Riverbank they felt desperate to escape, reaching out to associates in Washington. This time they sent and received letters at their own address in Geneva, avoiding Fabyan’s surveillance net. Joseph Mauborgne of the army leapt at the chance to hire the Friedmans and promised to create positions for both of them at once. “We feel that it would be a great misfortune if the Friedman family were to retire to some other kind of a job,” Mauborgne wrote.
The Friedmans accepted the offer in December 1920. William was afraid to tell Fabyan, and he worried what the Colonel might do to his friend Mauborgne, too. William warned Mauborgne, “He is as powerful as he is ruthless.” They all dreaded the rich man’s reaction. “I expect a lively row when the news breaks upon Colonel Fabyan’s portly frame and expect that no little of his fury will be vented upon me,” Mauborgne wrote to William. “Perhaps you had better fix up that side of it—if you can.”
Elizebeth wanted to leave in the middle of the night without telling Fabyan. William found this overly cruel. She begged him to reconsider: If they wanted to escape, she said, they had to be just as tricky as Fabyan.
So together the Friedmans planned a clandestine operation: “our secret plot to be able to get away without getting our throats cut,” Elizebeth called it. One morning they loaded all of their possessions into a car they had managed to borrow, cleaned out the house they’d been renting in Geneva, locked all the doors, drove to Riverbank, and located the Colonel. They showed him the car with all their luggage. They said they were leaving on the three o’clock train and their decision was final.
They thought he’d explode, turn red and scream, maybe try to restrain them. Instead, with an eerie calmness, Fabyan smiled and wished them well. It was so out of character that William assumed he must have already decided to seek his revenge at a future moment of his choosing.
There would be time to worry about that later. For now, they were giddy as they traveled east to Washington. They thought they were free. William believed that “after a very limited number of years,” Riverbank “will disappear from the Earth and be but a black memory.” He was grateful to escape and eager to work with his wife in a new city, keeping the Friedman Combination intact, as he had talked about during the war: “Oh, you are some partner, I’ll say! . . . and to think you love poor me!”
Elizebeth’s professional intentions were a little different. She thought leaving Riverbank might unshackle her from William to some degree. At times there, working at his side, she had felt pressure to compete, but the war had inflated William’s renown to the point where she couldn’t possibly keep up, and she figured that no one in Washington would expect her to match him. There was relief in that. As she put it later, “By the end of the war I was more or less known as a military cipher expert, but I was better known as the wife of my husband,” who had “made a reputation so startling that I regarded the task of catching up to him as being altogether hopeless.” But if she believed she would never again rival her husband, she was wrong. In the nation’s capital, she was about to carve her own path, her own name, with a set of blades that would one day turn out to be just the right shape for dismembering the plans of Nazis.
PA
RT II
TARGET PRACTICE
1921–1938
To work in this field, you have to become devious yourself. You have to think like a malicious attacker to find weaknesses in your own work. . . . Cryptographers are professional paranoids. It is important to separate your professional paranoia from your real-world life so as not to go completely crazy.
—CRYPTOGRAPHY ENGINEERING,
FERGUSON, SCHNEIER & KOHNO, 2010
American cryptology was in a shambles after the First World War, a perilous mess. The codes used by the troops were already out of date, “completely inadequate” going forward, in William’s opinion.
The problem was twofold: speed and security. Old pencil-and-paper methods of generating cipher messages were too slow compared to the speed with which dots and dashes of Morse code could travel by radio. “Military, naval, air, and diplomatic cryptographic communications had to be sped up.” And because more vital messages were increasingly transmitted by radio and could therefore be intercepted and studied by the enemy, new techniques were required to protect that information from prying eyes. Security and intelligence are two sides of the same coin. Without one, the other is no good. You can intercept and decrypt the juiciest enemy secrets in the world, but if your own codes and ciphers aren’t secure, you are defeating yourself, filling a leaky bucket at the top while secrets spill out the bottom.
Every powerful government on earth realized this now: the urgent need to invent new kinds of machines to make cipher messages, machines that were faster, easier to use, and dramatically more secure, all at once. “All the countries of the world were trying to develop something that nobody else could read and make sense out of,” Elizebeth later said. “They were all playing with machines.”
This epiphany marked the dawn of a peacetime arms race that would draw the battle lines of the next world war, and the Friedmans were plunged into the heart of it as soon as they arrived in Washington in the last days of 1920, fresh from their traumas at Riverbank, with no time to relax and take a breath.
Elizebeth and William both went to work for the government on January 3, 1921, three days after the first dry New Year’s Eve in U.S. history, when 1,400 newly hired Prohibition agents (“dry agents”) across the country surveilled the midnight parties, and the restaurateurs of Washington, D.C., spared no effort “to make the celebration, well, as festive as it could ever be under modern circumstances,” one hotelier told the Washington Herald. That following Monday the Friedmans reported to the Munitions Building in Washington, a low hulk of concrete on the National Mall. Hastily constructed during the Great War, it teemed with fourteen thousand army and navy workers, including the staff of the Army Signal Corps, the part responsible for communications. The chief of the signal corps was Joseph Mauborgne, the kindly cryptologist, and the Friedmans now became his junior colleagues.
It was the first proper job they’d had in years, with regular paychecks and a nonderanged boss, and they felt happy, hopeful, and profoundly relieved. They had escaped from the clutches of a paranoid millionaire without getting their throats cut. Now they could live without fear.
William was placed in the army reserves at his prior rank of lieutenant and worked for the signal corps in that capacity, while Elizebeth worked as a civilian. He was twenty-nine, she twenty-eight. His starting salary at the army was $4,500 and Elizebeth’s was $2,200, equal to $58,000 and $28,000 in today’s dollars. This seemed like a lot of money to both of them after the poverty wages of Riverbank. And they were finally in a real city, which the young couple thought was just as nice as getting paid. They could see friends, go to the theater, movies, the orchestra. Their first Washington apartment was a piano studio above a bakery. They woke each morning to the smell of fresh bread, and when they left for work, the owner of the apartment taught piano students there. Some evenings, when it was warm, Joe Mauborgne visited with his cello, and the three of them opened the windows and played together, Elizebeth on piano and William on violin, pedestrians stopping on the sidewalk outside to listen, not knowing that the musicians inside were three of the most experienced cryptologists in the country—almost the only experienced cryptologists.
The world of American cryptology was still tiny. There were only three codebreaking units in government, with fewer than fifty employees among them. The largest and best-funded unit, with two dozen people, was run by the former army lieutenant Herbert Yardley. After the war he had won funding from the State Department to launch a codebreaking bureau in New York City, in a four-story town house off Lexington Avenue. He considered it a modern version of the cabinets noirs of old Europe, the secret rooms in post offices where clandestine agents melted the wax seals of letters—an American black chamber. Yardley and his wife, Hazel, lived in an apartment on the top floor, and Herbert and his employees worked on floors below, reading the mail of foreign diplomats. They dealt in paper ciphers, and had some successes breaking the messages of Japanese diplomats, though Herbert wasn’t skilled enough to go further, into the era of machines. The Friedmans knew the Yardleys socially and had dinner with them sometimes in New York, the two men chatting amiably across a deep chasm of professional rivalry and personal incompatibility. William was shy and monogamous, Yardley a boozy raconteur who during the war had kept a Paris apartment for his mistress. Although Herbert respected Elizebeth’s intelligence, he once told William that she had “an edge on her.”
The other two American codebreaking units were in Washington, one at the navy and one at the army, each smaller and more poorly funded than Yardley’s black chamber.
The army is where the Friedmans started out, in a small windowless office in the Munitions Building. William smoked a pipe, Elizebeth smoked cigarettes. By the end of the afternoon the room resembled an industrial city seen from a distance, the couple’s bodies like churches poking out of the haze. Together they produced the first scientifically constructed set of pencil-and-paper codes and ciphers in army history. There was still a place for “hand” or “paper” ciphers as opposed to machine ciphers. The best paper system was more secure than a weak machine, or a strong machine improperly handled, which is why inventors of cipher machines in the 1920s were struggling to make their prototypes easy to use, almost idiot-proof.
At the request of the army, William started tinkering with these machines, analyzing them, flipping them all around, searching for their soft and vulnerable places. He was the first Friedman to confront the machine era of cryptology, although Elizebeth would one day take on the machines as well, in the most spectacular way.
“There’s all the difference in the world between machine cipher and paper cipher,” Elizebeth explained later. When trying to break a paper cipher, with pencil and paper and brain alone, you had to depend on finding repetitions, patterns in the messages. But the new breed of machines generated what seemed to be patternless winds of letters. “You can start from here and go to the end of the world and never have a repetition,” Elizebeth said. In theory, the only way to read a message was to know the starting configuration of the machine’s internal parts—the “key”—which only the sender and recipient would possess. What’s more, the machines were designed to survive capture and study. Even if you got your hands on a copy and took it apart like a broken clock, examining each gear for as long as you pleased, you would still not be able to read messages produced by another such machine.
Many inventors of cipher machines were private citizens, and a quirky bunch at that: hucksters, dreamers, engineers, lotharios, thieves. William met Edward Hebern, a burly Californian who had built a machine based on alphabet wheels that turned with the application of electrical current. Called rotors, these electrified wheels represented an important advance that would find more sophisticated expression in the German Enigma machine; rotors could be easily removed, swapped, and linked in a chain. William asked Hebern how he happened to think of this elegant concept of a wired rotor. Hebern replied, “Well, you see, I was in jail.” William asked what for. Heber
n said, “Horse thievery.” William asked if he was guilty. Hebern said, “The jury thought so.”
Hebern believed his machine was unbreakable and was trying to sell it to the navy. William placed the machine on his desk and thought about it. He stared at the small box for six straight weeks in 1923. He told Elizebeth he was “discouraged to the point of blackout.” Then the solution occurred to him one night when he and Elizebeth were getting dressed for a party: “As I was tying my black tie, it suddenly came to me.” It was the first-ever solution of a wired rotor machine. William mentioned the accomplishment to George Fabyan in a letter; Fabyan had let him borrow one of his cryptologic curios—a nineteenth-century cipher device—for a lecture, and William was returning the device. “P.S.,” he scrawled at the bottom of the letter, “I busted a beautiful ‘indecipherable cipher’ machine recently and it is extremely important in many respects. . . . Gave the Navy an awful jolt! Best piece of analysis I ever did. B.”
In contrast to Elizebeth, who never wanted to talk to Fabyan again and didn’t write to him after leaving Riverbank, William kept a connection alive. He wrote regular letters to the tycoon from his signal corps office, sharing bits of personal news and asking for Fabyan to send him pieces of cryptologic literature from his unrivaled library at Riverbank. He did it partly out of professional fear; it was best to maintain cordial relations with such a powerful figure. But William also coveted the documents that Fabyan still controlled, the records of the Riverbank Cipher Division. He realized that the records could be used to write a true history of cryptology, a history that did not exist. William wrote to Fabyan, “It’s a striking paradox that a subject which forms the basis of material which is exchanged every hour of the day over the whole face of the globe, under its waters, and through its ether—material that touches directly or indirectly every human being—lacks an authentic, detailed history. Somebody, somewhere, is going to write that history.” He hoped it would be him, and he needed access to Fabyan’s papers to do it.