by Jason Fagone
After busting the Hebern machine, William moved on to the next supposedly unbreakable device, invented in 1924 by a German named Alexander von Kryha, who committed suicide in 1955. The Kryha cipher machine was shaped like a half-moon and contained two discs of alphabets, one a fixed semicircle, the second a circle that rotated against it. According to the inventor, it could encipher a message in 2.29 x 1082 ways, a number larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe. William was not impressed: “The number of permutations and combinations which a given machine affords, like the birdies that sing in the spring, often have nothing or little to do with the case.” Other features were more important, like the method of selecting alphabets and the motions of the wheels. William conquered the Kryha and later demonstrated his mastery by solving a two-hundred-word message prepared by a lawyer in New York who believed the Kryha was unbreakable. William found the solution in a mere three hours and thirty-one minutes, including a fifty-minute lunch break.
In this new era of machines, William was showing that the human was still king. Until the invention of digital ciphers in the 1960s, the field of cryptology would be defined by heroic human attacks on physical cipher machines. These attacks would often be aided by machines specially built to speed the attacks—like the famous electromechanical “bombes” designed by the British codebreaker Alan Turing, and some of the world’s first computers, monstrosities of wires and vacuum tubes that occupied entire rooms—but not necessarily. It was still possible at this point to defeat a machine with mere pencil and paper. The human brain could beat the machines, if it was the right brain, and if the owner of the brain was willing to accept the cost of victory.
The common saying about cryptologists, as William phrased it, was that “it is not necessary” to be insane, “but it helps.” There was uncomfortable truth in the joke. To operate at the highest level of the field seemed to require the kind of pitiless attention and focus that turned some otherwise pleasant and well-adjusted people into zombies who stumbled down the stairs. Mental breakdown was a hazard of the job. During the coming war, several American cryptologists would crack under the strain. Captain Joe Rochefort, one of the navy’s top codebreakers from 1925 until the end of the Second World War, suffered from ulcers. A slender, high-strung man, Rochefort recalled later that he would come from work three days out of four and lie in bed for two hours, unable to eat, because he felt so much pressure. The pressure didn’t come from superior officers, or even from the urgencies of war; it came from within. “Here is a bunch of messages and I can’t read them,” Rochefort said. “Now what’s wrong? It was this sort of a thing, you see. And this was sort of standard. You’ll find people like this who maybe go into a trance, what looks like a trance when you’re talking to them, and the first thing you notice is that they are not paying any attention to you at all, and their mind is on this other problem which they brought home from the office.” Rochefort had to stop breaking codes for two years in the late 1920s for health reasons, but the navy pressed him back into duty. He knew William Friedman well. “There is no one that could compare with Friedman,” Rochefort said, “no one at all.”
There was one other cipher machine that William studied briefly: Enigma, invented by a young German engineer in 1918 and available at that time on the open market. It looked a bit like a typewriter. Under the cover of the Enigma were three rotors, wired wheels similar to the ones in the Hebern machine but invented independently and capable of more intricate movements, the electrical current crossing and doubling back in mazes.
William was impressed with the Enigma and its “clever inventor” but didn’t make a serious effort to solve the machine. It was just a curiosity at this point, not a haunted piece of technology cloaking the schemes of fanatical killers. The Nazi Party had just been founded in 1920. Hitler was speaking to modest crowds in beer halls. William Friedman had no way of predicting the fatal battles around Enigma yet to come, and no way to know that Enigma loomed larger in the destiny of his wife than his own: that one day Elizebeth would conquer multiple Enigmas with pencil and paper.
By this point, she had quit her job. She wasn’t working as a cryptologist anymore. After about a year at the army, Elizebeth resigned in the spring of 1922, saying she planned “to stay home and write some books.” William had encouraged her to quit. For one thing, he was excited about her books—he admired good writers and thought highly of her as a prose stylist—and in another sense it was just the path of least resistance, the expected arrangement, for a young Washington wife to stay home. The decision seemed to clear the way for Elizebeth’s ambitions and for the couple to start raising children. But as soon as she quit, Wiliam missed her at the office, complaining to a friend that Elizebeth was home “and I am all alone.” Then she left Washington for a five-week vacation through the Midwest, visiting family and friends, and his loneliness shaded into panic. She sent William letters about how much fun she was having. “I drove 36 miles to Lake Erie and then swam and broiled ham on the shore for supper. After it got dark we told stories and sang around the fire—it was a glorious night with the moon making fairyland of the lake.”
She mentioned that a certain midwestern stranger had been following her to social events, expressing romantic intentions. William tried to make her jealous in his replies. He described going for an evening walk with the attractive wife of a friend, an outing cut short by clouds of mosquitoes. Elizebeth wrote back, “My dear, I’m proud of you! If fate had only been gentle with you and spared the chiggers, what a nice Memory you would have.” She added, “Hold as many hands as you can! Life grows short!” In another letter she asked, “Am I wicked to be glad you are missing me?” and signed off with a love note in a rail-fence cipher:
(George C. Marshall Research Foundation)
Plaintext: JE T’ADORE MON MAR, “I love you my husband” in French.
Not long after Elizebeth returned from her trip, the Friedmans decided to move out of the city, to the pine forest of what is now Bethesda, Maryland. They rented a house with a wraparound porch that looked out to pines, apple trees, a tulip grove, and a garden spattered with irises of purple, blue, red, yellow, and white. The interior was comfortable and a bit creaky, the forest dampness making the paint peel from walls. They got a dog and called him Krypto, after kryptos, the Greek root of the word “cryptology,” meaning secret or hidden. Krypto was an Airedale terrier, tan on both ends and black in the middle, with the alert eyes of a hunter and a wiry coat. They added a cat to the mix, Pinklepurr, named after the A. A. Milne poem about “a little black nothing of feet and fur.”
William rode the trolley to the Munitions Building in the morning, an hour spent in his head, thinking about alphabets. After Elizebeth resigned, the army had given him an assistant, a former boxer with cauliflower ears. The man’s only skill was typing. If you would like to imagine the birth of the mighty National Security Agency, please visualize two men in a small room, one with a pug nose, pecking at a typewriter, the other a dandy in a suit and bow tie, smoking a pipe, wondering what his wife was up to at home, and if she was missing him.
“Now,” Elizebeth wrote on her typewriter, “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn that there are some persons reading this book who if suddenly awakened from a sound sleep would not be able to recite the alphabet, so here it is:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
“It is composed of 26 letters and their order is fixed. I couldn’t for the life of me tell you why A comes first, B second, and so on, nor can anybody else tell you—and don’t let them kid you into thinking they can, either.”
Sitting with her typewriter by a crackling fire, Elizebeth worked on a book about codebreaking aimed at teens and curious adults, a “little book” to “afford you some amusement for leisure moments.” The idea had been in the back of her head since Riverbank. She wanted to write about codes and ciphers with a light and whimsical touch nowhere to be found in other literature. She thought up playful analo
gies to explain cryptologic concepts. “Miss Transposition Merely Turns Her Clothes Around”; Miss Substitution changes into a new outfit. Adopting the tone of a mischievous schoolteacher, stern but kind, Elizebeth walked readers through sample problems and cheered them along: “You’re just eating ’em up.” “Bravo!” Meanwhile, she wrote a draft of a second book, a children’s history of the alphabet, illustrated with her own drawings of hieroglyphs and cuneiform tablets. She had begun working on it at Riverbank. The alphabet, part of the backdrop of our lives, like the sky or electricity or advertising, but the one tool that makes all the others possible—she wanted kids to know that the alphabet is a miracle.
The goal with both books was the same: to share, explain, demystify, get people excited about the possibilities of words. This was the opposite of what government seemed to be about, in her experience—the dreary, smoky vault at the Munitions Building. She was having fun, developing a voice of her own, and she might have been perfectly happy here, writing books by a fire for the rest of her life, if men from the government had not begun to knock on her door, asking her to solve puzzles for America again.
Her skill was the force that pulled them. There were just so few cryptologists of her ability, or William’s. They were like a binary star system in a void, twin suns rotating around each other, drawing lesser bodies by their light.
Having to choose between the two Friedmans, people almost always approached William first. He was the man, the one with his name on publications, the one who had served in France during the war. A retired astronomy professor asked William to analyze radio signals collected from a device that printed the waves as black lines on a thirty-foot-long piece of film. He theorized that if aliens existed on Mars, they might be transmitting; William found no pattern in the signals (they were probably interference). He consulted on criminal investigations. A man sent a bomb to Huey Long, the Louisiana politician, along with a note full of hieroglyphic markings. William solved it. The warden of an Ohio penitentiary sent him a cryptogram smuggled into prison by the mother of a bank robber. William sent back the plaintext, which revealed a plot to help the inmate escape by placing bombs along a prison wall and exploding them on a Sunday during church.
In 1923 William gave expert advice to a congressional committee that was investigating political bribes written in coded letters. Top officials in the Warren Harding administration had taken cash from oil tycoons—the “Teapot Dome” affair, the biggest corruption scandal in U.S. history. His testimony caught the eye of a twenty-eight-year-old J. Edgar Hoover, then an FBI agent working the Teapot Dome case, and in the years that followed, after Hoover was named director, he asked William to consult on a few FBI cases. The bureau had no cryptanalytic section, no skilled codebreakers of its own. It had to rely on outside experts. When Hoover’s agents arrested several of John Dillinger’s gang members, notes scrawled with code were found in the pockets of the machine gunners. Hoover sent the notes to William. He solved them.
A wealthy businessman, Washington Post owner Edward McLean, hired William in 1924 to design a code for his personal correspondence, then refused to pay him. This was a man who had bought the Hope Diamond as a gift for his wife. She wore it around her neck at parties she threw for wounded veterans. And McLean stiffed William on his fee.
Elizebeth urged her husband to protest, but he let the matter drop, fearing the stereotype of the “money-grubbing Jew.” America was growing more anti-Semitic in the 1920s, the successes of Jewish immigrants provoking ugly responses. The president of Harvard changed admissions rules to keep Jews out. Henry Ford launched an anti-Semitic weekly newspaper with a declaration that “the Jew is the world’s enigma.” Officers in the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department tracked intelligence reports about Jewish activities on index cards labeled “Jews: Race” and kept a central dossier on the “Jewish Question” that included documents like “The Power and Aims of International Jewry.” The MID men were William’s colleagues.
So he treaded carefully in Washington, lest he provoke an anti-Semitic reaction that seemed to always be near. He tried to get along, said yes a lot, loaned out pieces of his brain. Inevitably there was only so much of him to go around, and requests for his time spilled over to Elizebeth. “When they couldn’t get him, I’d be offered a job,” she said later. “That’s the story of my life. Somebody asks for my husband and they can’t get him, so they take me.”
On the one hand, she found this insulting. It was like people were trying to use William’s brain “second-hand” by hiring the woman who presumably enjoyed intimate access to it. “Sad for me,” she said. But it also gave Elizebeth a way to demonstrate that she was a master codebreaker in her own right.
First it was the navy that wanted to hire her, in late 1922. They had lost a civilian cryptologist, Agnes Meyer Driscoll, a woman with a mathematics Ph.D. who had left for the private sector, partnering with the horse thief Hebern to launch a cipher machine factory in California. “I didn’t want to work for the Navy,” Elizebeth said, “but they were just sitting on my doorstep all the time and the only way to get rid of them was to go there for a little while until they found someone else.” She took Driscoll’s place and filled in for a time, designing codes for sailors. Then she became pregnant. Elizebeth left the navy after five months, again thinking she would never go back to the government, and gave birth to the Friedmans’ first child, a girl they named Barbara, in 1923.
Elizebeth had always been hesitant to bring a baby into the world, her own childhood having been less than warm. She had watched her mother, Sopha, raise nine kids, exhausting herself in the process and dying of cancer, suppressing her own desires and dreams to the extent that she never said what they might have been. Elizebeth didn’t want to sacrifice herself like that. Ever since she married in 1917 it had been her husband who pushed the issue of children and she who pushed back, saying she wanted to wait. William confessed in letters from France that he wished they had begun having children at Riverbank, before he deployed to France with the AEF. “Often I feel that in many ways we made a mistake,” William wrote. “Our love will only be complete when there is a third—flesh and blood of yours and mine.” She lacked this conviction; when Elizebeth did think about having children, it was an impulse that gripped her and then quickly passed. “Sometimes I wish I were going to have a child,” she wrote in one letter to France. William replied that “a queer sensation” came over him when he read those words. A child, “the wonder of all mysteries!” Whatever Elizebeth wrote in response, she destroyed.
When children finally arrived, Elizebeth didn’t put aside her ambitions, although the delivery of Barbara was a difficult one, leaving the mother laid up in bed for months with spinal pain. William made the mistake of mentioning Elizebeth’s pain in a letter to Fabyan, who offered to prescribe some back exercises, spinal alignment being his long obsession. “If she were here I am quite sure we could help her,” Fabyan wrote to William. “The general idea is to get the anterior curve in the back near the hips out, and one way of doing it is to lie on your back on a table and stick up your knees, bringing the heels as near the buttocks as you can.” William replied that he thought she would be all right.
She hired a nanny, a black woman named Cassie (her last name is not recorded), and continued to work on the two book projects from home, sharing the cooking duties with Cassie and taking breaks to play with Barbara, the firstborn, followed by a second child, John Ramsay, three years later, in 1926.
The daughter and the son had opposite personalities and Elizebeth felt constantly perplexed by the size of the gap. Barbara was an affectionate, verbally prolific infant with blond ringlets who charmed all of the Friedmans’ friends, loved books, and shared her dolls with Krypto the dog. John Ramsay didn’t talk much, didn’t like to be sung to, didn’t seek out books, and swung wildly between moods, “his mirth excited by so little, his hilarity so whole-souled,” Elizebeth wrote. “And then in a flash, fury and rage takes its turn.”
The only music he seemed to enjoy was whatever Elizebeth played at top volume on the Victrola.
She took a hands-off approach to parenting, hewing to a doctrine of no doctrines, in agreement with William. The Friedmans were determined not to consciously teach their kids anything or tell them what to believe, only to create a comfortable environment, pour in vitamins, “and let the rest take care of itself,” as Elizebeth put it. She respected her offspring as autonomous, independent creatures and was captivated by their efforts to learn how to communicate. Some of Barbara’s noises sounded like verbalized cryptograms. Elizebeth, always looking for insight into language, transcribed her daughter’s babble inside a book Fabyan had given her, What I Know About the Future of Cotton and Domestic Goods, the one that contained only blank pages. “She strings together consonants impossible to an English tongue,” Elizebeth observed. “Within the last week she says I don’t know in answer to questions. When I first told her father of it, he scoffed saying the concept of not knowing a thing was impossible at her age. But as I pointed out, she does not use the separate words—it is rather one elided sound—IDONTKNOW, a perfect imitation.” She copied Barbara’s ejections verbatim and analyzed the text with a codebreaker’s curiosity. Pfnr-pfnh-hnwhwp. It seemed clandestine. There was structure in it, a pattern at the edge of legibility: pfnr-pfnh-hnwhwp. What did it mean? IDONTKNOW.
After two years living in the forest of Bethesda, the Friedmans decided to move back into the city, closer to William’s job, and bought their first house together, at 3932 Military Road in northwest Washington, a newly constructed home with an elephant-shaped door knocker. The neighborhood was full of families and young oak trees, two hundred yards from the Maryland state line. Fathers tended to work for the military or the government. Lieutenants sat on porches, reading the newspaper. This is the house where Barbara and John Ramsay grew up—the Friedmans would stay at 3932 Military Road for more than two decades—and it’s where government agents once again came knocking for Elizebeth, hoping to use her husband’s brain secondhand.