by Jason Fagone
“Never said a word to me,” Elizebeth swore.
All through the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s, the only thing he revealed to his wife about his work is that it involved Japan. That was all. He didn’t talk about Red or Purple, or his own designs.
People wondered later how this could have been true, how a husband and wife, lying in bed together at night, both of them cryptologists, could possibly resist sharing the dramatic details of their work. No: “My husband never never opened his mouth about anything.” She had to guess at the mind of her husband by watching changes in his behavior. He came home in the evening and said little. He opened a silver snuff box and inhaled the black tobacco dust. He was almost never cross, only withdrawn. The kids picked up on it. They noticed there were times when friends and neighbors were welcome to visit, when William cooked steaks on a backyard grill and laughed a lot and “was hugging me warmly,” as Barbara later recalled, and other times he seemed trapped in a fugue state and was unable to come to the door. In the morning he paced through the house. At night he couldn’t sleep. The bed would shake at 3 A.M. and Elizebeth would see him out of a corner of her eye, heading downstairs to make himself a sandwich.
He was not as sick as he would get in later years. She was not yet seeing him unable to get out of bed, lethargic, shaking, acutely depressed, talking casually of suicide, carrying a length of rope in the backseat of his car. She still thought of William’s affliction as “nothing more or less than exhaustion” and refused to call it mental illness, a rational choice given the wide stigma against the mentally ill and the poor treatment options (no antidepressants). The chief psychiatrist at the city’s preeminent hospital, Dr. Walter Freeman of George Washington University, was an early adopter of electroshock therapy and the inventor of the ice pick lobotomy, a cruel and unwarranted procedure that involved jamming a sharp metal stick through the back of the patient’s eyeball while the patient was awake and wiggling it around until a sufficient amount of brain matter was turned to goo. There was a fair chance that if William sought mental treatment in Washington, he would end up under the care of Dr. Freeman or one of his disciples (and sure enough, eventually, William did).
So Elizebeth did her best in the 1930s to cover for her husband in public and shore him up in private, lending her strength to a person who seemed unwell without letting on to friends that he was unwell, out of loyalty to her lover and also a simpler kind of self-interest. The Friedmans had always refused to acknowledge clear distinctions between his career and her career, his adventures and her adventures, because it all sprang from those same fertile years at Riverbank when they worked so closely together and ultimately forged a sacred alliance to escape, and that bond had survived through the decades: “Any story of my experiences is quite inseparable from that of my husband, whose wizardries in cryptanalysis are of international note,” Elizebeth once wrote. Their relationship was progressive in this sense, a joint bank account of the mind. It didn’t seem like sacrifice for Elizebeth to help her husband when he was down and weak. It was like treating a wound on one of her own limbs.
The closest she ever came to explaining the politics of their marriage was in a letter years later to Barbara, recommending she read a novel called Immortal Wife, about a real American couple from the nineteenth century, Jessie and John Frémont. John was an army colonel who mapped the wilds of California, Jessie the feisty daughter of a senator, and they collaborated all their lives, Jessie believing that “to be a good wife a woman must stand shoulder to shoulder and brain to brain alongside her husband.” As a husband and wife they attracted fame and controversy. Jessie took the fragmentary journals from John’s expeditions and turned them into rich narratives that enthralled Americans. The Frémonts made money and lost it all; the U.S. Army court-martialed John on a bogus charge of insubordination; he suffered a nervous breakdown, deteriorating into a “gray-haired and sunken-cheeked person . . . his face at war with itself.” Some of the novel’s more vivid passages describe the efforts of Jessie to rebuild John’s shattered confidence:
Everything that happened to John must of necessity happen to her; when two people marry they cease to be purely themselves but step into a new and expanded character, the character of their marriage. . . . She used every art and guile known to the heart of woman to nurse him to health. As they rode . . . spirited horses through the forests she challenged him to race with her, complimented him on how beautifully he sat the horse. Sitting before the warmth and bright red flames of the fireplace she played up the hours and episodes he had enjoyed most in their years together, in which he had appeared to the best advantage, filled him with her pride in his accomplishments. . . . She played the temptress, wearing her loveliest gowns, using her most delicate perfumes, shamelessly arousing his sexual love for her, the love that always had been such a strong and potent force between them. . . .
William also told his son to read this book if he wanted to understand his own parents: “In many ways it parallels my life with your mother,” he wrote, calling Elizebeth “a remarkable woman” whose “own indominable spirit helped me climb up out a psychological morass that was pretty deep and distressing.” The Friedmans connected with the tale of the Frémonts, this pair of American explorers menaced by the whims of the army and the nuances of neurochemistry. It made them feel, as all good books do, less alone.
Their lives had become so isolated in Washington. When they first met and fell in love, at Riverbank, secrecy was about exploration and connection, a joyous hunt for a hidden order. Now it was a force of loneliness.
They rebelled.
Not openly. Not by breaking laws or leaking secrets. Instead they figured out how to use cryptology to reach out to people, to resist the isolation that their cryptologic careers enforced.
They began with their own children, teaching them simple ciphers when they were seven or eight: A=B, B=C, C=D. Barbara wrote letters in this cipher from sleepaway camp. “EFBS NPUIFS BOE EFBS EBEEZ . . . Dear Mother and Dear Daddy. We went on a canoe trip. We went about 12 or 14 miles. We did it in 1 day too. I paddled 1/2 the way. Love, Barbara.” William and Elizebeth replied, “XF BSF QMFBTFE . . . We are pleased to know that you can handle a canoe. It is lots of fun. You will be surprised to learn that Pinklepurr had her kittens on August 2.”
The Friedmans also shared cipher letters with their friends. Each December they sent a holiday card in the form of a puzzle. In 1928, it was a “turning grille,” a square of red paper perforated with circular holes, its four sides numbered 1 through 4, with a single left-facing arrow that said “TURN.” When this square was laid atop a separate sheet of paper containing a 9-by-11 grid of letters, certain letters showed through the holes: FOR CHRISTMAS GREETINGS IN 28. Turning the overlay 90 degrees clockwise, new letters appeared in the holes (WE USE A MEANS QUITE UP TO DATE), then again with a third turn (A CRYPTO TELEPHOTOGRAM HERE), and a fourth (BRINGS YOU WORD OF XMAS CHEER). Another year William drew a picture of a tree with happy faces and sad faces hanging from its branches like fruit. “Friedman’s Wishing Tree,” the caption said. “Individual fruits biformed, differentiated by upcurving or downcurving crevice.” It was a message written in Bacon’s biliteral cipher: a nod to the Friedmans’ own past, to their creation story at Riverbank, the Garden of Eden where they fell in love and were expelled for the sin of learning to distinguish reality from delusion. The happy face was the a-form in the cipher, the sad face the b-form. The plaintext read, “Season’s Greetings from the Friedmans.”
They took these games further by organizing live puzzle-solving events that were famous in their social group throughout the 1930s. Some of these “cipher parties” were scavenger hunts that sent guests winging through the city. Elizebeth handed you a small white envelope. You tore it open to find a cryptogram. The solution was the address of a restaurant. When you arrived, you ate the salad course, then solved a second cryptogram to discover the location of the entrée. Other parties were hosted at the Friedmans’ home with food
cooked by Elizebeth. A shy army wife arrived at 3932 Military Road one evening with her husband and panicked when the Friedmans handed her a menu in code. “The first item was a series of dots done with a blue pen,” she later recalled. “The ‘brains’ at the party worked over the number of dots in a group when it occurred to me it had to be ‘blue points’—oysters—and it was! I had done my bit, and from then on I was quiet.”
On a different occasion, Elizebeth designed a menu that listed one of the courses as “An Indecipherable Cipher.” A guest wondered if this meant “hash,” a cryptographic term for a string of text that gets scrambled once and never unscrambled, like a door that locks forever behind you (today hashes are used to protect Internet passwords). The guest was delighted when Elizebeth arrived from the kitchen carrying a steaming plate of meat-and-potato hash.
The Friedmans received so much praise for these parties that William thought he saw a chance to make money: If the army wouldn’t let him sell his cipher machines because they were state secrets, couldn’t he bake some of the same ideas into a mass-marketed board game? In a heat of inspiration he tried to design a Monopoly of codes and ciphers. The Crypto-Set Headquarters Army Game was a folding piece of cardboard with a red spinning wheel; players had to solve puzzles to advance tokens from the start line to the finish. A second prototype, Kriptor, featured two ivory-colored rotating discs printed with hieroglyph-like symbols. Players had to play “codemaker” and “codebreaker,” trading secret messages.
He thought Kriptor had commercial potential and sent it to Milton Bradley, makers of Battleship and the Game of Life.
In the hands of the Friedmans, cryptograms were like poems or songs, a way of telling friends and family they were part of something wonderful, a shared language, and that they were loved. Given the immense secrecy of their profession, reaching out to people in these elaborate and whimsical ways, widening the circle instead of narrowing it, was a kind of defiance, although, ultimately, their most defiant act during these interwar years may have been the simplest.
They built a library.
Soon after moving to Washington, Elizebeth and William began to collect books and papers about all things related to secret writing, including documents that touched on their own lives in cryptology and that were not classified or restricted to government vaults. They stored objects on bookshelves in the den of their house. The library was as broad and curious as its creators. It contained books the Friedmans loved and books they hated; books they felt committed sins against cryptologic accuracy, good prose, or both; books that were centuries old but still contained relevant cryptologic knowledge; books they enjoyed but did not understand (William was beguiled and frustrated by the fiction of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, who wrote sentences so garbled they might as well have been in code). The most valuable book dated to the sixteenth century, De Furtivis Literarum Notis, by Giambattista della Porta, an Italian cryptologist and scientific rival of Galileo. The Porta book, with a burgundy binding and text in Latin—an extremely rare 1591 forgery of the 1563 first printing, one of only three such copies in the world—had arrived in the mail one day from Riverbank, an unexpected gift from George Fabyan. Elizebeth was moved by this gesture, because she had never known Fabyan to give anything away without demanding something in return.
All the rest of their books were collected cheaply. Wherever they went in the world, the Friedmans rummaged through used bookshops for ten-cent treasures. They salvaged books that other people discarded. Once, at the Munitions Building, William fell into conversation with a white-haired Civil War veteran. “He came up to me one morning as I was coming into work,” William recalled later, “and he whispered, ‘They’re burning things today.’ And I said, ‘Such as?’ And he showed me these books.” They were a complete set of Union army cipher books, precious items that William rescued from destruction.
Some of the most important items in the library were books of unsolved puzzles and historical mysteries that the Friedmans thought they stood a chance of solving, if they ever got the time. In this sense the library was an archive of their dreams, a set of escape hatches into other, lighter-hearted kinds of lives that seemed possible within the world of secret writing, lives of academic exploration and scholarship. Elizebeth had begun taking graduate classes at American University in 1929, working toward a master’s degree in archaeology. She was drawn to several richly illustrated books of Mayan pictographs that had never been decoded; she sometimes fantasized about quitting the coast guard and flying to Mexico, climbing through Mayan ruins in a straw hat, making sketches. William pondered his copy of the Voynich Manuscript, an illuminated book of uncertain lineage, written in a delicate looping script that corresponded to no known language, illustrated with pictures of flowers. He studied a book about the Beale Treasure, supposedly a stash of buried gold and silver ingots in Beale County, Virginia, its location revealed by an unsolved cryptogram. William once joked that he “worked on the cryptogram, on and off, but only in my leisurely hours at home, nights, Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays.”
They also collected their own writings in the library. The archives of the Riverbank code section had remained at Fabyan’s estate, so the Friedmans didn’t own their earliest worksheets, but in the years since they had kept or copied every other nonclassified scrap of paper that had passed through their hands.
The Friedmans weren’t necessarily doing this to document the history of American intelligence and tell a renegade story about its birth, although this would be the ultimate, magnificent result. Rather, the Friedmans built an archive because that’s what the best intelligence professionals do. They become librarians. It’s no accident that J. Edgar Hoover got his start in government as an eighteen-year-old Library of Congress clerk, a job that gave him “an excellent foundation for my work in the FBI,” he later said, “where it has been necessary to collate information and evidence.” The FBI was a library of human fingerprints and human deeds. Elizebeth’s thirty bound volumes of rum messages were a library of the outlaw seas. The files of Herbert Yardley’s American black chamber, now controlled by William, were a library of diplomatic intrigues from many nations, and William’s SIS unit at the army was fast becoming a library of as-yet-unsolved Japanese communications, an archive pitched against a rising fascist power.
For all the harmless innocence conjured by the word “library,” the Friedmans knew the truth: a library, properly maintained, could save the world—or burn it down.
They took their home library seriously enough to follow the practices of professional librarians. William made his own children sign a checkout slip if they wanted to carry a book from one floor of the house to another, and whenever the Friedmans acquired a book, they pasted a custom bookplate inside the cover, a rectangle of card stock designed by a professor friend who studied Mayan writing. The illustration on the bookplate showed a crimson warrior swinging an axe down upon the skull of a human. Pictographs spelled out a warning to book thieves:
Lay ca-huunil kubenbil tech same
This our book we entrusted you a while-ago.
Ti manaan apaclam-tz’a lo toon
It not-being you-return-give it us
Epahal ca-baat tumen ah-men
Is-being-sharpened our-axe by the expert.
On the wall of the library, to reinforce the message, William and Elizebeth hung an axe with a wooden handle and a black blade.
They were not trying to be mean or intimidating. They were showing their reverence for knowledge. Knowledge is power, as Francis Bacon once said and as George Fabyan and Mrs. Gallup taught them years ago. The Friedmans had taken this precept to an extreme, structuring their whole lives around it—an attitude of sharp curiosity and ruthless self-honesty that defined them. They had carried that little kernel of Bacon’s philosophy along with them when they escaped Riverbank, and afterward they stayed true to Bacon’s idea in ways their mentors at Riverbank never did, because to really live a life in search of knowledge, you must admit when you ar
e wrong.
Mrs. Gallup never acknowledged that her method was flawed. She never moved on to a new project, never left the estate at all, and Elizebeth and William did not write to her about the Bacon ciphers, feeling it would be unkind to keep restating their skepticism. As the Friedmans climbed onward to brilliant careers in Washington, Mrs. Gallup remained in a cottage at Riverbank, peering through a looking glass at old books, expenses paid by Fabyan, until her death in 1934. She died believing she was correct, that Bacon was Shakespeare, that she had discovered proof, that history would vindicate her.
As for Fabyan, he never quite said the Bacon cipher project was hopeless, that the messages were not really there, only that the argument was not winnable, that he and Mrs. Gallup had failed to make the case. “I have no facilities or knowledge by which to prove the authorship of any volume of Shakespeare,” Fabyan told the Chicago Evening American, which mocked him: “E’en Colonel Fabyan, the seer of Riverbank, now stands agnostic on the rock of doubt, chewing the food of sweet and bitter fancy, and says he does not know. . . .”
During the final years of Fabyan’s life, William’s attitude toward his old tormentor softened considerably. They wrote to each other like old friends. They gossiped about Herbert Yardley. Fabyan called Yardley an “ass.” William loved that. He noticed that Fabyan seemed glum and tired. His health was failing. He complained of a hernia and a prostate gland that had to be “reamed out” by a surgeon. He saw another world war coming and hoped it wasn’t true. “With love to Elizebeth and the family, and trusting we are not going to get into another war,” Fabyan wrote at the end of one letter, signing off, “Always the same old, GF.”