The Woman Who Smashed Codes

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The Woman Who Smashed Codes Page 18

by Jason Fagone


  George Fabyan died two years after Mrs. Gallup, in 1936, at the age of sixty-nine. The Friedmans heard the news in a letter from an old Riverbank colleague who still lived there. “The Colonel’s interest in life had slipped a good deal in the last year,” the colleague wrote. A bout of laryngitis had worsened into pleurisy of the lungs and a cascade of medical complications. Fabyan suffered greatly in the last ten days of his life, feverish on the bed in the Villa that hung from chains, the bed swinging to and fro with the violence of his coughing. He said that when he died he wanted his employees to shut off the light in the lighthouse, the one that flashed two white lights and three red lights in a continual pattern every night, the coded message saying keep out, keep out, keep out. It went dark according to his wish.

  Fabyan left behind far less money than anyone would have guessed. The Great Depression, along with his lavish expenditures on the laboratories and their science experiments, had nearly wiped him out. In his will he gave $175,000 to his widow, Nelle, and provided for a monthly stipend of $150 to his loyal Scottish secretary, Belle Cumming, for as long as she might want to live on the grounds as caretaker. Nelle died of cancer three years later, in 1939, and in 1946, Cumming was killed in a gruesome accident along with two other women when an oncoming train struck their car as it crossed the Geneva tracks. County officials purchased the estate for $70,500 and added it to the local forest preserve. Riverbank was public property, the once-mighty kingdom now an empty set of buildings and fields.

  All along in his letters to Fabyan, William had been coaxing the old man to give his papers to a library: his own personal papers and also the voluminous files of the Riverbank Department of Ciphers. In Fabyan’s last letter to William before he died, he had mentioned destroying “a lot of old correspondence on ciphers because I did not know whose hands it might fall into.” Now William wrote to his widow, Nelle. What was to be done with the files of the Department of Ciphers? These records were part of the Friedmans’ own history and America’s history too, and the Friedmans wanted to make sure they were preserved.

  The reply came that Fabyan, as one of his last wishes, had ordered many records to be burned.

  William and Elizebeth guessed that he did it to prevent embarrassing revelations about his many deceptions and schemes. Fabyan had chosen to go out in a flame of self-immolation, a Viking funeral of documents.

  It wasn’t as bad as they thought. While Fabyan had destroyed some documents, others survived and would eventually make their way to the New York Public Library. But the Friedmans assumed the worst. To them it was a tragedy: loss of history, loss of knowledge. No one else in America particularly cared. A dying man had burned some papers about cryptology. Cryptology is a profession of secrets. Secrets staying secret is the norm. Officials only get riled up when the opposite happens—when secrets are leaked, published, disclosed. And by now, the Friedmans and their colleagues were struggling to manage the consequences of the biggest leak of cryptologic secrets in the country’s history.

  “A lie!”

  At home, William turned the pages of a book with a black cover, facial muscles tightening, writing annotations in the margins:

  “This is a patchwork of misstatement, exaggeration, and falsehood.”

  “Lies, lies, lies.”

  Six crimson lines divided the book’s cover into seven black rectangles. Inside one of the rectangles, crimson letters read,

  THE AMERICAN BLACK CHAMBER

  HERBERT O. YARDLEY

  Yardley.

  The poker player and codebreaker had not reacted well to the closing of his State Department bureau by Henry Stimson, the secretary who believed that gentlemen do not read each other’s mail. When the government put Yardley out of work, he had been unable to find a new job in the Depression. Down to his last couple of dollars, he decided to spill his secrets, for money and revenge. He published a book, The American Black Chamber, in the summer of 1931, which became a bestseller and international sensation. It also hit the U.S. government like an exploding volcano, hurling rock and lava into the stunned surroundings and forcing the Friedmans to navigate the smoking landscape it left behind.

  The book claimed to be the true story of the black chamber, “a glimpse behind the heavy curtains that enshroud the background of secret diplomacy.” He framed it as an act of patriotism, and he had a case. Yardley believed it was dangerous and naive to stop breaking the codes of foreign governments. It made America weaker, more vulnerable. He believed there should be a debate, but it was impossible to have a debate about the kinds of things the black chamber did if the public didn’t even know that it had existed. He argued that because the bureau was now closed, there was no harm in revealing its activities.

  There was enough truth in the book to scandalize U.S. officials. Yardley disclosed, for instance, how his country had been reading the diplomatic traffic of Japanese ambassadors, information that Japanese readers were surprised to learn; the book sold 33,119 copies there. He also tantalized with anecdotes of sex and deception. “A lovely girl dances with the Secretary of an Embassy,” Yardley wrote in the book’s introduction, promising more details within. “She flatters him. They become confidential. He is indiscreet.” He devoted a full chapter to a bewitching female spy named Madame de Victorica, “the beautiful blonde woman of Antwerp,” who worked for the British and French during the Great War and employed ciphers and invisible ink. Yardley claimed that an unknown enemy once enlisted a blonde spy to seduce him at a New York speakeasy: “It did seem to me that she showed a bit too much of her legs as she nestled in the deep cushions.” They got into a taxi and went to her apartment, where she promptly fell asleep on the couch; Yardley, suspecting foul play, searched her desk and found a note that said, “See mutual friend at first opportunity. Important you get us information at once.” The next night, thieves broke into his office and rifled through the cabinets: “I took it for granted that they had photographed the important documents which they required.”

  This probably never happened. Yardley’s colleague later said that the story of the blue-eyed blonde was a “damned lie,” and that the only things taken from the office were a couple of bottles of booze. “It was my booze and I think [Yardley] took it himself.” As for Madame de Victorica, she did exist, but Yardley embellished her biography. He admitted to friends that he fictionalized parts of the book. He compressed time, invented dialogue, added “bunk” and “hooey,” and made no apologies: “To write saleable stuff one must dramatise.”

  William Friedman found this loose attitude intolerable. Truth was truth and anything else was fuckery. He also disagreed with Yardley’s assertion that there was no harm in telling old stories. William thought that some of Yardley’s revelations might startle adversaries into boosting the security of their communications, particularly Japan, thereby making the jobs of American codebreakers more difficult.

  In the end, though, William resented that Yardley was telling a story about cryptology that William wanted to tell himself. William had always been a stifled writer, unable to publish what he would have liked. At Riverbank the obstacle was the ego of a rich man, George Fabyan, who insisted on taking credit for William’s work, and now the reason was national security. He couldn’t tell stories of his army feats because, unlike Yardley, he wasn’t willing to violate his promise to keep America’s secrets.

  Yardley had actually sent William a copy of The American Black Chamber as a courtesy, signing his name on the inside cover. Beneath the signature, William wrote, “OMNIS HOMO MENDAX,” which means, in Latin, “Every man is a liar.” Then he began to write his own alternate history of the events and concepts Yardley had described, inside Yardley’s book, in the margins: “A lie! Which can be so proved to be. See papers attached. Exhibit 1.” He attached exhibits to another man’s book. He underlined sentences, bracketed paragraphs, tagged words with asterisks, spangled pages with exclamation marks. Revenge by annotation. Not content with his own annotations, he then circulated the copy of Y
ardley’s book among four of his colleagues in the army and MID, and they added their own annotations in their own handwriting, a chorus of jeers and boos. William created a numbered key in the front of the book so that future readers could keep track of the different voices.

  The fallout from the publication of Yardley’s book was lasting and broad. Intelligence bosses and lawmakers grew newly anxious about the security of cryptologic information and moved to crack down on future disclosures. Yardley became persona non grata in U.S. intelligence circles for the rest of his life; exiled from his old haunts, he made friends in Los Angeles and wrote screenplays for Hollywood movies. In 1933, Congress passed a law specifically to prevent Yardley from publishing a book of codebreaking yarns focused on Japan; the new law, called “An Act For the Protection of Government Records” and derided by Yardley as the “Secrets Act,” declared it a crime to reveal secrets about cryptologic information. But stories about codes and ciphers only increased after Yardley opened the gates. He had proven that there was a market for them, particularly yarns about Yardleyesque women who dealt in secrets, and when editors looked around for such a woman, they did not have to look far.

  Elizebeth Friedman was attractive. She was a mother. She was American. She was testifying in open court against the criminal masterminds of her age. And unlike Yardley’s women, she was verifiably real in every detail. “Widespread interest in the romantic stories of beautiful female spies, secret codes and ciphers which Yardley had told caused editors from this time on to become keenly aware of the news value of such stories,” went a confidential memo later circulated by the U.S. Navy to warn about the dangers of cryptologic publicity. “Consequently, when in 1934 magazine and newspaper accounts broke concerning Mrs. Elizabeth [sic] Smith Friedman, a Coast Guard Cryptanalyst, a number of similar incidents followed.”

  “I’ll confess, Mrs. Friedman, I was thunderstruck the other day when I met you for the first time. I simply wasn’t prepared to find a petite, vivacious young matron bearing the formidable title of Cryptanalyst for the United States Coast Guard. How did you ever get interested in the highly technical science of codes and crypts?”

  “I never thought of my job as terribly unusual until the newspapers stumbled upon what I do for the government, Miss Santry.”

  Margaret Santry was a radio reporter for NBC. In 1934 she launched a series of interviews with “First Ladies of the Capitol,” mostly socialites and the wives of congressmen, and in May she asked Elizebeth to speak about her career on a national NBC broadcast. Elizebeth brought her children to the NBC radio studio in Washington; commercial radio was less than a decade old, still slightly wondrous, and she thought the kids might enjoy seeing the technology. Barbara was ten, John Ramsay was seven. The NBC staff let the kids watch their mother from the glassed-in control room adjacent to the sound booth, analog indicator needles twitching back and forth as Santry peppered Elizebeth with questions.

  “Does the habit of thinking in code ever creep into your family life?”

  “I guess it’s bound to—it’s so much a part of our life,” Elizebeth said.

  “And are your children experts in code, too?”

  Elizebeth replied that Barbara was “quite an expert for her age” and had sent her parents messages in cipher two years earlier, when Elizebeth and William sailed to Spain for an international conference about radio transmissions.

  Santry asked, “And I suppose she wants to be a cryptanalyst like her mother when she grows up?”

  “No, she wants to be a professional dancer,” Elizebeth said. As for her son, John Ramsay “states he wants to be a code expert when he grows up,” but “at present he is in the boats and guns stage.”

  “How do you solve the business of running a home and a family—and an important job—all at the same time, Mrs. Friedman?”

  “Oh, it solves itself rather nicely; especially when I have such a grand housekeeper to look after things at present. I never really made any definite plans for a career, Miss Santry—it just happened.”

  This NBC interview was one of the rare media appearances that Elizebeth enjoyed; she preferred speaking with female reporters, and NBC treated her children with kindness. Most of the time she hated dealing with the press. Depending on the reporter, she found the experience irritating to unbearable, and altogether the articles and radio shows represented a real threat to her livelihood.

  Codebreaking is a secret profession. Its practitioners aren’t generally supposed to talk about how they do what they do, as demonstrated by the shock at Herbert Yardley’s disclosures. Elizebeth wasn’t anything like Yardley; he was motivated by money, and she was motivated by doing the job that the government was asking her to do. Elizebeth only discussed active cases in public when a prosecutor called her to testify in court, and at all other times she limited her comments to closed cases, and then only with the full authorization of the Treasury publicity office. She testified for a reason: to put bad guys in prison.

  Yet Elizebeth was so talented at this task, and the trials so spectacular, that the resulting waves of publicity threatened to wash away her career, in an era when government was growing concerned about the security of secret information.

  The publicity coincided with a rise in the drama and stakes of her cases. When Prohibition was repealed in 1934, destroying the market for bootleg liquor, several of the rum rings made a nimble transition to smuggling drugs, mainly opium and the drugs derived from it, heroin and morphine, which were refined by pharmacists and criminal gangs in the port cities of China. Elizebeth adapted. Bags of heroin were smaller than crates of booze, easier to conceal, which only made codebreaking more essential—the only reliable way to discover the drugs was to swipe the details of their location from the smuggler’s own lips.

  The drug networks were global in scope, spanning more lands and languages than the rum syndicates. Elizebeth coordinated the investigations with T-men in offices all across America, with members of the U.S. State Department, and with police inspectors in foreign countries. She worked with translators to read encrypted notes in Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Mandarin. She was able to take messages written in blocks of letters or numbers and trace these figures back to specific Mandarin words in commercial code books designed for Chinese merchants. Reporters and readers seemed amazed that she could break a code in a language she did not speak, but that was the power of having a system, a science. “The whole deciphering science is based on what we call the mechanics of language,” she explained on NBC radio, making it seem easy. “There are certain fixed ways in which language operates, so to speak; and by studying the known elements and making certain assumptions, one can arrive at a result that usually does the trick.”

  Global heroin rings went up at the stroke of her pencil. Smuggling ships were skimmed off the ocean like fat from a simmering pot of soup stock. Each new feat startled loose a flock of news articles that sang about Elizebeth’s previous feats and added one more verse to the ballad of her growing legend. She decrypted a stack of intercepted letters and telegrams exchanged between a member of Shanghai’s fearsome Green Gang of criminal warlords and two brothers in San Francisco, Isaac and Judah Ezra, the dissolute twin sons of an upstanding Shanghai pharmacist. They had been smuggling opiates from Yokohama, Japan, to San Francisco on the passenger liner Asama Maru, the drugs hidden in barrels of tree-nut oil. The messages spoke of “wyset,” “wysiv,” and “wyssa” in various quantities; Elizebeth determined that “wyset” meant cocaine, “wysiv” was heroin, and “wyssa” was morphine. She alerted the T-men in San Francisco, who searched the Asama Maru when it arrived and found 520 tins of smoking opium, 70 ounces of cocaine, 70 ounces of morphine, and 40 ounces of heroin. Informed that their code had been broken, the Ezras quickly confessed and were each sentenced to twelve years in prison.

  EZRA GANG FALLS IN TRAP OF WOMAN EXPERT AT PUZZLES, went a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle. SOLVED BY WOMAN. The press had a way of praising Elizebeth and cond
escending to her at the same time, professing amazement at the capabilities of the female brain. She had “supplied the Federals with enough dynamite to break up the ring,” the paper said, and now “the Ezra boys have twelve years to figure out another code she can’t break.”

  When the reporter asked her how she broke the Ezras’ code, Elizebeth declined to say: “We have to keep our ideas secret so that we do not give other smugglers any new ideas.” Worried that she was attracting too much attention, that T-men would feel slighted by her fame and that Treasury chiefs would fret about smugglers getting wise to her methods, she tried to get the press to stop writing about her. She begged reporters to credit the coast guard as a whole instead of one woman for solving the cases. She wrote apologies to colleagues and bosses, complaining that reporters would not leave her alone: “The mystery-lure of the words code and cipher, coupled with a woman’s name, invariably inflames the news reporters and they start on the trail of a story.”

  Nothing worked. She had chosen a profession that continually immersed her in lurid realities. “She is entrusted with more secrets of the crime world and of federal detection activities than any woman in history,” reported Reader’s Digest in 1937, in a five-page feature that declared Elizebeth “Key Woman of the T-Men” and was mailed to more than a million subscribers. “When one of the Treasury Department’s enforcement agencies gets the scent of a new international enterprise in smuggling, dope running . . . there is one unofficial order that sticks in every agent’s mind: ‘Get some of the gang’s correspondence and send for Mrs. Friedman.’ ”

 

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