The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

  She watched the lights come on in America. Gas stations resumed normal operations. The newspapers said nylon hose would be available soon. Shoes by Christmas. The military was starting to release large numbers of personnel who were no longer needed. Arlington Hall ordered a 50 percent staff cut by September 31 and another 25 percent cut by December 31. The Naval Annex in Washington had been emptying for weeks and was down to a skeleton force, quieter than Elizebeth had ever seen it. The temporary workers, including most of the WAVES, no longer necessary in peacetime, had been released without so much as a thank-you cake, and permanent employees were escaping the Annex for offices in more modern buildings.

  Elizebeth knew she needed to make a decision about her future, about what to do with her postwar life. Her superiors at the coast guard said they wanted her to stay, to keep her code-breaking unit together in peacetime and return to smuggling investigations, but she couldn’t see the point. There wasn’t a lot of smuggling traffic anymore.

  She noticed with detached amusement that American intelligence officials were scrambling to cast themselves and their agencies in a favorable light so that they might keep their jobs in peacetime. “The O.S.S. is starting a deluge of publicity,” Elizebeth wrote to William, mentioning the wartime spy agency of Wild Bill Donovan, for whom she had worked in the early months of the war. “Fight against extinction, I suppose.”

  Elizebeth heard a radio interview with a New York man who taught cryptology classes. He was discussing the importance of codebreaking to the Allied victory. Elizebeth knew him to be a minor figure and wondered, in an offhand way, how he ever got the spotlight.

  She turned fifty-three years old on August 26, a cold Sunday. Her coast guard colleague, Lieutenant Jones, came over with his wife, Gertrude, and Elizebeth Friedman, secret hunter of Nazis, cooked a dinner of minced clams in cheese sauce, a tossed French salad, and hot borscht that everyone agreed tasted wonderful in the cold evening. William spaced out his birthday presents to Elizebeth over four days, starting the previous Friday with a cable from Bletchley Park. ABSENCE ON YOUR BIRTHDAY DARLING SADDENS ME BUT HOPE FLORAL AMBASSADOR . . . WILL VOUCHSAFE UNDYING LOVE. On Saturday a mutual friend hand-delivered a box of perfume to her door. Sunday morning, a dozen roses came, along with one of his business cards. The front said only, MR WILLIAM F. FRIEDMAN, and on the back he had written, “I love you! I love you! I love you! Bill.” The next day, Monday, a letter arrived from William, written eight days earlier and timed to reach her right now. “I find it hard to tell you how much I miss you and love you—you’re the most wonderful person to have for wife, helpmate, lover, and all,” he wrote. “Save some special kisses for me when I get back. . . . I miss you.”

  She realized how tricky it must have been to coordinate all these gifts and messages across the distances of the war, the disrupted postal and cable lines, and land them to her at the exact moment of his choosing, around her special day. The timing alone was a performance of devotion.

  “Dearest,” Elizebeth wrote, “what a darling you are!”

  He was ready to come home “very soon,” he told her in a letter from London three days after her birthday. He said he was already thinking about what would come next for him and for the family. He wanted to make the kind of money that would give them the freedom to travel and pursue their dreams. National security concerns had always prevented William from profiting from the cipher machines he invented, but the war was over now. Surely he would be permitted to patent his ideas and commercialize them? When he was finished describing these thoughts to Elizebeth he rotated the sheet of paper and filled the side margin: “I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU! VERY MUCH (I shall have that printed as a border on my special stationery to you.)”

  Four days after that, on September 2, in Tokyo Bay, General Douglas MacArthur accepted the Japanese surrender aboard the battleship USS Missouri. Elizebeth heard Truman say on the radio, “It is our responsibility—ours, the living—to see to it that this victory shall be a monument worthy of the dead who died to win it.” She agreed that there was no point in having fought a war to preserve freedom if people used that freedom to start more wars. She wondered if William heard the same Truman broadcast. “You are the dearest and best husband any woman ever had!” she wrote on September 4. “Roses lasted until today. All, all my love, Elsbeth.”

  Around September 12, in Prestwick, England, William finally boarded an army transport plane. He flew to the Azores, then Bermuda, then New York, each minute of the long flights an agony of anticipation. It was raining when he landed in New York and got on a train for Washington. The sky when he stepped out of Union Station was a slab of gray and the air was violent with fat drops that followed him to his office at Arlington Hall. Arlington Hall was like Bletchley Park had been, emptier than he ever remembered it, big empty rooms and echoing hallways and a handful of people carrying boxes around and packing up files. He could not concentrate on anything because he knew he would see Elizebeth soon. He waited out the day and it was still raining like crazy when he left the heavily guarded military facility and shoved his dripping luggage in a taxi and rode home, to the house at 3932 Military Road.

  Elizebeth opened the door. She cried out in joy. His clothes were wet. His mustache was wet. She reached up and threw her arms around him and squeezed as hard as she could.

  The months after V-J Day were a period of limbo for U.S. intelligence. All the agencies were thinking about how to extend the gains of the war and also justify their own existence in peacetime, when the government would surely contract. The future of cryptology was especially murky.

  It was obvious to William and many others that there ought to be a centralized cryptologic function in America, one agency that gathered intelligence from wireless signals and broke the codes that must be broken. As an elder in the cryptologic community, a person who had not only invented many of its tools but also built a successful organization within the army to apply those tools, William was involved in these discussions at the highest levels—discussions that would give birth, in 1952, to the National Security Agency. In the meantime he entered a phase of furious personal documentation, writing technical descriptions of his cipher machines and applying for new patents in hopes of commercializing the inventions.

  Elizebeth was documenting, too; not for commerce but rather for teaching and history. At the Naval Annex she sorted through the voluminous files of her coast guard unit, tens of thousands of intercepts, worksheets, memos, translations, and decrypts. Working with Lieutenant Jones and other colleagues, she produced a detailed technical account of their unit’s work between 1940 and 1945, a 329-page book that detailed all forty-eight of the Nazi clandestine radio circuits and how the coast guard broke the codes. The book was secret, meant only for other intelligence agencies to use as a reference and perhaps also for historians of codebreaking in the far future. Five copies were printed, with dark green covers, and every page of every copy was stamped TOP SECRET ULTRA.

  With the technical history complete, Elizebeth was told to mark a percentage of the unit’s documents for preservation and destroy the rest. She decided to keep four thousand decrypts—the typed, solved messages from the forty-eight Nazi radio circuits. These she organized for transport to the classified areas of the National Archives in Washington. The phrase “government tombs” occurred to her. That’s what it felt like. She was burying her experiences in Uncle Sam’s mausoleum.

  When the task was done, Elizebeth prepared to leave the Naval Annex for the last time. The navy forced her and all other departing workers to sign secrecy oaths that demanded their silence unto death. They could never tell anyone what they did in the war, under penalty of prosecution, for as long as they lived. They could not even tell their grandchildren.

  At the end of her final workday, Elizebeth walked down the stairs from the second floor to the first, went out past the turnstile where the first marine guard stood watch, then past the second marine guard, to the other side of the barbed-wire fences
, until she was standing on the sidewalk on Nebraska Avenue. She crossed the street, paused for a few seconds, and looked back at the grubby, flat-roofed building where she had spent her war. She knew in that moment that she would never again return “to that particular form of endeavor”—breaking codes for the coast guard. “I was back in the world-at-large once more,” she wrote later. “It was the end of a Period, an Era.”

  She was still a coast guard employee, and soon Elizebeth found herself back at her old desk in her old prewar office in the Treasury Annex, near the White House. But she had an exit plan. She was only going to stay long enough to complete a single job. At the Naval Annex she had sorted and filed the records of her clandestine war against the Nazis. Now, at Treasury, she needed to do the same for her smuggling cases of the 1920s and ’30s. The smuggling records had been gathering dust during the war—“thrilling records in many respects, detective stories of high interest in many cases,” Elizebeth recalled. “The past had been rich in accomplishments. I should see that everything was prepared for posterity to comprehend, if posterity should ever choose to examine the archives.”

  From the late fall of 1945 to summer 1946, Elizebeth conducted her last campaign for the United States: organizing and indexing the paper archive of her cat-and-mouse tussles with rum lords and drug gangs. Because the records were old and contained no national secrets, she was allowed to keep personal copies for her own library. Then, the task complete, she recommended to Treasury that the department abolish her coast guard unit, along with her job, on the grounds that it served no national purpose in peacetime. They obliged. On August 14, 1946, the coast guard notified her that, “In view of the curtailment of cryptanalytic activities previously performed by the U.S. Coast Guard, it has been necessary to effect a reduction in personnel,” and she was hereby terminated at the close of September 12, 1946. Her salary at the time, the most she ever earned, was $5,390, or $67,000 in today’s dollars.

  J. Edgar Hoover used his influence to expand the FBI after the war. Elizebeth used it to get out of the game.

  She had never really wanted to be a government employee anyway. It was only the constant requests from “people on my doorstep” that had gotten her into it in the first place. Now, with the war over, her thoughts turned to projects and desires she had put on hold to serve her country. She still wanted to finish her long-in-progress children’s book about the history of the alphabet. She wanted to visit Barbara at Radcliffe and see how John Ramsay was living at the Army Air Corps base in Biloxi, Mississippi. And she wanted to reconnect with William and find a way to collaborate with him. The Friedmans had lived for years in an awkward and isolating silence, working in separate but adjacent government bunkers, afraid to speak freely even in their own home. No more! Goodbye to that! They wanted to work together on something again, and they had the perfect idea.

  Elizebeth and William had never lost their fascination with the varieties of occult theories they first encountered in their youth at Riverbank; they never stopped wondering why people believed things that weren’t true. The previous December, when the war was still on, they had attended a sold-out Washington show by the Amazing Dunninger, the foremost mentalist of the day. A New Yorker with a poof of brown hair and a tuxedo, Dunninger was both debunker and illusionist; he explained onstage how spirit mediums usually worked, showed that he was not using any of those tricks—and then read the minds of audience members anyway. William and twenty-five other intelligence men planted themselves here and there throughout the crowd at Constitution Hall in an attempt to learn his methods and “came away with theories as to how it’s done, but no proof,” Elizebeth wrote in a letter to her daughter. “The mere fact that Dunninger is still going strong is proof that human beings, the credulous dears, want to believe in the mysterious and supernatural.”

  It had not escaped Elizebeth and William that many people continued to believe the theory that the two of them had rejected in their earliest days at Riverbank, way back in 1917: that Francis Bacon placed cipher messages in Shakespeare’s plays. The community of Bacon obsessives was still around, alive and kicking, publishing new articles and arguments. After Mrs. Gallup died in 1934, followed by George Fabyan in 1936, the Baconians lost two of their most famous and energetic proponents, but others picked up the torch. In 1938 the son of Teddy Roosevelt, Theodore Jr., asked the Friedmans for an opinion on a cipher system devised by an economist named Dr. Walter McCook Cunningham. Roosevelt Jr. was vice president of the Doubleday publishing firm and Dr. Cunningham had submitted a manuscript about his cipher. The method was based on anagrams, and the Friedmans quickly recognized it as bunk. To demonstrate the cipher’s folly, they applied Cunningham’s method to a page from Julius Caesar to produce the following message, which they sent to Roosevelt Jr.:

  Dear Reader: Theodore Roosevelt is the true author of this play but I, Bacon, stole it from him and have the credit. Friedman can prove that this is so by this cock-eyed cypher invented by Doctor C.

  The experience got them thinking that they should lay out their skeptical arguments in a book of their own, explaining once and for all why these ideas about secret messages in Shakespeare were only fantasies. The Friedmans obtained a pittance of a book deal from a British publisher (advance on royalties: 250 pounds) and went to work. For the sake of the project, they decided to sell their beloved house on Military Road and bought a spacious, high-ceilinged house on Capitol Hill within walking distance of two libraries where they needed to do research, the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Library of Congress. Many who live on Capitol Hill are lobbyists. The Friedmans moved there to be close to libraries.

  They transported their own precious books and papers to the new house, reassembling their private library in the den of the second floor, and rehung the axe on the wall as a warning to potential book thieves. And together, researching and writing, they galloped back through the past, weighing the arguments of Baconians and cutting them to pieces. In their hands The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined became a story about the drug of self-delusion and the joy of truth. One section analyzed the cipher system of a French general that had revealed the secret phrase IF HE SHALL PUBLISH. The Friedmans showed that the cipher could just as easily have produced the text IN HER DAMP PUBES. George Fabyan received the full brunt of their scrutiny. The Friedmans wrote that while Fabyan possessed “great natural gifts of energy and dynamism,” he was a salesman, not a scientist, and suppressed facts he didn’t like. As for Mrs. Gallup, “a sincere and honourable woman, and no fraud,” she “found in her texts what she wanted to find” and “was therefore at the mercy of the promptings of her expectant mind.”

  The Friedmans wrote with a ruthless honesty because that’s who they were as people. Still, working on the book made them realize how much they owed the misguided mentors of their youth. In the preface they thanked Mrs. Gallup, “whose work on the question of Shakespearean authorship aroused our life-long interest in the subject,” and they thanked Fabyan, too—for introducing them to Mrs. Gallup. They were genuinely grateful. Elizebeth said she and her husband had decided to “give the devil his due,” and in later years Elizebeth even went as far as admitting, “Vile creature that he was in many ways, George Fabyan really launched two or three things that were of vital importance to this country,” which was true. For all his malice and superstition, Fabyan threw enough money at actual scientists to accelerate the discovery of actual knowledge. He funded investigations of Nature with a fortune that other tycoons would have spent on yachts and jewels. He succeeded in creating the first real code-breaking institution in America, Riverbank Laboratories, an idea factory christened by wartime realities. It not only forged a new science of immense power; it also spawned a love affair that spread the science and ultimately sharpened it into an antifascist weapon. The modern-day universe of codes and ciphers began in a cottage on the prairie, with a pair of young lovers smiling at each other across a table and a rich man urging them to be spectacular.

  Until she s
tarted researching the book in 1946, Elizebeth always insisted that her life in secret writing was an accident, a series of unpredictable chases, mazes, escapes, and detective capers. Now, viewing her life from a distance, she understands there might be order in it after all, a taut line stretching back through the decades and terminating at that mad place on the prairie.

  To help herself write vividly about Riverbank, Elizebeth sits in the new house on Capitol Hill. She closes her eyes. She tries to imagine herself thirty years earlier, in the summer of 1916, a young woman at a rich man’s estate, unmarried and free, her whole life in front of her.

  A fragrance of overripe banana wafts up. William’s fruit flies in the windmill.

  The fire pit at night. The chemical reek of a mortar bursting near the ordnance lab. Fatty pork on her dinner plate from pigs slaughtered at Fabyan’s word.

  Silver blade of river, dome of prairie sky.

  She remembers riding bicycles with her friend William Friedman, rushing past lawns and flowers thickened with summer rain, a blur of green and pink. She remembers the low Illinois sun streaming through the windows of the Lodge as she works there with Mrs. Gallup, struggling to see what the older woman saw, squinting through a magnifying glass at a page of Shakespeare, trying and failing to free the imprisoned ghost of Francis Bacon.

  Mrs. Gallup and Fabyan keep telling her, try harder. The messages are there.

  And there comes a day when Elizebeth just thinks: no.

  There is nothing wrong with me. What’s wrong is with other people.