The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

  This is the moment that hurls her out to the rest of her life. The savaging of Nazis, the birth of a science: It begins on the day when a twenty-three-year-old American woman decides to trust her doubt and dig with her own mind.

  The room is dark but her pencil is sharp. An envelope of puzzles arrives from Washington, sent by men who have the largest of responsibilities and the tiniest of clues. With William she examines the puzzles. He is game, he looks at her with eyes like little bonfires, he is in love with her. She is not in love yet but she would not be ashamed to fall in love with such a bright and kind person. She stares at the odd blocks of text and starts to flip and stack and rearrange them on a scratch pad, a kindling of letters, a friction of alphabets hot to the touch, and then a flame catches and then catches again, until she understands that she can ignite whenever she wants, that a power is there for the taking, for her and for anyone, and nothing will ever be the same. The ribs of a pattern shine through. Something rises at the nib of her pencil and her heart whomps away. The skeletons of words leap out and make her jump.

  EPILOGUE

  Girl Cryptanalyst and All That

  The Friedmans in their home library, 1957.

  (George C. Marshall Research Foundation)

  The government came for their books on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday in 1958. Scattered clouds, cool midwinter sun. William and Elizebeth were inside their home on Capitol Hill and heard a knock on the front door. They opened it and saw at least three men from the government. Behind them, on the street, was a rented truck, as if the men planned to remove something large from the house.

  The Friedmans let them inside. One of the men, S. Wesley Reynolds, was the NSA’s director of security. A second man worked for Reynolds, and a third worked for the U.S. attorney general.

  The men asked to see the home library. The Friedmans brought them up to the second floor.

  Elizebeth was sixty-six now, William sixty-seven. His health was precarious but the men didn’t know that. They said they had orders to remove a list of books and documents that the NSA wished to reclassify according to a Defense Department order of July 8, 1957, Directive 5200.1, which declared that cryptologic documents previously marked “Restricted,” a low level of classification, were now upgraded to “Confidential,” a higher level. To the horror of the Friedmans, the men started to pull things off the shelves. They removed forty-eight items, including an entire personal safe full of William’s documents, several manuals he had written about cryptology, envelopes of his lecture cards and notes, and his own articles from every phase of his career, including Riverbank, forty years ago.

  According to a rumor that later spread through the agency, William “went berserk and he was throwing books around and saying, ‘Take this, take that.’ ” The junior NSA employee who went to the house denied this but admitted that both Friedmans appeared “obviously upset by the action being taken.” The NSA’s Reynolds wrote in a memo three days later, “Mr. Friedman voiced no objections to my taking this material, however, it was quite obvious that he felt deeply hurt and that the material was being taken for reasons other than Security. He stated that this material deals with the history of cryptography and should belong to the American people.”

  William didn’t understand why information about hand ciphers from the First World War needed to be seized. The ciphers were obsolete. Was it really necessary to seize papers from 1917 and 1918? To raid their home, their sanctuary, their archive of knowledge? He told a friend, “The NSA took away from me everything that some nitwit regarded as being of a classified nature.”

  As the men worked, carrying files out to the truck, Elizebeth looked on in silent rage, barely suppressing her tongue. She considered this a violation of their privacy and worried it was bad for William’s health, which had corroded in the thirteen years since the war, darkening with the mood of a city where counterintelligence had become an obsession. Soviet spies had stolen nuclear secrets from the Manhattan Project, and the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee went hunting for communist agents. “The mad march of red fascism is a cause for concern in America,” J. Edgar Hoover said to HUAC, promising that the bureau would attack and expose “the diabolic machinations of sinister figures.” Senator Joe McCarthy destroyed people’s careers with no evidence at all.

  William’s depression had returned in 1947. At first he complained to a doctor of “psychic giddiness” while walking and playing golf; the condition manifested itself as a tendency to walk to the left. The giddiness was followed by increasingly severe bouts of insomnia. Unable to sleep, on January 23, 1949, he checked himself into the psychiatric ward of the Veterans Administration hospital in Washington, where doctors placed William with a group of deeply psychotic patients. He hated it there. He went home and continued to deteriorate. By January 1950, William was unable to work or solve puzzles, his mind and muscles seeming to move at one-third or one-quarter speed, and suffering from acute despair. He had suicidal thoughts. His son found a rope and a noose at the house. A friend noticed a length of rope in the backseat of William’s car and asked about it. William replied in a joking tone, “I’m looking for a tree to hang myself.”

  Desperate for a solution, he sought out a new psychiatrist in March 1950, Dr. Zigmond Lebensohn of George Washington University Hospital, who was an early proponent of electroshock therapy. William agreed to try it. The first course of shocks began on March 31, 1950. The legendary William Friedman was repeatedly electrocuted while awake, possibly without muscle relaxants (they were not widely used at the time), a heavily padded tongue depressor placed in his mouth to prevent him from breaking his jaw by grinding his teeth when the seizure hit. After six courses of shocks, five to fifteen shocks per course, William was sent home on April 11, 1950. Lebensohn observed that the patient “was almost elated when he was discharged and in a characteristically effusive way he kissed the nurses goodbye in a rather avuncular fashion. About a month or so later I saw him and his wife at a Toscanini concert at Constitution Hall.”

  William’s illness took a toll on Elizebeth. Hair graying at the temples, perhaps shrunken by an inch (she considered herself five feet and two inches tall now instead of five three), she was 110 pounds and thinner than she’d been since she was a girl. In the polite phrasing of a girlfriend, “Anxiety kept her figure slim.” Retired from government and earning a tiny pension, she spent increasing amounts of time taking care of William. On mornings when he was depressed, she helped him get dressed, drove him to work, walked in with him, placed a pen in his hand, and moved his hand to get the pen moving. She answered his professional mail when he was incapacitated in mental wards. Somehow she still made time for friends and hobbies. She surprised her friends by getting serious about cooking, hosting dinner parties themed around the dishes of India, Mexico, Italy: “I found it an outlet for some hidden creative instincts perhaps.” She looked after her neighbors, once appearing on a sick neighbor’s doorstep with a tray of roast lamb, roast potatoes, gravy, and a yellow rosebud in a vase. She stayed active in the League of Women Voters, researching the legal status of women, international relations, finance, and the urgent need for D.C. statehood. “At the drop of a hat,” she wrote, “I will turn on a spigot labeled SUFFRAGE FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA!”

  It often seemed that she had forgotten her own career in codebreaking, that she was content to see her identity and history wash away. This wasn’t the case. In 1951 she received an invitation to speak about her life in codebreaking to a women’s social club in Chicago founded by the first female judge in Illinois. At first Elizebeth urged the group to reconsider: “That part of my life is over, my dear,” she wrote the chairwoman. “You are asking a Has-Been to speak! Your audience will feel cheated, I am sure.” But then she wrote a speech and traveled to Chicago with a suitcase full of lantern slides and at least fifteen mutilated sheets of paper, typed and cut with scissors and taped back together into a new order while she had agonized about what to say, and as soon as Eli
zebeth introduced herself to the women of the club, the beautiful hopeful postwar women of Chicago, they were hanging on her every word.

  Speaking in a pink ballroom at the Blackstone Hotel, where the women had gathered for a dinner-dance, Elizebeth made it clear she wasn’t free to talk about her life during the Second World War, but she was happy to share anything else, to answer any question at all. “Perhaps you may think that the expression ‘code and cipher expert’ describes a person who must live in a world apart,” she said, then explained why this is a misconception. Your child’s report card is a code. A is good, F is bad. It’s not a world apart. It’s just the world.

  Elizebeth showed slides of code messages from her famous cases. The I’m Alone. The heroin network of the Ezra twins, “SOLVED BY WOMAN.” The polite Canadian gangsters of the Consolidated Exporters Corporation. The women of Chicago kept her there, asking questions, transfixed, and afterward, Elizebeth received more speaking invitations, traveling to Detroit and giving her talk to a pair of neighborhood groups in private homes; one of the groups asked her questions for two and a half hours. They seemed to think that the story of Elizebeth Smith Friedman was one of the greatest they had ever heard.

  Every once in a while, the urge struck Elizebeth to write it all down in one place. She wondered if history would remember her. One winter she and William traveled to England and attended a luncheon at Cambridge with two of their colleagues from the war, including Elizebeth’s cheerful comrade, the astronomer Chubby Stratton. The men at the table got to talking about the war. “As befits a woman in the monastic traditions of Cambridge, I said little,” Elizebeth recalled later, “but my own recollections began to boil up from the cauldron of memories.”

  After the luncheon she took out a sheet of lined yellow paper, wrote “FOREWORD” at the top, then described her feelings after V-J Day in 1945, when she “folded my tent to steal away” from the coast guard after six years of “exciting, round-the-clock adventures as we counter-spied into the minds and activities of the agents attempting to spy into those of the United States.” She continued for seven pages, hinting at the dramas and capers of her war without going into specifics, the way an author does at the beginning of a book.

  If Elizebeth intended this to be her memoir of the Invisible War, she never wrote the rest. The seven handwritten pages and a typed version of the same are all that exist. She later tucked the typescript into a manila folder marked “foreword to uncompleted work.”

  President Truman established the National Security Agency on November 4, 1952, at the peak of McCarthy’s popularity and two and a half years after William’s shock treatments. The NSA fused the signals intelligence units of the army and navy into one organization, including the unit that William founded and nurtured between the wars.

  From the start the NSA was the most secret of agencies, basic facts of its existence concealed. William accepted a job there as a counselor and adviser, a role befitting a respected elder. But the agency had less and less use for him as it grew through the 1950s. It hired thousands of young linguists and cryptanalysts who were trained by the textbooks William wrote but who didn’t necessarily listen when he spoke. It broke ground on a new campus in Fort Meade, Maryland, where today at least twenty thousand people work inside two large cubes of eavesdropping-resistant blue-black glass, and invested heavily in computers for breaking codes. William thought computers were “mostly nonsensical and completely nitwit gadgets for daily affairs,” he wrote in a morose letter to the historian Roberta Wohlstetter. And as the NSA grew larger and stronger, it began to use that strength in ways that made William uncomfortable. It scooped up enormous quantities of signals seemingly because it could, towering haystacks of intelligence that would make it difficult to find the needles, and it continued to conceal and classify more and more kinds of documents that William thought should be publicly available. At other times in his life he had argued for greater secrecy, as when he objected to Herbert Yardley’s book in the 1930s; now he muttered darkly to friends about a “secrecy virus” loose in government.

  He suffered his first heart attack in April 1955, followed quickly by a second while in the hospital recovering from the first. That fall William retired from the NSA as a full-time employee. The agency gave him a nice ceremony and a consultant contract to keep him around; the director of the NSA at the time, Ralph Canine, admired William. Then a new director replaced Canine, a man with more inflexible views about secrecy and no personal fondness for the great codebreaker, and the agency raided the Friedmans’ home library, and William became depressed again. He wanted to criticize the agency in public, to sound the alarm about the secrecy virus, but feared the NSA would withdraw his security clearance, severing him from his community and many of his own writings.

  Whether or not the agency was specifically trying to humiliate him or just rigidly following regulations, William felt persecuted, and in his mentally delicate position, the ordeal was enough to push him to the edge. “Frightening to be alone [with] suicidal thoughts,” he scribbled on a loose sheet of paper. “For fifty years have struggled with this off and on. . . . Repression by secrecy restrictions—fear of punishment chimerical but still there.”

  As his disillusionment with the NSA intensified into full-blown paranoia, he reconsidered his long intent to donate his papers to the Library of Congress. He couldn’t bear to hand over the contents of his private library, his proudest possession, to the same government that had sent men to raid it. After some thought he decided instead to bestow his archive to the George C. Marshall Foundation, a private institution at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia. With Elizebeth’s help he began organizing and indexing his vast trove of treasures in preparation for transfer to the Marshall Library: thousands of books, papers, memos, photographs, prototype board games, and other cryptologic curios. For a brief time the project seemed to revive him. “I now have a great desire to live,” he wrote, “to bring the Marshall Foundation project to a completely satisfactory conclusion.” His body did not cooperate. He suffered more heart attacks. His feet swelled so much he could not climb the stairs at the Folger Shakespeare Library when he went to hear lectures. Elizebeth cared for him as always, taking notes on his condition in a daybook.

  MARCH 15, 1969: Bill had fall in night. Confused and loss of memory momentarily.

  JULY 20: MAN ON THE MOON. ES & WFF watched on CBS until 3 a.m. when Neil Armstrong and ‘Buzz’ had finished moon walk and return to the module.

  SEPTEMBER 24: WFF birthday. Asked for spare ribs!

  A few minutes after midnight on November 2, 1969, he had his last heart attack and stopped breathing. Elizebeth called the doctor. William could not be revived. The doctor stayed at the house until after 2 A.M. to comfort her while William’s body was taken away.

  Overwhelmed, she picked up the daybook, out of habit.

  My beloved died at 12:15.

  She started a brief letter to Barbara, who was traveling in Rome.

  Dear heart be courageous. Your beloved father died. . . .

  Rejoice that he suffered only a very short time.

  More than 750 letters and cards of sympathy arrived at the house over the next weeks. Joseph Mauborgne called William “the greatest brain of the century,” a man with an “ever shining place in history.” The novelist Herman Wouk wrote to Elizebeth, “His effect on world history was incalculable, greater than that of kings & captains. Yet what a modest man!” Juanita Morris Moody, a codebreaker who got her start at William’s Arlington Hall in 1943 and went on to supervise the NSA’s Soviet desk, told Elizebeth that her husband was the last of his kind: “Our business now involves many more people and disciplines,” Moody wrote. “It has become more abstract and impersonal. There are no more William Friedmans nor will there ever be.”

  Elizebeth received, from the Board of Management of the Cosmos Club, the men-only social club in Washington to which William had belonged, a “Woman’s Privilege Card,” granting access to the clu
b’s facilities for a period of two years.

  She designed his tombstone.

  WILLIAM F. FRIEDMAN

  LIEUTENANT COLONEL

  UNITED STATES ARMY

  1891 • • • 1969

  KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

  Elizebeth decided to embed a secret message in the stone, in Bacon’s cipher, in the letters of Bacon’s quote. She specified that certain letters be carved with serifs and the rest without. The serifs were the a-form, sans-serifs the b-form:

  KnOwl / edGeI / spOwE

  (a- & b-forms shown as lower & upper case)

  babaa / aabab / aabab

  W / F / F

  WFF: her husband’s initials. It was a signature in cipher.

  The army buried William with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery, the casket draped with a flag and carried by six black horses along the winding roads of the cemetery to the grave, accompanied by drummers. People from every branch of the military attended the funeral, and so did the antiwar U.S. senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy. Elizebeth and the children were amazed to see him. The kids had worked on his 1968 presidential campaign. It turned out that McCarthy had worked as a codebreaker at Arlington Hall in 1944 under William’s command. The family had had no idea.

  After the funeral John Ramsay sent an emotional thank-you letter to McCarthy. “Your presence there seemed to make the idea of a military funeral a little more bearable for all of us. . . . I thought you might like to know that my father was a gentle and peaceful man who detested killing and war, secrecy, spying and all the things you and I hate. But he had a mad love affair with the world of secret writing to which he devoted his life and for which he felt many deep pangs of guilt. In spite of all his honors, he was not a happy man.”

  Elizebeth became William’s avenger. Bitter about his treatment over the years by the army and the NSA, and worried that his contributions would be forgotten or erased, she set out to make sure that William received the credit he deserved. She took on this burden at the expense of curating her own legacy, which her grief and her anger now made a secondary concern.