The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

  Immediately after his funeral, in the now-empty house, she sat at William’s own desk, the one with the 1918 KNOWLEDGE IS POWER photo under the glass, and worked to complete the annotated bibliography of his papers. The task occupied her for eight to ten hours a day. She mourned her husband while writing crisp descriptions of his articles and books on index cards. She did it out of a sense of duty to William, who would have wanted the project completed, and she also hoped that the collection, once open to the public, would entice a first-rate historian to write a biography of William, a book to cement his reputation.

  The Marshall Library paid for a typist to help her one to two days a week and it still took months to finish the 3,002 cards for the 3,002 unique items in William’s collection. Then she arranged to transport all of the material from Washington to the library, three hours south. Men came to the house one day in 1971 and loaded the boxes into trucks, along with William’s desk. She told friends it felt like watching Bill die all over again. She followed the trucks on the highway in her beat-up, ten-year-old Plymouth, engine wheezing all the way to Lexington: “I guess I’m just a little old lady standing in the center of ruin and decay.”

  At the Marshall Library she worked six-hour days to manage the details of the transfer, making sure the papers were handled just so, out of love and respect for Bill. The archivists were thrilled to have her guidance (she “was entertained like a queen,” she said) and got her on tape speaking about the donated materials, the Friedmans’ life together, and Elizebeth’s own career. And though she kept the focus on Bill, she also told stories about herself and donated thousands of her own personal papers to the Marshall, separate from her husband’s collection. Elizebeth’s papers included documents she had preserved from the smuggling era of the 1920s and ’30s, personal letters, her unfinished book manuscripts, diaries, and a lot more, but she had not indexed and annotated the collection like she did with William’s. The archivists helped organize Elizebeth’s files into twenty-two archival boxes, reverently stored behind the metal doors of the vault on the first floor.

  In years that followed, researchers journeyed to the Marshall Library and used the Friedman files to write books that wouldn’t have been possible before. The author James Bamford relied partly on William’s collection to piece together his 1981 book, The Puzzle Palace, the first popular history of the NSA, whose publication the agency tried and failed to stop. The NSA sent representatives to the library twice, in 1979 and 1983, each time removing an unknown number of William’s items, but the Friedmans had done such a careful job of indexing that a sharp-eyed professor at Virginia Military Institute, Rose Mary Sheldon, noticed that about 200 of the 3,002 index cards were missing. Sheldon submitted a series of Freedom of Information Act requests that eventually prodded the NSA to release 7,000 additional Friedman documents. In the last two decades the agency has gotten more comfortable telling its history—today it holds public cryptologic history conferences and operates a museum—but it took a while, and in the meantime, the Friedmans had created this alternate archive, beyond U.S. government control, where anyone could learn about U.S. codebreaking.

  Even so, the attention of researchers fell lopsidedly on one Friedman and not the other. Elizebeth’s papers at the library, unindexed and therefore mysterious, largely gathered dust while people explored William’s. The world forgot about her and remembered him, which is what she had expected anyway. In 1975 the NSA informed Elizebeth that it planned to name the main auditorium at Fort Meade in William’s honor and asked her to inspect and approve a bronze bust of his head. She attended the dedication ceremony. The NSA men’s chorus sang “The Testament of Freedom.” The following year a biography of William was published, The Man Who Broke Purple, which Elizebeth felt was a competent account of her husband’s professional life but did not capture “the man I knew and loved.”

  She struggled in her final years as her savings dried up and her arteries hardened. She missed Bill so much. In her letters she sounded like a battle-hardened version of the girl who set Riverbank aflame, quick as ever but no longer joyful. “There is just one thing in this world I would now advise all unborn babies,” Elizebeth typed one morning in a long letter addressed to no one (“I just had to blow off some steam”). She continued, “Either be born Rich or BE BORN POOR. It is we in between who PAY-PAY-Pay-y-y-y.” She disliked the direction her field was taking, its increasing reliance on computers. She gave an interview to a Houston Chronicle reporter who found her “lounging in a turquoise silk robe from China, a gift from her husband in 1928.” She told him computers are a curse. “The problem with machines is that nobody ever gets the thrill of seeing a message come out.” She let her children know she wanted her body to be cremated when she died, with no funeral services. “In a few years there will be no place left on earth to bury any one, and before too long, I think, all cemeteries will have to be disposed of,” she wrote. “Why add one jot or tittle to the mess already in existence?”

  Elizebeth was eighty-eight when her arteries failed. She died on October 31, 1980, in a nursing home in Plainfield, New Jersey, four days before Americans elected Ronald Reagan to his first term as president.

  The public response to her death was more muted than it had been for William’s eleven years earlier. The Washington Post and New York Times printed respectful obituaries of Elizebeth. None of the obituarists mentioned her feats of codebreaking in World War II; almost certainly none of the writers were aware.

  At Arlington National Cemetery her ashes were scattered atop William’s grave and her name carved beneath his:

  BELOVED WIFE

  ELIZEBETH SMITH FRIEDMAN

  1892 • • • 1980

  For years, nothing much happened.

  It took a while for people to rediscover Elizebeth. Bit by bit, people went looking. Mostly women. They suspected there was more to her story than had been told, and they were right. A historian at the Department of Justice, Barbara Osteika, located records of Elizebeth’s old smuggling cases and came to see Elizebeth as a “beacon of hope” for women in federal law enforcement, a trailblazer. An FBI cryptanalyst, Jeanne Anderson, who solves the handwritten code and cipher notes of suspected criminals, found transcripts of Elizebeth’s trials from the 1930s and studied them for guidance on speaking to juries. And although Elizebeth had never worked there, she also won fans at the NSA, where female cryptanalysts rose to distinction after the war, including Juanita Morris Moody, who briefed U.S. leaders during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Ann Caracristi, who became the agency’s number-two official.

  In the 1990s the NSA renamed its auditorium. The William F. Friedman Memorial Auditorium is now the William F. Friedman and Elizebeth S. Friedman Memorial Auditorium. As of 2014 there is a second auditorium in the Washington area bearing her name, at a Justice Department building, thanks to a campaign launched by Barbara Osteika. Above the doors it reads, ELIZEBETH SMITH FRIEDMAN, PIONEER OF INTELLIGENCE-LED POLICING.

  These things happened for two reasons: because women went looking for Elizebeth’s ghost, and because her ghost was making noise in the archives. She was there inside the Marshall Library, rattling the doors of the vault, and she was in the “government tombs,” the National Archives, where her records from the Invisible War were finally declassified. The ghost also cried out from unexpected places. Three of the index cards in William’s collection contain brief, verifiably true comments about how J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI took credit for feats of spycatching actually performed by Elizebeth and the coast guard. These comments were obviously written by Elizebeth—William wasn’t in a position to know. Each card is a knife slipped between the ribs of Hoover, Elizebeth’s patient revenge.

  She intended to use all of these archives to write her own story. She never got around to it. Maybe she lost hope. But the files are exactly where she left them, the fragments of an extraordinary life. The files have a weight to them, a texture. They can’t be erased any more than Elizebeth’s legacy can be erased, becaus
e her legacy is embedded in our lives today, in our smartphones and Web browsers, in the science that powers secure-messaging apps used by billions, in the clandestine procedures of corporations and intelligence agencies and in the mundane software loaded onto the iPhones in our pockets.

  Secret communication is still a dance of codemakers and codebreakers, locks and lockpickers. The locks are different now, of course. With computation as an aid, everything has been massively sped up and mathematized beyond anything Elizebeth would have comfortably understood. But the game is still based in patterns. Someone designs a pattern that looks like mere clutter, and someone else tries to rearrange the clutter into a picture. Over and over again, gazing at what seemed random in the world, Elizebeth found a tiny spot of sense, and then she stood on that spot and invented a system to transform the rest of the landscape all the way out to the horizon, and this is still the process today. Codebreaking is work and patience and method and mind. And Elizebeth had more of these qualities than perhaps anyone else in her time.

  She always remained a little sphinxy. Up to the end of her life she hesitated to blurt out all her secrets, to answer every question in movie detail, whether out of modesty, habit, fear of prosecution, or an appreciation for mystery.

  “There are plenty of mysteries that you can leave dangling,” she told the NSA’s Virginia Valaki during their discussion in 1976. “Enough to allure a reader, I’m sure.”

  “I’ve been trying to put together the pieces,” Valaki said. “We’ll never make the whole picture . . . at least we’ll get some of the perspective straightened out.”

  Valaki was one of Elizebeth’s descendants, part of the next generation of women codebreakers who prospered after the war. She first joined the agency in 1954 as a linguist and now edited the NSA technical journal Cryptolog.

  “Well, thanks again, Mrs. Friedman,” Valaki said.

  “Well, don’t thank me,” Elizebeth said. “It’s been interesting.”

  “Sometime I myself would love to do a profile on you,” Valaki added.

  “Oh!” Elizebeth said.

  “Girl cryptanalyst and all that. I would think it would be extremely interesting for people to read.”

  “What happened the other day?” Elizebeth said, asking the question to herself. She said she had been out in the city, walking on Capitol Hill, when she realized that a couple of young women nearby had seen her and were talking about her. Elizebeth recognized one of the women. They had crossed paths somewhere years earlier, in a professional capacity, and Elizebeth was tickled by the fact that these women considered her some kind of noteworthy figure. “Oh my!”

  Valaki shut off the recorder. She and Elizebeth spoke for an unknown amount of time, possibly about mutual acquaintances at intelligence agencies. Then the recorder started again, and before too long, the conversation wound to a close.

  They checked the time.

  “You mean to say it’s only five minutes after one?” Elizebeth said.

  “My heavens!” Valaki said.

  It had been so long since Elizebeth had talked about her life smashing codes that a simple conversation felt like an opera.

  “I’ll bet no two women ever said as many words in [so] short a time,” Elizebeth said.

  The transcript notes that the women laughed.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe a lot to the people who shaped this book:

  My editor, Julia Cheiffetz at Dey Street. Julia’s passion for Elizebeth’s story was always there, even when I didn’t exactly know how to tell it, and our conversations enriched the book immeasurably. I’m grateful for her sharp eye, her instincts, and her belief. Thanks also to Sean Newcott, Lynn Grady, and the rest of the team at Dey Street: Tom Pitoniak, Kendra Newton, Heidi Richter, Dale Rohrbaugh, Paula Szafranski, and Owen Corrigan.

  My agent, Larry Weissman. I am so glad to have the benefit of Larry’s counsel and his sensibility for narrative nonfiction. I feel the same about his unflappable partner, Sascha Alper. I can’t imagine writing books without their guidance and friendship.

  Librarians and archivists: This book would not exist without the archivists who preserved, indexed, and annotated the Friedmans’ files with such care. Paul Barron and Jeffrey Kozak at the George C. Marshall Foundation are wonderful humans, and their library is just one of the great American places. I was amazed by Rose Mary Sheldon, the Virginia Military Institute classics professor who spent years assembling her epic “The Friedman Collection: An Analytical Guide.” She did it as a labor of love—didn’t earn a cent—and was generous with her time and wisdom. The NSA historian Betsy Rohaly Smoot and NSA librarian Rene Stein shared expertise and files with me. Hannah Walters at the Fabyan Villa Museum showed me around what remains of George Fabyan’s Riverbank and answered numerous questions about Riverbank in its prime. Thanks also to Thomas Larson at the New York Public Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division; Jessica Strube at the Geneva History Museum; JoEllen Dickie at the Newberry Library; and the staff of the National Archives at College Park, Maryland.

  Kari Walgran has been a friend and sounding board for years. Some of my favorite parts of the book grew from her questions and comments on drafts. Malcolm Burnley and Kirsten Hancock were capable research assistants who found and flagged important files. Phil Tomaselli turned up materials about the Nazi spy hunts in the UK National Archives in Kew. Eduardo Geraque in São Paulo sent documents from police archives there. Linda D. Ostman is a hero for discovering the transcript of the 1933 Consolidated Exporters case in a Texas court repository. I also appreciate research performed by Beth Robertson and Lisette Lacroix in Canada.

  Thank you to the American women who spoke to me about their cryptologic experiences in World War II: Judy Parsons, Martha Waller, Pat Leopold, and Helen Nibouar.

  I appreciate the historians, cryptologic obsessives, and technology enthusiasts who shared their time and wisdom. Philip Marks, the British expert in machine ciphers, was extremely patient in explaining Enigma systems and reviewing technical passages. Craig Bauer’s engaging books about cryptology helped me navigate the subject, and conversations with Craig were always clarifying. The historian Richard McGaha helped me chart a path through the crazy waters of espionage and counterespionage in Argentina. The renegade Canadian author John Bryden pointed me toward the coast guard’s clandestine decrypts in the National Archives. Jason Vanderhill in Vancouver knows everything there is to know about Canadian rum syndicates. James Somers is the kind of friend you want to have if you’re writing about technology, a terrific writer who is also a programmer. I enjoyed meeting and talking with Barbara Osteika at ATF, a relentless researcher, and William Sherman, the Renaissance scholar who told me about the Riverbank cipher collection at the New York Public Library. Any cryptologic or historical errors in the text are mine.

  Thank you to friends who provided advice, encouragement, leads, etc.: Carrie Frye, Sasha Issenberg, Eileen Clancy, Christi Bender, John Whittier-Ferguson, Nathalia Holt, Elonka Dunin, Josh Dean, Jason Leopold, Roy Kesey, Ann Daciuk, Sheila Liming, Puneet Batra, Chris McDougall, Stephen Rodrick, Steve Volk, Samantha Newell, Rob Morlino, Neel Master, Elon Green, and my excellent magazine colleagues—Greg Veis and Rachel Morris at the Huffington Post Highline, and Kristen Hinman and Michael Schaeffer at Washingtonian.

  I’m indebted to the University of Michigan and the Knight-Wallace Fellowship program for inviting me and my family to Ann Arbor in 2014 and 2015. In a lot of ways, this book is a direct result of the rare alchemy of that program. Thank you so, so much to Charles and Julia Eisendrath for one of the best years of my life, Birgit Rieck and the fellow fellows, John DeCicco, and Carl Simon and the Center for the Study of Complex Systems. And I will always be grateful to Matthew Power for encouraging me to apply in the first place.

  Thank you to Duchess Goldblatt for allowing me to borrow one of her lovely sentences.

  Finally, thank you to my family: Frank, Sharyn, and Lauren Fagone; Gloria Jewell; Lynn and Rich Bauer; and the Howel
l clan. Most of all, thank you to the bright, adventurous women in my life, Dana Bauer, and our daughter, Mia Fagone. Dana and Mia inspired the book and kept telling me they wanted to read it. To the two of you:

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  NOTES

  The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was made. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature on your eBook reader.

  ABBREVIATIONS

  ESF

  Elizebeth Smith Friedman

  WFF

  William Frederick Friedman

  ESF COLLECTION

  Elizebeth S. Friedman Collection, George C. Marshall Research Foundation (Lexington, Virginia)

  WFF COLLECTION

  William F. Friedman Collection, Marshall Foundation

  NARA

  U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (Washington)