by Jason Fagone
NYPL
Bacon Cipher Collection, New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division (New York)
NSA
William F. Friedman Collection, U.S. National Security Agency, 2015 release (nsa.gov)
TNA
The National Archives of the UK (Kew, United Kingdom)
AUTHOR’S NOTE
xii “the world’s greatest” David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet, rev. ed. (New York: Scribner, 1997), 21.
“Singlehandedly, he made” Ibid., 392.
“CRYPTOLOGIC PIONEER” Program for “Dedication Ceremony, William F. Friedman Memorial Auditorium,” May 21, 1975, box 14, file 12, ESF Collection.
“She and her husband” Memorandum from Chief of Communications to Chief (redacted), November 8, 1949, box 12, file 15, ESF Collection.
“Mrs. Friedman and her husband” U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, memorandum, Subject: Velvalee Dickinson, R. A. Newby to D. M. Ladd, March 14, 1944. Obtained under the Freedom of Information Act from FBI; received December 2015.
xiii “We try to tell people” Jeffrey Kozak (director of library and archives at the Marshall Foundation) in discussion with the author, January 2015.
xiv an elite codebreaking unit “History of USCG Unit #387,” Record Group 38, Crane Material, Inactive Stations, box 57, 5750/2, NARA. This is a 329-page technical history of ESF’s coast guard unit between 1940 and 1945, a thick bound volume written in 1945 or 1946. The unit had multiple names over its lifetime—the Coast Guard Cryptanalytic Unit, Coast Guard Unit #387, then OP- 20-GU, and later OP-G-70, after the unit was absorbed by the navy in 1941—but it’s all the same organization, founded by ESF in 1931 and evolving as it faced different challenges through the end of the war. Every page of the technical history is stamped TOP SECRET ULTRA, including the cover. No author is listed; it was probably written by ESF’s coast guard commander, Lieutenant Leonard T. Jones, in collaboration with her and other codebreakers on the team. It wasn’t declassified until 2000.
tracked and exposed them ESF and her coast guard team preserved the decrypts that they generated during the war—the typed sheets of solved messages. These are located in two places at NARA. An incomplete set of decrypts is in RG 38, Records of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, CNSG Library, boxes 77–81. The bulk of the decrypts are in RG 457, Messages of German Intelligence/Clandestine Agents, 1942–1945, subseries SRIC, boxes 1–5. More than any others, these are the records that made it possible to figure out what ESF really did in the war and why it mattered. It is not good etiquette to cry out in joy when you are researching in the National Archives, but I may have done that when I read the decrypts for the first time. I’m indebted to the Canadian historian John Bryden for flagging the importance of these documents in his excellent book Best-Kept Secret: Canadian Secret Intelligence in the Second World War (Toronto: Lester, 1993).
CHAPTER 1: FABYAN
3 a female representative Transcript of ESF interview with Virginia T. Valaki, November 11, 1976, transcribed January 10, 2012, NSA Center for Cryptologic History. Obtained under the Freedom of Information Act from NSA; received October 2015; originally requested by G. Stuart Smith. Valaki was a cryptolinguist for the NSA and retired in 1994 after a forty-year career; she died in 2015. See “Virginia T. Valaki,” obituary, New Haven Register, June 7, 2015, http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/nhregister/obituary.aspx?pid=175022791.
“Do you want a cigarette” Ibid., 1.
4 eighty-four years old ESF was born on August 26, 1892, in Huntington, Indiana. See Official Personnel Folder, box 7, folder 3.
“Nobody would believe it” ESF interview with Valaki, November 11, 1976, transcribed February 16, 2012, 10.
“I’d be grateful” ESF interview with Valaki, November 11, 1976, transcribed January 10, 2012, 1.
six slightly different answers ESF interview with Valaki, November 11, 1976, transcribed February 16, 2012, 6–13.
5 thought to tell the story Ibid., 6–7.
June 1916 Transcript of ESF interview with Forrest C. Pogue, May 16–17, 1973, box 16, folder 19, ESF Collection, 3.
a chauffeured limousine Ibid., 2.
five foot three ESF’s ration book from the Second World War lists her as five foot three and 120 pounds, and she writes elsewhere that she was a bit smaller as a young woman.
dark-brown curls and hazel eyes Though reporters sometimes called her eyes blue, and a 1930 oil painting of ESF shows her eyes to be a deep forest green, her children later insisted to a potential biographer of their mother that her eyes were really hazel. See Katie Letcher Lyle, “Divine Fire: Elizebeth Smith Friedman, Cryptanalyst,” unpublished manuscript, July 4, 1991, ESF Collection, two PDF files, 175.
crisp gray dress ESF interview with Pogue, 3.
6 more than a foot Richard Munson, George Fabyan: The Tycoon Who Broke Ciphers, Ended Wars, Manipulated Sound, Built a Levitation Machine, and Organized the Modern Research Center (North Charleston, SC: Porter Books, 2013), 3. Fabyan was six foot four, Elizebeth five three at most.
6 impression of a windmill ESF interview with Valaki, November 11, 1976, transcribed February 16, 2012, 8.
“Will you come to Riverbank” ESF interview with Pogue, 2.
“Oh, sir” Ibid.
“That’s all right” ESF interview with Valaki, November 11, 1976, transcribed February 16, 2012, 8.
lifting her by the arm Ibid.
meek because she was small ESF autobiography (unpublished manuscript), ESF Collection, PDF file, 2.
“odious name of Smith” ESF diary, April 22, 1913, box 21, folder 1, ESF Collection. She also wrote in this entry that she hated the name Smith because it seemed terribly unfair for a lover of words to be saddled with a name so lexically vanilla: “Call it vanity if you will—but how should you like to have a name for which you couldn’t have even the fun of looking up the etymology?”
“I feel like snipping” Ibid.
7 John Marion Smith “Geneaology from notes of ESF,” July 23, 1981, box 11, folder 21, ESF Collection.
served in local government “Addenda and Corrections to biographical data re Elizebeth Smith Friedman,” box 11, folder 21, ESF Collection.
“My Indiana family” Lyle, “Divine Fire,” 166.
Sopha Strock ESF Personal History Statement, box 11, folder 16, ESF Collection, 3.
grown up and scattered Ibid., 13.
“We call a lot of things luck” ESF diary, July 1, 1913.
“from her father” Mary Goldman to Vanessa Friedman, February 15, 1981, box 12, folder 14, ESF Collection.
8 seamstress for hire ESF diary, February 27, 1913.
underlining the pages ESF’s volume of Tennyson, box 22, ESF Collection.
Erasmus who “believed in one aristocracy” ESF, “The Need for Erasmianism,” box 12, folder 8, ESF Collection.
“I sit stunned” ESF, “After Senior Philosophy Course,” 1915, box 12, folder 9, ESF Collection.
9 “passed away” ESF diary, March 20, 1913.
“I have marvelous abilities” ESF diary, June 22, 1913.
“Very suggestive” ESF, “The Need for Erasmianism.”
“my musical heart was carried” ESF diary, July 14, 1913.
10 “it reveals the naked man-soul” Carleton Miller to ESF, July 22 [1915?], box 1, folder 44, ESF Collection.
10 “mental question mark” ESF diary, January 29, 1916.
substitute principal ESF interview with Valaki, November 11, 1976, transcribed February 16, 2012, 7.
a county high school It was the public high school in Wabash, Indiana. See “Education and Experience,” ESF Personnel Folder.
Almost 90 percent Hans Joerg-Tiede, University Reform: The Founding of the American Association of University Professors (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 14.
939 women National Center for Education Statistics, 120 Years of American Ed
ucation: A Statistical Portrait, ed. Thomas D. Snyder (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, 1993), 83.
62 women Ibid.
“little, elusive, buried splinter” ESF diary, October 10, 1914.
“I am never quite so gleeful” Ibid., July 2, 1913.
11 More than a thousand Official Report of the Proceedings of the Sixteenth Republican National Convention (New York: Tenny Press, 1916), 11–13.
rained most every day Associated Press, “Republican Conclave Depressed by Weather; Shows Little Enthusiasm,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 9, 1916.
the political delegates Ibid.
baseball parks I. E. Sanborn, “Rain Stops Cubs; Double Bill Today with Herzog’s Reds,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 21, 1916. See also James Crusinberry, “Sox Lose Chance to Rise by Rain in Mack Series,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 9, 1916.
12 died on a steamship Paul Finkelman, “Class and Culture in Late Nineteenth-Century Chicago: The Founding of the Newberry Library,” American Studies 16 (Spring 1975): 5–22.
had to be free to use Ibid.
wealthy Chicago businessmen Ibid.
13 dreamlike White City “World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893,” Chicago Architecture Foundation, http://www.architecture.org/architecture-chicago/visual-dictionary/entry/worlds-columbian-exposition-of-1893/.
a day of demonstrations “Under 10,000 Wheels,” Chicago Tribune, August 27, 1893.
twice as large The main building of the palace covered nine and a half acres and the U.S. Capitol building spreads across four acres. See Encyclopaedia Brittanica, New American Supplement to the New Werner Edition, s.v. “World’s Fairs”; and Architect of the Capitol, “About the U.S. Capitol Building,” https://www.aoc.gov/capitol-buildings/about-us-capitol-building.
one hundred thousand people “Under 10,000 Wheels.”
13 builders completed construction “History of the Newberry Library,” https://www.newberry.org/newberry-library-history-newberry-library.
“a select affair” Chicago Times, July 17, 1887, cited in Finkelman, “Class and Culture in Late Nineteenth-Century Chicago.”
five-story building Finkelman, “Class and Culture in Late Nineteenth-Century Chicago.”
fill out a slip Ibid.
14 hundreds of incunabula Ibid.
Arabic script “Frequently Asked Questions about Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife,” Newberry, https://www.newberry.org/time-traveler-s-wife. See also Lawrence S. Thompson, “Tanned Human Skin,” Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 34, no. 2 (1946): 93–102.
six thousand books Finkelman, “Class and Culture in Late Nineteenth-Century Chicago.”
a haul that included “Chicago Gets a Prize: Librarian Poole’s Report on the Probasco Collection,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 22, 1890.
Romanesque lobby Finkelman.
mounting exhibitions Jo Ellen Dickie (reference librarian, Newberry Library), e-mail message to the author, January 4, 2017.
13 inches tall and 8 inches wide The name of this particular Folio is “Winsor 17” and it now resides in the special collections department of the Bryn Mawr College library in Pennsylvania. Anthony James West, The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book, vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 233.
an engraving of a man The Bodleian First Folio: digital facsimile of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, Bodleian Arch. G c.7, http://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/.
The text said Ibid.
15 “that an archaeologist has” ESF autobiography, 1.
One of the librarians ESF interview with Valaki, November 11, 1976, transcribed February 16, 2012, 7.
Richmond, Indiana Ibid.
“something unusual” Ibid.
reminded her of Mr. Fabyan Ibid.
“young, personable” ESF autobiography, 1.
too startled Ibid.
“Shall I call him up?” ESF interview with Pogue, 2.
“Well, yes” Ibid.
be right over ESF interview with Valaki, November 11, 1976, transcribed February 16, 2012, 8.
16 any minute Ibid., 8. Elizebeth recalled that Fabyan arrived “before you could have hit a button.”
“This is Bert” Ibid. Bert is spelled “Burt” in the NSA transcript but his name was Bert Williams, according to John W. Kopec, The Sabines at Riverbank: Their Role in the Science of Architectural Acoustics (Woodbury, NY: Acoustical Society of America, 1997), 29.
Chicago & North Western ESF interview with Valaki, November 11, 1976, transcribed February 16, 2012, 8.
“Where am I” Ibid.
she remained still Ibid.
She smiled at him Ibid., 6.
17 within inches Ibid.
“WHAT IN HELL DO YOU KNOW” Ibid.
something stubborn Ibid., 9.
turned her head away Ibid., 6.
“That remains, sir” ESF interview with Pogue, 3.
most immoral remark ESF interview with Valaki, November 11, 1976, transcribed February 16, 2012, 9.
a great roaring laugh Ibid.
he began to talk of Shakespeare ESF autobiography, 2.
18 he believed what he was saying ESF eventually came to believe that Fabyan was deceptive in how he promoted his ideas but he did seem to earnestly believe them.
He said that a brilliant female scholar ESF autobiography, 2.
350-acre estate Munson, George Fabyan, 3.
Teddy Roosevelt, his personal friend Ibid., 13.
P. T. Barnum Ibid.
Famous actresses Ibid. The actresses included Mary Pickford, Billie Burke, and Lillie Langtry.
19 a second limousine ESF interview with Valaki, November 11, 1976, transcribed January 12, 2012, 6.
came to a stop ESF autobiography, 3; ESF interview with Pogue, 3.
a two-story farmhouse Ibid., 4; author’s visit to the Fabyan Villa Museum, Geneva, Illinois, March 19, 2015.
CHAPTER 2: UNBELIEVABLE, YET IT WAS THERE
21 A naked woman John W. Kopec, The Sabines at Riverbank: Their Role in the Science of Architectural Acoustics (Woodbury, NY: Acoustical Society of America, 1997), 36–37.
sign that read Fabyan Ibid.
22 satisfy his lust Ibid.
22 two white flashes Norman Klein, “Building Supermen at Fabyan’s Colony,” Chicago Daily News, April 22, 1921.
The electric trolley Richard Munson, George Fabyan: The Tycoon Who Broke Ciphers, Ended Wars, Manipulated Sound, Built a Levitation Machine, and Organized the Modern Research Center (North Charleston, SC: Porter Books, 2013), 48.
bombs exploding Kopec, The Sabines at Riverbank, 42.
warplanes buzzing Ibid.
“A Garden of Eden” Mme. X, “A Visit to a Garden of Eden on Fox River,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 2, 1921.
“Fabyan’s colony” Klein, “Building Supermen at Fabyan’s Colony.”
“a wonder-working laboratory” “A Wonder Working Laboratory Near Chicago,” Garard Review, November 1928, 1.
“one of the strangest” Klein, “Building Supermen at Fabyan’s Colony.”
23 “one of the greatest” “Varying the List of Clubs . . .” Cincinnati Star, December 21, 1923, Box 14, “The Ideal Scrap Book,” NYPL.
“one who has achieved” “Scientist Spends Millions in Experiments to Develop Flapper into Perfect Woman,” Evening Public Ledger (Philadelphia), July 18, 1922.
“the man of a thousand interests” “War on Debutante Slouch Is Started by Col. Fabyan,” July 5, 1922, Box 14, “The Ideal Scrap Book,” NYPL.
“the lord and master” Klein, “Building Supermen at Fabyan’s Colony.”
“Chicago inventor” “Flywheel Discs Cut Resistance,” Kansas City Journal, March 13, 1923.
multi-millionaire country gentleman “Fabyan Tries to Rear Perfect Flapper on Farm,” Chicago Herald Examiner, July 6, 1922.
“the seer” Leroy Hennessey, “Twas Bill! Nay, Bacon! But Now E’en Fabyan Knows Not
Who Did Shakespeare,” Chicago Evening American, January 1922, Box 14, “The Ideal Scrap Book,” NYPL.
“the caliph” “Col. George Fabyan Declares War on Profiteers,” Box 14, “The Ideal Scrap Book,” NYPL.
“Credible persons” Cinderella, “Chicagoan Wins Name at Sculpture,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 1, 1915. This seems to be a legend; staff at the Fabyan Villa Museum told me that Fabyan only rode in a zebra-drawn chariot once, not twice a day every day.
donations . . . board meetings Munson, George Fabyan, 4.
The black sheep Ibid., 20.
$3 million fortune Ibid., 10.
23 striped seersucker cloth Ibid., 22.
24 “Ripplette” Ripplette ad, Farmer’s Wife (St. Paul, Minnesota), January 1, 1927.
“I ain’t no angel” George Fabyan to WFF, June 10, 1926, WFF and George Fabyan Correspondence, Item 734, WFF Collection.
The steel magnates of Pittsburgh Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, who hated and trolled each other. Frick built his mansion one mile from Carnegie’s and vowed to make his rival’s home look “like a miner’s shack” in comparison. Christopher Gray, “Carnegie vs. Frick, Dueling Egoes on Fifth Avenue,” New York Times, April 2, 2000.
a 165-room castle “Other Features Around Hearst Castle,” California State Parks, http://hearstcastle.org/history-behind-hearst-castle/the-castle/.
“Some rich men” Klein, “Building Supermen at Fabyan’s Colony.”
Aspirin, vitamins Aspirin was discovered in 1897, vitamins in 1912, blood types in 1900; medical X-rays began in 1895.
Einstein’s theory He published his theory of general relativity in 1915. American Institute of Physics, “2015: The Centennial of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity,” https://www.aip.org/history-programs/einstein-centennial-2015.
swarm of bees “Col. Geo. Fabyan Soon to be a Miller De Luxe,” Chicago Herald, July 12, 1915, reprinted in Kopec, The Sabines at Riverbank, 30–32.
25 “Do you ever think” Klein, “Building Supermen at Fabyan’s Colony.”
“community of thinkers” Ibid.
an ultraquiet test chamber Kopec, The Sabines at Riverbank, 59–73.
the buzz of a stray mosquito “A Wonder Working Laboratory.”