The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies

493 Pages·2016·2.82 MB·English

by  Jason Fagone

Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Contents
Author’s Note: Prying Eyes
Part I: Riverbank
Chapter 1: Fabyan
Chapter 2: Unbelievable, Yet It Was There
Chapter 3: Bacon’s Ghost
Chapter 4: He Who Fears Is Half Dead
Chapter 5: The Escape Plot
Part II: Target Practice
Part III: The Invisible War
Chapter 1: Grandmother Died
Chapter 2: Magic
Chapter 3: The Hauptsturmführer and the Funkmeister
Chapter 4: Circuit 3-N
Chapter 5: The Doll Lady
Chapter 6: Hitler’s Lair
Epilogue: Girl Cryptanalyst and All That
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher

(George C. Marshall Research Foundation)
EPIGRAPH
The king hath note of all that they intend,
By interception which they dream not of.
—SHAKESPEARE, HENRY V, 1599
Knowledge itself is power.
—FRANCIS BACON, SACRED MEDITATIONS, 1597
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Author’s Note: Prying Eyes
Part I: Riverbank
Chapter 1: Fabyan
Chapter 2: Unbelievable, Yet It Was There
Chapter 3: Bacon’s Ghost
Chapter 4: He Who Fears Is Half Dead
Chapter 5: The Escape Plot
Part II: Target Practice
Part III: The Invisible War
Chapter 1: Grandmother Died
Chapter 2: Magic
Chapter 3: The Hauptsturmführer and the Funkmeister
Chapter 4: Circuit 3-N
Chapter 5: The Doll Lady
Chapter 6: Hitler’s Lair
Epilogue: Girl Cryptanalyst and All That
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Prying Eyes
T
his is a love story.
In 1916, during the First World War, two young Americans met by chance on
a mysterious and now-forgotten estate near Chicago. At first they seemed to
have little in common. She was Elizebeth Smith, a Quaker schoolteacher who
found joy in poetry. He was William Friedman, a Jewish plant biologist from a
poor family. But they fell for each other. Within a year they were married. They
went on to change history together, in ways that still mark our lives today. They
taught themselves to be spies—of a new and vital kind.
What they learned to do, better than anyone in the world, was reveal the
written secrets of others. They were codebreakers, people who solve secret
messages without knowing the key. Puzzle solvers. In a time when there were
only a handful of experienced codebreakers in the entire country, the two lovers
became a sort of family codebreaking bureau, a husband-and-wife duo unlike
any that existed before or has since. Computers didn’t exist, so they used pencil,
paper, and their brains.
Over the course of thirty years, while raising two children, Elizebeth and
William Friedman unscrambled thousands of messages spanning two world
wars, prying loose secrets about smuggling networks, gangsters, organized
crime, foreign armies, and fascism. They also invented new techniques that
transformed the science of secret writing, known as cryptology. Today the
insights of this one couple lurk at the base of everything from huge government
agencies to the smallest fluctuations of our online lives. And the Friedmans did it
all despite having little to no training in mathematics. The basic unit of their life
was not the equation but the word. At heart they were people who loved words
—words kneaded and pulled and torn, words flipped and arranged in grids and
squares and strips and in lines marching down the pale sheet of scratch paper.
In the decades since the Second World War, the husband, William Friedman,
has become a revered figure to intelligence historians. He is called “the world’s
greatest cryptologist” by the eminent chronicler of secret writing David Kahn:
“Singlehandedly,” Kahn writes, “he made his country preeminent in his field.”
William Friedman is also widely considered to be the father of the National
Security Agency, the part of the U.S. government that intercepts foreign
communications and sifts them for information—“signals intelligence.” He
wrote the definitive textbooks that trained generations of NSA analysts who are
still working today. In 1975 the agency named its main auditorium after William
Friedman, at its headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, and a bronze bust of
William’s head still stands guard there, above a plaque that reads CRYPTOLOGIC
PIONEER AND INVENTOR, FOUNDER OF THE SCIENCE OF MODERN AMERICAN
CRYPTOLOGY.
Today Elizebeth isn’t nearly as famous, despite her talent and contributions.
Early on she worked side by side with William and collaborated on several of
their groundbreaking scientific papers; she was considered by some of their
friends to be the more brilliant of the pair; she ultimately carved out a
spectacular career of her own; and by 1945 the government considered both
Friedmans to be pioneers of their field. A then-secret document said of
Elizebeth, “She and her husband are among the founders of American military
cryptanalysis”—cryptanalysis is another word for codebreaking—and a federal
prosecutor told the FBI that “Mrs. Friedman and her husband . . . are recognized
as the leading authorities in the country.” Yet in the canonical books about
twentieth-century codebreaking, Elizebeth is treated as the dutiful, slightly
colorful wife of a great man, a digression from the main narrative, if not a
footnote. Her victories are all but forgotten.
I started reading about the Friedmans in 2014, after Edward Snowden shocked
the world by revealing that the NSA was gathering the phone records of millions
of ordinary Americans. Curious to know more about Elizebeth, I found a brief
bio on the website of a Virginia library, along with a set of pictures. There she
was, a petite woman in a white dress, standing on a patch of grass almost one
hundred years ago, skin porcelain, head cocked at the photographer, smiling and
squinting slightly in what must have been a blinding sun.
The library held the Friedmans’ personal papers. One morning I drove down
to Virginia and asked the chief archivist to show me what Elizebeth had left. In
the back of an office, he unlocked a solid gray metal door and an inner door of
silver metal bars, led me into a darkened, humidity-controlled vault, and pointed
to multiple shelves of gray archival boxes, twenty-two boxes in all. “We try to
tell people that Elizebeth’s stuff is amazing,” the archivist said, but usually
researchers want to see William’s papers.
You get these moments sometimes as a journalist, if you’re lucky. You hear a
voice that bursts from a body or a page with beauty or urgency or insight.
Elizebeth’s boxes contained hundreds of her letters. Love letters. Letters to her
kids written in code. Handwritten diaries. A partial, unpublished autobiography.
I’m not a mathematician, and I’ll never be an expert on codes and ciphers, but
Elizebeth’s descriptions of her work gave me a sense of what it must have felt
like to be her—the excitement of solving the kind of puzzle that could save a life
or nudge a war. She liked to say that codes are all around us: in children’s report
cards, in slang, in headlines and movies and songs. Codebreaking is about
noticing and manipulating patterns. Humans do this without thinking. We’re
wired to see patterns. Codebreakers train themselves to see more deeply.
As rich as Elizebeth’s papers were, they struck me as incomplete. The records
trailed off around 1940. What was she doing in the Second World War? No one
seemed to know.
It took me almost two years to find the answer. She spent the war catching
Nazi spies, among other little-known feats. Working with an elite codebreaking
unit that she founded in 1931 and collaborating closely with both British and
U.S. intelligence, Elizebeth became a secret detective, a Sherlock Holmes on the
trail of fascist agents infiltrating the Western Hemisphere. She tracked and
exposed them, smashing the spy rings, ruining Nazi dreams.
In a broader sense, she filled gaps in agencies that weren’t prepared for the
battle of wits that now faced them, a pattern that repeated throughout her entire
career. The FBI, the CIA, the NSA—to different degrees Elizebeth pressed her
thumb into the clay of all these agencies when the clay was still wet. She helped
to shape them and she battled them, too, a woman hammering herself into the
history of what we now call the “intelligence community.” But when powerful
men started telling the story, they left her out of it. In 1945, Elizebeth’s spy files
were stamped with classification tags and entombed in government archives, and
officials made her swear an oath of secrecy about her work in the war. So she
had to sit silent and watch others seize credit for her accomplishments,
particularly J. Edgar Hoover. A gifted salesman, Hoover successfully portrayed
the FBI as the major hero in the Nazi spy hunt. Public gratitude flowed to
Hoover, increasing his already considerable power, making him an American
icon, virtually untouchable until his death in 1972.
It’s not quite true that history is written by the winners. It’s written by the best
publicists on the winning team.
What follows is my attempt to put back together a puzzle that was fragmented
by secrecy, sexism, and time. I relied on the Friedmans’ letters and papers,
declassified U.S. and British government files, Freedom of Information Act
requests, and my own interviews. Anything between quotation marks in this
book is from a letter or other primary source document.
In these files I found a story of a true American adventure. A young woman
with no money or connections is hired during the First World War by a
millionaire to probe an odd theory about the works of Shakespeare. Through the
millionaire’s sleight of hand and the urgencies of war, this eccentric literary
project turns into a life-or-death hunt for actual enemy secrets, one that spawns a
completely new science of codebreaking. The woman goes on in the 1930s to
become one of the world’s most famous codebreakers, a front-page celebrity,
before the government recruits her for one of the most closely guarded missions
of the Second World War. And through it all she serves as muse and colleague to
her husband, a troubled genius who lays the foundation of modern surveillance.
All democracies ride the line between security and transparency, secrecy and
disclosure. What do people have a right to know? What must stay secret and
why? The Friedmans lived these tensions more deeply than most. Their journey
took them to great heights in the service of their country—and also to the depths
of paranoia, poverty, and madness.