The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted Ame
(if you google "Elizebeth Friedman", you will find much more information)
The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies
This Woman Saved the Americas From the Nazis
Pioneering codebreaker Elizebeth Friedman, a poet and mother of two, smashed spy rings by solving secret messages.
Elizebeth Friedman, here with her husband William, learned to crack codes when she took a job with an eccentric millionaire who was obsessed with Shakespeare.
Photograph Courtesy of the George C. Marshall Foundation, Lexington, Virginia.
By Simon Worrall
British codebreaker Alan Turing had a movie, The Imitation Game, made out of his life—and Benedict Cumberbatch to play him. The great American codebreaker Elizebeth Friedman hasn’t been so lucky. Although she put gangsters behind bars and smashed Nazi spy rings in South America, Friedman’s name has been forgotten. Her work remained classified for decades, and others took credit for her achievements. (Find out what secret weapon Britain used against the Nazis.) Jason Fagone rescues this extraordinary woman’s life and work from oblivion in his new book, The Woman Who Smashed Codes. When National Geographic caught up with Fagone by phone, he explained how Friedman, like Alan Turing, broke the Enigma codes to expose a notorious Nazi spy, how J. Edgar Hoover rewrote history to sideline her achievements, and how the cryptology methods that she and her husband, William Friedman, developed became the foundation for the work of the National Security Agency (NSA). (Go inside the daring mission that stopped a Nazi atomic bomb.)
Elizebeth Friedman is probably not a name familiar to most of our readers. Introduce us to this remarkable woman—and explain what drew you to her.
Well, it’s an amazing American story. A hundred years ago, a young woman in her early twenties became one of the greatest codebreakers America had ever seen. She taught herself how to solve secret messages without knowing the key. That’s codebreaking. And she started from absolutely nothing.She wasn't a mathematician. She was a poet. But she turned out to be a genius at solving these very difficult puzzles, and her solutions changed the 20th century. She caught gangsters and organized-crime kingpins during Prohibition. She hunted Nazi spies during World War II. She also helped to invent the modern science of secret writing—cryptology—that lies at the base of everything from government institutions like the NSA to the fluctuations of our daily online lives. Not bad for a Quaker girl from a small Indiana town! [Laughs]
We first meet Elizebeth at a mansion named Riverbank near Chicago that belonged to a notorious millionaire named George Fabyan. Paint a picture of this larger-than-life man—and explain his obsession with Shakespeare. Fabyan was a lot like William Randolph Hearst or Andrew Carnegie—one of these incredibly wealthy Gilded Age multimillionaires who’d made his fortune in the textiles industry. Unlike a lot of other Gilded Age rich men, Fabyan didn’t go for lavish vacations on the French Riviera or collect art. He dreamed of discovering the secrets of nature. Although he was a high school drop-out, he saw himself as a great sponsor of science, somebody who used his fortune to bring together some of America’s finest scientists and give them carte blanche to discover the secrets of the world.
. . . .
After she left Riverbank in 1921, she moved to Washington and was soon recruited by the U.S. Treasury Department to fight illegal liquor smuggling that had grown because of Prohibition. Rumrunners used ships that could outrun the Coast Guard vessels to smuggle rum into the U.S. The Coast Guard was unable to stop them because the rumrunners got good at concealing their operations using coded radio messages. Thousands of these messages were piling up in the Coast Guard offices so they approached Elizebeth Friedman to get help reading them. Between 1926-1930, she solved 20,000 smuggling messages per year in hundreds of different code systems. She did it all by hand with pencil and paper, before the era of computers. It was analog heroism.
Toward the end of the 1920s, she also began to testify in court against some of the biggest gangsters of the day. These criminal cases required her to explain to juries how she had solved these secret messages. She would go into court carrying her handbag, wearing a pink dress and hat with flower pins, and would explain to a jury exactly how she had intercepted these radio messages and decoded them.
. . . . .
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/10/elizebeth-friedman-codebreaker-nazi-spy-fagone/
Nathalia Holt: What drew you to this story?
Jason Fagone: Well, it’s one of these amazing American origin stories. A hundred years ago, a young woman in her early twenties suddenly became one of the greatest codebreakers in the country. She taught herself how to solve secret messages without knowing the key. Even though she started out as a poet, not a mathematician, she turned out to be a genius at solving these very difficult puzzles, and her solutions ended up changing the 20th century. She helped us win the world wars. And she also shaped the intelligence community as we know it today.
NH: William Friedman has long been recognized as a pioneer of cryptology, so why have we never heard of Elizebeth before?
JF: Sexism and secrecy. A lot of the time she was omitted or even erased from the records by the men in her life. Sometimes they were men close to her, like her husband, William Friedman, who was also a champion codebreaker, and sometimes they were men in power, like J. Edgar Hoover. All through World War II she used her skills to hunt Nazi spies who were spreading into the West. She broke these Nazi spy codes for the FBI, which would have been lost without her—and then Hoover turned around and painted himself as the big hero. There was nothing she could do, because of secrecy rules.
NH: In the Author’s Note of your book you describe the excitement of discovering Elizebeth’s archives in a vault of a Virginia library. What was that moment like and what types of resources did you use to research this story?
JF: I’ll never forget that moment. Elizebeth donated 22 boxes of papers to the George C. Marshall Foundation in Lexington, Virginia. Since her death in 1980 those boxes have been carefully preserved at the Foundation’s library in a vault. Elizebeth left thousands of her personal letters, whole diaries full of poems, newspaper clippings of her famous rum cases, and original code worksheets. She kept everything that wasn’t classified. The only period of her life missing from the archive was 1939 through 1945—World War II. So I had to patch the gap. It took me more than two years to find the missing records, hunting through archives in the U.S. and the U.K.
NH: How can Elizebeth Smith Friedman’s story inspire young women today?
JF: I think a lot of professional women today can relate to her experiences. She did all this important work and got very little credit. But at the same time, because she was so good at her job, she had a lasting impact on the world. She blazed a trail in a lot of ways, and she did it in her own style. Once she wrote, “If I may capture a goodly number of your messages, even though I have never seen your code book, I may still read your thoughts.” That captures her personality: Do whatever you like, but I still have this mind, and you will have to reckon with it.
NH: This book is in many ways a love story. Can you tell us about the letters sent between Elizebeth and her husband?
JF: Elizebeth and William started writing to each other before they were romantically involved, when they were still only friends. They were these two young people who wanted to accomplish great things, to leave a mark. In 1918, when William joined the Army and sailed to France to serve as a codebreaker, he wrote Elizebeth these 20- and 30-page love letters by the light of an oil lamp, calling her 'Divine Fire.' He liked to include bits of code that he knew only Elizebeth would understand, and she replied in code, too. For the Friedmans it was a lovers’ shorthand, a way of staying connected. And later, when they had kids, they taught the kids how to do it, too.. . .
Anyone interested in the History of cryptography knows William F. Friedman, known as the man who broke Purple the Japanese cipher machine and many things. But who did know that his wife, née Elizebeth Smith, was his equal in cryptographic skills? She created a Coast Guard cryptographic team, broke an Enigma without any help from Bletchley Park, helped expose many Prohibition-era gangs and Nazi spy networks in South America during WWII and worked in tandem with William during WWI. She is as much part of cryptographic history as her husband is.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32025298-the-woman-who-smashed-codes
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