The Woman Who Smashed Codes Read online

  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

  This 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 Wor
ld 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.

  Jason Fagone

  PHILADELPHIA

  Terminology: A Cheat Sheet

  You don’t need to know math to enjoy this book, just a bit of lingo.

  A code is a fixed relationship between one set of symbols or ideas and another. It can be a very ordinary and everyday thing. Slang is code, emoji are code. Think of Paul Revere hanging lamps in the Boston steeple to signal the route of the British invasion: one if by land, two if by sea. That’s a code.

  A cipher is a rule for altering the letters in a message. Usually it involves a one-to-one exchange: one letter gets replaced with one other letter, or a digit. For instance, if A=B, B=C, and so on, SMASH becomes TNBTI.

  A cryptogram is a catchall term for a string of garbled text, solution unknown. It can be generated by a code or a cipher.

  You can think of codes and ciphers as different sorts of locks that protect words, like a padlock protects money in a safe. In this analogy, the security professionals who make the locks and the keys are called cryptographers, and the thieves who try to pick the locks without having the keys are called either codebreakers or cryptanalysts, two terms that mean exactly the same thing.

  The broad science of codes and ciphers—making them, breaking them, studying them, writing about them—is cryptology.

  At different points in their careers, Elizebeth and William were asked to make codes, and they were good at this task, but their most significant feats involved codebreaking. They snuck into vaults of text, sometimes alone, sometimes together, feeling for the click of the bolt. Their lives became a series of increasingly spectacular and improbable heists. They used science to steal truth.

  PART I

  RIVERBANK

  1916–1920

  CHAPTER 1

  Fabyan

  Sixty years after she got her first job in codebreaking, when Elizebeth was an old woman, the National Security Agency sent a female representative to her apartment in Washington, D.C. The NSA woman had a tape recorder and a list of questions. Elizebeth suddenly craved a cigarette.

  It had been several days since she smoked.

  “Do you want a cigarette, by the way?” Elizebeth asked her guest, then realized she was all out.

  “No, do you smoke?”

  Elizebeth was embarrassed. “No, no!” Then she admitted that she did smoke and just didn’t want a cigarette badly enough to leave the apartment.

  The woman offered to go get some.

  Oh, don’t worry, Elizebeth said, the liquor store was two blocks away, it wasn’t worth the trouble.

  They started. The date was November 11, 1976, nine days after the election of Jimmy Carter. The wheels of the tape recorder spun. The agency was documenting Elizebeth’s responses for its classified history files. The interviewer, an NSA linguist named Virginia Valaki, wanted to know about certain events in the development of American codebreaking and intelligence, particularly in the early days, before the NSA and the CIA existed, and the FBI was a mere embryo—these mighty empires that grew to shocking size from nothing at all, like planets from grains of dust, and not so long ago.

  Elizebeth had never given an interview to the NSA. She had always been wary of the agency, for reasons the agency knew well—reasons woven into her story and into theirs. But the interviewer was kind and respectful, and Elizebeth was eighty-four years old, and what did anything matter anymore? So she got to talking.

  Her recall was impressive. Only one or two questions gave her trouble. Other things she remembered perfectly but couldn’t explain because the events remained mysterious in her own mind. “Nobody would believe it unless you had been there,” she said, and laughed.

  The interviewer returned again and again to the topic of Riverbank Laboratories, a bizarre institution now abandoned, a place that helped create the modern NSA but which the NSA knew little about. Elizebeth and her future husband, William Friedman, had lived there when they were young, between 1916 and 1920, when they discovered a series of techniques and patterns that changed cryptology forever. Valaki wanted to know: What in the world happened at Riverbank? And how did two know-nothings in their early twenties turn into the best codebreakers the United States had ever seen—seemingly overnight? “I’d be grateful for any information you can give on Riverbank,” Valaki said. “You see, I don’t know enough to . . . even to ask the first questions.”

  Over the course of several hours, Valaki kept pushing Elizebeth to peel back the layers of various Riverbank discoveries, to describe how the solution to puzzle A became new method B that pointed to the dawn of C, but Elizebeth lingered instead on descriptions of people and places. History had smoothed out all the weird edges. She figured she was the last person alive who might remember the crags of things, the moments of uncertainty and luck, the wild accelerations. The analyst asked about one particular scientific leap six different times; the old woman gave six slightly different answers, some meandering, some brief, including one that is written in the NSA transcript as “Hah! ((Laughs.))”

  Toward the end of the conversation, Elizebeth asked if she had thought to
tell the story of how she ended up at Riverbank in the first place, working for the man who built it, a man named George Fabyan. It was a story she had told a few times over the years, a memory outlined in black. Valaki said no, Elizebeth hadn’t already told this part. “Well, I better give you that,” Elizebeth said. “It’s not only very, very amusing, but it’s actually true syllable by syllable.”

  “Alright.”

  “You want me to do that now?” Elizebeth said.

  “Absolutely.”

  The first time she saw George Fabyan, in June 1916, he was climbing out of a chauffeured limousine in front of the Newberry Library in Chicago, a tall stout man being expelled from the vehicle like a clog from a pipe.

  She had gone to the library alone to look at a rare volume of Shakespeare and to ask if the librarians knew of any jobs in the literature or research fields. Within minutes, to her confusion and mystification, a limousine was pulling up to the curb.

  Elizebeth Smith was twenty-three years old, five foot three, and between 110 and 120 pounds, with short dark-brown curls and hazel eyes. Her clothes gave her away as a country girl on an adventure. She wore a crisp gray dress of ribbed fabric, its white cuffs and high pilgrim collar imparting a severe appearance to her small body as she stood in the lobby and watched Fabyan through the library’s glass front doors.

  He entered and stormed toward her, a huge man with blazing blue eyes. His clothes were more haggard than Elizebeth would have expected for a person of his apparent wealth. He wore an enormous and slightly tattered cutaway coat and striped trousers. His mustache and beard were iron gray, and his uncombed hair was the same shade. His breath shook the hairs of his beard.

  Fabyan approached. The height differential between them was more than a foot; he dwarfed her across every dimension. With an abrupt motion he stepped closer, frowning. She had the impression of a windmill or a pyramid being tipped down over her.

  “Will you come to Riverbank and spend the night with me?” Fabyan said.