You may have heard the name William Friedman, an expert cryptologist who broke codes for the U.S. Army during World Wars I and II. He even coined the term “cryptanalysis.”
Yet, few know about his wife, Elizebeth Friedman, who became recognized as America’s first female cryptanalyst.
Born in Huntington, Indiana, in 1892, she was the youngest of 10 children who had a passion for poetry. Elizebeth’s love of words is what led her to pursue education despite her father’s disapproval of women attending college.
She was so intent on learning, in fact, that she eventually agreed to borrow tuition money from her father at a 6% interest rate.
Elizebeth first graduated from Hillsdale College in Michigan as an English literature major in 1915 before working as a teacher at a small Indiana school for one year.
Then, in 1916, she traveled to Chicago and started looking for a new position. Her search was unsuccessful, but before she left Chicago, she went to the Newberry Library.
One of Shakespeare’s first folios, printed in 1623, was there, and Elizebeth had always been interested in the English playwright and poet.
She ultimately asked the librarian if any literature or research jobs were available, and within mere minutes, she was put in touch with George Fabyan.
George ran Riverbank, a 500-acre private research facility in Geneva, Illinois, and needed a research assistant for a scholar, Elizabeth Wells Gallup, who was attempting to prove that Sir Francis Bacon had actually penned Shakespeare’s plays.
NSA – pictured above is Elizebeth
Elizebeth traveled to Riverbank for an interview and was hired for the role in days. This position ultimately changed the trajectory of her life.
She worked with ciphers and used a magnifying glass to spot differences between fonts. At the time, the Riverbank estate was also like its own “think tank,” filled with scientists and academics. That’s precisely how Elizebeth came to know her future husband, William Friedman.
William was a geneticist who studied at Cornell and was brought onto the Shakespeare project. The pair ended up falling in love and tying the knot in Chicago in May 1917, only one month after the United States entered World War I.
Elizebeth and William went on to work in tandem as they decrypted secret messages sent by the Navy.
Due to her expertise as a code-breaking expert, as well as her teaching experience, she also trained the first generation of military code breakers.
“So little was known in this country of codes and ciphers when the United States entered World War I, that we ourselves had to be the learners, the workers, and the teachers all at one and the same time,” Elizebeth later wrote in her memoir.
Following the end of World War I, the couple relocated to Washington, D.C., and Elizebeth relished her new city life. She visited the theater several times during her first week there.
She and William continued focusing on their military contract work full-time as well. However, Elizebeth earned a significantly smaller salary than her husband and left her position after one year.
She took a break to have her two children, yet in 1925, the U.S. Coast Guard specifically requested her help in cases related to the prohibition.
Alcohol was being illegally trafficked, which sparked a huge black market. Mobsters were bringing in supplies via the sea, and the Coast Guard couldn’t stop it alone.
Elizebeth successfully decrypted two years’ worth of messages sent by rumrunners. And once the million-dollar bootleg operation was busted, she became a star witness in the 1933 trial.
While in the courtroom, she was directly asked how she was able to decode a string of seemingly random letters into, “Anchored in the harbor, where and when are you sending fuel?”
This represented just one of the possibly thousands of messages that served as crucial evidence in the trial.
Elizebeth displayed her skill by asking the judge for a chalkboard. Then, she delivered a lecture about cipher charts, mono-alphabetic ciphers, and polysyllabic ciphers for the court.
Plus, she discussed how, for two years, she’d intercepted and deciphered radio broadcasts from four illegal distilleries in New Orleans.
Her lecture left a lasting impression, and in 1931, Elizebeth led the first official code-breaking unit created by the U.S. Coast Guard.
She was an essential witness in various cases, helping to convict some of the world’s most dangerous criminals, such as Al Capone.
Elizebeth’s life became more complicated by 1940. She was balancing the care of her children while working and caring for William, who’d reportedly had a nervous breakdown due to his own code-breaking work for the Army.
Still, her contributions weren’t finished. In 1941, following Pearl Harbor, Elizebeth’s unit shifted to Navy command.
She took on a secondary position as a Nazi spy hunter, monitoring communications between the German High Command and a Nazi spy ring in South America.
She discovered secret messages by SARGO, a spy’s codename, who was giving up Allied ships’ locations to German U-boat captains in the Atlantic.
In 1942, she even saved 8,000 men aboard the Queen Mary, the Allies’ biggest supply ship, after decoding more messages.
Elizebeth’s assistance allowed the U.S. to bust the spy ring and get rid of the Nazi threat in the Western Hemisphere.
Nonetheless, she was required to sign an oath of silence regarding all of her accomplishments during wartime. This led J. Edgar Hoover, who was the FBI Director at the time, to take credit for her work.
1945 marked the year her unit was disbanded, and she retired in 1946. But, over a decade later, Elizebeth finally published a book with William in 1957.
Their work, The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined, actually disproved the theory that Francis Bacon had written any of Shakespeare’s works.
William passed away in 1969, and Elizebeth spent a lot of time gathering his life’s work in cryptology. Finally, Elizebeth died herself on Halloween in 1980.
It wasn’t until 2008 that declassified documents revealed her significant World War II contributions in South America, in addition to the code-breaking work of other wartime women.
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