Elizebeth Smith Friedman: The Codebreaker
The details of Elizebeth Smith Friedman’s remarkable career sound a bit outlandish when you list them all together:
cracked thousands of codes and ciphers during WWI
did the same in WWII, helping to foil Nazi spy rings and protect Allied supply ships
chief cryptanalyst for the US Navy and the US Coast Guard
co-developed, with her husband, many of the principles of modern cryptology
broke mobster codes used by rumrunners bringing illegal alcohol into the US during Prohibition
testified in court against Al Capone
debunked the claim that Francis Bacon had secretly written Shakespeare’s plays
J. Edgar Hoover took credit for her “uncovering a Nazi spy ring operating across South America in 1943”, knowing that her wartime work was classified and she couldn’t correct him
From an NSA press release in 2020:
She began solving these encrypted messages and providing the Coast Guard with vital intelligence that supported their efforts to interdict smuggling. She also trained a small team in cryptanalysis to expand the crime-fighting intelligence effort. Elizebeth and her assistant solved about 12,000 coded messages between the so-called rum runners and smugglers, which resulted in 650 criminal prosecutions. In addition to criminals violating the Prohibition laws, some of the messages Ms. Friedman solved also enabled the arrest and conviction of a number of narcotics smugglers.
She had a personal role in some of the prosecutions. She testified as an expert witness in 33 cases, and frequently became the subject of newspaper and magazine articles. For a time, she was one of the most famous women in the country.
From a 2022 piece in the US Naval Institute’s Naval History magazine:
The Zimmermann Telegram, sent in code, changed the trajectory of life for the Friedmans, who possessed skills suddenly extremely valuable to the U.S. government. The military was desperate for codebreakers, and radio and wireless technology was changing the nature of war. There were possibly three or four persons in the whole of the United States who could break codes, and Elizebeth and William were two of them. Elizebeth was the first to decode military messages intercepted from the Mexican Army, working by counting the frequency of letters.
The Friedmans began operating as a team, developing strategies as they went along. For the first eight months of the war, they and their small team conducted all codebreaking for every part of the U.S. government, developing broader methodologies still in use today. Neither was particularly good at mathematics, but they operated on an intuitive level to devise techniques to discern patterns. Most importantly, their methods were scientific, which is to say the results could be replicated.3 The Friedmans worked feverishly to solve messages as they poured in. They decrypted messages from Scotland Yard revealing an intricate separatist plot by Hindu activists living in New York to ship weapons to India with German help. William was summoned to testify about how he broke the codes, but before he could take the stand, an Indian man in the gallery shot one of the defendants.
While testifying against Al Capone’s liquor smuggling ring in New Orleans, Mrs. Friedman taught a lesson on the science of codebreaking and the use of mono-alphabetic ciphers right in the courtroom. Col. Amos Woodcock, director of the Bureau of Prohibition said that without the work of the cryptanalysis unit and the expert testimony of Mrs. Friedman, the case would not have been won.
Time magazine: How America’s ‘First Female Cryptanalyst’ Cracked the Code of Nazi Spies in World War II — and Never Lived to See the Credit:
But her biggest achievement was uncovering a Nazi spy ring operating across South America in 1943 — a feat that J. Edgar Hoover took full credit for on behalf of the FBI. Friedman, meanwhile, took her involvement to the grave.
From the National Women’s History Museum:
Smith met William Friedman, a geneticist at the estate. After spending time together, Smith brought William onto her team to help break the Shakespearean codes. They worked together to show there was no evidence that Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays, while growing closer professionally and romantically. The couple married in Chicago in May 1917, just after the United States entered World War I. Now using her married name, Smith Friedman worked with her husband at Riverbank to decrypt every single secret message sent to them by the Navy. Trailblazing her way through the field as an expert and teacher, Smith Friedman successfully trained the first generation of codebreakers for the military.
In 2017, Jason Fagone published a bestselling biography about Friedman, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies (AMZN). That book was the basis for an hour-long PBS/American Experience documentary called The Codebreaker, which is available for rent at Amazon or as a free bootleg on Dailymotion. Here’s the trailer:
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