Codebreaker Elizebeth Friedman

Glen J. Carpenter speaks with Amy Butler Greenfield, author of The Woman All Spies Fear: Code Breaker Elizebeth Smith Friedman and Her Hidden Life, about one of the most remarkable intelligence figures of the 20th century. Their conversation examines Friedman’s path from Riverbank Laboratories to professional codebreaking; her work against rum runners, organized crime, and wartime espionage networks; her difficult relationship with the FBI; the partnership between Elizebeth and William Friedman; and the decision to place the Friedman papers at the George C. Marshall Foundation.

LINKS

The Woman All Spies Fear: Code Breaker Elizebeth Smith Friedman and Her Hidden Life

Age of Marshall is a podcast from the George C. Marshall Foundation exploring the people, events, and ideas that shaped Marshall’s world and the legacy of the soldier and statesman whose leadership helped define the 20th century.

Age of Marshall was established through the generosity of Jessine Monaghan, whose support made this series possible. The George C. Marshall Foundation presents this series in honor of her memory and her dedicated service as a Trustee.

Learn more about the George C. Marshall Foundation, its public programs, and its research library at MarshallFoundation.org.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Welcome to Age of Marshall from the George C. Marshall Foundation. I'm Glenn Carpenter. In this series, we explore the people, events, and ideas that shaped Marshall's world, and the legacy of the soldier and statesman whose leadership helped define the 20th century. Age of Marshall was established through the generosity of Jacine Monahan, whose support made this series possible. The George C. Marshall Foundation presents this series in honor of her memory and her dedicated service as a trustee. My guest today is Amy Butler Greenfield, author of the Woman All Spy Sphere, codebreaker Elizabeth Smith Friedman and Her Hidden Life. Her work has helped bring new attention to one of the most remarkable intelligence figures of the 20th century, and the subject of today's episode. Amy, welcome.

SPEAKER_01 0:50

Thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_00 0:52

Thank you. So can you tell us who is Elizabeth Smith Friedman and what first drew you to her story?

SPEAKER_01 0:58

Well, as you said, Elizabeth Smith Friedman was groundbreaking. She was a top American codebreaker in the 20th century. Her career spanned a number of decades. She started in even before World War I. She helped fight the mob with her codebreaking skills during the age of prohibition. She was important, played a critical role in counterintelligence in World War II. And she in the 1930s was one of the most famous codebreakers in the world, and certainly the most famous female codebreaker. I ran across her because I'm one of those readers who reads everything, including instruction manuals and the backs of cereal boxes. And when I was a kid, that meant I went up to the attic and there were boxes of old magazines there. There were readers' digests that went back to the 1930s. And in a 1937 edition, I ran across an article about Elizabeth Smith Friedman and her career up to that point, all her exploits. And I was hooked. I wanted to read more. So I went to the library and I looked in the kids section. There wasn't anything. I crept over to the grown-up section. There wasn't anything there either. And being a kid, I, you know, let it go. But years later, when I was old enough that I was having a child myself, I realized that there still weren't any books about her. That was true then. I worked on that. I researched and wrote. Now, in the past 10 years, there are about three biographies on her. There are just a wealth of materials. She was in the shadows for many, many decades. She was almost forgotten. So it's wonderful to see her coming out into the light.

SPEAKER_00 2:48

Absolutely. I started at the Marshall Foundation about 10 years ago at this point. And the Friedman room that we have here, which is all of her papers and the papers of her husband William, were were just mind-blowing. They they showed me that during my job interview, and it kind of sealed sealed the deal as this is the place for me, right? And seeing the revival of Elizabeth during that time with the documentary, with with the wonderful books, has been extraordinarily heartening because it was so obvious that this woman's story needed to be told because there is this wealth of uh of not just information, but just cool stuff available. So move moving on. Can you please uh describe the world she came from in Indiana and her early education?

SPEAKER_01 3:33

Well, she was a farmer's daughter. She was the youngest of nine surviving children. She was small and sickly. Um, not a lot was expected of her. She didn't get along very well with her father, who was, by the time she was born, was a fairly elderly Civil War veteran with a very sharp temper. But her mother was her champion. Her mother had been a schoolteacher, really valued education. I'm sure that's part of why Elizabeth ends up graduating from high school, which was not the common thing in those days. And then she has ambitions beyond that. She wants to go to college. Her father doesn't approve of this. He doesn't think women need that kind of education. Elizabeth applies to college anyway, hoping for scholarships. She just misses out on that. The only way she can go in the end is to get a loan from her father. And he finally does grant her that, but only at 6% interest. And Elizabeth never entirely forgave him for that. He really was not very supportive of what she wanted to do. However, she did end up getting a very good education. She had to scrimp and save in addition to that loan money and work odd jobs in order to get through. She didn't study codebreaking in particular. She didn't know codes and ciphers existed. There wasn't a course in it, but she studied languages. And so she had a very good training on Latin and German. You can see from her college diary how much she loves words. She's just playing with them all the time and all the synonyms and contrasts, and she's really thinking about words. You also see at that point that she she's taking coursework and the way that she's writing, logic and reasoning are very important to her. And she wants to get beyond the appearances of things to what things actually are the truth. And I think that was excellent preparation for someone who would end up as a co-breaker.

SPEAKER_00 5:37

So then how did she arrive at Riverbank Laboratories?

SPEAKER_01 5:41

Well, there weren't many jobs for women college graduates in 1915 when she came out. One of the only things you could be was a school teacher. She did that. She really hated it. She quits by the end of the year. She has to find something else. She's got to pay back that loan to her father. And she goes up to Chicago hoping in a big city she'll find a wider range of things. She pounds the pavement, gets nowhere, ends up at the Newberry Library, a rare books library, where she sees on display a copy of Shakespeare's first folio, which is the first printed edition of his plays. She gets to talking with the librarian who, hearing her story, says, I might have something for you, puts in a phone call. And then a few minutes later, this giant of a man comes rushing into the library up to them. He is George Fabian. He's a millionaire. And Elizabeth is only a little over five feet tall, and she's sort of swept up in what she thinks of as this giant windmill of a man. And he whisks her down to a waiting limousine. They go on the train. They end up at Riverbank. And Riverbank is Fabian's private estate. It's a think tank. It's kind of bizarre experimental laboratory that has Japanese gardens and it's got a windmill, and it has its sound recording studio. It's got its own zoo. It's a very strange place. It also has a literary project about Shakespeare. There's a woman there, Elizabeth Gallup, who says that she can read secret messages in Shakespeare's first folio, that there's a code there. And Elizabeth is being hired to help her.

SPEAKER_00 7:31

Thank you. What do you think her work on the Bacon Shakespeare question shows about the way she thought and kind of about her standards of evidence and argument? Um, I bring that up because if if you read the interviews with her that that were recorded much later in her life, she doesn't seem very impressed with Riverbank as an organization or some of the people there, not naming names, but but I do urge everybody to take a look through them because they're a scream. So, dude, do you mind talking a little bit about that Bacon Shakespeare question?

SPEAKER_01 8:01

Yes, Elizabeth goes into it just open-mindedly. She's very diligent, she's good at studying things, and she loves learning things. So she likes learning about codes and ciphers and how they work, and learning about Sir Francis Bacon and this cipher that he had, and how you could apply it to Shakespeare's first folio. But that's where things start to fall apart because she sees the way Mrs. Gallup, the leader of the project and others are applying it. And essentially they're saying there are two different fonts in this, and this letter belongs in font A or this letter belongs in font B. And she's saying the way they're classifying this makes no sense. They're just sort of saying this is A or B, depending on what works for them, not on any real clear proof and evidence and careful scientific study of this. She is somebody who likes to think for herself. She says her mother is the one who taught her to go her own way. And so instead of just saying, okay, I'll do whatever you tell me, she keeps trying. She wants to make it work, but she begins to doubt that there really is a system here. The person she confides in is a young man a year older than she is, William Friedman, who is the director of genetics at River Bank, but has been roped into this project. And he too is really thinking the whole thing is just a lot of imagination being poured into this book and they confide in each other what their doubts are. They have a similar turn of mind. They both really believe in evidence. They want to uncover the truth of things. They don't want to be told a story. They want to see it for themselves. Don't just tell me, show me how it works. And so they keep pushing at this until they conclude that the whole project is bunk. And they tell George Fabian this, and he is not pleased.

SPEAKER_00 9:58

How does she move from this kind of fanciful riverbank world into the very practical business of code-breaking in Washington? And can you talk about what that shift was like for Elizabeth personally? What was going on in her life as a woman and a new mother?

SPEAKER_01 10:14

Well, for Elizabeth and for William Friedman as well, the pivot point is World War II. What happens after they essentially denounce the Shakespeare Project is Fabian is angry with them. But then he's always thinking about how he can use people. So he quickly forms a Department of Ciphers. He puts the two of them in charge of it. And then he offers their services to the United States government. The United States is just entering into World War I and it has very few codebreakers. And so the Army is the first one to take them on. They need their services. Sacks and sacks of messages start arriving on the railways down to riverbank. There are other things coming on the telegraph lines. They end up decrypting things for not just the Army, but the Navy, the State Department, the Justice Department, the Post Office. They're leading a small group of codebreakers. And for the first nine months of America's involvement in the war, they are the chief domestic codebreaking agency for the United States. During this time, William had already fallen for Elizabeth. Elizabeth agrees to marry him. So they are a married couple who are working on this. So they're working out their marriage. They fall deeply, deeply in love with each other. And at the same time, they're trying to work out the rules of code breaking and having these thousands of messages coming in really helps them start to understand things that people haven't understood before about it. They're working and they're learning. And people said that they just kind of ate and breathed codebreaking. So that really changed things for them. That made them into professional codebreakers. What happens after that? In 1918, William goes to the front in France. Elizabeth can't. The codebreaking operation at Riverbank is falling apart for complicated reasons. She decides not to stay. She doesn't want to work on that Shakespeare project. She goes home. She looks after her father, who is in need of real care. She's grabbing floors, she's cooking. She is not codebreaking. And by the time William comes back in 1919, he is at the forefront of cryptology. He is about to publish a paper that will set cryptology on a new foundation. He is really at the apex of developments. And she felt very small. She said what she felt like was a champion swimmer who'd been surrounded in the Sahara. She also said that she thought it would be impossible to ever catch up with her husband. I mean, most people thought it would be impossible to catch up with him. He had great faith in her, though. He believed in her brilliance. And when the War Department comes and offers him a job, he's somebody they need to have on their team, he says there needs to be a job for Elizabeth too. And not just, you know, oh, you can hire her as my assistant. She needs a job offer in her own name because she's a codebreaker too, and she's going to be doing work in Washington with me. So that's how they get to Washington.

SPEAKER_00 13:33

During Prohibition, as you mentioned in your introduction, she's becoming involved with, you know, gangsters, rum runners, smugglers. Can you talk about what that work looks like on her side?

SPEAKER_01 13:44

Yeah, she ends up working for the Coast Guard after a very turbulent period. And she ends up in and out of coat breaking, partly because she has very rough pregnancies. She's ill for protracted amounts of time. She also is interested in writing books, but she gets pulled back in in the mid-1920s into breaking codes for the Coast Guard, which is fighting against organized crime, which is she's running all that rum to the shore. The way that her work proceeds, it's very unusual. She is mostly working for home. She has two young children. She wants to be based there. She may be one of the government's first kind of work-from-home employees. And she takes messages back with her and other information, other material she can feed into breaking those and goes periodically back and forth to the city to pick up more material, bring back what she's broken. She's working on radio transmissions. That was what the rum running was about. There would be giant ships out to sea, like liquor warehouses floating out in the ocean. And then there were smaller vessels that would ferry it to shore. And all of this was coordinated by gangsters, mobsters, you know, these top people in organized crime. And in order to communicate, they used radio and to make sure that no one could understand what they were saying, they encrypted those messages. And it was Elizabeth's job to break them. Between 1927 and 1930, she breaks an astounding 12,000 messages. Wow. And she says, I know, isn't that amazing? And then in 1930, a little later, she says that she's seen at least 50 different encryption systems. And it's changing all the time. That isn't the end of it. There will just be more and more because organized crime is essentially becoming organized crime because of the huge amount of money it's making from run-rounding. It can hire anyone that it wants. They're taking some of the top cryptologists in the world and they're putting them on the payroll. And so Elizabeth is the mind that is working against all this to try and break things, to try and find out where those cargers are coming, who is responsible, who are the shadowy forces behind this.

SPEAKER_00 16:13

So what does it mean for her to take the stand as an expert witness and explain her solutions to judges and juries?

SPEAKER_01 16:22

She is brought in as an expert witness because the government wants to prove conspiracy. It doesn't just want to get the small fry, it wants to get the kingpins. And the only way to show that the kingpins are involved is to show that chain of messages that goes back and forth, the ones that are in code, the ones that Elizabeth has decrypted. So she needs to go in front of these juries and explain how she did this. How it's not her imagination, as the defense is saying, she didn't imagine what these messages said. This is how go-breaking works. Here's what the science is, here's how I did it, is what she's saying. By going up on the witness stand, there are several more or less unforeseen consequences. One is there's enormous publicity. She is a small woman, and the newspaper reporters can't get over it that this little woman is the nemesis, one of them calls her, of the rum runners of organized crime. And Elizabeth finds that she wasn't averse to a bit of publicity. She had actually been interested in publishing some stories about her work and she enjoyed communicating with the public. But she finds reporters are constantly focused on her appearance. They want to write about her little brown hair and her heart-shaped face and what she was wearing. And they also make up facts. So that's hard. She doesn't like that at all. They also reveal a lot about her home life, who her children are, where she lives, what her husband does. And that also causes problems. And it causes problems in part because she is a witness against mobsters, against some of the most dangerous men in America. If they can take her out, then they may win more cases. They might not go to jail. They also might get more rummounding accomplished. There are lots of reasons to take her out. So all of this publicity does add to the danger. The government had a point where it gave her bodyguards, but that was only for a short while during the case itself. Most of the time she's traveling on her own, doing this very dangerous work by herself. She was very fatalistic about this. She was like, if my number comes up, it comes up, and until then I won't worry. But her family worried, her husband worried, and especially her young daughter worried a lot about whether her mom was safe.

SPEAKER_00 18:55

Turning to the Second World War, how does her Coast Guard unit become involved in kind of German espionage networks in Latin America? And where does Operation Bolivar sit within that story?

SPEAKER_01 19:06

Well, in about the time of Pearl Harbor, the Coast Guard comes under the control of the Navy. And that includes Elizabeth's unit. By then, she's trained a few code breakers to work under her. But they are now put in charge underneath a male officer because that's how the Navy rolls. Women are not in charge of their own unit. She doesn't have much control over what they do. The whole unit is put onto counterintelligence duties, or as she called it, the spy stuff. What she is doing is spying on spies. And the main spies she's spying on are the ones in Latin America. The Nazis have realized that Latin America is hugely important to them. It's a source of resources. Lots of information circulates about the war effort in the United States. There's also the shipping that is constantly going back and forth. And that is useful for the U-boats, the German submarines to take it down. So there are a lot of spies, access spies working in South America. It's Elizabeth's job to try and sell their coded messages that again are picked up by radio. And she and her unit are terrific at this. Their specialty is hand ciphers, which is pencil and paper ciphers. These get quite complicated, but they essentially are solved using pencil and paper. But then partway through the war, Germany decides to give its top spies enigma. And this is a particular kind of enigma called affair enigma. And so Elizabeth and her group are now getting these transmissions. And they also solve those. And the work that they do is really crucial for breaking up those spy rings. By 1944, they are on the run. So the work that she did is is tremendously important.

SPEAKER_00 21:04

Can you talk a little bit about the Dollwoman case? I mean, it's so bizarre. And can can you can you can say how it adds to or complicates the idea that we have of Elizabeth from her run from the run-running years and her work on German spy traffic?

SPEAKER_01 21:18

Well, I think probably the best thing that the Doll Woman case illustrates about Elizabeth's career is the very difficult relationship she had with the FBI.

SPEAKER_00 21:28

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 21:29

Yes, it's the FBI who first learns about these weird letters that involve dolls that are going to strange addresses. They're coming back to the United States. People are picking them up. The FBI gets all of these. They're not sure quite what to make of them. They eventually trace them back to this woman who runs a doll shop in New York City. But they're still not clear on what exactly these letters about dolls are, are they really spy things? Or are they innocent? For years the FBI had been relying on Elizabeth to do its difficult code breaking for it. And what they would do is take the codes that were broken by Elizabeth and her unit, and they bring them into their agency, file them without attribution, use them, and then claim total credit for solving the case, including the code breaking. And this is something that starts to happen again with the Dalton case that they really have to have an answer to this. What are these letters saying? They turn to Elizabeth. Elizabeth, it's extremely busy at that point, but she does take the time. She goes through them. She figures out a good way to interpret them. They are kind of loose kind of code, but she does an excellent job of not pushing it too far, but just really being able to show what these are about, which is about American shipping reporting to Japan. What's happening to ships that were bar were bombed in Pearl Harbor? How quickly are they being repaired? When then will they go out? Where will they be traveling? It's crucial shipping information. At that point, the prosecutor of the Doll Woman wants her to appear in the witness box. The Navy is, no, we can't have one of our top codebreakers out in public getting attention in the newspapers. The FBI really does not want Elizabeth getting credit for the case. The compromise is that she's put as an anonymous information. She is on the witness stand, but her name and identity aren't revealed. And that really does make it easier in the end. That testimony is terribly important for making sure that the Dollwoman is put behind bars. But the FBI is able to claim total credit for that. And it does that for decades. It is down as an FBI victory with absolutely no mention of the crucial role that Elizabeth played.

SPEAKER_00 24:04

From Riverbank on through to the Doll Woman, how would you characterize the way Elizabeth approached a new problem?

SPEAKER_01 24:10

When you look at her code breaking, you see that there's a great deal of logic to it. She really understands the science of code breaking. She's careful about her steps. She's meticulous about her worksheets. But she also has a real gift, an instinct for code breaking. William Friedman would refer to it as the golden guess. If you had the power of the golden guess, that was a wonderful thing for a code breaker to have. And boy, did Elizabeth have it. Part of what those instincts were, it wasn't something that was woo-woo. A lot of it was pattern recognition. If you are breaking 4,000 messages a year for the Coast Guard, you see everything. She at times she said she was looking at, you know, many thousands more, trying to decide which ones are the crucial ones. She got a really good instinct for which is crucial. Do you track the beginning or the end? Have I seen this before? I'll bet this is a book code. Those kinds of instincts that she develops, it is because she has done so much of this work and she has a phenomenal memory for what she's seen. So she really is a great example of that logic and intuition. And then the other thing that she brings to it, you see, is persistence. There are stories of really critical codes that no one could get into, that she would study and study and study for weeks and not get anywhere. And she wouldn't tear anything up, she wouldn't walk away forever, she would just lock it up in her desk in a top drawer. And when she had a little time, she'd come back to it, look at it again, and she'd just keep doing that sometimes for months. And then one day she would come back to it and suddenly she would see something she hadn't seen before. She might see that I need to attack it here, or this type, this this group belonged together. Or in one case, she realized that instead of looking at how a code looked, she needed to think about the sound that the words made. That was the key to getting in. So that kind of persistence is absolutely crucial to the making of a good codebreaker. And it certainly was for Elizabeth. She was a sterling example of persistence.

SPEAKER_00 26:33

Thank you. So her husband William will almost certainly get his own episode in the future. But could you talk a little bit about his and Elizabeth's decision later in life to place their papers here at the Marshall Foundation and what that choice tells us about how they wanted their work to be understood?

SPEAKER_01 26:50

Yes, they really were in a bit of a bind about the papers. Most of their papers were things that could be public, either had never been classified or had been declassified, and so ought to be publicly available. But a small amount of the material was still restricted. They had interest from the NSA, wanted to take the papers. The evidence felt if they gave the papers to the NSA, they would not see the light of day, maybe not for decades. I think they feared they might never see it at all. And they really wanted the papers to have public access. They believed that in order to have a new generation of codebreakers, you needed to share these things. You needed to talk about it. It was a time in American government where decisions had been made that you couldn't share information at all, even if it was about civil war code breaking. Can't talk about that. William Friedman had had a paper on Edgar Allan Poe. Can't publish that. So it was extremely strict, and they were worried about that. So the Marshall is one of the few facilities in the country that could that had a commitment to making papers public, but that had the facilities that met the standards to handle the restricted material. So technically it was a good solution. I think the other thing that really appealed to them both was that they so admired General Marshall. William Friedman was the one who had worked most closely with him, and even there it was at arm's length. But his department, his his group, he was the head of army codebreaking for a long time. He was the chief cryptologist there. And so he was supplying material to Marshall, and he appreciated Marshall's support for code breaking. And it was just the personal qualities as well, just the honesty that Marshall had, his directness, his discretion, all of those things I think really made them feel they had found the right place. And I certainly think they did.

SPEAKER_00 28:57

As uh classified material has been released and archives have opened up, how has the picture of Elizabeth's career changed from the one available in her own lifetime or even beyond?

SPEAKER_01 29:08

Well, it changed things the most in terms of the classified papers was getting information about what she did and World War II. For a long time, there was just this blank from about 1939 until 1945-46, where we just didn't know what she was doing. She said she was just doing some low-level Navy work. Um you knew that probably wasn't true, but we didn't have the evidence. And it's 2008, I think, that the history of what her unit did became available. And you could see how much they broke and from how many places and all of this work they were doing, tracking, particularly South American spies, but also elsewhere in the world. And so that was really important. I would say, though, that there are papers that weren't classified, they just were overlooked. And those were papers that were put into the Marshall Library. Elizabeth always saw that as a memorial to her husband, but she had also put her papers in the family papers there. And she last read crumbs about the kind of work that she had done. She couldn't say the FBI stole my work, but she could have accounts of the FBI and then mark them as not true. So you knew there was more to the story. But just the sheer wealth of letters and diaries and some of the just wonderful jokes and souvenirs from the cryptologic parties they used to hold, all of that is in the more personal files. And a lot of it was overlooked by Williamsboro biographer in the late 1970s, and then it just wasn't used for a long time. Now, wonderfully, it's available because it's been digitized recently, which is a spectacular development, which will allow many more people to make use of the collection. And I think that's, you know, we can understand more about her work from knowing these declassified papers about what she did in World War II. But it's this personal papers that let us know who she was, who she and what her life was and how she wanted her life to be understood.

SPEAKER_00 31:27

Absolutely. Finally, where do you think Elizabeth Friedman belongs in the larger history of cryptanalysis and 20th century intelligence?

SPEAKER_01 31:35

I am sometimes asked to rank Elizabeth Friedman and William Friedman and maybe Alan Troyd and other famous cryptologists. I don't think ranking is really helpful. I think one of the best ways to look at this is something that William and Elizabeth wrote during World War I. And they said that in code breaking, you needed different minds centered on the same problem. That's how you got good results. And it's actually having different kinds of minds that is so important, these different perspectives. And from that, what I would say is some of Elizabeth's qualities of mind we've talked about with the that balance of logic and intuition and persistence, terms of how we think about her within the history of cryptology. She is one of the early pioneers using what we think of now as all points intelligence when she's breaking those rum runner messages. She's using intelligence from many sources to help get into them. When she gets into the message, she takes the information from that, feeds it back to the Coast Guard, to the police, to the different departments that would be able to make use of that pool of intelligence. So she is figuring out ways to keep intelligence from being in silos. So that's tremendously important. And then if you think about what she does in World War II, when she's breaking those messages from South America, there are two other teams that are doing that same work. There's a lot of overlap. There's a team at Bletchley, there's a team at Canada. Sometimes Elizabeth's team is the first one to get into a system and they inform the other two teams. If Bletchley is the first, then that information feeds back to Elizabeth. It makes everyone stronger. And that is there are a lot of co-breaking groups that are doing that, but she is in that vanguard of what really would later become the kind of sharing of intelligence of five eyes in the post-war period, again, on the principle that if we work together, then we can make everybody stronger. So that is a terribly important thing about what she does. And finally, you know, she is just a superb leader in the field of professional women in general, and certainly women in code breaking. She opened doors for so many people. In her day, she was known. There would be women who would read articles about her in the paper, some of the publicity she hated, but they would read it and they would say, I could do this too. And we know of examples of people who saw that, did a codebreaking course, and then were important codebreakers, female codebreakers in World War II. So we can see that happening. We can see her opening the door. And so it's it's wonderful to see that she can finally get credit for all that she did and also get credit for that.

SPEAKER_00 34:35

Amy, thank you so much for sitting down and talking with me about Elizabeth Friedman. I really appreciate it and urge everybody to take a look down in the description box for links to resources about her as well as Amy's book. Thank you for listening to Age of Marshall. To learn more about the George C. Marshall Foundation and its programs, and to support our mission, visit Marshall Foundation.org.