The Woman Who Smashed Codes

Jason Fagone

• Publisher: Dey Street Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780062430502
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia social

National Bestseller

NPR Best Book of the Year

"Not all superheroes wear capes, and Elizebeth Smith Friedman should be the subject of a future Wonder Woman movie." — The New York Times

Joining the ranks of Hidden Figures and In the Garden of Beasts, the incredible true story of the greatest codebreaking duo that ever lived, an American woman and her husband who invented the modern science of cryptology together and used it to confront the evils of their time, solving puzzles that unmasked Nazi spies and helped win World War II.

In 1916, at the height of World War I, brilliant Shakespeare expert Elizebeth Smith went to work for an eccentric tycoon on his estate outside Chicago. The tycoon had close ties to the U.S. government, and he soon asked Elizebeth to apply her language skills to an exciting new venture: code-breaking. There she met the man who would become her husband, groundbreaking cryptologist William Friedman. Though she and Friedman are in many ways the "Adam and Eve" of the NSA, Elizebeth's story, incredibly, has never been told.

In The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Jason Fagone chronicles the life of this extraordinary woman, who played an integral role in our nation's history for forty years. After World War I, Smith used her talents to catch gangsters and smugglers during Prohibition, then accepted a covert mission to discover and expose Nazi spy rings that were spreading like wildfire across South America, advancing ever closer to the United States. As World War II raged, Elizebeth fought a highly classified battle of wits against Hitler's Reich, cracking multiple versions of the Enigma machine used by German spies. Meanwhile, inside an Army vault in Washington, William worked furiously to break Purple, the Japanese version of Enigma—and eventually succeeded, at a terrible cost to his personal life.

Fagone unveils America's code-breaking history through the prism of Smith's life, bringing into focus the unforgettable events and colorful personalities that would help shape modern intelligence. Blending the lively pace and compelling detail that are the hallmarks of Erik Larson's bestsellers with the atmosphere and intensity of The Imitation Game, The Woman Who Smashed Codes is page-turning popular history at its finest.

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.

Elizebeth didn’t understand any part of this sentence. She didn’t know what he meant by spending the night or what Riverbank was. She struggled for a response, finally stammering a few words. “Oh, sir, I don’t have anything with me to spend the night away from my room.”

“That’s all right,” Fabyan said. “We’ll furnish you anything you want. Anything you need, we have it. Come on!”

Then, to her surprise, Fabyan grabbed Elizebeth under one elbow, practically lifting her by the arm. Her body stiffened in response. He marched her out of the library and swept her into the waiting limousine.

People often guessed that she was meek because she was small. She hated this, the assumption that she was harmless, ordinary. She despised her own last name for the same reason; it seemed to give people an excuse to forget her.

“The odious name of Smith,” she called it once, in a diary she began keeping at age twenty. “It seems that when I am introduced to a stranger by this most meaningless of phrases, plain ‘Miss Smith,’ that I shall be forever in that stranger’s estimation, eliminated from any category even approaching anything interesting or at all uncommon.” There was nothing to be done: changing her name would cause horrendous insult to blood relations, and complaining provided no satisfaction, because whenever she did, people asked why she didn’t just change her name, a response so “inanely disgusting” that it made her feel violent. “I feel like snipping out the tongues of any and all who indulge in such common, senseless, and inane pleasantries.”

Her family members had never shared this fear of being ordinary. They were midwestern people of modest means, Quakers from Huntington, Indiana, a rural town known for its rock quarries. Her father, John Marion Smith, traced his lineage to an English Quaker who sailed to America in 1682 on the same boat as William Penn. In Huntington he worked as a farmer and served in local government as a Republican. (“My Indiana family,” Elizebeth later wrote, “were hide-bound Republicans who had never under any instances voted for any other ticket.”) Her mother, Sopha Strock, a housewife, delivered ten children to John, the first when she was only seventeen. One died in infancy; nine survived. Elizebeth was the last of the nine, and by the time she was born, on August 26, 1892, most of her brothers and sisters had already grown up and scattered. She got along with only two or three, particularly a sister named Edna, two years her elder, a practical girl who later married a dentist and moved to Detroit.

Sopha had decided to spell “Elizebeth” in a nonstandard way, with ze instead of the usual za, perhaps sensing that her ninth child named Smith would want something to set her apart in the world. But Elizebeth didn’t need the hitch in her first name to know she was different. Prone to recurring fits of nausea that began in adolescence and plagued her for years, she had trouble sitting still and keeping her tongue. She clashed with her father, a pragmatic, stubborn man who ordered his children around and believed women should marry young. She questioned her parents’ faith. John and Sopha, though not devout, were part of a Quaker community and believed what Quakers do: that war is wrong, silence concentrates goodness, and direct contact with God is possible. Elizebeth’s God was more diffuse: “We call a lot of things luck that are but the outcome of our own bad endeavor,” she wrote in the diary, “but there is undoubtedly something outside ourselves that sometimes wins for us, or loses, irrespective of ourselves. What is it? Is it God?”

Her father didn’t want Elizebeth to go to college. She defied him and sent applications to multiple schools, vowing to pay her own tuition; a friend later recalled that she was full of “determination and energy to get a college education with no help or encouragement from her father.” (John Smith did end up loaning her some money—at 4 percent interest.) After being rejected from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, a top Quaker school, she settled on Wooster College in Ohio, studying Greek and English literature there between 1911 and 1913. Then her mother fell ill with cancer and Elizebeth transferred to another small liberal arts school, Hillsdale College in Michigan, to be closer to home. At both schools she earned tuition money as a seamstress for hire. Her dorm rooms were always cluttered with dresses in progress and stray ribbons of chiffon.

College took Elizebeth’s innate tendency to doubt and gave it a structure, a justification. At Wooster and Hillsdale she discovered poetry and philosophy, two methods of exploring the unknown, two scalpels for carving up fact and thought. She studied the works of Shakespeare and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, carrying books of their poems and plays around campus, annotating and underlining the pages until the leaves separated from the bindings. A course on philosophy introduced her to a new hero, the Renaissance scholar Erasmus, who “believed in one aristocracy—the aristocracy of intellect,” she wrote in a paper. “He had one faith—faith in the power of thought, in the supremacy of ideas.” Elizebeth, a smart person from a working-class family, found this concept liberating: the measure of a person was her ideas, not her wealth or her command of religious texts. She wrote a poem about this epiphany:

I sit stunned, nerveless, amid the ruins

Of my fallen idols. The iconoclast Philosophy

Has shattered for me

My God . . .

But through the confusing ruins, Faith, still hoping,

Somehow raises her hands and bids me—

Yearn on! Finally

Through the mazes of error and doubt and mistrust

You will come, weary heart

To the final conclusion upon which you will build anew.

You will find triumphant

The Working Hypothesis,

The Solid Rock.

In addition to the well-worn volumes of Shakespeare and Tennyson, she lugged her own diary from place to place, a book with a soft black binding that said “Record” on the cover in silver script. The round-cornered pages were lined. She wrote in wet black ink with a quill pen, in a slanted cursive hand that was not too beautiful, about the importance of choosing the right words for things, even if those words offended people. She didn’t like it when she heard a friend say that a person who had died had “passed away” or that a staggering drunk at a party was “a bit indisposed.” It was more important to be honest. “We glide over the offensiveness of names and calm down our consciences by eulogistic mellifluous terms, until our very moral senses are dulled,” she wrote. “Let things be shown, let them come forth in their real colors, and humanity will not be so prone to a sin which is glossed over by a dainty public!”

Sometimes Elizebeth had trouble channeling these energies and frustrations into cogent work. Her professors found her intensely bright, yet unfocused and argumentativ...