Elizebeth Smith was born on this date in Huntington, Indiana. She went to college, majoring in English literature, and also studied Latin, Greek, and German. [As an article in the Smithsonian relates, Elizebeth’s father, a wealthy Indiana dairy farmer, hadn’t wanted her to pursue higher education. She went anyway, borrowing the tuition from him at a six percent interest rate.]
After graduating with a degree in English literature, she got a job in 1916 at Riverbank Laboratories in Geneva, Illinois, one of the first facilities in the U.S. founded to study cryptography, on a project related to the rumor of encrypted messages in the works of Shakespeare.
Elizebeth Smith Friedman (Source of photo: NSA)
While there, Smith gathered historical information on secret writing, and until the Army’s Cipher Bureau was created during World War I, Riverbank was the only facility in the U.S. capable of solving encrypted messages. During that war, several U.S. Government departments sent people to Riverbank for training, one of whom was William F. Friedman, who would become Smith’s husband. In 1921, the now-married Friedmans left Riverbank to work for the U.S. War Department in Washington, D.C.
William and Elizebeth took jobs working together as cryptanalysts, or code breakers, for the Army Signal Intelligence Service, with Elizebeth earning half of what her husband made, according to her memoir.
After the war, she and her husband worked for the U.S. Coast Guard, working on breaking codes written by liquor smugglers during Prohibition. In her first three months of work, Elizebeth decoded two years of backlogged messages.
Elizebeth Friedman, here with her husband William
She often testified at criminal trials brought against the smugglers based on her work, helping to convict twenty-five smugglers. In 1931, for instance, during the height of Prohibition, federal agents raided the New Orleans headquarters of a powerful Vancouver-based liquor ring. A grand jury indicted 104, and in 1933, the U.S. Attorney General’s office prosecuted 23 members of what one prosecutor called “the most powerful international smuggling syndicate in existence, controlling practically a monopoly of smuggling in the Gulf of Mexico and on the West Coast.” The star witness was Elizebeth Friedman. As the WETA history blog reports: “’Without [Friedman’s and her colleagues’] translations, I do not believe that this important case could have been won,’” the prosecutor said.”
In 1938, Canadian officials once again needed help breaking up a crime ring, and asked the U.S. Treasury Department to loan Elizebeth to the Canadian government. All of the coded messages could only be deciphered into Chinese, a language Friedman could not speak, read, or write. But with the help of a Chinese interpreter, she cracked the code and solved the case.
During World War II, she was part of a team that discovered the identity of a Japanese spy living in New York.
WETA writes:
Friedman became essential to efforts by the Coast Guard, and later the Treasury Department, to catch drug and liquor smugglers. By the end of her career, she had broken the code to over 12,000 radio messages.”
Elizebeth retired in 1946. William remained in government signals intelligence, eventually becoming, in 1952, chief cryptologist for the National Security Agency (NSA) when it was formed. He also produced a classic series of textbooks, “Military Cryptanalysis,” which was used to train NSA students.
William retired in 1956 and the two once again turned their attention to the problem that had originally brought them together: examining Francis Bacon’s supposed codes in the works of Shakespeare. Together they wrote a book entitled The Cryptologist Looks at Shakespeare, which won a prize from the Folger Library and was published under the title The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined. The work concluded that Bacon did not write the plays; the book is regarded as the definitive work on the subject.
William Friedman died in 1969, and Elizebeth in 1980. William, but not Elizebeth, was inducted into the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame. Friedman and his wife Elizebeth are buried in Arlington National Cemetery. MentalFloss reveals:
Inscribed on their double gravestone is a quote, not by William Shakespeare, but commonly attributed to Francis Bacon: “KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.” It too is a cipher—when decrypted, it reads “WFF,” William Friedman’s initials.”
In an interview for National Geographic with Jason Fagone, who has written a book about Elizebeth called The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Simon Worrall asks Fagone: “Today, most codebreaking is done by computers. What sort of methods did Elizebeth have at her disposal?” His answer is most interesting:
Great question! She did everything with pencil and paper and a series of techniques, some of which had been around for hundreds of years and some she had to invent herself. Working with William Friedman, who later became her husband, in the early days of Riverbank, she created different approaches and attacks on secret messages that allowed her to pick apart garbled blocks of letters and arrange them into patterns that made sense.
Over decades of practice, solving tens of thousands of messages every year, she developed an intuition, a way of thinking that made her one of the best in the world at seeing the shapes of words in a field of letters that nobody else could make sense of.”
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