1189 Beall Avenue, Wooster, Ohio 44691, United States
In 1911, age 19, Elizebeth Smith enrolled at Ohio's Wooster College, 200 miles from home, to study Greek and English literature.
Gallery of Elizebeth Smith Friedman
33 E College St, Hillsdale, MI 49242, United States
In 1913, after her mother was diagnosed with cancer, Elizebeth Smith transferred to Hillsdale College, Michigan, which was only 100 miles from home. She completed her bachelor's degree in spring 1915, majoring in English literature with minors in languages and applied sciences.
Career
Gallery of Elizebeth Smith Friedman
Elizebeth Smith Friedman
Gallery of Elizebeth Smith Friedman
Elizebeth Smith Friedman and William Frederick Friedman.
Gallery of Elizebeth Smith Friedman
Elizebeth Smith Friedman and William Frederick Friedman.
33 E College St, Hillsdale, MI 49242, United States
In 1913, after her mother was diagnosed with cancer, Elizebeth Smith transferred to Hillsdale College, Michigan, which was only 100 miles from home. She completed her bachelor's degree in spring 1915, majoring in English literature with minors in languages and applied sciences.
Elizebeth Smith Friedman was an American cryptologist who helped decipher enemy codes from World War I to World War II. She has been called "America's first female cryptanalyst."
Background
Clara Elizebeth Smith was born into a working-class Quaker family on August 26, 1892, in the small city of Huntington, Indiana, United States. She grew up there on her parents' small farm.
Elizebeth's father, John Marion Smith, was a farmer, Civil War veteran, and Republican politician. He had traced his American family back to 1682, the year one of his ancestors arrived on the same ship as William Penn, the Quaker nobleman and writer after whom Pennsylvania is named.
Elizebeth's mother was Sopha Smith (née Strock). She ran the home and cared for the family's nine children - Elizebeth was the youngest.
Education
Educated at local schools in Huntington, Elizebeth applied to several colleges hoping to study for a bachelor of arts degree. This angered her father, who believed women should marry at a young age. Elizebeth told her father she was going to college, whatever he might say, and she would pay for her own education by finding work.
Her father relented and loaned her the money she needed, but charged her six percent interest. Elizebeth took the loan, but for the rest of her life, she resented what she saw as her father's meanness in charging her interest.
In 1911, age 19, Elizebeth Smith enrolled at Ohio's Wooster College, 200 miles from home, to study Greek and English literature. She earned money working as a freelance seamstress - her room was always full of dresses she was working on.
In 1913, after her mother was diagnosed with cancer, Elizebeth transferred to Hillsdale College, Michigan, which was only 100 miles from home. She completed her bachelor's degree in spring 1915, majoring in English literature with minors in languages and applied sciences.
Shortly after graduating, Elizebeth took a job as a substitute high school principal in Wabash, Indiana, 20 miles from her hometown. She soon realized that day-to-day school-life was less gripping than she had hoped. She quit the job after a year and returned to her family's home in Huntington.
At college, Elizebeth had been infamous for her argumentativeness, often disputing her work with her professors. She now began bickering incessantly with her equally quarrelsome father. It was clear the two could not live under the same roof. In June 1916, Elizebeth boarded a train for Chicago where she hoped to find a thought-provoking job - ideally as a researcher.
An employment agency sent Elizebeth to Newberry Library. There she learned that an eccentric millionaire by the name of Colonel George Fabyan was seeking a cryptographer to analyze Shakespeare's works to prove they were written by Francis Bacon. This aligned so closely with her own interests that it seemed almost too good to be true.
Colonel Fabyan offered Elizebeth a job and she moved to Riverbank, his 600-acre estate in Geneva, Illinois. There she found about 150 other researchers studying a wide range of subjects for the capricious Colonel Fabyan.
At Riverbank she soon met the man who would become her husband, William Friedman. Elizebeth and William were each paid the same very low salary, $30 a month. On the plus side, Colonel Fabyan provided accommodation and meals. Elizebeth introduced William to cryptography and soon they were searching together for secret messages in Shakespeare's plays.
Elizebeth and William found no codes or hidden messages. They began to doubt the value of their research. Both were ambitious people who wanted to achieve something worthwhile. They suggested to Colonel Fabyan that other work might be more fruitful. Fabyan flew into a frightening rage - a disturbing and recurrent aspect of his behavior - and ordered them back to their Shakespeare work.
Elizebeth left Riverbank at the beginning of 1917 to be with her dying mother. Following her mother's death in February, Elizebeth returned to work. In late 1916, Fabyan became convinced that America would soon enter World War I. The United States military, however, had minimal experience of codebreaking. In early 1917, Fabyan established a cryptography team at Riverbank headed by Elizebeth and William. In March 1917, he offered its services to the government to break encrypted Morse code radio messages.
In April 1917, when America entered World War I, all its military codebreaking work was carried out at Riverbank by Elizebeth, William, and a team that grew to 30 people. Soon after starting their war work in early 1917, Elizebeth and William decided to join the military. They were fed up of Fabyan's unpredictable temper and controlling attitude. They sent letters to Washington D.C. offering their codebreaking services but never heard back.
Later they learned that Fabyan had intercepted and read their incoming mail. He had destroyed job offers sent to Elizebeth and William by the military. They also learned that Fabyan had installed hidden microphones to spy on them and thwart their plans to escape from Riverbank.
In early 1918, William finally made it into the Army Signal Corps. He was sent to France in May 1918, as a first lieutenant tasked with decoding German Army messages. Elizebeth dearly wished to accompany him, but the Army refused this: working near the enemy's lines was for men only. She remained at Riverbank, breaking codes there.
The war ended on November 10, 1918. Although the war was over, William was ordered to stay in France. Elizebeth, her loathing for Fabyan reaching fever pitch, left Riverbank quietly without telling Fabyan. She headed back to her hometown where she found work in the town library. She also managed to make peace with her father.
In April 1919, William arrived back in America. He and Elizebeth reluctantly resumed work with Fabyan, but this time they lived in the nearby town of Geneva rather than on his Riverbank estate.
At the end of 1920, the Friedmans escaped Fabyan forever. They moved to Washington D.C. where they began working for the Army Signal Corps on January 3, 1921. In April 1921, Elizebeth resigned to become an author and start a family. She continued with some government work from home. William continued in the Army, his fame as a cryptologist growing rapidly.
In 1925, Elizebeth became a special agent of the United States Treasury. She agreed to work for them as a cryptanalyst on the condition that she work from home. This was the era of Prohibition. The Treasury was fighting organized crime gangs who were smuggling alcohol into America by the shipload. Some of the larger crime syndicates had started using highly sophisticated codes several layers deep, more complicated than any code seen in World War 1. The gangsters were also changing codes frequently: if the government broke a code, the work was quickly obsolete.
In her first three months, Elizebeth decoded messages that had remained unbroken for the previous two years.
In 1927, Elizebeth began working with the Bureau of Prohibition and of Customs. She attacked codes used by organized crime gangs, cracking over 12,000 messages in three years and decrypting 24 different major codes. Working from home was no longer practical and Elizebeth traveled around the United States helping customs agents.
She was the Customs Bureau's sole cryptanalyst and by 1930 was in danger of burning herself out. Codebreaking is exhausting, painstaking work; it makes demands on the intellect that have driven many codebreakers to mental illness. Some years later, during World War 2, the demands of his job pushed Elizebeth's husband William into a distressing illness.
In 1931, she was made Cryptanalyst-in-Charge, United States Coast Guard; she received funds to recruit three junior codebreakers to help her. This gave her more time to work on cracking particularly challenging codes.
Elizebeth gave evidence in a number of high-profile mobster trials. Her work came with risks: the government provided her with bodyguards several times. Newspapers and magazines ran features on her and she became famous. She regretted this because she felt her work was best done in the background.
Her evidence helped put a large number of mobsters in jail. Defense lawyers would attempt to have the court rule that her evidence was "incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial," because nobody could understand what she had done - she might have made the messages up herself rather than decoding anything. Elizebeth showed the defense lawyers were wrong, at times using a blackboard to explain the basics of her codebreaking to the court.
Prohibition ended in 1934, but smuggling did not. Alcohol smuggling continued, with gangs trying to evade tariffs. Narcotics and jewelry smuggling were also rife. Elizebeth continued her work, all the while wishing she had a lower public profile. With the rise of Nazi Germany, she was about to get it.
Elizebeth's greatest contribution to World War II was to crack three of the Nazi's infamous Enigma encryption machines. These machines were transmitting encrypted messages between South America and Germany. She did this without the huge electromechanical computer invented by Alan Turing. This was possible because the German agents in South America: used somewhat less sophisticated machines than those used by the Germany military, and wrote messages over periods of time without changing the key, giving Elizebeth an entry point to breaking the code and deciphering the wiring of the Enigma machine transmitting it.
She was also helped by the fact that radio operators in Germany sometimes made crazy blunders, such as transmitting the message "OK Hello" repeatedly for 15 minutes, offering a marvelous opportunity for a codebreaker to reveal the wiring of the Enigma machine sending the messages.
When World War II ended, Elizebeth's codebreaking days ended too. She continued in employment for a year, archiving the work she and her team had carried out. In September 1946, at age 54, her duties with the United States Coast Guard were complete.
After William's retirement, he and Elizebeth returned to the work that had first brought them together. In 1957, they published a book The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined decisively refuting the claim that Francis Bacon authored Shakespeare's plays or that there were hidden messages in them.
After Wiliam's death in 1969, Elizebeth dedicated the rest of her life to collecting her husband's work into the most extensive private collection of cryptographic material in the world, housed in the George Marshall Library in Lexington, Virginia.
She died in 1980 in obscurity, her achievements were overshadowed by the work of her male colleagues in the world of cryptography and law enforcement.
But Elizebeth was an exceptional individual with a pioneering brain who for over thirty years deciphered thousands of secret codes, armed only with a pen, paper, and basic knowledge of maths. An enduring fascination with cryptology and a recent renewed interest in her work will hopefully bring her the recognition she has long been due.
Throughout the 1920s, the American government was involved in a strenuous fight against organized crime, which was at the core of the Prohibition Era. Thanks to Friedman's efforts and teachings, thousands of secret codes were deciphered and contraband operations were blocked. Working from international reports and intelligence obtained undercover, via wiretaps, informants and surveillance, Elizebeth broke codes and solve encrypted messages, both written and transmitted on the radio. She deciphered over 12,000 rum-runners messages, solved 650 smuggling traffic cases, and decrypted 24 different coding systems used by smugglers.
Her achievements during Prohibition are exceptional but her career reached its pinnacle during World War II, when she helped decipher several Enigma machines while training army officers and aiding both the American and the Canadian government with domestic and international operations.
Elizebeth was deeply influenced by growing up in a family of Quakers. She never felt very connected to her parents or most of her siblings, but she did absorb the Quaker belief in peace, and it stayed with her all her life.
Politics
Elizebeth never consumed alcohol during Prohibition. However, she did not agree with the law - she believed it gave organized crime its first foothold in America.
Views
Elizebeth learned that Argentina was co-operating with German schemes to overthrow other governments in South America and replace them with ones sympathetic to the Nazis. The Nazis hoped to develop South American bases to attack the United States from the south. The fact that Elizebeth and her codebreaking team were reading messages between Argentina and Germany was one of the great secrets of the war - Elizebeth never talked about it. It was vital that neither Germany nor Argentina should realize their messages were being read.
This created a problem. America wanted to show the Argentinians that it knew exactly what they were up to. However, this needed to happen without the information source becoming known. The solution again came from Elizebeth. She decoded a message revealing that a junior Argentinian diplomat was going to travel by sea from Argentina to Spain. Her work had previously shown that this man was working for the Nazis.
The Americans shared this information with the British, whose marines kidnapped the diplomat from the ship he was on, confiscated materials he was carrying to Germany, and took him back to the United Kingdom for questioning. The results of the interrogation were sufficient to hide the fact that Elizebeth and her team were the true source of information about Argentinian-German cooperation.
America told the Argentinian government that it knew all about its activities. A large force of American warships turned up a few miles from Argentina's capital Buenos Aires. The result was that, in January 1944, the Argentinian government broke off all relations with Germany and Japan and started arresting suspected German agents.
Quotations:
"We had a lot of pioneering to do. Literary ciphers may give you the swing of the thing, but they are in no sense scientific... We simply had to roll up our sleeves and chart a new course."
"The Prohibition era took thousands of people into illicit operations who would definitely not have been underworld characters if it had not been for the unpopular feeling generally held against the law, the Volstead Act."
Membership
Pi Beta Phi
Personality
Elizebeth was often quarrelsome - a trait she picked up from her father.
Interests
Gardening, playing the piano
Philosophers & Thinkers
Erasmus of Rotterdam
Writers
William Shakespeare and Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Connections
In May 1917, at age 24, Elizebeth married William Frederick Friedman, who was 25. The ceremony was performed by a rabbi. When William told his mother he had married Elizebeth, his mother collapsed in shock, ashamed that her son had married a "Shiksa" - a pejorative term for a non-Jewish woman. William's mother never came to terms with her son's marriage, which upset both William and Elizebeth.
Elizebeth and William had two children: Barbara, born in 1923, and John Ramsay, born in 1926. William died in 1969, after which Elizebeth lived at different times with her daughter and her son.
