Author Jason Fagone (Photo by Jamie Siever)
(WPR Host Norman Gilliland interviewed author Jason Fagone)
1. Elizebeth (that’s how she spelled her name) Friedman was a Quaker schoolteacher when she was hired by George Fabyan to analyze the works of Shakespeare to find secret messages and prove that they were actually written by Francis Bacon. What innate abilities did she have that suited her for the job?
As a college student, Elizebeth studied literature, and she filled her diaries with her own poetry. So from a young age she had a pretty acute sense for the rhythms of words and letters, and I think it helped her get the knack of codebreaking, which is the act of solving secret messages without knowing the key.
Codebreaking is mainly about seeing patterns. This, to me, was a big surprise. Before working on the book, I had this idea that codebreakers are all math geniuses. Historically, that’s not necessarily true. The core requirement for a codebreaker is recognizing patterns in what looks like noise. We all do that every day. When we recognize the face of a loved one, we’re matching a pattern. Elizebeth turned out to be a kind of pattern-matching genius. She was able to take these garbled messages, chop them up into their constituent parts, count and weigh the letters and whirl them around until the messages made sense. She spent decades training her abilities and inventing new methods to solve messages. After a while she developed an intuition that was rooted in science and experience but to other people often seemed like magic.
2. You describe your book as a love story. What made Elizebeth and William Friedman such a good match?
I always come back to this sentence that Elizebeth wrote on an index card late in life: "WFF and ESF have always been fascinated by WORDS, even before we had need of them as ‘tools of our trade.’" They just had this powerful love affair with words and languages and puzzles. When they first met and began working together, in 1916, they were in their twenties, and they worked across from each other in the same room, at the same desk, solving puzzles with pencil and paper. This was all before computers - the only tool was your pencil and your mind. And they realized pretty quickly that when they worked together, it felt like they were flying. Their minds clicked and they could do anything.
You can see this in the amazing letters they exchanged all through their lives. When they started falling in love, they included bits of cipher in the letters, speaking in a secret language that brought them closer. Later, when they had kids, they taught the kids how to write letters to them in cipher from summer camp. They used to throw “cipher parties” that were famous in their Washington circle of friends. You’d show up at the Friedmans’ house, and Elizebeth would be there in a stunning gown, and she’d hand you an envelope with a cryptogram inside, and you had to solve the cryptogram to find the address of a restaurant somewhere in D.C. where the appetizer would be served, and then you’d go there and solve another cryptogram to find the main course.
3. Were the relatively simple codes of Prohibition era rumrunners a good lead-in to the increasingly difficult codes the Germans used during World War II?
Absolutely. Elizebeth spent much of the 1920s and 1930s breaking codes for the Coast Guard, tracking these huge smuggling rings that carried bootleg liquor and drugs on ships that circled the globe. The smugglers coordinated their operations by radio, sending radio messages from ship to shore in Morse Code, and they used various code and cipher systems to garble the message texts before tapping out the dots and dashes of Morse. It was basically a giant criminal underworld, connected by radio and protected by codes. Elizebeth learned how to light up that underworld by intercepting the radio messages, breaking the codes, and tracking the ships. She became the best in the world at it.
Then, at the dawn of World War II, when Nazi spies began spreading into the Western Hemisphere, particularly into South America, they relied on the same strategies as the smugglers - clandestine radio and codes. For that reason, Elizebeth was the perfect person to tackle the Nazi spy threat. She already had this amazing running start. The FBI didn’t know how to break the codes, but Elizebeth did. So the FBI relied on her Coast Guard unit to track these dangerous Nazi spy networks in the West. She was the FBI’s secret weapon.
4. World War II codebreakers were under tremendous psychological pressure. Yet after breaking the notoriously difficult Japanese Purple Code, William Friedman seems to have begun falling apart emotionally. Was his decline worsened, do you think, by being separated from Elizebeth for long periods of time?
I think so. The Friedmans weren’t allowed to talk to each other about their work, because they were employed by secret teams in different parts of the government: William at the Army, Elizebeth at the Coast Guard. It was a strange and sort of sad situation: Here you had two of the greatest codebreakers in the country, working these very stressful jobs in wartime, and they weren’t able to talk freely and comfort each other. William complained once that if it were up to the United States, he and Elizebeth would sleep in separate beds.
5. William and his team broke the Purple Code before the attack on Pearl Harbor. How specific were the warnings that an attack would come and what failed in the communication chain that enabled the Japanese to pull off a surprise attack?
Lots of books have been written about this, and I don’t get into it too deeply in mine. I was more interested in how the intelligence failure of Pearl Harbor affected William emotionally and shaped his views of his own profession. The gist is that yes, before the attack, William and his team of Army codebreakers decrypted some Japanese messages suggesting that an attack on a U.S. base was imminent. The messages weren’t specific to Pearl Harbor, but they were alarming enough that the team forwarded them through channels to military leaders. Somewhere in the chain, though, the messages got bottled up and didn’t make it to the people who needed to see them. So William did everything he could to stop the attack. Despite that, he carried some guilt pangs with him for the rest of his life. It was just the kind of person he was. He felt the system had failed.
6. Elizebeth’s wartime work focused mainly on German messages coming out of South America, which she and her team were able to decode by the hundreds. How much did the decoding of those messages affect relations between South American countries and Germany?
This is a corner of the war that I didn’t know much about. Churchill called it the Secret War. The war of spies and saboteurs. Elizebeth made an invaluable contribution by mapping the German spy network that was spreading across South America. She monitored the spies’ radio circuits, broke the codes, read the messages, and learned what the Nazis were up to, spies with code names like SARGO and ALFREDO and Luna, and one really important thing she learned is that the Nazi S.S. enjoyed a close relationship with powerful military leaders in Argentina.
It turned out that the S.S. spies were working with the Argentines to turn the southern part of South America into a fascist bloc of countries aligned with Hitler. They were plotting coups to install pro-German leaders. They actually succeeded in Bolivia. Elizebeth’s Coast Guard team ultimately played a major role in exposing this secret link between Germany and Argentina, and when the link was publicly revealed, it forced Argentina to sever its ties with Germany, which weakened the Nazis, shrank their power.
7. J. Edgar Hoover doesn’t look good in your book. You indicate that his ego led him to do serious harm to the codebreaking efforts of Elizebeth and her team.
Yes, this was one of the most surprising things I learned reporting the book. Not only was the FBI deeply unprepared to monitor and disrupt Nazi spy networks during WWII, they actually damaged the work of other people who knew what they were doing, namely Elizebeth and the team of Coast Guard codebreakers that she founded in the early 1930s and led for years.
Hoover was a very powerful guy, obviously, and also extremely focused on arresting bad guys and generating publicity for the FBI through those arrests. Sometimes that police mindset makes sense, but it was totally wrong for the job of monitoring Nazi spy networks, breaking their codes, and understanding how they functioned. You didn’t need a cop for that. You needed a codebreaker. A patient listener.
Hoover didn’t get it. In early 1942, without consulting Elizebeth’s team, he suddenly directed the FBI to charge into Brazil and arrest a bunch of spies. Of course, as soon as the guys were arrested, they got word out to their colleagues that their codes were blown. So the Nazi spies in South America switched to more secure kinds of codes, and the whole clandestine Nazi network went dark at a critical moment. Elizebeth and her team had to spend about 9 months breaking the new codes and trying to clean up the mess.
8. In 1958 agents from the National Security Agency and the U.S. attorney general’s office removed books and files from the Friedmans’ house, some of them going all the way back to World War I. Why?
I don’t think anyone at NSA thought it was a big deal at the time. They said they were just abiding by a new regulation that required certain kinds of intelligence documents to be classified at a higher level, and William happened to keep some of those documents at his house. For the agency, getting them back was a minor piece of bureaucratic housekeeping. But William didn’t experience it that way. He saw these guys from the government showing up at his house with guns and raiding his private library, taking a bunch of old cryptology papers from as far back as the first world war. It didn’t make any sense to him, and he viewed it as part of a trend that disturbed him - the spread of Cold War paranoia that was making the U.S. government more secretive and less transparent.
9. How much did the Friedmans’ friends and relatives know about their work?
Little to nothing, unless those friends also happened to be government codebreakers.
10. What did Elizebeth and William think about the use of computers to break codes?
They weren’t big fans! William thought computers were an abomination and fought, unsuccessfully, against their wide-scale adoption at the NSA. He was very grumpy about it. Elizebeth was a little more open and curious about new technologies, and she did use some of the earliest punch-card computers to help break a few code systems toward the end of WWII, but to her, computers took some of the fun out of the thing — the joy of seeing a solution appear at the tip of your pencil. Still, the pencil-and-paper codebreaking techniques invented by the Friedmans became part of the foundation for all that followed, including computer methods used today.
11. William’s work is familiar to many in the communications industry. Why is Elizebeth’s just now coming to light?
Sexism and secrecy. First of all, men in her life often omitted or even erased her from the story of her own achievements. Sometimes these were men close to her, like William, who often received sole credit for projects they had worked on together. Early in her life, she seems to have gone along with that, out of practical considerations — she realized that William was likely to make more money as a codebreaker, so she didn’t mind helping to build his professional reputation. She was also very modest by temperament, which was part of it. Later in her life, she encountered men like J. Edgar Hoover, who went out of his way to steal credit from Elizebeth and her Coast Guard team for their work hunting Nazi spies. After the war, Hoover painted himself and the FBI as the big hero, even though they were mostly clueless throughout. That angered her, but there was nothing she could do, because all her WWII files were stamped “TOP SECRET ULTRA” and hauled away to classified vaults. They were only declassified after 2000!
12. What about those secret messages in Shakespeare’s works?
They’re almost certainly not there. At least, there’s no persuasive cryptologic evidence that the messages really exist. That was the conclusion of the book that Elizebeth and William wrote together after the war, The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined.
The book is a totally Friedmanesque object: precise, scholarly, often brutal, sometimes quite funny. They dissect all the proposals of secret messages in Shakespeare, including the dubious ideas of their old nemesis, George Fabyan. For instance, they show that one supposedly secret phrase extracted from a Shakespeare play, “if he shall publish,” could, by the same method, produce a sexually explicit reference to human anatomy. To me, the book is beautiful because it’s a love letter to scientific honesty, which was a core principle of the Friedmans, and also because it represents a kind of reunion for Elizebeth and William. After decades on separate career paths, they came together again on this project, and it made them happier than they had been in a long time.
