WOMEN IN WARTIME: THE CODEBREAKER by Yvonne Saxon

June 1916, Chicago, Illinois: After a week of searching, twenty-three year old Elizebeth Smith remains jobless, with no prospects. Elizebeth (spelled with an "e" because her mother didn't want her called "Liza") graduated from Hillsdale College in 1915 with a major in English Literature and had also studied Latin, Greek, and German. But she's quit her teaching job after a year because it was "uninspired." Now she has no choice but to return home to Indiana, defeated. It's her last day in the city, so she goes to the Newberry Library for a special treat-- a look at Shakespeare's First Folio, printed in 1623. A librarian sees her interest, talks to her, and makes a phone call. One hour later Elizebeth is being offered a job by George Fabyan, a wealthy industrialist!

Convinced there are secret messages in Shakespeare's works showing that Francis Bacon is the actual author, Fabyan hires Elizebeth on the spot to decode them. She's whisked away to his grand estate and immediately begins work in his Riverbank Laboratories.

At Riverbank she masters a method of encoding messages invented by Francis Bacon in 1623. She works side by side with geneticist and photographer William Friedman, who photographs the different typefaces in Shakespeare's works for Elizebeth to examine. Together they dig into Fabyan's collection of codebreaking books and historical information on secret writing. As they exchange insights and ideas, they also fall in love and marry in May 1917. It's said that when William was asked how he got into cryptography he replied: "I was seduced!"

When World War I breaks out there are only three or four people in the United States who know anything about military cryptography; Elizebeth and William Friedman are two of them. The Friedman's are put in charge of Fabyan's newly created Riverbank Department of Ciphers, whose services are offered to the U.S. government.

The invention of radio completely transforms the value of codebreaking. "Messages could win or lose a battle, destroy a regiment, or sink a ship." Strong codes and ciphers are extremely valuable. Soon, thousands of secret messages are coming to Riverbank from the military and state departments for decryption. Elizebeth finds she is very good at finding patterns hidden in the text. Then she and William begin figuring out methods of solving secret messages that have never been imagined before. In 1921, the Friedman's leave Riverbank to work for the War Department in Washington, D.C.

It's 1925 and Prohibition is the law of the land. The Coast Guard approaches Elizebeth, now a mother of two, for help decrypting hundreds of intercepted messages from rum-runners and bootleggers. Smugglers are bringing liquor, narcotics, and other heavily taxed items into the U.S.using encrypted Morse Code radio messages to conduct their operations. During her first three months on the job, Elizebeth single-handedly decrypts two years worth of backlogged messages! But she's not only decrypting the messages, she takes the info in the ciphers and figures out the who, the what, and the where behind the messages to track down organized crime and presents it to the U.S. government.

Elizebeth's work is so indispensable, her plan to build an official code-breaking unit is approved by the Coast Guard, the first ever to be run by a woman. By the end of 1932 she has developed the best radio-intelligence team in the country.

In 1937, the Canadian government asks for her help with an opium-smuggling gang. She solves an unknown Chinese enciphered code without even knowing the language, and the gang is successfully convicted.

During World War II Elizebeth's Coast Guard unit is transferred to the Navy. A secret German network is operating in South America, led by a spy master code-named "Sargo." Her team, still the primary U.S. codebreakers, successfully breaks the spy ring transmitting the location of Allied ships in the Atlantic to German U-boats. Her work is described as "some of the most important work of the Second World War." 

Unfortunately, mistakes in rounding up the spy network result in Sargo escaping. It's not long until he rebuilds a new German spy network with a far more complex system of codes.With months of codes piling up,  Elizebeth suspects the codes are generated by one of several models of a highly complex machine called the "Enigma." The model Elizebeth faces is slightly less complex, but not by much. After two months using only pencil and paper, she gets a break: twenty eight messages all sent in the same key, a careless mistake by the spies. She breaks the code, finds Sargo again, and soon the Nazi threat in the Western Hemisphere is eliminated. 

Elizebeth's amazing work in South America would go unknown, however. She signed an oath with the U.S. Navy promising to keep her role in World War II secret until her death, and she did so. It was not until 2008 that the documents were finally declassified. Elizebeth Friedman's methods formed the basis of codebreaking for decades to come. 

For more information:

The Codebreaker, an episode of the television documentary series American Experience.

The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted  America's Enemies.  Jason Fagone

The Woman All Spies Fear: Code Breaker Elizebeth Smith Friedman and Her Hidden Life.  Amy Butler Greenfield