November 15, 2017 • 45 mins
Every week, the FBI, CIA and Treasury Department would show up to Elizebeth Friedman's door and hassle the mother of two-- not for any crime, but because she had an insane talent: she solved puzzles to protect America. Meet the Quaker poet who caught gangsters, defeated Nazis and unlocked a new world of Codebreaking in this episode-long interview with "The Woman Who Smashed Codes" author Jason Fagone.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Guess what, mango? What's that? Will? All right? So tell
me this doesn't sound like a great premise for a movie.
About a century ago, a young woman from a small
town in Indiana heads off to college to study poetry
and philosophy. Now she does this against her father's will,
by the way, So she finishes college, travels to Chicago
to figure out what to do with her life. Already
(00:20):
following so far, because here's where the crazy plot twist
comes in. She's about to give up, and then she's
discovered and hired by this really eccentric tycoon, makes a
major shift in her life and realizes she has this
remarkable ability to break codes. She then goes on to
become one of the greatest code breakers in history, helps
the US win World War One, helps US defeat the
(00:41):
Nazis in World War Two, and plays a major role
in building the foundation for the intelligence agencies in the
USA today. Boom, what do you think about this? I'd
watched that movie, yeah, and it should be a movie.
But here's the thing, it's all true and thanks to
the years of research and writing by Jason Fagoni, we
now have a brilliant book. It's called The Woman who
(01:02):
smashed codes and it tells the story of Elizabeth Smith Friedman.
I can't stop thinking about this story, so let's dive ina.
(01:28):
Hey there, podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm
Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good
friend Mangesh Ticketer and on the other side of the
soundproof glass obsessing over his new decoder ring and what's
he doing. He's he's like he's communicating with us in
some sort of new language of signals. He and he's
always so impressive. Mango, that's our that's our friend and
(01:48):
producer Tristan McNeil. Now today we're talking about one of
the most fascinating people history almost forgot and honestly might
have forever had it not been for the book we're
talking about today. I know it's it's just this incredible story.
And when you started telling me about it, I'll be honest,
I really didn't think it could be true. I mean,
like this poet learning code breaking and then taking down
(02:10):
Nazis and gangsters and cracking codes with pretty much this
relative ease, like it just sounded too good. And especially
since you know, we've done a lot of stories and
I've never really heard of Elizabeth Smith Friedman before I
know it's it's honestly why I can't stop talking about
that story. You really haven't stopped talking about it for
a while. Well, I'm thrilled we finally have the right
(02:30):
person on the line to talk about this story, and
that's the author of The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Jason Fagoni. So, Jason,
welcome to Part Time Genius. Hey, thanks, guys, I'm glad
to be here. Well, Jason, I want to jump straight
into this this really bizarre break that Elizabeth got, you know,
becoming a code breaker, And of course we want to
ask you about how you even stumbled into this story.
(02:50):
But first, can you set the scene a little bit
and just talk about what her early life was like
before she got this big break. Yeah. So it's one
of these kind of classic American tales. You have a
a hundred years ago, a young woman in her early
twenties is bored with her life and board with her job.
She lives in a small town, uh in Midwest, in
rural Indiana where she's from. She's teaching high school and
(03:14):
for a bright young woman in nineteen fifteen, nineteen sixteen,
this is kind of the end of the line right there,
there is not really um a lot of opportunity beyond
teaching school. Elizabeth was extremely intelligent, ambitious, and brave, and
she decided in June nine, sixteen, to take a risk.
She quit her job teaching school and she moved to
(03:35):
the big city, to Chicago, to look for something more unusual.
And that was really all she wanted, was something a
little bit more unusual. That brought her to a library
in Chicago, the Newberry Library that happened to have a
rare volume of Shakespeare from sixteen twenty three was the
Shakespeare First Saffolio. And she happened to love Shakespeare. She
(03:57):
had studied Shakespeare in school. She was a poet by training,
literature scholar, and she just kind of wanted to see
this rare book. She she hadn't had any luck finding
a job in Chicago. She spent about a week, week
and a half they're looking for work, had no luck.
She was about ready to go back home and move
in with her parents back in Indiana, but she made
(04:17):
this one final stop at this library to see this
Shakespeare book, and she happened to have a chance meeting
there with an eccentric tycoon named George Fabian that that
ended up transforming her life, but not just her life, Uh,
it ended up changing the shape of the twentieth century.
And to be clear, like she hadn't studied any code breaking, right,
(04:38):
Like she was um more a liberal arts type, is
that right? Yeah, absolutely she was. She was a poet
in a literature person. So and this is one of
the surprising things about the story and one of the
things that pulled me in from the from the first
day I began to read her letters, is that I
think we we kind of think of code breakers as mathematicians.
We have this image of the code breakers as someone
like allan turning professional mathematician, math professor. But the fact
(05:01):
is code breakers often come from unusual places because the
core thing about code breaking is it's really about seeing patterns.
The code breaking is the science of solving a secret
message without knowing the key. Um. It's akin to if
you've ever solved the cryptogram and the in the puzzle
page in the paper. Um. Elizabeth was doing this at
a sort of more sophisticated level than than most people.
(05:24):
But it's the same principle. You you you sort of
take a block of letters that looks like gobbledygook. You
chop them into their constituent parts, you whirl them around,
count them and measure them and rearrange them into their
original order. And um, Elizabeth was a genius at seeing patterns.
Even though she wasn't mathematically trained, she she had a
(05:44):
genius for seeing patterns. And that, uh, that's one of
the things that made her one of the one of
the most important code breakers of her era. And before
she was doing the code breaking, that obviously, you know,
changed the world. And in many ways, it was an
interest first project. I mean, can you talk a little
bit about Fabian because he seemed like such a bizarre character,
(06:05):
and and how this meeting came to be, and and
and what she was actually asked to do in her
first assignment with him. So Elizabeth went to this library,
the Newberry Library, to see this rare book of Shakespeare,
and she having to fall into conversation with the librarian
there who saw that she was interested in Shakespeare. The
librarian comes over and says, you know, it's funny, but
there's this odd, rich guy who keeps coming to the
(06:27):
library looking at the same book of Shakespeare. He's convinced
that there are secret messages embedded inside inside this book
that have been planted there by the true author of
Shakespeare's plays. He thinks that the true author is actually
this guy who is a contemporary of Shakespeare's named Francis Bake.
So the librarian is telling Elizabeth this, and the librarian says, uh,
(06:50):
this rich guy, George Fabian. He says he's been looking
for a research assistant. Would you be interested in something
like that? Elisabeth says, oh, sure, you know, maybe possibly.
The librarian makes a phone call to the George Fabian.
George Fabian ends up coming to the library immediately, bringing
bringing his chauffeurg limousine. He pulls up in front of
the Newberry Library and this limo and he tumbles out
(07:13):
of the limousine and Elizabeth Smith looks at George Fabian
for the first time, and what she sees is an
enormous human being. He is six foot for two pounds,
big iron gray beard. Uh. He just he just sort
of stomps towards her. Uh. He has big red face,
and he's sort of full of energy and intent, and
(07:34):
he's basically towering over her. Because Elizabeth is very petite.
She's about five ft three and about a hundred and
ten pounds um. And he looks at her and he says,
would you like to come to Riverbank and spend the
night with me? This is you know, this is a
completely scandalous question. Uh. You know, Elizabeth's from this from
a fairly devout Quaker family, and and um, and she
(07:56):
doesn't even know what to say to this. She doesn't
know what Riverbank is, and said she she kind of
stammers reply, and she says, well, sir, I don't have
anything to to sleep in. I don't have any of
my nightclothes or my or my or my toiletries or
anything like that. And he says, oh, don't mind that.
We'll we'll set you up with all of that. Come on,
and and and this guy, George Fabian, grabs her by
the arm and sort of walks her out to his
limousine and and takes her to the Chicago and Northwestern
(08:19):
train station. And from there, Uh, she has brought to
this place called river Bank. And what river Bank is
is one of the most bizarre institutions in America at
that time, nineteen sixteen. So George, baby, and it turns
out is a Chicago textile multimillionaire. He's made his fortune
by selling different kinds of cloth, and he has kind
(08:42):
of a marketing genius for selling different kinds of cloth
to department stores. Um. Classic kind of self made guys.
He's a high school dropout, he's not educated, but he
has a lot of money, and he has kind of
the ability in the Gilded Age to build a kingdom
around himself and to and to kind of set the
rules for everybody in his orbit. And um, he's a
(09:02):
lot like someone like Andrew Carnegie or William Randolph Hurst,
these these guys with that era who just had more
money than God. What distinguished George Fabian from those guys
is that, you know, instead of spending his money on
French Impressionist paintings or you know, building a big castle,
what really interested George Fabian was discovering the secrets of nature.
(09:23):
He was really into science. He wanted to discover things
about nature that had never been discovered. And so he
turned his private estate, which was called River Bank, into
a kind of half rich man's fantasy land and half
private scientific laboratory, very much like Thomas Edison's Menlo Park,
(09:44):
New Jersey or Nikola Tesla's Lab in New York. It
was a place where, you know, a single committed person
with a lot of money had built a scientific laboratory
and institution to investigate secrets of nature. And there was
all kinds of experiments happening at Riverbank to There was
genetics experiments, agriculture experiments, acoustical experiments, and then there was
(10:06):
this project that George Fabian wanted Elizabeth Smith to work on,
which was the Bacon Cipher Project, the project of discovering
these secret messages inside the works of Shakespeare, ripping them
out and translating them into the plain text, and revealing
the secrets of this Shakespeare book to the world. And
that's that's what he told Elizabeth he wanted her to
(10:29):
do when he went that day, when he met her
in the library and whisked her off on the train
to Riverbank. He wanted her to help him discover the
secrets that were indebted in Shakespeare and sort of sort
of transformed the history of English literature. It's just it's
just unbelievable to think about. I think about the number
of hours, Mango, that you and I spent just sitting
(10:50):
in libraries hoping that some eccentric tycoon would come along
and discover us and lisk us away and it just
it never happened, but it was. It's it's fascinating to
read about it, to to think about our fantasy of that.
But yet, so so that project, that's Shakespeare project didn't
exactly go you know, anywhere big from there. But but
(11:12):
but can you tell us, like, how did she end
up making this transition from trying to figure out the
code within Shakespeare and seeing if there was any truth
to this too what she eventually ended up doing and
some of the very serious code breaking. Sure, that's a
great question. So so she's brought out to Riverbank, knowing
nothing about code breaking. She's immediately plunged into this project
(11:35):
to find secret messages in Shakespeare. And she can't find them.
And she's there for months and months and months, and
she's still having having trouble, you know, discovering these secret messages.
Ultimately she concludes that it's all a wild goose chase,
it's all kind of a grand delusion. The secret messages
(11:56):
aren't actually there. What's happening is that George Fabian and
the people who believe what he believe are kind of
seeing what they want to see. This is the thing
about human beings is that we're we're very good at
seeing patterns. Were all kind of born to do it.
And sometimes we're so good at seeing patterns that we
end up seeing patterns that aren't really there, right, and uh,
and this is what was happening. They thought they saw
(12:17):
these messages in the works of Shakespeare that weren't really there.
Elizabeth had to figure this out. Um. But what that
experience did is, you know, being dropped into this kind
of delusion. It made her very interested and well, if
I wanted to find patterns that really were there, and
if I wanted to be sure that they were there,
how would I do that? How would I develop a method?
(12:39):
How would I develop a system to make sure that
I wasn't tricking myself? And so, beginning in this kind
of world of delusion um inspired her to try to
create a true method and a true scientific system for
discovering patterns in in these blocks of gobbledygook. And that's
what launched her on her code breaking career, sort of
(13:01):
in confluence with this other thing that happened, which is
a year after she got to River Bank, America, entered
World War One, so April nineteen seventeen, you know, America
enters the war, and at that point, you know, it's
amazing for me to go back and learn this history
because you know, I had always kind of assumed that
the American intelligence community that we that we know today
(13:24):
that's mighty and powerful, the National Security Agency, the CIA,
the FBI. I had always assumed that these institutions are
always kind of always powerful and had always existed. But
you know, in nineteen seventeen, when America entered World War One,
there really was no American intelligence community. There was no
n s A, there was no CIA, and the FBI
was very young. And one of the things that you
(13:45):
need to do when you're going to war is, you know,
you need to read the secret messages that the enemy
is sending. You need to know what they're saying and
what they're doing so you can have an advantage. The
thing is, you know, when America went to World War
in World War One in nineteen seventeen, uh, it had
no ability to do that. There were maybe five people
in the entire United States who even knew what a
(14:07):
code or a cipher and so, uh it just so
happened that some of these five people were Elizabeth and
her colleagues at Riverbank Laboratories, this bizarre private institution run
by a crazy rich guy on the Illinois Prairie. It's
one of these things, you know, truth is stranger than fiction,
and American history is very, very weird. It gets very
very weird, very very fast when you get beyond the surface.
(14:28):
So what happened is, you know, through the urgency of war,
the necessity of war, you know, the War Department, the
Army realized they didn't have any code breakers and they
needed code breakers very quickly. So, uh, just out of desperation,
they ended up kind of annexing Riverbank Laboratories, which became
kind of the first national security agency. The War Department
(14:51):
and other departments of the U. S. Government began to
send uh, secret messages that they couldn't read out to Riverbank,
and Elizabeth and her colleagues they're working for this crazy tycoon,
would solve the messages and send them back to Washington.
And for the first eight months of World War One,
UM Riverbank, Elizabeth and her colleagues, they're handled the entire
(15:12):
code breaking burden for the U. S. Government. While it
was at war, which is which is incredible to think about,
because you know, you've got to realize Elizabeth is four
years old at this time, and she has just learned
about code breaking in the last year, but all of
a sudden she was the expert and she had to perform.
(15:39):
Welcome back to Part Time Genius. We're chatting with Jason Fagoni,
the author of The Woman who Smashed Codes. So, Jason,
the whole thing about um, that code breaking really wasn't
a thing before is is just kind of stunning to
be because I always think about like things in the paper,
like the cryptograms, or you think about like uh, Lewis
Carroll and anagrams and people playing with words and in
crazy ways, But that this art isn't the thing is
(16:02):
is just kind of amazing. She also wasn't alone in
this endeavor, right, She had a sort of a love
interest and partner during this time exactly. She met a
young scientist there named William Friedman. And and again it's
one of these kind of classic American tales, two young
people from very different worlds. Elizabeth was, you know, a
Quaker girl from the Midwest. William Friedman was a Jewish scientist,
(16:24):
from Pittsburgh. Um, he had been brought to Riverbank to
perform genetics experiments. He was breeding fruit flies. Ah, he
was trying to breed different varieties of corn and wheat
that might take root in different kinds of soil. But
the thing about William Freedman is that he he had
a talent for photography and a lot of the original
(16:47):
work on the Bacon Cipher project. This, this project of
finding secret messages in Shakespeare depended on enlarging photographs of uh,
the original Shakespeare manuscript, the six Stafolio. So so because
William was good with camera and he knew how to
develop Prince and in dark Ram, George Fabian roped him
(17:08):
into this project. And so William Friedman began to work
with Elizabeth Smith on the Shakespeare project and and they
both kind of looked at each other around the same
time and had this had this epiphany which was, Um,
everybody at this place is completely crazy except for us.
You know, we are the we might be the only
(17:29):
sane people here, and we need to, uh, we need
to form a bond to kind of to protect ourselves
from these lunatics. And while all of this craziness was
swirling around them. Elizabeth and William did something extremely important,
which is, together they invented the modern science of cryptology,
which today is at the core of our intelligence agencies.
(17:52):
So this is a remarkable thing. You know, in the
span of about two or three years, starting in nineteen
they invented new techniques of code breaking UM that had
not been known in America. They wrote papers together, they
worked across from each other in the same room, at
the same desk, solving puzzles with pencil and paper. You
(18:13):
gotta remember, this is before the era of computers. This
is all pencil and paper. You're just sitting there with
pencil paper in your mind. And because so little was
known about code breaking in America, UM, they they very
quickly had to invent new techniques. They had to become scientists,
and they had to become explorers. And they did that. Uh.
And they were able to do it because they just
(18:34):
had this They had this bond, this link. You know,
there's something kind of miraculous seemed to happen when they
worked together. They made each other better UM and and
very quickly they started to consider themselves a duo and
and a team. UM. After they were married, William even
even came up with the name he called them. He
called them the Freedman Combination. And you know, and it's
interesting because because these papers that they wrote together are
(18:57):
known as the Riverbank Publications, and uh uh you know,
they've historically been credited to William alone. You know, it's
only his name that's on the papers. But I went
back and I looked at the early drafts of these publications,
which are in the New York Public Library, uh, in
their Manuscripts and Archives division. And when you look at
the drafts, you see that Elizabeth's handwriting has all over them.
(19:19):
In fact, you know her her her name is even
typed on some of the type scripts as the author
of certain sections of the papers. So I think that
for several of the papers, especially the early, the early papers,
Elizabeth was every bit the co author, and in fact,
William considered her to be the co author too. He
referred to the papers as our papers. And uh. The
(19:41):
thing that kind of seals the deal from me is that,
you know, uh, in his personal archive, which is at
a private library in Virginia, he has uh he he
kept his own personal copies of the River Bank Publications
and on one of them. He actually writes Elizabeth's name
as a co author on the cover, even though it's
not there in the printed version, and so so she was.
(20:02):
She was the co founder I think of modern American cryptology. Wow.
And you know when you talk about that, that impact
that they had, and I guess finally the War Department
wakes up to the fact that maybe they need more
than just five people at this weird estate in the
middle of nowhere and and decides to start their own
code breaking units. But but that doesn't mean the end
of it for for William and Elizabeth. Can you talk
(20:24):
a little bit about what you know Elizabeth specifically was
up to in between the world wars, because she was
still very much involved in this world Sure, right, So
you're right, the War Department comes to the conclusion that
maybe it's not the best idea to have a crazy
tycoon handling all of the code breaking bird and forward
the United States. Uh, they started, they start to build
code breaking teams and capacities in Washington. What happens is, eventually, uh,
(20:49):
George Fabian sort of reveals his insanity. He begins to
spy on the Freedman's while they're still at Riverbank. He
surveils them, he intercepts them, nail. He becomes very controlling.
There's a suggestion that he might have sexually harassed Elizabeth
while William was serving in France briefly during World War One.
(21:11):
William comes back from the war, they both get out
of there. They make their escape. They essentially pack up
their things in the middle of the night because they're
terrified of Fabian and they moved to Washington, d C.
And this is where they spend the rest of their
careers and so um. Initially they're working in Washington, d C.
Together starting they both they both start working for the army,
(21:31):
and at first they're working in the same room just
like they were before, designing new codes for the Army
news safer codes for for the use of the dough boys. UM.
Pretty quickly, Elizabeth gets bored with that and she quits.
She she stays at home and starts to write children's books,
which was a long ambition of her. She wanted to
write a children's book about the history of the alphabets
(21:53):
and show sort of the wonders of the alphabet and
the system of of of written communication to it's and
young adults. And she also had gave birth to their
first child around that time, Barbara daughter, and uh soe
Elizabeth is kind of out of the game, right she
she's at home, she's writing children's books, she's recovering from labor,
(22:17):
and she is a mother. And this is kind of
what she thinks she's going to do for the rest
rest of her life and her career. But what happens
is that men from the government show up on her
doorstep and ask herself puzzles for America. And this is
this is exactly these are her words, by the way,
this is how she put it. She she was kind
of a complaint all of her life. She said that
(22:37):
men from the government keeps showing up on my doorstep
asking me to selve puzzles, and the only way the
only way to make them go away is to say
yes and agree to do these projects. The problem for
Elizabeth is that she was just so good at what
she did um she and she had such an unusual
set of skills that she became indispensable. And so the
government really could not afford to leave her alone. And
(22:59):
so at every stage of her career, and men from
the government were showing up on our doorstep asking her
to confront some kind of challenge for which they were
unprepared and and the challenge in nine the first men
from the government who showed up on her doorstep in DC.
We're from the U. S. Treasury Department, specifically the U. S.
Coast Guard, and they were asking Elizabeth to help them
(23:21):
fight the war against organized crime because of prohibition. What
the Coast Guard needed to make any progress in in
this war against uh these rum runners was code breaking.
And by the way, these were not gentlemen run runners, right,
the gentleman rum runners, the guys sort of the the
small time entrepreneurs with a boat. Yeah, they were out
of the game by nineteen twenty four. They were. They
(23:42):
were edged out. They were forced out by organized crime,
by these mafias. And so, uh so, what the Coast
Guard needed to make any progress was code breaking. They
needed someone like Elizabeth to come in look at the
intercepted radio messages, you know, solve them and light up
this dark and underworld too, that the Coast Guard would
be able to catch these boats and put these guys
(24:03):
on trial. And that's exactly what she started to do.
Starting she became an expert in this discipline of radio intelligence,
which is intercepting the radio messages, solving the codes, using
the information to map the hit and network the darkened
underworld to throw light on it. And then once she
had solved the messages of these rum runners, a lot
(24:24):
of the times she would be called to testifying court
against them, which is incredible to think about, because you know,
it's this badite woman five ft three, you know, walking
to the front of a courtroom, you know, in a
pink dress and a pink hat with a flower pinned
to the brim, and she's sitting in the witness box
staring down, you know, in one case, more than twenty
agents of an organized crime syndicate and explaining to a
(24:48):
jury exactly what code breaking is and exactly how she
solved these messages, because she had to be able to
convince a jury that it was real science, that the
words that she was saying, the rum runners were saying,
we're her actual words, that she really was kind of
reading their thoughts, and that there was a science to it.
And so, uh So, Elizabeth became, for a brief time
in the in the early nineteen thirties, a front page story.
(25:11):
Uh and it was kind of an irresistible story for
reporters because you know they would they would describe her
as sort of like, uh, a small woman in a
pink dress who protects the United States or or you know,
a pretty little woman in a in a philly prank
pink dress. Um, and she and she would find herself
on the front page all of a sudden and testifying
(25:33):
in these spectacular trials. Wow. Yeah, And I think you
said at one point she was decoding up to what
like twenty five thousand messages in a year, So not
only was she good at this, but she was incredibly fast. Yes,
it was an astonishing volume of stuff. And and again
this is before computers, so so a lot of the
job was just this kind of daily grind of of
(25:57):
cranking through paper. So, Jason, I want to get into
uh jed or Hoover and how the FBI messed up
so many things and and all that story is fascinating,
But before that, can you tell us a little bit
about how you found the story and how you reported
it because it obviously has uh, you know, a ton
of work went into this incredible book. Sure, so the
(26:18):
genesis of the story was really the Edward Snowden, Uh
leaks in. So after the Snowden story broke, I started
reading about the n s A, right, and I think, um,
the history of the n s A. Where did it
come from? And like a lot of Americans, I think
I didn't really know much about the n s A.
And when you start reading about the history of the
n s A, all roads lead to William Friedman, Elizabeth's husband.
(26:41):
He's considered to be the godfather of the n s A.
That today, if you go to n s A headquarters
in Fort Meade, Uh, there's an outside of the auditorium
that is named for William is a bronze bust of
his head. So William is like the guy, the guy
with the n s A. UM. But I also read
I also read that he that he had a wife
who was a codebreaker herself, and I thought that was interesting, right,
(27:05):
like a husband and wife codebreaker. That's that's kind of unusual.
And I went looking for more information about Elizabeth, but
there wasn't really much that I could find. And so
one day I drove down from my from my house
outside of Philly to the library in Lexington, Virginia, where
the Freedman's left their personal papers before they died and
(27:28):
William left, uh, you know, reams of stuff, boxes and
boxes and boxes and boxes. Elizabeth left a smaller amount
of material, but she still left twenty two boxes full
of full of documents, and um, I asked if I
could see them, And so I started reading reading her stuff,
starting with Box one, File one. And you know, immediately
(27:48):
when I started reading her letters, I was just I
was just taken with her voice, you know, on on
the page a hundred years ago, reading reading reading her
words in her own hand. And she's just so sort
of funny, witty, warm, sometimes sort of biting, sarcastic. She
could be very savage on the bag sometimes and um,
and I was just captivated with with her voice. But
(28:10):
you know, the more I read in those twenty two boxes,
the more I realized that, um, you know, not only
was this the story of uh, you know, a remarkable woman,
um who had an amazing kind of dramatic, kind of
irresistibly you know, cinematic career. I mean, a code breaking
Quaker poet who caught gangsters. It's it's it's kind of irresistible, right,
(28:34):
But I also realized that, you know, she was really
a hidden woman behind the birth and the growth of
the intelligence uh community in America, because she really was
present at the beginning of a lot of things that
that today are very important. And so I thought it
was you know, it was both kind of like a
you know, an incredible just human story that hadn't been told,
(28:56):
but I also thought it was it was important in
terms of the bigger picture of American intelligence. That the
thing about the twenty two boxes that I found at
the library that Elizabeth had left was, uh, there was
nothing in World War about World War Two in those boxes,
so there was essentially a gap between nineteen thirty nine
and so what she did during World War Two, what
(29:20):
I found in those records is that, um, she was
hunting Nazi spies. So after Hitler invaded Poland, Nazi spies
began spreading out into the Western hemisphere, and uh, most
of them set up shop in South America. South America
was a good place for them to be because it
was kind of upper grabs, it was neutral, uh, and
(29:43):
it was close to North America. So it was a
good listening post for Nazi spies to gather intelligence about
what America was doing and what Britain was doing. There
were also a lot of sort of right wing movements
in individual South American countries that kind of resembled fascism,
So there was some natural sympathy for the fascist cause.
They're also millions of German columnists already living there, so
(30:07):
Nazis had kind of a natural advantage. It was fertile
soil for Nazi spies to set up. And and what
they did is when they when they went to South America,
they started to build clandestine radio stations, pirate radio stations,
and they would transmit their intelligence reports back to Berlin
and Hamburg um over the radio. And uh. It was
the FBI's job, Jagger Hoover's job at that point, to
(30:29):
try to stop these Nazi spies. The problem was he
wasn't very good at it. So um. There's a famous story.
The FBI created a whole new division in to try
to go after Nazi spies in South America. It was
called the s I S. And the first couple of
FBI agents who went to South America, they got off
(30:50):
the plane and they were immediately spotted by the locals
and and made for FBI guys. You know, the locals.
The locals looked at them and they they looked like
FBI guys they had seen in the movies. They had
the snap brim hats and then you know, uh, you know,
the square jaws and everything, and they were really pale.
They didn't have they didn't speak the languages. Um. You know,
there's a story about one of the guys who had
taken a language course in New York in preparation for
(31:13):
his posting to South America. The the FBI had taught
him Spanish, and then he was posted to Brazil and
he got off the plane in Brazil, you know, disappointed
to discover that the language that's spoken in Brazil is
mainly Portuguese and not spanning. So these guys were completely lost,
right the FBI, Yeah, they were never they were never
going to be able to find these Nazi spies using
(31:33):
kind of old school FBI techniques of developing confidential informants
and that sort of thing. What they really needed was
code breaking, right, they needed a technical advantage. They needed
to intercept these radio messages, uh, solve the messages and
light up the darkened underworld by by kind of stealing
the thoughts directly from the lips of the spies. Um.
But they couldn't do that because the FBI didn't have
(31:56):
Because the FBI didn't have a code breaking team, they
had no code breaking compa city, They had no ability
uh to break codes and to read the messages of
what these Nazi spies were saying. But Elizabeth Friedman did
because you know, she had spent the last fifteen years
uh kind of doing target practice against rum runners and
drug smuggles. She she had developed this expertise at intercepting
(32:21):
radio messages, solving them and mapping these underworld networks because
that had been her job during the twenties and thirties
to to fight smuggling and so UM, it wasn't that
she set out to hunt Nazi spies. It's just that
she she happened to have the right set of skills
the right moment, you know, and in she was ready
to go. And so so what ended up happening is
the FBI relied on Elizabeth and UM and the code
(32:44):
breaking team that she had built within the Coast Guard
UH code breakers that she had trained she had led
UM relying on them to as as kind of the
technical back end of this of this hunt for Nazi
spies in South America. Elizabeth and her team monitor these
clandestine radio circuits used by Nazi spies, solve the messages,
(33:05):
and provide the translated English plain texts to allied intelligence agencies,
including the Army, the Navy, the FBI, and also British intelligence.
And by the end of the war, they had monitored
about fifty different UH clandestine radio circuits used by the Nazis,
solved four thousand messages. You know, these messages were incredibly
(33:26):
important in ultimately destroying these Nazi spy rings in South
America and eliminating a dangerous threat. You know, Elizabeth and
her teammates really brought these Nazi spies to Ruin Pick
to pick their networks apart, piece by piece, destroyed them,
you know, neutralized the threat. And then after the war,
(33:47):
Jagger Hoover you know, stuck up his hand and went
out to the public on kind of a publicity campaign
taking credit for all of that, and he said, you know, America,
the FBI saved you for on this dangerous Nazi spy
invasion in South America, and UH, You're welcome. And that's
kind of the story that has been told ever since,
(34:09):
is that is that the FBI did UH, did all
of the hard dangerous, brave. Uh, you know, brilliant work
of catching these Nazi splies of South America. But I
think the truth is that the real driver was Elizabeth Freedman.
It was this. It was this American mother of two
who figured out how to sweep the Western hemisphere free
(34:29):
of undercover Nazis. And uh, and yet she never got
the credit for it because because Hoover got out there
in front. Welcome back to Part time Genius. We're chatting
(34:51):
with Jason Fagoni, the author of The Woman who Smashed Codes. Okay, Jason,
So she, you know, helps through World War One obviously
de codes, know what, as you said, twenty five thousand
messages a year in between the world wars at times,
and and helped defeat the Nazis in World War Two.
It's just an unbelievable story. And then you said, after
(35:11):
all of this, she and William kind of come back
to the Shakespeare project later in their lives, and and
why was this? Yes? So after the war, Uh, William
was one of the people who helped form the National
Security Agency that the team that he had created and
built at the Army, which during World War Two achieved
(35:33):
essentially the impossible by breaking the Japanese diplomatic code, which
was called Purple, which she gave the Allies a huge
advantage and probably shortened the war. Yeah, he did all
these heroic things during World War Two, and then after
the war helped to create the n s A. His
his army unit was kind of absorbed into this thing
that became the n s A. But as the n
s A kind of began to grow, um it it
(35:56):
grew beyond what what he uh felt like he could bear. Um.
He became a critic internally of some of the n
s AS policies and it's uh it's directions. He he
became concerned that that too many documents were being classified.
Um he felt like the NISA was collecting too much information.
(36:19):
He felt like they would never ever be able to
sift all the information they were collecting for actionable intelligence
and UH and it really troubled him and uh and
and throughout the nineteen fifties, as the Cold War UH
kind of sharpened in d C, atmosphere of paranoia grew.
Um William became more and more despairing about his relationship
(36:42):
with this organization and with the government more broadly. That
he that he felt he had always served very loyal
loyally and um, you know it this kind of culminated
in this famous, famous day in eight when the n
s A sent agents to the personal home of William
and Elizabeth Freedman and removed documents and books from their
(37:06):
from their private library, uh, saying saying that they were
classified and needed needed to be moved to a higher
level of classification the free you know, A lot of
the a lot of the materials were so old that
they dated back to the First World War. UH. William
was baffled, you know that that the n s A
would uh would want to classify these things because they
(37:26):
were so old and there they were really of only
historical interest, he thought. But um, you know, they they
found this to be kind of intolerable, a uh, you know,
an invasion of their privacy. And um, I think it
motivated him and and and probably Elizabeth too to pull
away from from government work more and more and back
(37:47):
to personal projects. And so one of the personal projects
that they could could talk about that they could work on. Uh.
In this atmosphere of kind of deepening paranoia, security and
classification was something that had nothing to do with government
codebreak all is something that's something that went back to,
uh to their original kind of wild goose chase of
their youth at Number Bank Laboratories. So so you know,
(38:10):
they and what they did is they went back to this, uh,
to this theory that George Fabian had always tried to
get them to prove this theory that that Francis Bacon
had inserted secret messages in the works of Shakespeare and
uh and they just demolished it. They used all of
their ability, all of their uh, all of their kind
of savagery on the page to to sort of go
(38:31):
through every piece of piece of purported evidence for for
this theory and uh and just and just destroy it
page by page. And it is wonderful. And they wrote
it together. Um, it's a very funny book. It's it's
it's a very uh sort of precise book and uh
and and that was the thing that brought them back
together working together after decades of of kind of growing
(38:56):
growing apart because of their uh, you know, increasingly important
purity duties for the United States. Wow. Well, I have
to say, Jason, in reading this book, this is this
is one of those history books that as you're reading it,
you can almost see and feel the blood, sweat and
tears that went into this project. It's not only beautifully written,
(39:17):
but you can tell just all of the the intense
amount of research that you've done to put into this book,
and and for that, I honestly, I just want to
say thanks, because it is one of the best books
I've read in a long time. And I do hope
our our readers will check out The Woman who Smashed Codes.
It's an incredible story. So Elizabeth died in nineteen eighty
(39:37):
at the age of eighty eight, mostly unacknowledged for her
foundation laying cryptographic word, but you know you stumbled into
her story and and for that and all the work
you put into this, I just want to say thanks. Oh,
thank you guys. I I really appreciate your um. I
don't know your questions were great. It's clearly that you
paid a lot of paid a lot of attention to
(39:57):
the book and and honestly, it was it was a
joy doing the research. It was it was one of
those projects that every journalist and every writer hopes to
stumble across, and I feel lucky to have to have
gotten to do it. M H. Welcome back to part
(40:22):
time genius. Now we've learned a ton today, but you know,
we can't wrap this thing up without a good old
fashioned backed off. So you want to kick us off, mango, Yeah, definitely. So.
I know Jason talked about this a little bit earlier,
but I loved reading about how Elizabeth and William taught
their kids the basics of cryptography, like as early as
seven years old. So when their daughter Barbara was off
at sleepaway camp, she'd send home letters and code, and
(40:45):
the Freedman's would use codes and ciphers and their Christmas
cards and sometimes they even had cipher parties where their
guests would have to solve the cipher just to figure
out what would be served for dinner. Wow, that's pretty awesome,
And actually it's kind of neat to see this coming
back in a way with like these brave gout type
places that people will go with their friends to play.
Have you seen these exit the room things? Yeah, yeah, exactly.
(41:07):
I've never been to one, but they seem pretty interesting.
All right. Well, I know we've been talking about the
woman who Smashed Codes, but there was another book published
this fall that's more generally about women code breakers, and
it's called Code Girls. The Untold Story of the American
women code breakers of World War Two, and it's by
Liz Mundy, So I think i'll share just a couple
of facts from that. And it does tell the story
(41:27):
of the more than ten thousand college students and school teachers,
among other women who were recruited to really be the
backbone of our intelligence efforts. But one of the things
I thought was so interesting is that it was a huge,
huge advantage for the Allied powers because unlike the Allied
Powers who put all of these women to work, the
Access Powers didn't do the same. And their estimates that
it shortened the war by as many as two or
(41:49):
three years. Oh wow, that's incredible. So one of the
more strange figures that Elizabeth took down was this woman
known as Doll Lady, and she discovered the secret code
hidden in the letters of this New York woman named
Beelvolye Dickinson, who was acting as this Japanese spy. It's
an amazing story. So Dickinson owned a doll shop and
would send letters to an address in Buenos Aires, and
she'd be talking about various dolls in her collection. But
(42:11):
Elizabeth realized that her references to like English dolls and
foreign dolls were actually a way to communicate about the Allies.
And the doll lady was eventually sentenced to ten years
in prison and find after being charged with espionage. She
got that doll lady. Wow, what a strange character. I know,
it just confirms my theories that adults who love dolls
shouldn't be trusted. That it's a good that's a good one.
I go, maybe we'll do a whole episode on that
(42:33):
at some point. All right, Well, back to Monday's books.
So she writes about how the branches of military were
different from one another and who they allowed to be
code breakers and who they didn't. So the Navy, for example,
didn't allow non whites. They didn't want Jewish women, they
didn't want African American women. The Army, on the other hand,
did allow non whites. However, not surprisingly, these groups were segregated.
(42:55):
And it was really frustrating from Moundy as she was
doing the research because there's no substantial records out there
other than a few photos, and you can actually see
these in Monday's book, and you know, it shows a
room full of African American code breakers, most of them
being women. So, as Jason explained to us, by the
early nineteen twenties, there were only three code breaking units
in the government and fewer than fifty employees, and about
(43:16):
half of those employees worked for the State Department, and
the Army and Navy had the other two. But in
nine the Secretary of State decided to shut down the
State Department's unit because, as he put it, quote, gentlemen
do not read each other's mail. Wow, what a strange thing,
all right. Well, one of the other things Monday shows
and Code Girls is that unlike this common notion that
(43:37):
there are all these big and exciting kind of ah
ha moments in code breaking, it's actually much more similar
to a marathon. And she does a great job of
showing how they were working often around the clock, just
looking for patterns and searching and searching. And it really
was this marathon work that had played a huge role
in helping to shorten the war, as I mentioned earlier,
(43:58):
because the Allies just had a much better idea of
what the Japanese and Germans We're planning to do each
step along the way. And I bet you want a
carbo load before each stage. With that definitely definitely. So
I know we like to talk about the best job titles,
so I had to tell you about uh. When Elizabeth
was tapped to head up the Coast Guards codebreaking team,
not only was she the first woman to run a
US government code breaking unit, but she was also given
(44:20):
a business card that said cryptanalyst and charge US Coast Guard.
That's one of the best titles I've ever heard. I
cannot beat that. So I'm gonna give you today's fact
off Mango. Thank you, thank you. All Right, that's it
for today's show. A special thanks to Jocelyn Sears for
her excellent research help with this episode. Now, if you
want to share any of your favorite code breaking facts,
you can always email us at part Time Genius at
(44:41):
how stuff Works dot com or call us on our
seven fact hop line one eight four four pt Genius.
You can also hit us up on Facebook or Twitter,
and don't forget to let us know if you'd like
to come on to play a quiz with us sometime.
Thanks for listening, Yeah, thanks again for listening. Part Time
(45:09):
Genius is a production of How Stuff Works and wouldn't
be possible without several brilliant people who do the important
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(45:31):
to your ears. Good job, Eves. If you like what
you heard, we hope you'll subscribe, And if you really
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good review for us. Do you do? We forget Jason
Jason who
Guess what, mango? What's that? Will? All right? So tell
me this doesn't sound like a great premise for a movie.
About a century ago, a young woman from a small
town in Indiana heads off to college to study poetry
and philosophy. Now she does this against her father's will,
by the way, So she finishes college, travels to Chicago
to figure out what to do with her life. Already
(00:20):
following so far, because here's where the crazy plot twist
comes in. She's about to give up, and then she's
discovered and hired by this really eccentric tycoon, makes a
major shift in her life and realizes she has this
remarkable ability to break codes. She then goes on to
become one of the greatest code breakers in history, helps
the US win World War One, helps US defeat the
(00:41):
Nazis in World War Two, and plays a major role
in building the foundation for the intelligence agencies in the
USA today. Boom, what do you think about this? I'd
watched that movie, yeah, and it should be a movie.
But here's the thing, it's all true and thanks to
the years of research and writing by Jason Fagoni, we
now have a brilliant book. It's called The Woman who
(01:02):
smashed codes and it tells the story of Elizabeth Smith Friedman.
I can't stop thinking about this story, so let's dive ina.
(01:28):
Hey there, podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm
Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good
friend Mangesh Ticketer and on the other side of the
soundproof glass obsessing over his new decoder ring and what's
he doing. He's he's like he's communicating with us in
some sort of new language of signals. He and he's
always so impressive. Mango, that's our that's our friend and
(01:48):
producer Tristan McNeil. Now today we're talking about one of
the most fascinating people history almost forgot and honestly might
have forever had it not been for the book we're
talking about today. I know it's it's just this incredible story.
And when you started telling me about it, I'll be honest,
I really didn't think it could be true. I mean,
like this poet learning code breaking and then taking down
(02:10):
Nazis and gangsters and cracking codes with pretty much this
relative ease, like it just sounded too good. And especially
since you know, we've done a lot of stories and
I've never really heard of Elizabeth Smith Friedman before I
know it's it's honestly why I can't stop talking about
that story. You really haven't stopped talking about it for
a while. Well, I'm thrilled we finally have the right
(02:30):
person on the line to talk about this story, and
that's the author of The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Jason Fagoni. So, Jason,
welcome to Part Time Genius. Hey, thanks, guys, I'm glad
to be here. Well, Jason, I want to jump straight
into this this really bizarre break that Elizabeth got, you know,
becoming a code breaker, And of course we want to
ask you about how you even stumbled into this story.
(02:50):
But first, can you set the scene a little bit
and just talk about what her early life was like
before she got this big break. Yeah. So it's one
of these kind of classic American tales. You have a
a hundred years ago, a young woman in her early
twenties is bored with her life and board with her job.
She lives in a small town, uh in Midwest, in
rural Indiana where she's from. She's teaching high school and
(03:14):
for a bright young woman in nineteen fifteen, nineteen sixteen,
this is kind of the end of the line right there,
there is not really um a lot of opportunity beyond
teaching school. Elizabeth was extremely intelligent, ambitious, and brave, and
she decided in June nine, sixteen, to take a risk.
She quit her job teaching school and she moved to
(03:35):
the big city, to Chicago, to look for something more unusual.
And that was really all she wanted, was something a
little bit more unusual. That brought her to a library
in Chicago, the Newberry Library that happened to have a
rare volume of Shakespeare from sixteen twenty three was the
Shakespeare First Saffolio. And she happened to love Shakespeare. She
(03:57):
had studied Shakespeare in school. She was a poet by training,
literature scholar, and she just kind of wanted to see
this rare book. She she hadn't had any luck finding
a job in Chicago. She spent about a week, week
and a half they're looking for work, had no luck.
She was about ready to go back home and move
in with her parents back in Indiana, but she made
(04:17):
this one final stop at this library to see this
Shakespeare book, and she happened to have a chance meeting
there with an eccentric tycoon named George Fabian that that
ended up transforming her life, but not just her life, Uh,
it ended up changing the shape of the twentieth century.
And to be clear, like she hadn't studied any code breaking, right,
(04:38):
Like she was um more a liberal arts type, is
that right? Yeah, absolutely she was. She was a poet
in a literature person. So and this is one of
the surprising things about the story and one of the
things that pulled me in from the from the first
day I began to read her letters, is that I
think we we kind of think of code breakers as mathematicians.
We have this image of the code breakers as someone
like allan turning professional mathematician, math professor. But the fact
(05:01):
is code breakers often come from unusual places because the
core thing about code breaking is it's really about seeing patterns.
The code breaking is the science of solving a secret
message without knowing the key. Um. It's akin to if
you've ever solved the cryptogram and the in the puzzle
page in the paper. Um. Elizabeth was doing this at
a sort of more sophisticated level than than most people.
(05:24):
But it's the same principle. You you you sort of
take a block of letters that looks like gobbledygook. You
chop them into their constituent parts, you whirl them around,
count them and measure them and rearrange them into their
original order. And um, Elizabeth was a genius at seeing patterns.
Even though she wasn't mathematically trained, she she had a
(05:44):
genius for seeing patterns. And that, uh, that's one of
the things that made her one of the one of
the most important code breakers of her era. And before
she was doing the code breaking, that obviously, you know,
changed the world. And in many ways, it was an
interest first project. I mean, can you talk a little
bit about Fabian because he seemed like such a bizarre character,
(06:05):
and and how this meeting came to be, and and
and what she was actually asked to do in her
first assignment with him. So Elizabeth went to this library,
the Newberry Library, to see this rare book of Shakespeare,
and she having to fall into conversation with the librarian
there who saw that she was interested in Shakespeare. The
librarian comes over and says, you know, it's funny, but
there's this odd, rich guy who keeps coming to the
(06:27):
library looking at the same book of Shakespeare. He's convinced
that there are secret messages embedded inside inside this book
that have been planted there by the true author of
Shakespeare's plays. He thinks that the true author is actually
this guy who is a contemporary of Shakespeare's named Francis Bake.
So the librarian is telling Elizabeth this, and the librarian says, uh,
(06:50):
this rich guy, George Fabian. He says he's been looking
for a research assistant. Would you be interested in something
like that? Elisabeth says, oh, sure, you know, maybe possibly.
The librarian makes a phone call to the George Fabian.
George Fabian ends up coming to the library immediately, bringing
bringing his chauffeurg limousine. He pulls up in front of
the Newberry Library and this limo and he tumbles out
(07:13):
of the limousine and Elizabeth Smith looks at George Fabian
for the first time, and what she sees is an
enormous human being. He is six foot for two pounds,
big iron gray beard. Uh. He just he just sort
of stomps towards her. Uh. He has big red face,
and he's sort of full of energy and intent, and
(07:34):
he's basically towering over her. Because Elizabeth is very petite.
She's about five ft three and about a hundred and
ten pounds um. And he looks at her and he says,
would you like to come to Riverbank and spend the
night with me? This is you know, this is a
completely scandalous question. Uh. You know, Elizabeth's from this from
a fairly devout Quaker family, and and um, and she
(07:56):
doesn't even know what to say to this. She doesn't
know what Riverbank is, and said she she kind of
stammers reply, and she says, well, sir, I don't have
anything to to sleep in. I don't have any of
my nightclothes or my or my or my toiletries or
anything like that. And he says, oh, don't mind that.
We'll we'll set you up with all of that. Come on,
and and and this guy, George Fabian, grabs her by
the arm and sort of walks her out to his
limousine and and takes her to the Chicago and Northwestern
(08:19):
train station. And from there, Uh, she has brought to
this place called river Bank. And what river Bank is
is one of the most bizarre institutions in America at
that time, nineteen sixteen. So George, baby, and it turns
out is a Chicago textile multimillionaire. He's made his fortune
by selling different kinds of cloth, and he has kind
(08:42):
of a marketing genius for selling different kinds of cloth
to department stores. Um. Classic kind of self made guys.
He's a high school dropout, he's not educated, but he
has a lot of money, and he has kind of
the ability in the Gilded Age to build a kingdom
around himself and to and to kind of set the
rules for everybody in his orbit. And um, he's a
(09:02):
lot like someone like Andrew Carnegie or William Randolph Hurst,
these these guys with that era who just had more
money than God. What distinguished George Fabian from those guys
is that, you know, instead of spending his money on
French Impressionist paintings or you know, building a big castle,
what really interested George Fabian was discovering the secrets of nature.
(09:23):
He was really into science. He wanted to discover things
about nature that had never been discovered. And so he
turned his private estate, which was called River Bank, into
a kind of half rich man's fantasy land and half
private scientific laboratory, very much like Thomas Edison's Menlo Park,
(09:44):
New Jersey or Nikola Tesla's Lab in New York. It
was a place where, you know, a single committed person
with a lot of money had built a scientific laboratory
and institution to investigate secrets of nature. And there was
all kinds of experiments happening at Riverbank to There was
genetics experiments, agriculture experiments, acoustical experiments, and then there was
(10:06):
this project that George Fabian wanted Elizabeth Smith to work on,
which was the Bacon Cipher Project, the project of discovering
these secret messages inside the works of Shakespeare, ripping them
out and translating them into the plain text, and revealing
the secrets of this Shakespeare book to the world. And
that's that's what he told Elizabeth he wanted her to
(10:29):
do when he went that day, when he met her
in the library and whisked her off on the train
to Riverbank. He wanted her to help him discover the
secrets that were indebted in Shakespeare and sort of sort
of transformed the history of English literature. It's just it's
just unbelievable to think about. I think about the number
of hours, Mango, that you and I spent just sitting
(10:50):
in libraries hoping that some eccentric tycoon would come along
and discover us and lisk us away and it just
it never happened, but it was. It's it's fascinating to
read about it, to to think about our fantasy of that.
But yet, so so that project, that's Shakespeare project didn't
exactly go you know, anywhere big from there. But but
(11:12):
but can you tell us, like, how did she end
up making this transition from trying to figure out the
code within Shakespeare and seeing if there was any truth
to this too what she eventually ended up doing and
some of the very serious code breaking. Sure, that's a
great question. So so she's brought out to Riverbank, knowing
nothing about code breaking. She's immediately plunged into this project
(11:35):
to find secret messages in Shakespeare. And she can't find them.
And she's there for months and months and months, and
she's still having having trouble, you know, discovering these secret messages.
Ultimately she concludes that it's all a wild goose chase,
it's all kind of a grand delusion. The secret messages
(11:56):
aren't actually there. What's happening is that George Fabian and
the people who believe what he believe are kind of
seeing what they want to see. This is the thing
about human beings is that we're we're very good at
seeing patterns. Were all kind of born to do it.
And sometimes we're so good at seeing patterns that we
end up seeing patterns that aren't really there, right, and uh,
and this is what was happening. They thought they saw
(12:17):
these messages in the works of Shakespeare that weren't really there.
Elizabeth had to figure this out. Um. But what that
experience did is, you know, being dropped into this kind
of delusion. It made her very interested and well, if
I wanted to find patterns that really were there, and
if I wanted to be sure that they were there,
how would I do that? How would I develop a method?
(12:39):
How would I develop a system to make sure that
I wasn't tricking myself? And so, beginning in this kind
of world of delusion um inspired her to try to
create a true method and a true scientific system for
discovering patterns in in these blocks of gobbledygook. And that's
what launched her on her code breaking career, sort of
(13:01):
in confluence with this other thing that happened, which is
a year after she got to River Bank, America, entered
World War One, so April nineteen seventeen, you know, America
enters the war, and at that point, you know, it's
amazing for me to go back and learn this history
because you know, I had always kind of assumed that
the American intelligence community that we that we know today
(13:24):
that's mighty and powerful, the National Security Agency, the CIA,
the FBI. I had always assumed that these institutions are
always kind of always powerful and had always existed. But
you know, in nineteen seventeen, when America entered World War One,
there really was no American intelligence community. There was no
n s A, there was no CIA, and the FBI
was very young. And one of the things that you
(13:45):
need to do when you're going to war is, you know,
you need to read the secret messages that the enemy
is sending. You need to know what they're saying and
what they're doing so you can have an advantage. The
thing is, you know, when America went to World War
in World War One in nineteen seventeen, uh, it had
no ability to do that. There were maybe five people
in the entire United States who even knew what a
(14:07):
code or a cipher and so, uh it just so
happened that some of these five people were Elizabeth and
her colleagues at Riverbank Laboratories, this bizarre private institution run
by a crazy rich guy on the Illinois Prairie. It's
one of these things, you know, truth is stranger than fiction,
and American history is very, very weird. It gets very
very weird, very very fast when you get beyond the surface.
(14:28):
So what happened is, you know, through the urgency of war,
the necessity of war, you know, the War Department, the
Army realized they didn't have any code breakers and they
needed code breakers very quickly. So, uh, just out of desperation,
they ended up kind of annexing Riverbank Laboratories, which became
kind of the first national security agency. The War Department
(14:51):
and other departments of the U. S. Government began to
send uh, secret messages that they couldn't read out to Riverbank,
and Elizabeth and her colleagues they're working for this crazy tycoon,
would solve the messages and send them back to Washington.
And for the first eight months of World War One,
UM Riverbank, Elizabeth and her colleagues, they're handled the entire
(15:12):
code breaking burden for the U. S. Government. While it
was at war, which is which is incredible to think about,
because you know, you've got to realize Elizabeth is four
years old at this time, and she has just learned
about code breaking in the last year, but all of
a sudden she was the expert and she had to perform.
(15:39):
Welcome back to Part Time Genius. We're chatting with Jason Fagoni,
the author of The Woman who Smashed Codes. So, Jason,
the whole thing about um, that code breaking really wasn't
a thing before is is just kind of stunning to
be because I always think about like things in the paper,
like the cryptograms, or you think about like uh, Lewis
Carroll and anagrams and people playing with words and in
crazy ways, But that this art isn't the thing is
(16:02):
is just kind of amazing. She also wasn't alone in
this endeavor, right, She had a sort of a love
interest and partner during this time exactly. She met a
young scientist there named William Friedman. And and again it's
one of these kind of classic American tales, two young
people from very different worlds. Elizabeth was, you know, a
Quaker girl from the Midwest. William Friedman was a Jewish scientist,
(16:24):
from Pittsburgh. Um, he had been brought to Riverbank to
perform genetics experiments. He was breeding fruit flies. Ah, he
was trying to breed different varieties of corn and wheat
that might take root in different kinds of soil. But
the thing about William Freedman is that he he had
a talent for photography and a lot of the original
(16:47):
work on the Bacon Cipher project. This, this project of
finding secret messages in Shakespeare depended on enlarging photographs of uh,
the original Shakespeare manuscript, the six Stafolio. So so because
William was good with camera and he knew how to
develop Prince and in dark Ram, George Fabian roped him
(17:08):
into this project. And so William Friedman began to work
with Elizabeth Smith on the Shakespeare project and and they
both kind of looked at each other around the same
time and had this had this epiphany which was, Um,
everybody at this place is completely crazy except for us.
You know, we are the we might be the only
(17:29):
sane people here, and we need to, uh, we need
to form a bond to kind of to protect ourselves
from these lunatics. And while all of this craziness was
swirling around them. Elizabeth and William did something extremely important,
which is, together they invented the modern science of cryptology,
which today is at the core of our intelligence agencies.
(17:52):
So this is a remarkable thing. You know, in the
span of about two or three years, starting in nineteen
they invented new techniques of code breaking UM that had
not been known in America. They wrote papers together, they
worked across from each other in the same room, at
the same desk, solving puzzles with pencil and paper. You
(18:13):
gotta remember, this is before the era of computers. This
is all pencil and paper. You're just sitting there with
pencil paper in your mind. And because so little was
known about code breaking in America, UM, they they very
quickly had to invent new techniques. They had to become scientists,
and they had to become explorers. And they did that. Uh.
And they were able to do it because they just
(18:34):
had this They had this bond, this link. You know,
there's something kind of miraculous seemed to happen when they
worked together. They made each other better UM and and
very quickly they started to consider themselves a duo and
and a team. UM. After they were married, William even
even came up with the name he called them. He
called them the Freedman Combination. And you know, and it's
interesting because because these papers that they wrote together are
(18:57):
known as the Riverbank Publications, and uh uh you know,
they've historically been credited to William alone. You know, it's
only his name that's on the papers. But I went
back and I looked at the early drafts of these publications,
which are in the New York Public Library, uh, in
their Manuscripts and Archives division. And when you look at
the drafts, you see that Elizabeth's handwriting has all over them.
(19:19):
In fact, you know her her her name is even
typed on some of the type scripts as the author
of certain sections of the papers. So I think that
for several of the papers, especially the early, the early papers,
Elizabeth was every bit the co author, and in fact,
William considered her to be the co author too. He
referred to the papers as our papers. And uh. The
(19:41):
thing that kind of seals the deal from me is that,
you know, uh, in his personal archive, which is at
a private library in Virginia, he has uh he he
kept his own personal copies of the River Bank Publications
and on one of them. He actually writes Elizabeth's name
as a co author on the cover, even though it's
not there in the printed version, and so so she was.
(20:02):
She was the co founder I think of modern American cryptology. Wow.
And you know when you talk about that, that impact
that they had, and I guess finally the War Department
wakes up to the fact that maybe they need more
than just five people at this weird estate in the
middle of nowhere and and decides to start their own
code breaking units. But but that doesn't mean the end
of it for for William and Elizabeth. Can you talk
(20:24):
a little bit about what you know Elizabeth specifically was
up to in between the world wars, because she was
still very much involved in this world Sure, right, So
you're right, the War Department comes to the conclusion that
maybe it's not the best idea to have a crazy
tycoon handling all of the code breaking bird and forward
the United States. Uh, they started, they start to build
code breaking teams and capacities in Washington. What happens is, eventually, uh,
(20:49):
George Fabian sort of reveals his insanity. He begins to
spy on the Freedman's while they're still at Riverbank. He
surveils them, he intercepts them, nail. He becomes very controlling.
There's a suggestion that he might have sexually harassed Elizabeth
while William was serving in France briefly during World War One.
(21:11):
William comes back from the war, they both get out
of there. They make their escape. They essentially pack up
their things in the middle of the night because they're
terrified of Fabian and they moved to Washington, d C.
And this is where they spend the rest of their
careers and so um. Initially they're working in Washington, d C.
Together starting they both they both start working for the army,
(21:31):
and at first they're working in the same room just
like they were before, designing new codes for the Army
news safer codes for for the use of the dough boys. UM.
Pretty quickly, Elizabeth gets bored with that and she quits.
She she stays at home and starts to write children's books,
which was a long ambition of her. She wanted to
write a children's book about the history of the alphabets
(21:53):
and show sort of the wonders of the alphabet and
the system of of of written communication to it's and
young adults. And she also had gave birth to their
first child around that time, Barbara daughter, and uh soe
Elizabeth is kind of out of the game, right she
she's at home, she's writing children's books, she's recovering from labor,
(22:17):
and she is a mother. And this is kind of
what she thinks she's going to do for the rest
rest of her life and her career. But what happens
is that men from the government show up on her
doorstep and ask herself puzzles for America. And this is
this is exactly these are her words, by the way,
this is how she put it. She she was kind
of a complaint all of her life. She said that
(22:37):
men from the government keeps showing up on my doorstep
asking me to selve puzzles, and the only way the
only way to make them go away is to say
yes and agree to do these projects. The problem for
Elizabeth is that she was just so good at what
she did um she and she had such an unusual
set of skills that she became indispensable. And so the
government really could not afford to leave her alone. And
(22:59):
so at every stage of her career, and men from
the government were showing up on our doorstep asking her
to confront some kind of challenge for which they were
unprepared and and the challenge in nine the first men
from the government who showed up on her doorstep in DC.
We're from the U. S. Treasury Department, specifically the U. S.
Coast Guard, and they were asking Elizabeth to help them
(23:21):
fight the war against organized crime because of prohibition. What
the Coast Guard needed to make any progress in in
this war against uh these rum runners was code breaking.
And by the way, these were not gentlemen run runners, right,
the gentleman rum runners, the guys sort of the the
small time entrepreneurs with a boat. Yeah, they were out
of the game by nineteen twenty four. They were. They
(23:42):
were edged out. They were forced out by organized crime,
by these mafias. And so, uh so, what the Coast
Guard needed to make any progress was code breaking. They
needed someone like Elizabeth to come in look at the
intercepted radio messages, you know, solve them and light up
this dark and underworld too, that the Coast Guard would
be able to catch these boats and put these guys
(24:03):
on trial. And that's exactly what she started to do.
Starting she became an expert in this discipline of radio intelligence,
which is intercepting the radio messages, solving the codes, using
the information to map the hit and network the darkened
underworld to throw light on it. And then once she
had solved the messages of these rum runners, a lot
(24:24):
of the times she would be called to testifying court
against them, which is incredible to think about, because you know,
it's this badite woman five ft three, you know, walking
to the front of a courtroom, you know, in a
pink dress and a pink hat with a flower pinned
to the brim, and she's sitting in the witness box
staring down, you know, in one case, more than twenty
agents of an organized crime syndicate and explaining to a
(24:48):
jury exactly what code breaking is and exactly how she
solved these messages, because she had to be able to
convince a jury that it was real science, that the
words that she was saying, the rum runners were saying,
we're her actual words, that she really was kind of
reading their thoughts, and that there was a science to it.
And so, uh So, Elizabeth became, for a brief time
in the in the early nineteen thirties, a front page story.
(25:11):
Uh and it was kind of an irresistible story for
reporters because you know they would they would describe her
as sort of like, uh, a small woman in a
pink dress who protects the United States or or you know,
a pretty little woman in a in a philly prank
pink dress. Um, and she and she would find herself
on the front page all of a sudden and testifying
(25:33):
in these spectacular trials. Wow. Yeah, And I think you
said at one point she was decoding up to what
like twenty five thousand messages in a year, So not
only was she good at this, but she was incredibly fast. Yes,
it was an astonishing volume of stuff. And and again
this is before computers, so so a lot of the
job was just this kind of daily grind of of
(25:57):
cranking through paper. So, Jason, I want to get into
uh jed or Hoover and how the FBI messed up
so many things and and all that story is fascinating,
But before that, can you tell us a little bit
about how you found the story and how you reported
it because it obviously has uh, you know, a ton
of work went into this incredible book. Sure, so the
(26:18):
genesis of the story was really the Edward Snowden, Uh
leaks in. So after the Snowden story broke, I started
reading about the n s A, right, and I think, um,
the history of the n s A. Where did it
come from? And like a lot of Americans, I think
I didn't really know much about the n s A.
And when you start reading about the history of the
n s A, all roads lead to William Friedman, Elizabeth's husband.
(26:41):
He's considered to be the godfather of the n s A.
That today, if you go to n s A headquarters
in Fort Meade, Uh, there's an outside of the auditorium
that is named for William is a bronze bust of
his head. So William is like the guy, the guy
with the n s A. UM. But I also read
I also read that he that he had a wife
who was a codebreaker herself, and I thought that was interesting, right,
(27:05):
like a husband and wife codebreaker. That's that's kind of unusual.
And I went looking for more information about Elizabeth, but
there wasn't really much that I could find. And so
one day I drove down from my from my house
outside of Philly to the library in Lexington, Virginia, where
the Freedman's left their personal papers before they died and
(27:28):
William left, uh, you know, reams of stuff, boxes and
boxes and boxes and boxes. Elizabeth left a smaller amount
of material, but she still left twenty two boxes full
of full of documents, and um, I asked if I
could see them, And so I started reading reading her stuff,
starting with Box one, File one. And you know, immediately
(27:48):
when I started reading her letters, I was just I
was just taken with her voice, you know, on on
the page a hundred years ago, reading reading reading her
words in her own hand. And she's just so sort
of funny, witty, warm, sometimes sort of biting, sarcastic. She
could be very savage on the bag sometimes and um,
and I was just captivated with with her voice. But
(28:10):
you know, the more I read in those twenty two boxes,
the more I realized that, um, you know, not only
was this the story of uh, you know, a remarkable woman,
um who had an amazing kind of dramatic, kind of
irresistibly you know, cinematic career. I mean, a code breaking
Quaker poet who caught gangsters. It's it's it's kind of irresistible, right,
(28:34):
But I also realized that, you know, she was really
a hidden woman behind the birth and the growth of
the intelligence uh community in America, because she really was
present at the beginning of a lot of things that
that today are very important. And so I thought it
was you know, it was both kind of like a
you know, an incredible just human story that hadn't been told,
(28:56):
but I also thought it was it was important in
terms of the bigger picture of American intelligence. That the
thing about the twenty two boxes that I found at
the library that Elizabeth had left was, uh, there was
nothing in World War about World War Two in those boxes,
so there was essentially a gap between nineteen thirty nine
and so what she did during World War Two, what
(29:20):
I found in those records is that, um, she was
hunting Nazi spies. So after Hitler invaded Poland, Nazi spies
began spreading out into the Western hemisphere, and uh, most
of them set up shop in South America. South America
was a good place for them to be because it
was kind of upper grabs, it was neutral, uh, and
(29:43):
it was close to North America. So it was a
good listening post for Nazi spies to gather intelligence about
what America was doing and what Britain was doing. There
were also a lot of sort of right wing movements
in individual South American countries that kind of resembled fascism,
So there was some natural sympathy for the fascist cause.
They're also millions of German columnists already living there, so
(30:07):
Nazis had kind of a natural advantage. It was fertile
soil for Nazi spies to set up. And and what
they did is when they when they went to South America,
they started to build clandestine radio stations, pirate radio stations,
and they would transmit their intelligence reports back to Berlin
and Hamburg um over the radio. And uh. It was
the FBI's job, Jagger Hoover's job at that point, to
(30:29):
try to stop these Nazi spies. The problem was he
wasn't very good at it. So um. There's a famous story.
The FBI created a whole new division in to try
to go after Nazi spies in South America. It was
called the s I S. And the first couple of
FBI agents who went to South America, they got off
(30:50):
the plane and they were immediately spotted by the locals
and and made for FBI guys. You know, the locals.
The locals looked at them and they they looked like
FBI guys they had seen in the movies. They had
the snap brim hats and then you know, uh, you know,
the square jaws and everything, and they were really pale.
They didn't have they didn't speak the languages. Um. You know,
there's a story about one of the guys who had
taken a language course in New York in preparation for
(31:13):
his posting to South America. The the FBI had taught
him Spanish, and then he was posted to Brazil and
he got off the plane in Brazil, you know, disappointed
to discover that the language that's spoken in Brazil is
mainly Portuguese and not spanning. So these guys were completely lost,
right the FBI, Yeah, they were never they were never
going to be able to find these Nazi spies using
(31:33):
kind of old school FBI techniques of developing confidential informants
and that sort of thing. What they really needed was
code breaking, right, they needed a technical advantage. They needed
to intercept these radio messages, uh, solve the messages and
light up the darkened underworld by by kind of stealing
the thoughts directly from the lips of the spies. Um.
But they couldn't do that because the FBI didn't have
(31:56):
Because the FBI didn't have a code breaking team, they
had no code breaking compa city, They had no ability
uh to break codes and to read the messages of
what these Nazi spies were saying. But Elizabeth Friedman did
because you know, she had spent the last fifteen years
uh kind of doing target practice against rum runners and
drug smuggles. She she had developed this expertise at intercepting
(32:21):
radio messages, solving them and mapping these underworld networks because
that had been her job during the twenties and thirties
to to fight smuggling and so UM, it wasn't that
she set out to hunt Nazi spies. It's just that
she she happened to have the right set of skills
the right moment, you know, and in she was ready
to go. And so so what ended up happening is
the FBI relied on Elizabeth and UM and the code
(32:44):
breaking team that she had built within the Coast Guard
UH code breakers that she had trained she had led
UM relying on them to as as kind of the
technical back end of this of this hunt for Nazi
spies in South America. Elizabeth and her team monitor these
clandestine radio circuits used by Nazi spies, solve the messages,
(33:05):
and provide the translated English plain texts to allied intelligence agencies,
including the Army, the Navy, the FBI, and also British intelligence.
And by the end of the war, they had monitored
about fifty different UH clandestine radio circuits used by the Nazis,
solved four thousand messages. You know, these messages were incredibly
(33:26):
important in ultimately destroying these Nazi spy rings in South
America and eliminating a dangerous threat. You know, Elizabeth and
her teammates really brought these Nazi spies to Ruin Pick
to pick their networks apart, piece by piece, destroyed them,
you know, neutralized the threat. And then after the war,
(33:47):
Jagger Hoover you know, stuck up his hand and went
out to the public on kind of a publicity campaign
taking credit for all of that, and he said, you know, America,
the FBI saved you for on this dangerous Nazi spy
invasion in South America, and UH, You're welcome. And that's
kind of the story that has been told ever since,
(34:09):
is that is that the FBI did UH, did all
of the hard dangerous, brave. Uh, you know, brilliant work
of catching these Nazi splies of South America. But I
think the truth is that the real driver was Elizabeth Freedman.
It was this. It was this American mother of two
who figured out how to sweep the Western hemisphere free
(34:29):
of undercover Nazis. And uh, and yet she never got
the credit for it because because Hoover got out there
in front. Welcome back to Part time Genius. We're chatting
(34:51):
with Jason Fagoni, the author of The Woman who Smashed Codes. Okay, Jason,
So she, you know, helps through World War One obviously
de codes, know what, as you said, twenty five thousand
messages a year in between the world wars at times,
and and helped defeat the Nazis in World War Two.
It's just an unbelievable story. And then you said, after
(35:11):
all of this, she and William kind of come back
to the Shakespeare project later in their lives, and and
why was this? Yes? So after the war, Uh, William
was one of the people who helped form the National
Security Agency that the team that he had created and
built at the Army, which during World War Two achieved
(35:33):
essentially the impossible by breaking the Japanese diplomatic code, which
was called Purple, which she gave the Allies a huge
advantage and probably shortened the war. Yeah, he did all
these heroic things during World War Two, and then after
the war helped to create the n s A. His
his army unit was kind of absorbed into this thing
that became the n s A. But as the n
s A kind of began to grow, um it it
(35:56):
grew beyond what what he uh felt like he could bear. Um.
He became a critic internally of some of the n
s AS policies and it's uh it's directions. He he
became concerned that that too many documents were being classified.
Um he felt like the NISA was collecting too much information.
(36:19):
He felt like they would never ever be able to
sift all the information they were collecting for actionable intelligence
and UH and it really troubled him and uh and
and throughout the nineteen fifties, as the Cold War UH
kind of sharpened in d C, atmosphere of paranoia grew.
Um William became more and more despairing about his relationship
(36:42):
with this organization and with the government more broadly. That
he that he felt he had always served very loyal
loyally and um, you know it this kind of culminated
in this famous, famous day in eight when the n
s A sent agents to the personal home of William
and Elizabeth Freedman and removed documents and books from their
(37:06):
from their private library, uh, saying saying that they were
classified and needed needed to be moved to a higher
level of classification the free you know, A lot of
the a lot of the materials were so old that
they dated back to the First World War. UH. William
was baffled, you know that that the n s A
would uh would want to classify these things because they
(37:26):
were so old and there they were really of only
historical interest, he thought. But um, you know, they they
found this to be kind of intolerable, a uh, you know,
an invasion of their privacy. And um, I think it
motivated him and and and probably Elizabeth too to pull
away from from government work more and more and back
(37:47):
to personal projects. And so one of the personal projects
that they could could talk about that they could work on. Uh.
In this atmosphere of kind of deepening paranoia, security and
classification was something that had nothing to do with government
codebreak all is something that's something that went back to,
uh to their original kind of wild goose chase of
their youth at Number Bank Laboratories. So so you know,
(38:10):
they and what they did is they went back to this, uh,
to this theory that George Fabian had always tried to
get them to prove this theory that that Francis Bacon
had inserted secret messages in the works of Shakespeare and
uh and they just demolished it. They used all of
their ability, all of their uh, all of their kind
of savagery on the page to to sort of go
(38:31):
through every piece of piece of purported evidence for for
this theory and uh and just and just destroy it
page by page. And it is wonderful. And they wrote
it together. Um, it's a very funny book. It's it's
it's a very uh sort of precise book and uh
and and that was the thing that brought them back
together working together after decades of of kind of growing
(38:56):
growing apart because of their uh, you know, increasingly important
purity duties for the United States. Wow. Well, I have
to say, Jason, in reading this book, this is this
is one of those history books that as you're reading it,
you can almost see and feel the blood, sweat and
tears that went into this project. It's not only beautifully written,
(39:17):
but you can tell just all of the the intense
amount of research that you've done to put into this book,
and and for that, I honestly, I just want to
say thanks, because it is one of the best books
I've read in a long time. And I do hope
our our readers will check out The Woman who Smashed Codes.
It's an incredible story. So Elizabeth died in nineteen eighty
(39:37):
at the age of eighty eight, mostly unacknowledged for her
foundation laying cryptographic word, but you know you stumbled into
her story and and for that and all the work
you put into this, I just want to say thanks. Oh,
thank you guys. I I really appreciate your um. I
don't know your questions were great. It's clearly that you
paid a lot of paid a lot of attention to
(39:57):
the book and and honestly, it was it was a
joy doing the research. It was it was one of
those projects that every journalist and every writer hopes to
stumble across, and I feel lucky to have to have
gotten to do it. M H. Welcome back to part
(40:22):
time genius. Now we've learned a ton today, but you know,
we can't wrap this thing up without a good old
fashioned backed off. So you want to kick us off, mango, Yeah, definitely. So.
I know Jason talked about this a little bit earlier,
but I loved reading about how Elizabeth and William taught
their kids the basics of cryptography, like as early as
seven years old. So when their daughter Barbara was off
at sleepaway camp, she'd send home letters and code, and
(40:45):
the Freedman's would use codes and ciphers and their Christmas
cards and sometimes they even had cipher parties where their
guests would have to solve the cipher just to figure
out what would be served for dinner. Wow, that's pretty awesome,
And actually it's kind of neat to see this coming
back in a way with like these brave gout type
places that people will go with their friends to play.
Have you seen these exit the room things? Yeah, yeah, exactly.
(41:07):
I've never been to one, but they seem pretty interesting.
All right. Well, I know we've been talking about the
woman who Smashed Codes, but there was another book published
this fall that's more generally about women code breakers, and
it's called Code Girls. The Untold Story of the American
women code breakers of World War Two, and it's by
Liz Mundy, So I think i'll share just a couple
of facts from that. And it does tell the story
(41:27):
of the more than ten thousand college students and school teachers,
among other women who were recruited to really be the
backbone of our intelligence efforts. But one of the things
I thought was so interesting is that it was a huge,
huge advantage for the Allied powers because unlike the Allied
Powers who put all of these women to work, the
Access Powers didn't do the same. And their estimates that
it shortened the war by as many as two or
(41:49):
three years. Oh wow, that's incredible. So one of the
more strange figures that Elizabeth took down was this woman
known as Doll Lady, and she discovered the secret code
hidden in the letters of this New York woman named
Beelvolye Dickinson, who was acting as this Japanese spy. It's
an amazing story. So Dickinson owned a doll shop and
would send letters to an address in Buenos Aires, and
she'd be talking about various dolls in her collection. But
(42:11):
Elizabeth realized that her references to like English dolls and
foreign dolls were actually a way to communicate about the Allies.
And the doll lady was eventually sentenced to ten years
in prison and find after being charged with espionage. She
got that doll lady. Wow, what a strange character. I know,
it just confirms my theories that adults who love dolls
shouldn't be trusted. That it's a good that's a good one.
I go, maybe we'll do a whole episode on that
(42:33):
at some point. All right, Well, back to Monday's books.
So she writes about how the branches of military were
different from one another and who they allowed to be
code breakers and who they didn't. So the Navy, for example,
didn't allow non whites. They didn't want Jewish women, they
didn't want African American women. The Army, on the other hand,
did allow non whites. However, not surprisingly, these groups were segregated.
(42:55):
And it was really frustrating from Moundy as she was
doing the research because there's no substantial records out there
other than a few photos, and you can actually see
these in Monday's book, and you know, it shows a
room full of African American code breakers, most of them
being women. So, as Jason explained to us, by the
early nineteen twenties, there were only three code breaking units
in the government and fewer than fifty employees, and about
(43:16):
half of those employees worked for the State Department, and
the Army and Navy had the other two. But in
nine the Secretary of State decided to shut down the
State Department's unit because, as he put it, quote, gentlemen
do not read each other's mail. Wow, what a strange thing,
all right. Well, one of the other things Monday shows
and Code Girls is that unlike this common notion that
(43:37):
there are all these big and exciting kind of ah
ha moments in code breaking, it's actually much more similar
to a marathon. And she does a great job of
showing how they were working often around the clock, just
looking for patterns and searching and searching. And it really
was this marathon work that had played a huge role
in helping to shorten the war, as I mentioned earlier,
(43:58):
because the Allies just had a much better idea of
what the Japanese and Germans We're planning to do each
step along the way. And I bet you want a
carbo load before each stage. With that definitely definitely. So
I know we like to talk about the best job titles,
so I had to tell you about uh. When Elizabeth
was tapped to head up the Coast Guards codebreaking team,
not only was she the first woman to run a
US government code breaking unit, but she was also given
(44:20):
a business card that said cryptanalyst and charge US Coast Guard.
That's one of the best titles I've ever heard. I
cannot beat that. So I'm gonna give you today's fact
off Mango. Thank you, thank you. All Right, that's it
for today's show. A special thanks to Jocelyn Sears for
her excellent research help with this episode. Now, if you
want to share any of your favorite code breaking facts,
you can always email us at part Time Genius at
(44:41):
how stuff Works dot com or call us on our
seven fact hop line one eight four four pt Genius.
You can also hit us up on Facebook or Twitter,
and don't forget to let us know if you'd like
to come on to play a quiz with us sometime.
Thanks for listening, Yeah, thanks again for listening. Part Time
(45:09):
Genius is a production of How Stuff Works and wouldn't
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things we couldn't even begin to understand. Christa McNeil does
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(45:31):
to your ears. Good job, Eves. If you like what
you heard, we hope you'll subscribe, And if you really
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Jason who
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