A Hidden Heroine
Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP 2023-06-24
William Friedman was famous as one who broke codes during both world wars. I knew about him from articles such as this.
But wait 
What is so interesting is that I was unaware of her great contributions. I thought I knew the history of code breaking. But I was totally wrong. Elizebeth Friedman’s work on decrypting coded radio messages helped tip the balances of WWI and WWII. She saved thousands of lives, but her work was hidden by the US government for 62 years. Her superiors—all men—took credit for her work. She initially got none. Nothing at all.
This is—at least it was—one of the terrible injustices in the history of code breaking.
Century-Later Recognition
Her role was hidden until documents concerning it were declassified in 2008. She had taken an oath during her WW II work with the US Navy to keep that secret until her death, which came in 1980 with no fanfare.
Still, it took a decade more for true public awareness of her importance. Three recent biographies are:
- Gregg Stuart Smith, A Life in Code: Pioneer Cryptanalyst Elizebeth Smith Friedman, 2017.
- Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies, 2018.
- Amy Butler Greenfield, The Woman All Spies Fear: Code Breaker Elizebeth Smith Friedman and Her Hidden Life, 2021.
Although the last one is written for a young-adult audience, with large print and short chapters, it still has wonderful detail on her life and work.
In the meantime, the NSA’s own tribute, dated 2006, gives details on Elizebeth but is headlined only for William. Most of its 226 pages reprints six lectures by William that were originally circulated within the agency in 1963. It reprints a 1980 memorial to her at the end.
How She Started
Her origin story is amazing as well. She was one of only two in her Midwest farming family of nine to attend college and obtained a degree in English after transferring to a school closer to home. Her first job opportunity, a brief stint as substitute principal at a public high school in Indiana, did not lead to other teaching positions, so she moved back with her family. She journeyed to Chicago to look for work, using the Newberry Library as a hub.
In one of her last days there, a librarian tipped her that a visiting millionaire, George Fabyan, was looking for help on a project involving Shakespeare. She connected with him and the scholarly director of the project, Elizabeth Gallup, and became employed at Fabyan’s private Riverbank Research Laboratory.
Riverbank had standard scientific projects as well. William Friedman was employed out of Cornell to work on plant genetics. One of several factors drawing him to the Shakespeare project was that his skill photographing plants was handy for images of original manuscripts kept in England. A second was developing techniques for statistical analysis. A third was Elizebeth.
By the time they married in 1917, they had worked out that the statistical randomness of defective type metal re-used by Elizabethan printers and bias in how the alleged codes in Shakespeare were identified effaced the claimed footprints of Francis Bacon’s two-face cipher. Before they could even ascertain how to publish their eight draft papers of study, however, America’s entry into World War I pressed them into other applications. Fabyan himself volunteered the services of his lab for top-secret work.
Their work on Shakespeare was published in 1957. It wasn’t top secret and it bore both their names, as did its 1955 manuscript which won the Folger Library Shakespeare Prize.
Open Problems
In 1999, the year of its creation, she was inducted to the NSA Hall of Honor—see this.
I hope that in the future credit will be given equally to women as well as to men. This of course presupposes that the women had the opportunity to begin with. Let’s hope so.