Here's Where It Gets Interesting - How Women Won WWII: AABBA and the Art of Codebreaking

Episode Date: February 8, 2023

Today on Here's Where It Gets Interesting, let's break some secret wartime codes. Shakespeare and Al Capone. What could possibly be a link between these two men who were born centuries apart? A master codebreaker named Elizebeth Smith Friedman. If her name doesn’t sound familiar, there’s a reason for that. Even though she is one of the pioneers of cryptanalysis, very few people knew about her war-changing contributions until after her files were declassified in 2008. Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Written and researched by: Heather Jackson, Sharon McMahon, Valerie Hoback, and Amy Watkin Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends, and welcome to the eighth episode in our series, How Women Won World War II. Shakespeare and Al Capone. What could possibly be a link between these two men who were born centuries apart? A master codebreaker named Elizabeth Smith Friedman. If her name doesn't sound familiar, there's a reason for that. Even though she is one of the pioneers of cryptanalysis, very few people knew about her war-changing contributions until after her files were declassified in 2008. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. When asked about her life story, Elizabeth often said that it all started with an encounter at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Before that, she was a frustrated young woman with big dreams. Elizabeth was born as Clara Elizabeth Smith in 1892 as the youngest in a large Indiana

Quaker family where she always felt a bit out of place. Most of her eight siblings were content to live quiet, small-town farm lives. But she had bigger aspirations. Elizabeth wanted to be unoriginal. And she spent her childhood looking for ways to rebel. In her diary, she wrote, I am never quite so gleeful as when I am doing something labeled as an ought not. Like, you ought not do that.

That's when she was the happiest. This attitude meant that Elizabeth had a difficult relationship with her father, who saw her as a problem child and generally held the belief that a daughter's worth was tied to her ability to marry well and marry young. But Elizabeth insisted that she was going to go to college first, and that she'd pay for it herself by working if she had to. Her father eventually agreed to loan her the money for tuition, but only if she paid him back, plus 6% interest. Frustrated, but knowing she was a woman with very few avenues that would secure her financing, Elizabeth shook on it. She landed at Hillsdale College and studied Greek and English literature before graduating in 1915. In general, Elizabeth had a knack for languages and learned the basics of German, Latin, and French, but her real love

was Shakespeare. In fact, when Elizabeth moved to Chicago to find work as a researcher, she frequently spent time at the University of Chicago's Newberry Library, which was something of an informal hub for Shakespeare enthusiasts. The library was home to the 1623 first edition of Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, a collection of 36 of his plays. There was a theory among enthusiasts at the time. It's one you have probably heard too. Some Shakespeare hobbyists and scholars suspected that it was a different essayist and philosopher, Francis Bacon, who was the true author of Shakespeare's Place. Elizabeth got real interested in this Baconian theory and begin studying Shakespeare's lines carefully, looking for hidden meaning or

coded messages in them. Her budding cryptography hobby and her knowledge of Shakespeare set the stage for the new life that she was about to begin. that she was about to begin. George Fabian was a lesser-known Gilded Age American tycoon who made his fortune in textiles. But while his more famous counterparts like John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie collected art and real estate, Fabian collected scientists. His 350-acre estate outside of Chicago included a private research center he named Riverbank, and he invited numerous scientists and other scholars to live on his grounds and work in his labs. and work in his labs. Fabian's particular passion project was proving the validity of the Baconian theory. Like Elizabeth, he had also spent time at Newberry Library researching some of her same questions, but because Fabian was massively rich, he decided to outsource the work

to find answers. It was the librarian at the Newberry who connected Elizabeth and Fabian. Author and historian Jason Fagone shares what happened when the five-foot, two-inch-tall country girl met the six-form millionaire with a bushy mustache and a booming voice. Fabian walks right up to Elizabeth, and the first thing he says to her is, would you like to come out to Riverbank and spend the night with me? And she has no idea what to say to this. It's the most indelicate question that anyone ever posed to her. Creepy. Unlike Shakespeare or Bacon, George Fabian did not have a way with words. Or more likely, he was a very rich man who was used to saying whatever he wanted and getting

away with it. Once it became clear that Fabian was actually not propositioning her, but actually offering her a job as the new codebreaker on his Bacon Shakespeare project. Elizabeth accepted his invitation. She traveled to Riverbank and entered a whole new life. Let me tell you, from the outside looking in, working at Riverbank seemed pretty cushy. Elizabeth was paid the same as the men on the estate, around $30 a month. It wasn't a lot, but they had access to all of the estate's amenities, like a swimming pool, comfortable quarters, and top-notch food in the cafeteria. There were also a pair of monkeys who roamed the grounds and a beautiful Japanese garden. I mean, the monkeys alone would probably be worth it, right? Elizabeth's aptitude for languages and her quick mind made her a riverbank leader right from the get-go. Part of the reason scholars were convinced that Francis Bacon wrote

Shakespeare's plays and hid his true authorship within the works was because Bacon himself developed an encoding cipher. To create a code using Bacon's cipher, the writer used two different typefaces or fonts. One font represents A and the other represents B, so that the codebreaker has to go through the writing letter by letter, writing down an A every time a letter is found in one font, and a B every time a letter is found in the other font. As you can imagine, this results in a string of A's and B's that are altogether meaningless until you break those A's and B's into groups of five. And each new combination of five A's and B's is a code that represents a letter of the alphabet. So three A's, a B and another A, for example, represents the letter C.

example, represents the letter C. Using this multi-step process results in decoding a potential message. If it sounds overwhelming, time-consuming, and complicated, guess what? It is. And Bacon's cipher is probably the easiest cipher that Elizabeth used over the next 40 years of her life. George Fabian's personal assistant, Elizabeth Wells Gallup, was convinced that multiple typefaces had been used in Shakespeare's folio. Elizabeth soon realized that what appeared to be different typefaces were more likely ink smudges or some other sort of discrepancy that was created by happenstance. She was much less convinced that the works contained a purposeful secret code. At Riverbank, Elizabeth met a plant biologist named William Friedman. William immediately took to both cryptanalysis and to Elizabeth. And in William, Elizabeth found her intellectual equal.

Elizabeth and William were not the match that either of their families had hoped for. William was a Jewish-Russian immigrant, and Elizabeth later claimed that his mother physically collapsed when she learned about her son's relationship with a non-Jewish American woman. But a woman cryptologist and a Jewish scientist who work on an eccentric tycoon's estate were not exactly the types to play by conventional rules. So in 1917, William and Elizabeth secretly traveled to Chicago and got married by a rabbi. In their wedding photo, they both squint at the camera with slightly sly expressions on their faces, like they just got away with something big. The newlyweds hightailed it back to Riverbank

because there was no time for a honeymoon. The United States had entered World War I that same spring, just as Fabian put William and Elizabeth in charge of his newly created Department of Ciphers and offered their private cryptanalysis services to the United States Army. The CIA wouldn't be founded until 1947, and the NSA, our national security agency, didn't exist until 1952. So during and immediately after World War I, the American government and military counted solely on Riverbank's Department of Ciphers to decrypt the massive amount of coded messages they were intercepting. relying on people who are living at the estate of an eccentric tycoon to do the incredibly important work of decoding intercepted messages. I mean, if you picture that today, you can see Dateline visiting the estate of a weird tycoon who is interested in bizarre things, and they're in charge of all of these top secret messages. Wouldn't happen today. Elizabeth and William were both methodical and

rigorous in their work, but they approached it completely differently. William worked almost exclusively through math and his background in science, while Elizabeth used her language skills and was able to draw on something we might call intuition. She sometimes called it the golden guess. Elizabeth and William became masters of their craft and expanded their knowledge of deciphering by creating their own systems of cryptology, which were eventually collected as part of a series of pamphlets written by the scientists working for Fabian. They were published under the general umbrella of Riverbank publications without credit to the scientific authors. The luster of working for George Fabian at Riverbank had long worn off for both Elizabeth and William. Fabian was temperamental, to put it nicely. Elizabeth called him vile. He was prone to angry outbursts, and he regarded his scientists with suspicion. Like, he knew he had some very talented people working for him, and he did not want to share them with the outside world. When William and Elizabeth wrote to Washington, D.C. to offer

their services to the government, they never heard back. And that was because Fabian was intercepting their mail. He was also recording their conversations to make sure they weren't plotting to leave behind his back. I mean, he wasn't exactly locking Elizabeth and William in their laps, but it was pretty close to that. In 1920, Elizabeth and William managed to leave Riverbank for good, and they moved to Washington, D.C. Elizabeth became the assistant cryptanalyst for the U.S. War Department. It was very different from the way she was used to working at Riverbank. She worked beneath men who had less than half her talent for codebreaking, but who were in higher positions simply because they were men. And in 1923, when she was asked to fill the role of cryptanalyst for the U.S. Navy, she knew she was only offered the job because her husband turned

it down to continue his work with the army. She was not impressed by being their second choice. Elizabeth later said, this was a case of if we can't have William Friedman, we'll make use of his brains through his wife. That's the story of my life. Somebody asked for my husband and they can't get him, so they take me. But she agreed to take the job and she was paid $1,900 a year, which is the equivalent of about $32,000 a year today, far less than William was getting paid to create cipher machines for the Army Signal Corps. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve!

It's my girl in the studio! studio. Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Lady 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. Elizabeth worked for the War Department for a year before she left. She was fed up with the

misogyny and decided to concentrate on raising her children, Barbara and John. It was the mid-1920s, and the good life in the United States was in full swing. But so was Prohibition. The Coast Guard was overwhelmed by their limited resources to handle the illegal liquor trade, and their meager efforts were dwarfed by the powerful machine of organized crime. Mobsters like Al Capone used intricate codes via radios to do illegal business, and both the military and police were sitting on thousands of encrypted messages that they had no skills to decipher. They needed help. And they turned to Elizabeth.

She agreed to take the job with the Coast Guard on the condition that she could work from her home office. So maybe the sign of Elizabeth's true genius was that she figured out how to work from home 100 years before the rest of us caught on. The Consolidated Exporters Corporation, or Conexco, was the million-dollar organization controlling the rum runners, the people and ships who smuggled in alcohol. runners, the people and ships who smuggled in alcohol. Elizabeth cracked 12,000 coded messages sent back and forth between the smugglers. She discovered that they were using 12 different code systems, a fact that most code breakers would not have noticed, much less broken through. Elizabeth's work required a large investment of time and sometimes travel, and she was often away from her young family for a month or more. William was an unusual husband for the era,

though, and he supported Elizabeth's work because he knew it was important. He told her early in their marriage, I don't want a rubber stamp type of wife. What makes you so wonderful is your individuality, and I want you to develop it. He also said that home does not entail a spotless kitchen and a faultless parlor. Home does entail the presence of hearts that beat in unison. William could probably, by the way, make a living writing Valentine's Day cards. Or maybe running like a feminist TikTok account. In 1933, Elizabeth was the star witness for the prosecution in New Orleans federal court in the case against Connexco. Her evidence in that trial led to the convictions of 35 rum runners for violating the Prohibition Act. Elizabeth's presence turned heads at the Connexco trial.

She wore a pink dress and a flowered hat, and that was all anyone could talk about. Many people were hearing the word cryptanalyst for the first time, and they couldn't reconcile the technical-sounding title with the woman in front of them. Reporters called her a pretty government cryptanalyst and a pretty middle-aged woman and a smiling lady in a frilly pink dress. This bothered Elizabeth to no end. She was annoyed that they focused on her looks, offended that they called her middle-aged, and infuriated when they reported inaccuracies. She stopped giving interviews. Interestingly, while Elizabeth helped land organized crime leaders in jail and did not drink herself. She didn't agree with the laws of

Prohibition. Later in life, she recalled, the Prohibition era took thousands of people into illicit operations who would definitely not have been underworld characters if it had not been for the unpopular feeling generally held against the law. On the eve of World War II, Elizabeth and her Coast Guard team were tasked with monitoring communications between German authorities and a South American Nazi spy ring led by a man named Johannes Siegfried Becker. His codename was Sargo. Sargo and his people sent coded messages to the Nazis by radio, delivering intel about South American ports, ships, routes, and schedules. Elizabeth cracked their radio codes and gave the U.S. valuable information.

The movement of the German U-boats in the waters around South America pointed to the possibility that the Nazis were considering an attack on the southern United States. When Elizabeth first cracked Zargo's codes, the Coast Guard didn't make any moves to capture him or his South American spy ring. They knew it was more valuable to wait and listen to the plans and patterns undetected. Of course, the Coast Guard wasn't the only U.S. Department who kept tabs on Sargo. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI also had access to the intel, and a little too eager for the glory, Hoover sent agents to South America to start making a few petty arrests. It was the wrong move.

The arrests tipped off Zargo and the Nazis that their codes had been compromised. The radio communication went silent, and the Germans began developing new and more difficult codes that would have to be broken all over again. Vince Houghton, a 20th century war historian, wrote, Hoover wanted the headlines. That was really stupid of him to do. This was really life and death. Hoover completely cut us off from life-saving intelligence that allowed us to keep our convoys safe in the Atlantic Ocean. One of the worst things you can do if you're chasing spies is to arrest them before you're done following them and watching them and seeing what they're doing. Because the easiest way for a country to know that you've

broken their communication system or that they have a leak somewhere is if you round up all their spies. The Coast Guard eventually regained their access to the German messages, but there was no roadmap to decoding them until Elizabeth realized the new system was being run with a mighty tool of German intelligence, the Enigma. Enigma machines had a keyboard similar to a typewriter with electrical signals and rotating wheels to scramble the output so that the letter that appeared on the page would always be different from the letter the typist pressed on the keyboard. For example, on one particular setting, hitting the Q key on an Enigma would actually generate the letter F.

And then the next time you hit the Q key, it would type, say, the letter Y. A feature of any Enigma machine was that no letter was ever encrypted as itself. So a Q was never a Q. But in case enemies figured out one code setting, the Enigma could be switched to a totally different setting, in which striking the Q key would generate entirely different letters, no longer an F and then a Y. Y'all, hold on to your hats for this one.

A standard Enigma machine had 159 quintillion possible settings. That is 159 followed by 18 zeros. 159 quintillion. The Nazis who were passing messages to spies in South America used a specific Enigma machine they called Enigma-G. And even the codebreakers at Bletchley Park didn't know which settings they were using to communicate. Bletchley Park is an estate in the town of Bletchley, England, about 50 miles northwest of London. During World War II, the mansion at Bletchley Park was used by the British government to house the Government Code and Cipher School, where German and Japanese codes were intercepted and cracked during World War II. and cracked during World War II. Eventually, Bletchley Park employed around 10,000 people, and a whopping 75% of them were women, most of whom were wrens. Wrens at Bletchley Park signed the Official Secrets Act and kept some big secrets. One former Bletchley Park worker remembers standing in the middle of a train station

in 1945 with the urge to shout, the war is over, to the crowd. She'd already seen the coded messages come through at Bletchley Park, but knowing that her work was top secret, she had to wait until the official announcement was made to the public. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who maybe had a thing for taking metaphors too far, called the stuff at Bletchley Park his hens. And after the war, famously called Bletchley Park codebreakers the geese that laid the golden eggs, but never cackled. the geese that laid the golden eggs, but never cackled. A compliment, I guess, but not exactly a flattering one. Many of the wrens at Bletchley Park worked on the 211 bombs housed there. Now, what you probably think you just heard me say is that they worked on bombs like explosives, but I'm saying B-O-M-B-E-S, which are actually cryptanalysis machines that emulated the Enigma machines used by Germans. The bomb machines, B-O-M-B-E, were huge, taller than most men, and consisted of 100 rotating drums and 10 miles of wire.

They could search for patterns in the Enigma's wheels, turning codes into German words when it found the correct Enigma setting. But the bombs didn't work on their own. Renz had to make guesses about the code and ultimately decipher what the machine had spit back out to them. Jean Valentine, a Wren who worked with the bomb machines, remembered their work. Everything was so brilliantly compartmentalized, she said. I worked in the bomb room, and when we got an answer from the machines, We went to the phone to ring this possible answer to an

extension number. It wasn't until all these decades later that I realized we were just calling across the path. Then the encrypted messages went to the pink hut, which was just opposite the entrance of Hut 11, not just six steps away. There, the translators changed it into English, and the analysts decided who was going to get this information. This was all happening in this tiny little square. I saw nothing of Bletchley Park except the grass oval in front of the mansion. grass oval in front of the mansion. Other wrens employed at Bletchley Park worked with Colossus, an enormous computing machine, and it was true to its name. Colossus was about seven feet high, 17 feet wide, and 11 feet deep. One of the requirements for working with Colossus was that the woman had to be tall enough to reach all of the controls.

I would be perfect for this job. Adolf Hitler and his top officials were sending all sorts of encoded messages back and forth. They were not using the Enigma machines to communicate. Instead, they used an encoder machine called Lorenz. Instead, they used an encoder machine called Lorenz. At first, when Fletchley Park started decoding Lorenz messages, it took them up to six weeks to break the code by hand, which meant that by the time the messages were decoded, the Allies had no opportunity to intercept Hitler's activities.

Colossus didn't break codes on its own, but it sped up the process of figuring out which settings the Lorenz used. With Colossus, wrens were cracking Lorenz codes in as little as six hours. The rooms, or huts as they were often called, that housed the ten Colossus machines were unbearably hot and extremely loud. The machines were never turned off, so the heat and thrumming and clickety-clackety noises never stopped. Intercepted messages were printed out as a series of small holes on teletype tape, which was about an inch wide and rolled in very long strips. Once intercepted messages were printed out, Renz would take two identical tape patterns, splice them together

with glue to make a loop, and feed them into Colossus, which would read 5,000 characters every second. If the settings on Colossus matched the settings that the intercepted message had been created with, a series of letters, usually forming German words, could be decoded from the holes in the teletype tape. This part still needed to be done by hand, so Wrens would often have one shift operating the Colossus, and then in order to get a bit of a break from the heat and the noise, their next shift would be checking the answers to see if they could decode teletype messages. These shifts meant that there were always Wrens working around the clock to decode access power communication. And because it was all top secret, the cutting-edge technology

at Bletchley Park flew under the public radar for decades. The Colossus is now considered to be the very first digital electronic computer, and Bletchley Park is credited as the birthplace of modern computer science. So, computer science, a field now dominated by men, was at one time considered woman's work. In the United States, Elizabeth did not have access to a bomb or a Colossus machine to help her break German Enigma codes. But she was at the top of her game, and the German agents in South America got lazy. They stopped changing the key on their Enigma machine, which gave Elizabeth the opening she needed to crack their codes. Elizabeth figured out that one of Sargo's top men in

Argentina, Osmar Helmuth, planned to travel to Germany late in 1943 to meet with Heinrich Himmler, a leader of the SS, the elite guard of the Nazi Reich. Helmuth hoped to meet with Heinrich Himmler, a leader of the SS, the elite guard of the Nazi Reich. Helmuth hoped to meet with Hitler himself and strengthen Argentina's ties with Germany. With more supplies, finances, and support, Argentina could continue to help Germany overthrow governments in South America and replace them with ones sympathetic to the Nazis. But thanks to Elizabeth's code-breaking, the British were able to capture Helmuth before he reached Germany and interrogate him until he revealed all of the secrets. This meant that the Allies could report that they learned about Argentina's spy rings from Helmuth, and they wouldn't have to reveal that they had broken the

Enigma codes, keeping the work done by Elizabeth's Coast Guard team and the Wrens at Bletchley Park shrouded in secrecy. As soon as American warships showed up a few miles off the coast of Buenos Aires, Argentina broke its official ties with Germany and cooperated with the Allies in arresting suspected spies. Zargo's network crumbled, and he was captured. When World War II ended, so did Elizabeth's work. She officially retired from the Navy Coast Guard, and her contribution to the war effort disappeared. The National Security Agency packed up all of Elizabeth and William's wartime materials, records, journals, code sheets, and labeled them as classified. Elizabeth signed an oath

with the Navy promising to keep her role a secret until death. Not just for a few years, but literally, she was told to take her secrets to her grave. And so for years, years, she watched as the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover took credit for her work. Hoover ran a super public media campaign and claimed it was the FBI who led the code-breaking effort that resulted in the collapse of Sargo's spy network in South America. There were magazine articles and propaganda films that highlighted the heroic efforts of his agents. Never once was Elizabeth or the Coast Guard's code-breaking team mentioned. In retirement, both Elizabeth and William returned to some of the research they did while they were at Riverbank. They published a paper called the Shakespearean Ciphers Examined.

In it, they debunked the idea that Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare's works. Cheeky to the end, they used the Baconian cipher on a page in their publication that, when decoded, read, I did not write the place. F. Bacon. F. Bacon. Join me next time as I sit down with Christopher Gorham, author of The Confidant, a new biography about one of the most important women in American government that you've probably never heard of. I'll see you then. Thank you for listening to Hearer's Work. It's interesting. This show is written and researched by Heather Jackson, Sharon McMahon, Valerie Hoback, and Amy Watkin, edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder, and is hosted by me, Sharon McMahon.

We'll see you again soon. you