The Woman Who Smashed Codes Quotes

For all the harmless innocence conjured by the word "library", the Friedmans knew the truth: a library, properly maintained, could save the world - or burn it down.

It's not quite true that history is written by the winners. It's written by the best publicists on the winning team.

Truth was truth and anything else was fuckery.

It made them feel, as all good books do, less alone.

One way of thinking about science is that it’s a check against the natural human tendency to see patterns that might not be there. It’s a way of knowing when a pattern is real and when it’s a trick of your mind.

So this is where the CIA began—with J. Edgar Hoover telling the British to go to hell, and the British not appreciating it.

making yourself understood to another person is essentially a problem of cryptology.

the measure of a person was her ideas

To really live a life in search of knowledge, you must admit when you are wrong.

No code is ever completely solved, you know. —ELIZEBETH S. FRIEDMAN

Nikola Tesla predicted in 1926 that “when wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain

America First,” a campaign slogan of Woodrow Wilson, had been adopted by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s

The president of Harvard changed admissions rules to keep Jews out

You can never get sick of too much knowledge.

A library, properly maintained, could save the world, or burn it down.

It was once remarked of a well-known Oxford scholar that, while he had no enemies, he was hated by all his friends. Something of the same kind would express the feelings towards the FBI of its fellow U.S. agencies.

For the first eight months of the war, as incredible as it sounds, William and Elizebeth, and their team at Riverbank, did all of the codebreaking for every part of the U.S. government: for the State Department, the War Department (army), the navy, and the Department of Justice.

If you would like to imagine the birth of the mighty National Security Agency, please visualize two men in a small room, one with a pug nose, pecking at a typewriter, the other a dandy in a suit and bow tie, smoking a pipe, wondering what his wife was up to at home, and if she was missing him.

Before the coast guard sent the FBI a decrypt, the coast guard clerks typed “SIS Dupe” at the bottom of the sheet, beneath the line that said “CG Translation” and “CG Decryption.” These once-secret files, located in the National Archives and finally declassified in 2000, prove that the coast guard, not the FBI, solved these Nazi radio circuits.

William made his own children sign a checkout slip if they wanted to carry a book

Cryptographers are professional paranoids

It was anti-Nazi Google.

a nonderanged boss,

Codebreakers train themselves to see more deeply.

his mother collapsed at the news that her son had married a shiksa.

There were possibly three or at most four persons” in the whole United States who knew the slightest thing about codes

the essence of codebreaking, finding patterns, and because it’s such a basic human function, codebreakers have always emerged from unexpected places

rejected from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania,

the Friedmans did it all despite having little to no training in mathematics.

Secrets staying secret is the norm. Officials only get riled up when the opposite happens—when secrets are leaked, published, disclosed.

It’s not quite true that history is written by the winners. It’s written by the best publicists on the winning team.

These once-secret files, located in the National Archives and finally declassified in 2000, prove that the coast guard, not the FBI, solved these Nazi radio circuits.

He had always found this a comforting thought, that the age of barbarism was not long past, that if humans failed to be kind it was because they were still children, historically speaking

But the FBI didn’t intercept the messages. It didn’t monitor the Nazi circuits. It didn’t break the codes. It didn’t solve any Enigma machines. The coast guard did this stuff—the little codebreaking team that Elizebeth created from nothing.

Rather, all through the war, she dissected fascists in the dark. If you were her adversary you never felt the blade go in. You bled slowly, painlessly, for months or for years, from tiny internal wounds, and then sometimes there was a terrible morning when you woke up groggy and confused, and your kidney was sitting in a bowl of ice on the counter.

This is a love story. In 1916, during the First World War, two young Americans met by chance on a mysterious and now-forgotten estate near Chicago. At first they seemed to have little in common. She was Elizebeth Smith, a Quaker schoolteacher who found joy in poetry. He was William Friedman, a Jewish plant biologist from a poor family. But they fell for each other . Within a year they were married. They went on to change history together, in ways that still mark our lives today. They taught themselves to be spies— of a new and vital kind.

the importance of choosing the right words for things, even if those words offended people. She didn’t like it when she heard a friend say that a person who had died had “passed away” or that a staggering drunk at a party was “a bit indisposed.” It was more important to be honest. “We glide over the offensiveness of names and calm down our consciences by eulogistic mellifluous terms, until our very moral senses are dulled,” she wrote. “Let things be shown, let them come forth in their real colors, and humanity will not be so prone to a sin which is glossed over by a dainty public!

making yourself understood to another person is essentially a problem of cryptology. You reduce the noise of the channel between you (instead of noise, Shannon called it “information entropy”) in a way that can be quantified. And the method for reducing the noise—for recovering messages that would otherwise be lost or garbled—is decryption. Viewed through Shannon’s theory, intimate communication is a cryptologic process. When you fall in love, you develop a compact encoding to share mental states more efficiently, cut noise, and bring your beloved closer. All lovers, in this light, are codebreakers. And with America going to war, the two young codebreakers at Riverbank were about to become lovers.

Above the doors it reads, ELIZEBETH SMITH FRIEDMAN, PIONEER OF INTELLIGENCE-LED POLICING. These things happened for two reasons: because women went looking for Elizebeth’s ghost, and because her ghost was making noise in the archives. She was there inside the Marshall Library, rattling the doors of the vault, and she was in the “government tombs,” the National Archives, where her records from the Invisible War were finally declassified. The ghost also cried out from unexpected places. Three of the index cards in William’s collection contain brief, verifiably true comments about how J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI took credit for feats of spycatching actually performed by Elizebeth and the coast guard. These comments were obviously written by Elizebeth—William wasn’t in a position to know. Each card is a knife slipped between the ribs of Hoover, Elizebeth’s patient revenge.

authors of more recent books have also praised the bureau for destroying the Nazi networks in South America. But the FBI didn’t intercept the messages. It didn’t monitor the Nazi circuits. It didn’t break the codes. It didn’t solve any Enigma machines. The coast guard did this stuff—the little codebreaking team that Elizebeth created from nothing. During the Second World War, an American woman figured out how to sweep the globe of undercover Nazis. The proof was on paper: four thousand typed decryptions of clandestine Nazi messages that her team shared with the global intelligence community. She had conquered at least forty-eight different clandestine radio circuits and three Enigma machines to get these plaintexts. The pages found their way to the navy and to the army. To FBI headquarters in Washington and bureaus around the world. To Britain. There was no mistaking their origin. Each sheet said “CG Decryption” at the bottom, in black ink.

College took Elizebeth’s innate tendency to doubt and gave it a structure, a justification. At Wooster and Hillsdale she discovered poetry and philosophy, two methods of exploring the unknown, two scalpels for carving up fact and thought.

A course on philosophy introduced her to a new hero, the Renaissance scholar Erasmus, who “believed in one aristocracy—the aristocracy of intellect,” she wrote in a paper. “He had one faith—faith in the power of thought, in the supremacy of ideas.” Elizebeth, a smart person from a working-class family, found this concept liberating: the measure of a person was her ideas, not her wealth or her command of religious texts.

There was no path from teaching that led anywhere else she might want to go. A woman taught, had kids, retired, died.

Wanting something more, and ready to take a risk, Elizebeth quit her job at the Indiana high school in the spring of 1916 and moved back in with her parents to think about what was next.

The FBI, the CIA, the NSA—to different degrees Elizebeth pressed her thumb into the clay of all these agencies when the clay was still wet. She helped to shape them and she battled them, too, a woman hammering herself into the history of what we now call the “intelligence community.” But when powerful men started telling the story, they left her out of it. In 1945, Elizebeth’s spy files were stamped with classification tags and entombed in government archives, and officials made her swear an oath of secrecy about her work in the war. So she had to sit silent and watch others seize credit for her accomplishments, particularly J. Edgar Hoover.

When a woman turns professional criminal,” he wrote once, “she is a hundred times more vicious and dangerous than a man.” Women at Hoover’s bureau were only deemed fit for “boring clerical functions,” according to the memoir of one longtime agent. “It was perfectly all right to bullshit ’em and ball ’em: Just don’t tell ’em any secrets.

And Hoover was a chauvinist of the old school. When he first took charge of the bureau in 1922, there had been three female agents. He got rid of them. The next two female agents wouldn’t join the bureau until after his death in 1972. He argued that women weren’t agent material because they couldn’t be taught to shoot guns.

They were two cloaked particles meeting across a void at the speed of light and partially annihilating each other, leaving jets of alphabets, a spray of letters falling to the ground.

You had to get to know your adversary, to see into men’s hearts and predict their behavior from a running conversation of potentially enormous stakes that no one else in the world was watching except you.

When Elizebeth sent them a decrypt, the FBI placed it in their own SIS filing system, with a new four-digit identifying number, and the FBI invented new names for the radio networks that Elizebeth had already named. This is how the history of the Invisible War would become distorted; these are the small decisions that erased Elizebeth from the record and later allowed J. Edgar Hoover to take credit for her achievements.

The New Atlantis, Bacon imagined a lush, remote island ruled by superintelligent scientists.

Friedman, a Jewish plant biologist

And the Friedmans did it all despite having little to no training in mathematics.

her letters. Love letters. Letters to her kids written in code.

So she had to sit silent and watch others seize credit for her accomplishments, particularly J. Edgar Hoover. A gifted salesman, Hoover successfully portrayed the FBI as the major hero in the Nazi spy hunt. Public gratitude flowed to Hoover, increasing his already considerable power, making him an American icon, virtually untouchable until his death in 1972.

For instance, if A=B, B=C, and so on, SMASH becomes TNBTI.

Elizebeth had never given an interview to the NSA. She had always been wary of the agency, for

reasons the agency knew well—reasons woven into her story and into theirs. But the interviewer was kind and respectful, and Elizebeth was eighty-four years old, and what did anything matter anymore? So she got to talking.

I sit stunned, nerveless, amid the ruins Of my fallen idols. The iconoclast Philosophy Has shattered for me My God . . . But through the confusing ruins, Faith, still hoping, Somehow raises her hands and bids me— Yearn on! Finally Through the mazes of error and doubt and mistrust You will come, weary heart To the final conclusion upon which you will build anew.

You will find triumphant The Working Hypothesis, The Solid Rock.

All her life, Elizebeth assumed that her restlessness was a defect that adulthood would somehow remove. She had called it “this little, elusive, buried splinter” and hoped for it to be “pricked from my mind.” But she was learning to see the splinter as a permanent piece of her, impossible to remove. “I am never quite so gleeful as when I am doing something labeled as an ‘ought not.’ Why is it? Am I abnormal?

Why should something with a risk in it give me an exuberant feeling inside me? I don’t know what it is unless it is that characteristic which makes so many people remark that I should have been born a man.

The strength of a cryptographic system usually has less to do with its design than with the way people tend to use it. Humans are the weak link. Instead of changing keys or passwords at regular intervals, we use the same ones over and over, for weeks or months or years. We repeat the same words (such as "secret") at the start of multiple messages, or repeat entire messages multiple times, giving codebreakers a foothold. We choose key phrases that are easy to guess: words related to where we live or work, our occupation, or to whatever project we're working on at the moment. A couple of human mistakes can bring the safest cryptographic system in the world to its knees.

Over and over again, gazing at what seemed random in the world, Elizebeth founda tiny spot of sense, and then she stood on that spot and invented a system to transform the rest of the landscape all the way out to the horizon, and this is still the process today.

To attack each system--first Red, then Purple--the American codebreakers needed to build their own bootleg versions of the Japanese machines, reverse engineering them based on nothing but educated guesses from analyzing the garbled messages they produced. It was a task akin to building a watch if you have never seen a watch before, simply by listening to an audio recording of the ticking and clicking of its gears.

Elizebeth raced to stay on top of the shifting codes, the proliferation of patterns. Her worksheets grew weird, beautiful. She filled the grid squares with letters and numbers that made different geometric shapes when you stepped back and looked at the worksheet from a distance. Some of the shapes were parallelograms, some looked like stairs, other like labyrinths. She pulled mischievious letters from the sky and sorted them on the page. The invisible world was all out of whack, misaligned, and she had this set of tricks to knock it back into order.

His nervous collapse was an “anxiety reaction” sparked by “prolonged overwork

It was more important to be honest. “We glide over the offensiveness of names and calm down our consciences by eulogistic mellifluous terms, until our very moral senses are dulled,” she wrote. “Let things be shown, let them come forth in their real colors, and humanity will not be so prone to a sin which is glossed over by a dainty public!

one condition: that she be allowed to work from home.

It was funny how he felt more and more generous toward Fabyan by the year. You get older and want to connect to the people who understand. You try to speak with the young and find that something is wrong with your ears. They use their own slang, their own code, and you start to feel nostalgic about your former enemies, who at least shared the same intense moment on earth and spoke words you could understand

the U.S. was the worst-governed country in the world,” that Roosevelt wanted war “at the instigation of the Jews, who controlled industry and the press,” and that England was “a paper tiger with its little fleet and meager air force.

We glide over the offensiveness of names and calm down our consciences by eulogistic mellifluous terms, until our very moral senses are dulled,” she wrote. “Let things be shown, let them come forth in their real colors, and humanity will not be so prone to a sin which is glossed over by a dainty public!

doubted that men would give up their power without a vicious fight.

This is the essence of codebreaking, finding patterns, and because it’s such a basic human function, codebreakers have always emerged from unexpected places. They pop up from strange corners. Codebreakers tend to be oddballs, outsiders. The most important trait is not pure math skill but a deeper ability to pay attention.

The Second World War did not begin with a gunshot or a bomb. It began with a feat of deception involving elements long familiar to Elizebeth Friedman— a code phrase, a radio station, and a murder . The men responsible were Nazis, and they belonged to the same part of the Nazi state that would soon attract Elizebeth’s deep attention.

Hitler appreciated this wellspring of sympathy in South America. His strongest affinity was for Argentina, which had protected German interests in the First World War while ostensibly remaining neutral.

The Axis was growing bolder in the final months of 1940. Japan invaded Vietnam, expanding its empire in East Asia. The Nazis confiscated the private radios and telephones of Jewish families and cordoned off the Warsaw Ghetto with barbed wire, trapping 400,000 adults and children, most of them Polish Jews.

America didn’t want war. Both major political parties still supported neutrality. The aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh argued in popular radio speeches that it would be foolish and hypocritical to fight Germany. He said America had no standing to accuse the Nazis of aggression and barbarism because America had sometimes been aggressive and barbaric itself . Later he argued that American Jews were a “danger to this country” on account of their “ownership and influence in our motion pictures , our press, our radio and our government .” Lindbergh became the public face and champion of an antiwar group called the America First Committee. “America First,” a campaign slogan of Woodrow Wilson, had been adopted by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Within a year the America First Committee was holding rallies at Madison Square Garden.

The British were afraid. They knew they didn’t have the money, the people, or the weaponry to sustain a long fight against the Nazis. They needed America to join the war. Their survival as a nation depended on it.

So this is where the CIA began— with J. Edgar Hoover telling the British to go to hell, and the British not appreciating it. This was also when the British began making friendly advances toward Elizebeth Friedman.

The wild success of the “Ducase” had two large and lasting effects on America. The first was that it discouraged future Nazi attempts at spying within the borders of the United States. The second was that it made J. Edgar Hoover a legend.

All her life, Elizebeth assumed that her restlessness was a defect that adulthood would somehow remove. She had called it “this little, elusive, buried splinter” and hoped for it to be “pricked from my mind.” But she was learning to see the splinter as a permanent piece of her, impossible to remove. “I am never quite so gleeful as when I am doing something labeled as an ‘ought not.’ Why is it? Am I abnormal? Why should something with a risk in it give me an exuberant feeling inside me? I don’t know what it is unless it is that characteristic which makes so many people remark that I should have been born a man.

William concluded that Germany had never lost faith in the security of the Enigma machine. They thought Enigma was unbreakable all the way to the end. He was proud to learn that Nazi codebreakers had never managed to defeat America’s best cipher machine, the SIGABA, which he had invented with Frank Rowlett.

Riverbank Laboratories, an idea factory christened by wartime realities. It not only forged a new science of immense power; it also spawned a love affair that spread the science and ultimately sharpened it into an antifascist weapon.

So this is where the CIA began—with J. Edgar Hoover telling the British to go to hell, and the British not appreciating it. This was also when the British began making friendly advances toward Elizebeth Friedman.

This is how the history of the Invisible War would become distorted; these are the small decisions that erased Elizebeth from the record and later allowed J. Edgar Hoover to take credit for her achievements.

warm, spacious drawing room. The walls were lined with double-paned casement windows

The articles said variously that the code had been cracked by “FBI cryptographers” or “a check with the Navy.” Hoover himself wrote about the Doll Lady in The American Magazine, calling her “one of the cleverest woman operators I have encountered. Cultured, businesslike, cunning, and, despite her 45 years of age, most attractive,

He paid the codebreakers and scientists tiny salaries but promised to take care of them in all other ways. Food, lodging, recreation: they would live like the “minor idle rich” as long as they stayed under his wing at Riverbank.

He didn’t care about the answers so much as the questions. He enjoyed science because it was an interesting way of being alive.

For the first eight months of the war, as incredible as it sounds, William and Elizebeth, and their team at Riverbank, did all of the codebreaking for every part of the U.S.

To work in this field, you have to become devious yourself. You have to think like a malicious attacker to find weaknesses in your own work. . . . Cryptographers are professional paranoids. It is important to separate your professional paranoia from your real-world life so as not to go completely crazy.

The common saying about cryptologists, as William phrased it, was that “it is not necessary” to be insane, “but it helps.

To those who had a chance to watch them both work, the minds of William and Elizebeth appeared equally amazing and equally incomprehensible. Their brains were Easter Island statues, stony and imposing.

In their hands The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined became a story about the drug of self-delusion and the joy of truth.

She had conquered at least forty-eight different clandestine radio circuits and three Enigma machines to get these plaintexts. The pages found their way to the navy and to the army. To FBI headquarters in Washington and bureaus around the world. To Britain. There was no mistaking their origin. Each sheet said “CG Decryption” at the bottom, in black ink. These pieces of paper saved lives. They almost certainly stopped coups.

The director of the FBI had been boasting about catching spies he did not really catch. Elizebeth, who did catch them, bragged about her family.

One historian has called TICOM, short for Target Intelligence Committee, “the last great secret of World War II.

During the Second World War, an American woman figured out how to sweep the globe of undercover Nazis.

By any measure, Elizebeth was a great heroine of the Second World War. The British knew it. The navy knew it. The FBI knew it. But the American public never did, because Elizebeth wasn’t allowed to speak.