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

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

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

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

You can never get sick of too much knowledge.

The president of Harvard changed admissions rules to keep Jews out

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.

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.

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

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

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

Codebreakers train themselves to see more deeply.

rejected from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania,

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

It was anti-Nazi Google.

Cryptographers are professional paranoids

a nonderanged boss,

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Earlier that year, his daughter asked him in a letter if he believed in Zionism, the project to create a Jewish homeland. He said no. “Zionism is only one of many virulent forms of a detestable disease known as ‘nationalism,’ ” William wrote to Barbara. “The sooner we realize that we are all God’s children regardless of color, race, creed, nationality, etc., the better for all nations and the world as a whole.” He didn’t believe in nations anymore, not even his own. This

Earlier that year, his daughter asked him in a letter if he believed in Zionism, the project to create a Jewish homeland. He said no. “Zionism is only one of many virulent forms of a detestable disease known as ‘nationalism,’ ” William wrote to Barbara. “The sooner we realize that we are all God’s children regardless of color, race, creed, nationality, etc., the better for all nations and the world as a whole.” He didn’t believe in nations anymore, not even his own. This is what he had tried to tell his daughter. The world is very fragile, more fragile than it is healthy to believe if you want to get out of bed and make it through the day.

was obvious to William and many others that there ought to be a centralized cryptologic function in America, one agency that gathered intelligence from wireless signals and broke the codes that must be broken. As an elder in the cryptologic community, a person who had not only invented many of its tools but also built a successful organization within the army to apply those tools, William was involved in these discussions at the highest levels—discussions that would give birth, in 1952, to the National Security Agency. In

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

Queene Elizabeth is my true mother and I am the lawfull heire to the throne. Finde the cypher storie my bookes containe. It tells great secrets, every one of which, if imparted openly, would forfeit my life. —F. Bacon.

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.

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.

people valued politeness more than truth

Between 1917 and 1920, George Fabyan used Riverbank’s vanity press to publish eight pamphlets that described new kinds of codebreaking strategies. These were little books with unassuming titles on plain white covers. Today they are considered to be the foundation stones of the modern science of cryptology. Known as the Riverbank Publications, they “rise up like a landmark in the history of cryptology,” writes the historian David Kahn. “Nearly all of them broke new ground, and mastery of the information they first set forth is still regarded as the prerequisite for a higher cryptologic education.

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.

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.

Captain Eddie Hastings, a retired Royal Navy officer, now working for BSC in Washington; according to Hastings, America needed a new agency capable of “offensive” spy maneuvers in foreign countries. In July 1941, Roosevelt established the Office of the Coordinator of Information, a new civilian intelligence organization attached to the White House. The following year, the Office of the COI was renamed the Office of Strategic Services, which was the forerunner of the CIA. So this is where the CIA began—with J. Edgar Hoover telling the British to go to hell, and the British not appreciating it.

Until 1930, almost all codebreaking for the U.S. government’s planetary war against smuggling was handled by these two tired and perpetually overworked women, Elizebeth and her clerk,

The codebreakers had known for days, if not weeks, that a large Japanese attack was coming. William and the rest of his team had seen the MAGIC intercepts. It was obvious from MAGIC that Japan had been poised to strike; the only mystery was where. What surprised William on December 7 was not the attack itself but the location. He thought it would happen in Manila, not Pearl Harbor.

MAGIC secret. It was a prime example of the brutal choices that codebreakers must live with. Do you take risks to keep a secret that may save hundreds of thousands of future lives, or do you expose the secret to save a small number of lives right now? William once referred to this broad dilemma as “cryptologic schizophrenia,” adding, “What to do? Thus far, no real psychiatric or psychoanalytic cure has been found for the illness.

It was the only time before or since when Americans became emotionally invested in the idea of self-deprivation and frugality. Third graders roamed their neighborhoods in packs, gathering scrap materials, tires, and paper and cooking fat and old sneakers whose soles could be sacrificed for the rubber. The Big Three automakers stopped making cars and started making planes. Factory workers took secrecy oaths. Everybody had a secret now.

(Morgenthau grumbled at a staff meeting, “He wants Mrs. Friedman”). This became her first mission after Pearl Harbor. Detailed to Donovan’s office on a temporary basis, she spent three and a half weeks creating the first permanent cryptographic section for the proto-OSS and proto-proto-CIA. She built it from scratch, making alphabet strips and other aids to generate ciphers, obtaining hard-to-find cipher devices through navy channels, installing the machines, and customizing them according to the new agency’s needs