Elizebeth S. Friedman
Born: August 26, 1892, Huntington, Indiana
Died: October 31, 1980 (aged 88), Plainfield, New Jersey
Elizebeth Smith Friedman was born into a Quaker family of ten children, only two of whom went to college, and one of whom died in infancy. Her father was not a supporter of higher education for women but did lend her the money to attend college, at 6% interest. She graduated from Hillsdale College in Michican in 1915 with a major in English, having also studied Greek, Latin and German.
She taught in highschool for a year before leaving. On a trip to Chicago looking for a new job, she was put in contact with George Fabyan, a rich industrialist with a passion for proving that it was Francis Bacon who wrote Shakespear’s plays. Fabyan believed that the text of the plays contained hidden codes and cyphers that revealed their ‘true’ authorship. To this end he maintained a team of codebreakers at his Riverbank estate in Geneva, Illonois. It was here that Elizebeth was introduced to cryptology, and her future husband William Friedman. They married in Chicago in May, 1917. Working with William, they showed that there was no evidence of hidden messages in Shakespear’s work.
After the USA entered WWI in 1917, Elizebeth and William worked to decrypt signals sent to them by the US Navy, at which they were widely successful. She also took on the task of training the first generation of codebreakers for the US military.
In 1919 Elizebeth and her husband moved to Washington DC to work for the Army Signals Corp.. Here, she was paid much less than her husband. She left the Signals Corp. after a year and soon thereafter gave birth to her daughter and later, her son. However, she was brought back into the world of codebreaking when the US Coat Guard recruited her to help with their ‘war’ against smugglers, particularly booze smugglers.
Working for the Coast Guard, Smith Friedman decoded a backlog of coded messages produced by the smugglers, allowing her to understand their planning and methods. She was a major witness in the court cases that convicted many major players, including Al Capone.
In 1941, after Pearl Harbour thrust the USA into WWII, Smith Friedman unit was transferred from the Coat Guard to the Navy. The Navy gave her a reduced position from that in the Coast Guard, assigning her to the monitoring of traffic between a Nazi spy ring in South America and German High Command. Many of the messages she decoded concerned the movement of allied shipping. Decoding them allowed the allied naval forces to redirect shipping to avoid U-boat attack.
After WWII Smith Friedman forbidden from revealing her secret work but that didn’t prevent J. Edgar Hoover from taking credit for it for the FBI.
After her government service she worked for the International Monetary Fund, creating a signals security system for them. After her husband William’s death in 1969, Elizebeth devoted much of her time to collecting and collating his records, producing a library and bibliography of his work. She died in October 1988 in a nursing home in Plainfield, New Jersey.
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