American Experience (1988) s33e05 Episode Script
Billy Graham
1
(radio static crackles,
intermittent beeping)
♪
(waves crashing)
NARRATOR:
In March of 1942,
German U-boats prowled the vast
Atlantic Ocean in wolf packs,
attacking scores
of Allied transport ships
as they headed towards
war-torn Europe.
(mechanical whirring)
(torpedo releasing)
(explosion)
In less than three months,
the Nazi submarines had sunk
more than a million tons
of desperately needed supplies
and killed
thousands of soldiers.
The U-boat captains
had a secret weapon
encrypted messages sent by
Nazi spies in South America
had provided them
with the coordinates
of the targeted ships.
ROSE MARY SHELDON:
We're talking about networks
all over South America,
an entire front in
the Second World War.
NARRATOR:
But America had on its side
one of the most skilled
codebreakers in the world
Elizebeth Friedman.
DAVID HATCH:
She was a suburban mom.
Nothing really to mark her
as anything unusual.
But she lived a double life.
NARRATOR:
In World War I,
Friedman had trained
the first team of codebreakers
for the U.S. military.
During Prohibition,
she had taken on
the most powerful gangsters
in the country
and brought down
an international
rum-running operation.
BARBARA OSTEIKA:
The gangsters
put a hit out on Elizebeth,
and the Coast Guard puts
a protection detail on her.
NARRATOR:
Now, as she decrypted
the intercepted messages
on her desk,
she knew everything
she had learned in her career
had led to this moment.
AMY BUTLER GREENFIELD:
She was somebody who had
the ability to see beyond
what most other people could.
She could see things starting
to unlock in front of her eyes.
NARRATOR:
She was one woman
fighting a secret army.
Her success or failure
could determine
the outcome of the war.
JASON FAGONE:
Elizebeth Friedman was
a code-breaking Quaker poet
who hunted Nazi spies,
and there's nobody like her
then or since.
(car horns honking,
trolley clanking)
♪
NARRATOR:
Elizebeth Smith Friedman's life
was unexpectedly set on course
during a visit to the bustling
city of Chicago in 1916.
Twenty-three and full of dreams,
she was hoping to escape
the life she
had been raised to expect.
FAGONE:
Elizebeth came from
a large Quaker family in
small-town Indiana,
and from a very young age,
she felt like she didn't fit in.
She even hated her own name.
She called it
"the odious name Smith."
And she hated it
because she believed that
whenever she was introduced
as Miss Smith,
she would be seen as
something so ordinary,
and she didn't
want to be ordinary,
she wanted to be extraordinary.
She wanted an adventurous life.
♪
NARRATOR:
Her mother, Sopha,
had delivered ten children,
the first when she was only 17.
Elizebeth, born in 1892,
was the youngest.
FAGONE:
Elizebeth often felt
pity for her,
because Sopha's life had been
completely overtaken,
it seemed to Elizebeth, by
childbearing and child rearing.
She didn't seem to be able to
pursue any kind of life
of the mind, and to Elizebeth
that was horrifying,
because Elizebeth was
a very bookish kid.
She loved to read,
she loved poetry.
She wrote her own poetry.
GREENFIELD:
Her father was a
Civil War veteran.
He saw his youngest
as a difficult child,
and their relationship
absolutely was difficult.
Her father did not support
her going to college.
He was against
further education,
particularly for women.
She manages to
talk him into this,
and he says she can have
the money, but at 6% interest.
She has to pay it all back.
NARRATOR:
In college, Elizebeth studied
Greek and English literature.
When she discovered Shakespeare,
she became fascinated
by the intricacies of language,
sparking a passion that
would drive her ambitions.
After graduation,
Elizebeth pursued one
of the few careers available
to women at the time
and accepted a teaching job
at a small Indiana school.
She found the work uninspiring,
and quit after just a year.
In June of 1916,
she headed for Chicago
in search of a new job.
After a week of effort,
she found nothing.
(trolley bell chimes)
With no income
and no job prospects,
Elizebeth had no choice but
to return home in defeat.
On her last day in the city,
she indulged in a visit
to the Newberry Library
to see a rare treasure
Shakespeare's first folio,
printed in 1623.
FAGONE:
She's looking at this book
of Shakespeare.
And the librarian notices
and says,
"You're interested in
Shakespeare, aren't you?"
And Elizebeth says,
"Well, yes."
And the librarian says,
"You know, it's funny,
there's an odd, wealthy man
"who keeps coming to
the library,
"and he's looking for somebody
"to help him with this project,
"to find some kind of secret
that he thinks
is hidden in this book."
NARRATOR:
An hour later,
George Fabyan was standing at
her table.
At 6'4", 250 pounds,
the wealthy industrialist
towered over her.
FAGONE:
He walks right up to Elizebeth
and the first thing
he says to her is,
"Would you like to
come out to Riverbank
and spend the night with me?"
She has no idea
what to say to this.
It's the most
indelicate question
that anyone
has ever posed to her.
And he grabs her
under the elbow,
lifts her up
she's tiny, he's huge
and he frog marches her
out the door
to a waiting limousine,
which takes them to
the railway station.
(train clattering on track)
(birds chirping)
NARRATOR:
Soon, Elizebeth was wandering
the grounds of Fabyan's
vast Riverbank estate,
nestled on 350 acres
of rolling hills in
Geneva, Illinois.
Strolling the Japanese garden,
she was filled with a mix of
astonishment and curiosity
about the tycoon's
eccentric kingdom.
FAGONE:
George Fabyan had so much money
that he could do essentially
anything that he wanted.
And what he wanted to do was
to build a playground
for science.
He would go out and hire
some of the leading scientists
of the day,
bring them to Riverbank,
essentially collecting
these scientists,
and he would set them loose
and tell them to be spectacular,
tell them to make breakthroughs,
tell them to
unlock the secrets of nature.
NARRATOR:
What captured most of
Fabyan's attention, however,
was a literary project focused
on proving
that the works of
William Shakespeare
had been written by
another author
the Elizabethan philosopher
and scientist, Francis Bacon.
VINCE HOUGHTON:
Fabyan had this belief
that William Shakespeare
didn't write Shakespeare.
That actually Francis Bacon
had written a code
within the Shakespearean plays
that demonstrated that
Shakespeare was not the author,
that Bacon actually was.
NARRATOR:
Fabyan assigned Elizebeth
the job of ferreting out
the secret messages he believed
Bacon had implanted in the text.
Excited by the challenge,
she first had to master
a method of encoding messages
invented by Francis Bacon
in 1623.
In the Bacon system,
each letter of the alphabet
was assigned a combination
of the letters A and B,
in groups of five.
HOUGHTON:
Essentially what he did
is he said,
"Okay, I'm going to take
"every letter of the alphabet
and break it down
into a binary system
of As and Bs."
The letter A would turn into
five As, A-A-A-A-A.
The letter B was A-A-A-A-B.
The letter C and so on.
This can be represented
any way you wanted to,
as long as there's
two different things
you're using to represent
the binary system.
And this is
what the legend was
that the first Shakespeare folio
had this code written
in two different
typefaces throughout.
NARRATOR:
Once the differences
in the typeface were identified,
and the letters
sorted into clusters of five,
a hidden message
would be revealed.
♪
The work was tedious,
but Elizebeth discovered
she had the patience to
stare at characters on a page
for hours on end.
FAGONE:
What Elizebeth was
required to do
was peer through
a magnifying glass
and try to discern
very subtle variations
in the fonts on
photographic enlargements
of Shakespeare's plays.
And that was how she
was going to break the code
and rewrite the history
of English literature.
♪
NARRATOR:
Her work with the
Shakespeare manuscripts
would bring her together
with the young man who was
photographing and enlarging
the Shakespeare texts,
William Friedman.
Genetics was
his field of expertise.
Photography was his hobby.
At Riverbank,
he easily stood out.
SHELDON:
William always wore
a white starched shirt,
which in that heat, I don't know
how he didn't perspire to death
but he always looked
very together, very cool.
His hair was always
combed perfectly.
This was a man
who knew how to dress.
♪
FAGONE:
There are a lot of photos of
just Elizebeth
and you can tell that William
is gazing down at his camera
into the glass
and seeing an image of her
and probably smiling.
She was unlike anyone
he had ever met.
He was very quickly
falling in love.
NARRATOR:
The couple were an
unlikely match
She was a Quaker
from the Midwest
and he was a Jewish immigrant
from Russia.
HATCH:
Late in his life,
one of William Friedman's
colleagues
asked him how
he got into cryptology.
According to the story,
he had a sly smile
on his face and he said,
"I was seduced."
NARRATOR:
Working across from each other
day by day,
they began digging into
Fabyan's collection
of codebreaking books,
exchanging insights and ideas.
HOUGHTON:
And so Elizebeth was able to
bring William into the fold
and say, "Look, you can take
your very mathematical,
"scientific approach to
understanding codes and ciphers,
"I can bring my poetry
"and language skills,
and together
we'll be unstoppable."
NARRATOR:
As they began to master
rudimentary skills,
however, they saw
little indication
of embedded codes in
the Shakespeare manuscripts.
Every now and then,
there will be a letter
that is slightly different.
Now, it could be just because
the way the typeface
struck the paper.
There might be
a little tail off a letter
or a letter might be
a little wider.
They're random marks and they
can be made by any typesetter,
especially back in
the 16th century,
and so they're really
rather meaningless.
Now they both agreed that
the central project at Riverbank
had no scientific validity.
It was all a pipe dream,
it was a kind of delusion.
NARRATOR:
Disheartened by their
revelation,
they saw no future
in codebreaking.
Still, they saw a future
with each other.
In May of 1917,
Elizebeth and William
stole away from Riverbank
to get married in Chicago.
FAGONE:
William's family was shocked
and appalled by the marriage.
They wanted to see him marry
a Jewish woman.
His brother later said that
if William had been living
in Pittsburgh at the time,
in the close-knit
Jewish community there,
he would have been exiled.
The two of them go ahead,
and despite the differences
in their background,
despite the family opposition,
despite the lack of money,
despite all the many reasons
why they should not get married,
they do.
NARRATOR:
The newlyweds hoped
to start a new life
away from Riverbank.
World events, however,
would upend their plans.
A month before they wed,
the United States
had entered the "Great War"
in Europe
a war unlike anything
that had come before,
in part because of
the invention of the radio.
(static buzzes)
Suddenly, the air was full of
messages relaying information
that could win or lose a battle,
destroy a regiment,
or sink a ship
(radio beeping)
All of it easily intercepted
by anyone with an antenna.
FAGONE:
The invention of radio
completely transformed
the value of codebreaking.
(explosion echoes)
So it put an incredible premium
on cryptography,
on strong codes and ciphers,
because now that those messages
were flying through the air,
they had to be protected.
The problem for America is that
on the eve of World War I,
the United States
was completely unprepared
to break codes in the war.
HOUGHTON:
The United States
had no code-breaking
agency or bureau
in the United States military.
It just didn't exist.
There was no NSA,
there was C.I.A.,
the military branches
had their own
very, very small
intelligence agencies.
We're talking
about dozens of people,
not thousands, in this case.
NARRATOR:
At Riverbank, George Fabyan saw
an opportunity
to serve his country
and to enhance his reputation.
He established
the first dedicated
codebreaking unit in America
and, much to their disbelief,
placed Elizebeth and William
in charge.
Soon, the War, Navy, State,
and Justice Departments
were sending thousands
of secret messages
to Riverbank for decryption.
HOUGHTON:
So, William and
Elizebeth Friedman
at this point hadn't really
done this systematically
for very long.
They'd kind of played with it
a little bit.
But all of a sudden, they're
being asked to break codes
for the United States military
in a world war.
Talk about on-the-job training,
this is as deep as
on-the-job training gets.
(cipher ticking)
NARRATOR:
The couple scrambled to expand
their knowledge of codebreaking:
starting with
the most fundamental concepts,
like the difference
between a cipher and a code.
HOUGHTON:
A code is when you take a word
or even a phrase
and you replace it
with another word or a phrase.
So if we have the word "gun,"
we might say
every place the word "gun" is,
we're going to
put "Bob" instead.
That way you're able
to replace the words,
but if somebody
intercepts your message,
they may not actually know
there's a secret message there,
because it reads like
plain text.
A cipher, on the other hand,
is taking individual letters
or groups of letters,
and changing them
through some process,
through some algorithm,
into other letters,
into numbers, into symbols,
into anything,
so that you can
mix up the message
and make it unreadable.
♪
NARRATOR:
Using a method that had been
around for hundreds of years,
they began decrypting messages
using frequency analysis.
HOUGHTON:
This is what's called
a frequency chart.
This is what allows
a codebreaker
to very effectively look through
an enciphered message
and say, "Okay, look,
there's a lot of Ns,
"there's a lot of Gs,
there are a lot of Qs,"
so the likelihood
is those are going to be
some of these very common
letters
in the English language
Es, Ts, Ns, As.
If we understand this in
a very mathematical way,
it can help us
to attack secret messages
and break them down
and understand
what they actually mean.
NARRATOR:
Elizebeth quickly discovered
that she was quite good at
spotting patterns
hidden in the texts.
Before long, though,
William and Elizebeth
reached the limits
of what was known about
codes and ciphers,
and they began inventing
their own methods.
They figured out methods of
solving secret messages
that had never been
imagined before.
The first eight months
of World War I
this sounds incredible
but it's completely true
Elizebeth, William, and
their colleagues at Riverbank
broke all messages for
every part of the U.S. military
and the Department of Justice.
NARRATOR:
They documented their
breakthroughs in eight volumes
known as the
Riverbank Publications,
which established
a mathematical foundation
to the principles of cryptology.
HATCH:
Prior to the publications
at Riverbank
from Elizebeth and William,
cryptology had been thought of
as a field for linguists,
for people with knowledge
about foreign cultural areas
and perhaps math
might be a tool.
But the Riverbank Laboratories'
publications
turned cryptology
from language to statistics.
NARRATOR:
In an age when codebreaking
was becoming a weapon of war,
Elizebeth and William
were forging
a new science of immense power.
It was a heady time
for Elizebeth.
She was training the first
generation of codebreakers
for the U.S. military.
The couple were so captivated
by cryptology,
for fun, they embedded
codes everywhere,
even the officer trainee
class photo.
As the group gathered,
they instructed
everyone assembled how to pose.
And if you're just
looking at the picture,
you're like, man,
whoever decided to shoot this
wasn't very disciplined.
A good chunk of
the people in the photograph
are looking forward,
but a good chunk
are looking to the side.
It turns out that
each person in the photo
stands for
a letter in
Bacon's biliteral cipher.
So the people who are
looking off to the side
are the B form of the cipher,
and the people who are looking
straight ahead are the A form.
And when you put it
all together,
the people in Bacon's cipher
spell out the phrase
"knowledge is power,"
which is one of Bacon's mottos
and a motto that William and
Elizebeth adopted as their own.
And it's not written in letters
but it's written in people.
NARRATOR:
The Friedmans' work at Riverbank
was an eye-opener for
the U.S. military.
Six months into the war,
the Army established its own
cipher bureau in Washington.
With the workload
at Riverbank dwindling,
William signed up for
military duty
as a field codebreaker
in Europe.
Elizebeth wanted to
do field work as well,
but she could not;
women were excluded
from serving at the front.
HOUGHTON:
Being left behind had to be
incredibly difficult
for Elizebeth.
Not only is
the man that she loves
being sent off to fight a war,
but this was her field.
She taught William
how to break codes and ciphers.
This was a key way to
move forward in your career.
William could do it,
she couldn't.
♪
NARRATOR:
And worse still,
she would be on her own
at Riverbank.
FAGONE:
It was a terrifying time
for her.
She let it be known
in letters to William
that George Fabyan was
not treating her well,
that he was pressuring her.
There's a reference in
one of William's letters
to the fact that
Fabyan might have
sexually harassed Elizebeth,
might have propositioned her.
William was very angry,
he called Fabyan
"that nameless rascal"
in that letter
and said he wanted to hurt him,
to beat him up.
And so when they were reunited,
they were highly motivated
to get the hell out of there.
NARRATOR:
At war's end, William used
his military contacts
to line up a job in Washington.
He arrived in Washington
with a reputation earned
on the battlefield.
Elizebeth arrived in Washington
as William's wife.
Technological innovations
were fueling a global race
to create ever-more
advanced devices
for making and breaking codes.
The post-war world
was still a dangerous place.
In 1921, William went to work
for the Army Signal Corps
developing new cipher machines.
Elizebeth
was also offered a job
but at half of William's salary.
She took the position,
but left after a year.
She believed her
codebreaking days were over.
♪
In 1923, Elizebeth
gave birth to a daughter,
soon followed
by the birth of a son.
Codebreaking unexpectedly
entered Elizebeth's life again
in 1925
when a Coast Guard officer
knocked on the door of
her suburban home
with an urgent request.
He explained that the Coast
Guard's network of radio towers
had intercepted
hundreds of encrypted messages,
but no one knew
how to break them.
Decrypting the messages
might help them
gain the upper hand against
a deadly adversary.
The Prohibition Act,
signed into law
several years earlier,
had triggered an explosion of
illegal trafficking in alcohol.
Mobsters and gangsters
ruled the streets.
OSTEIKA:
Murder was rampant,
and it became not just murder of
gangster on gangster,
but they were starting to murder
anybody who opposed them.
The federal police didn't even
really understand
the concept of organized crime.
FAGONE:
A massive black market rises up,
and it's controlled by
gangsters,
racketeers, and mafiosi.
And very quickly,
they make a mockery out of
the Coast Guard.
NARRATOR:
The Coast Guard was charged with
stopping the deluge of liquor
coming in by sea,
but it only had 200 boats to
patrol 5,000 miles of coastline.
The rum runners,
on the other hand,
had unlimited resources.
Huge ocean-going vessels
served as mother ships
that stored millions of dollars'
worth of liquor
in their holds.
A fleet of smaller crafts,
called black ships,
would divvy up the cargo and
transport it back to shore,
logistics made possible by
the use of shortwave radios
and sophisticated codes.
The Coast Guard officer pleaded
with Elizebeth for help.
She was no teetotaler,
but Elizebeth saw the damage
organized crime
was doing to the country.
During her first three months
on the job,
she single-handedly decrypted
two years' worth
of backlogged messages.
GREENFIELD:
It's basically Elizebeth and a
secretary filing her decrypts,
and she's doing all of that work
during those years.
She says she ends up looking
at about 25,000 intercepts
a year.
That's just astonishing.
It's really a war.
NARRATOR:
Elizebeth, however, was not
just decrypting the messages,
she was weaponizing the data she
was gathering.
OSTEIKA:
What Elizebeth does
is she begins
the development
of strategic intelligence,
which nobody has done
to this point.
And what that means is she takes
the information
that she's obtaining in these
broken codes and ciphers,
which are basically the plans
and intentions of the gangsters.
And she begins to figure out who
owns the ships,
where a ship is scheduled
to leave from,
where those ships are going,
who's meeting those ships.
All of these arrangements were
made with wireless radio.
She was able to explain
basically to the U.S. government
and all of its federal law
enforcement agencies
what organized crime
looked like,
how they were doing their job,
and how to stop them.
And that is really visionary.
NARRATOR:
By 1931, Elizebeth's work was so
indispensable
the Coast Guard approved her
plan to build
an official codebreaking unit
one of only a handful of such
units in the country
and the first to be run
by a woman.
FAGONE:
She was allowed to hire junior
codebreakers and train them.
She was given a raise to $3,800
a year,
which is not a lot of money,
but a bump for her.
And she got a new title along
with it.
She was called the
"cryptanalyst in charge"
essentially the chief
codebreaker for the Coast Guard.
♪
NARRATOR:
For a mother with young
children, a home to run,
and a husband who worked equally
long hours,
it was an exhausting time.
A decade into Prohibition, the
crime syndicates had grown
into multinational businesses
run with exacting efficiency.
But with Elizebeth's
intelligence in tow,
the U.S. government could
finally
take the mobsters to court.
Elizebeth became the key witness
in a series
of sensational trials,
starting with the prosecution
of CONEXCO,
the largest rum-running
enterprise in the world.
They had the network from
the manufacturer
of the liquor to the final
distribution of that liquor
to speakeasies and nightclubs.
When the government went after
CONEXCO,
it would be like the government
going after Walmart today.
NARRATOR:
With a virtual monopoly on
bootlegging in the Pacific
and the Gulf of Mexico,
CONEXCO supplied liquor
to the most notorious mobster
in the country, Al Capone.
Within a year,
the U.S. government indicted
CONEXCO's top rank,
which included Capone's brother.
In 1933,
at the trial in New Orleans,
prosecutors called upon
Elizebeth to testify
against some of the most
dangerous men in the country.
There were a lot
of prohibition agents
who had already been killed
in the line of duty.
SHELDON:
There are these plainclothes
people that she doesn't know
that are there to keep her from
being whacked by the bad guys.
But it wouldn't have occurred to
her not to testify against them.
These people had to be put away,
that was the whole point
of breaking the codes.
(gavel pounds)
NARRATOR:
When Elizebeth took the stand,
she was grilled mercilessly
by Al Capone's attorneys
who worked to undermine her
credibility.
FAGONE:
Whenever Elizebeth tried
to explain
how she solved the messages,
these six lawyers men
Would often stand up and object
and say that it was some kind
of witchcraft,
that code breaking was not
science,
that Elizebeth was
just making a guess.
She got so fed up with
the repeated objections
of the defense attorneys
that she asked a judge
if she could have access
to a blackboard.
And Elizebeth proceeded to give
a class in codebreaking.
And by the time
she was finished,
the defense attorneys
had nothing else to say.
OSTEIKA:
They must have been thinking
they were going to be able
to bowl her over
and make her testimony
irrelevant.
And instead she takes control
of that
and, you know, seals the deal.
She gets the conviction.
NARRATOR:
Elizebeth became
a national celebrity.
One newspaper praised her
"class in cryptology."
Another described her as
"a pretty woman who protects
the United States."
Reporters expressed surprise
that one woman could take down
some of the most dangerous
gangsters in the country.
HOUGHTON:
This is juicy stuff,
these are murderers
and these are people
who will become household names
in America.
And then along comes this woman
who is the key witness
at the trial
to get these guys thrown
in prison.
They don't talk about her
skills,
they don't talk about her
brains,
her ability to break these
codes,
and to bring these gangsters
to justice.
They talk about how she looks,
how she's dressed,
that she's this dainty,
little woman who is bringing
these big Al Capone-type
mobsters to justice.
NARRATOR:
William was delighted that his
wife was finally getting
the recognition she deserved.
"I'm as proud as I can be,"
he told her.
As Elizebeth's work was seeing
the light of day,
William's was burrowing deeper
into the shadows.
By the late fall of 1939,
Elizebeth knew something was
terribly wrong with her husband.
FAGONE:
He developed mood swings
that's what Elizebeth called
them,
mood swings or down swings.
Elizebeth was trying to figure
out what was going on.
She assumed that he was working
on a very difficult project
at work.
She didn't know what it was.
He didn't tell her
and he couldn't tell her.
NARRATOR:
William's work
for Army intelligence
was classified top secret.
He was breaking into the
encryption machines
of America's enemies.
The machines had reached
a new level of complexity.
Many were considered
unbreakable.
(plane engines droning)
(bombs whistling)
(explosion)
With the start of the Second
World War in Europe,
William's work reached
a new level of urgency.
GREENFIELD:
There's Blitzkrieg.
You see Paris fall.
You see that Britain is left
standing almost alone.
You see that the Japanese
are starting to make overtures
to be joined in alliance with
Germany and with Italy.
It's looking very bad
and William,
in addition, as a Jewish man,
is aware that terrible things
are happening
to Jewish people in Germany.
So I think the weight
was colossal.
NARRATOR:
William was trying to pry open a
Japanese machine called Purple,
a device he had never seen
or even had diagrams for.
FAGONE:
William and his team at the Army
worked around the clock
to try to reverse engineer these
Japanese cipher machines
because if they could,
then they would essentially be
able to read minds
of the Axis powers,
Japan and Nazi Germany.
HOUGHTON:
William had to keep
all that inside.
He had a small group of people
he worked with
that he could talk to,
but they all worked for him.
And because he internalized
all this stuff,
it just burned him up inside
until he finally broke.
NARRATOR:
William's team finally cracked
Purple in September of 1940.
Three months later,
he had a complete breakdown
and checked himself
into the psychiatric unit
of Walter Reed General Hospital.
Elizebeth watched in dismay
as he sank deeper and deeper
into a depression.
FAGONE:
William at that point was still
the main breadwinner
in the household.
He made much more money than
Elizebeth did.
And so the fact of him
being in the psych ward,
the uncertainty about his future
created a much bigger
uncertainty
about both of their lives.
NARRATOR:
Every day for the nearly three
months he was hospitalized,
Elizebeth made the exhausting
trip to see her husband.
GREENFIELD:
She is absolutely essential
to William's recovery.
The medical establishment just
let them sort it out themselves.
And William says later that
she was the person
who sent down the rope to the
terrible morass that he was in.
She pulled him out of the swamp.
She did it by willpower,
she did it by faith in him.
NARRATOR:
After he was discharged,
he returned to his job
at the Army.
But he would struggle with
clinical depression
for the rest of his life.
FAGONE:
Elizebeth and William had
always been equals, a team.
After William's breakdown
in 1941,
he would never quite
be the same.
And so Elizebeth would have
to step up.
From now on she would,
in many ways,
have to be the stronger
of the two.
(planes droning,
explosions echo)
♪
NARRATOR:
In December 1941,
after a surprise Japanese attack
at Pearl Harbor,
the U.S. military immediately
ramped up
its codebreaking capabilities.
Elizebeth's team had just
shifted from the Coast Guard
to the Navy.
Now a military operation,
the Navy placed
a uniformed officer
with much less experience
in charge of the unit.
SHELDON:
The Navy had a rule that women
couldn't be in charge of men,
and so she had to take a
secondary position
to a man who wasn't as good
as she was.
FAGONE:
She had to deal with the pain
and the frustration
of losing leadership of
something that she had created,
that she had built
and that was really her baby.
NARRATOR:
The unit's assignment was
to monitor communications
between a Nazi spy ring
in South America
and the German high command.
GREENFIELD:
There had been a high amount
of German emigration
to South America
in the early 20th century.
There were places that had
German towns
with German street names,
German newspapers,
German schools
(German music playing)
In addition, you had homegrown
fascist movements.
You had movements in Brazil,
in Paraguay, and other countries
where you see real similarities
with what is going on
with Hitler's Germany
and what's happening
in Mussolini's Italy.
NARRATOR:
Decoding messages written
in German
wasn't a problem for Elizebeth.
She was now so skilled
at recognizing
the various statistical
properties of foreign languages,
a translator could do the rest.
In her rum-runner days,
she had even decrypted messages
in Chinese.
Among the decrypted messages,
one name appeared over and over:
Sargo.
She doesn't know it yet,
but she's starting to suspect
she's onto something big,
and she is.
Sargo is the code name
for a man named
Johannes Siegfried Becker.
And Becker is the SS's main man
in South America.
He is part of Hitler's elite.
NARRATOR:
As Elizebeth began to decode
Sargo's messages,
she made a startling
revelation
his network was transmitting
the locations of Allied ships
to U-boats in the Atlantic.
HOUGHTON:
One of the most important
intelligence targets
for the Germans
is information about Allied
shipping,
because it would be so easy
for the Germans
to pick off these supply ships
one-by-one
or to take out entire convoys
all at once
if they had accurate information
about what route they were
taking that they could knock the
English out of the war.
And without the English,
the war's essentially over.
(rapid beeping)
NARRATOR:
In March of 1942,
Elizebeth decrypted a series of
ominous dispatches
about the largest of the Allied
supply ships, the Queen Mary.
With her record-breaking speed
and size,
the Queen Mary's military value
was so great,
Adolph Hitler was offering
$250,000
to the U-boat captain who could
bring her down.
On this trip, more than 8,000
men stood to lose their lives
if the ship was sunk.
Guided by the secret messages,
the U-boats found the Queen Mary
off the coast of Brazil.
But before they could strike,
Elizebeth's decrypts were
relayed to the ship's captain.
He was able to take
evasive maneuvers
and bring the ship safely
to port.
(ship horn blares)
♪
As soon as Elizebeth started
unlocking Sargo's messages,
the balance in the Atlantic
began to tip.
DAVID HATCH:
The information could be given
to American forces first for a
ship to take evasive action,
and also for
the hunter-killer teams
that the Americans had
in the South Atlantic.
And many U-boats were sunk based
on this kind of information.
(splash, explosion)
HOUGHTON:
The work that Elizebeth Friedman
is doing
is some of the most important
work of the Second World War.
It is allowing the supply line
to exist.
NARRATOR:
Then, without warning,
the Brazilian police started
rounding up the Nazi spies,
driving Sargo further
underground.
Within days,
the airwaves went silent.
HOUGHTON:
One of the worst things that 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.
NARRATOR:
Elizebeth was stunned to learn
that her work
had been tripped up
by one of her own.
The Brazilians were conducting
the arrests
at the behest of the
American FBI director
J. Edgar Hoover.
HOUGHTON:
Hoover wants the glory,
Hoover wants the headlines.
That was really stupid
of him to do.
This is really life and death.
Hoover is now completely cutting
us off from
this life-saving intelligence
that's allowing us
to keep our convoys safe
in the Atlantic Ocean.
This puts Elizebeth
and her team back at square one.
NARRATOR:
Sargo escaped and immediately
rebuilt the network.
The spies set up
15 new circuits,
each adopting a far more
complex system of codes.
Month after month,
the unsolved messages piled up.
Elizebeth suspected that the
codes were being generated
by a highly complex machine
called the Enigma,
used by the
German Intelligence Services.
There were several models
of the Enigma.
The British were using a newly
invented decoding device
to crack into the version used
by the German military.
The machine Elizebeth was facing
was slightly less intricate,
but not by much.
Her tools were still only pencil
and paper.
Day after day, she waded through
the messages.
After two months, she spotted a
chink in the Enigma's armor.
She intercepted a cache of
28 messages
all sent in the same key,
a careless mistake
made by the spies.
The breakthrough enabled her
to make inroads
into the machine's system.
She lined up the messages
one below the other
in a technique called solving
"in depth."
HOUGHTON:
When you solve in depth
and you put papers
next to each other
or one on top of the other
and you're looking at
what is the first letter in each
of these messages,
what is the second letter in
each of these messages,
once you have the knowledge that
you're dealing with the same key
every day,
then you can actually start
breaking down words
and understanding what letters
are turning into others.
(typing)
GREENFIELD:
I think that Elizebeth would be
the first to say
that you are always looking
for the mistake
that the other side is making.
You find a little doorway that's
been left open just a smidge
and that's where you attack
and that's where you go in.
NARRATOR:
Finally, she was able to follow
Sargo's activities again.
The decrypted messages laid bare
ominous new developments
in South America.
GREENFIELD:
There is a coup in Argentina,
a fascist coup,
in the summer of 1943.
At the end of that,
Sargo is really on the inside.
In Bolivia, again,
he is working with people
who want to turn the government
toward the Nazis,
and in December of 1943,
lo and behold, there's
a fascist coup in Bolivia.
And this is scary stuff
for the United States.
HOUGHTON:
The fear is that the Germans
will start a front in
South America.
This could be a dramatic
game changer
that could make it very
difficult for us
to fight the war overseas,
because we'd be worried
about fighting the war at home.
NARRATOR:
From her tiny office in
Washington,
Elizebeth shadowed
Sargo's every move.
Any which way they turned,
his spies were outflanked.
HOUGHTON:
In the end, Elizebeth is able to
give information to the Allies
which allows them to break up
the spy ring
and do it in such a way
that the Germans have no idea
that the spy ring was broken up
because their codes
had been broken.
NARRATOR:
German backed revolutions in
Bolivia and Chile were crushed.
Argentina's relationship
with Germany splintered.
Within months,
the Nazi threat in the Western
Hemisphere was eliminated.
Sargo went into hiding.
He would never rebuild his
network again.
Elizebeth's work in
South America
was an astonishing testament
to the power of codebreaking.
But it would be a private
and lonely victory.
She had signed a Navy oath
promising her silence
until death.
She could tell no one.
Not even William.
And she could do nothing as
J. Edgar Hoover took credit
for her crowning achievement.
He took all the decrypts
Elizebeth had sent
All 4,000 of them
and had them stamped with
FBI identification numbers,
erasing Elizebeth and her team
from the official record.
Elizebeth just had to kind of
grin and bear it,
and after a while she wasn't
grinning so much anymore.
It kind of ate at her,
but there was very little that
she could do.
NARRATOR:
In her Christmas card in 1944,
she wrote friends
that she was just carrying on a
routine Navy job.
William added a PS:
"Elizebeth was, is,
and continues to be
the most fascinating woman
I've ever known."
♪
NARRATOR:
World War II ended
in August 1945.
A year later,
Elizebeth's unit was disbanded.
She was 54 years old
and out of a job.
Codebreaking by pencil and paper
had become a thing of the past.
Computers were the future.
GREENFIELD:
The post-war era will be like
nothing Elizebeth has ever seen,
and she knows that.
She knows it's changing.
She can see that her era
is ending.
NARRATOR:
William continued to work
for the government.
In the early 1950s, he suffered
a series of heart attacks,
and struggled
with mental illness.
He was so depressed that
he was unable to even start
his hand to move
on a pad of paper at the office,
and so Elizebeth would put her
hand on top of his
and move the pencil for him.
And in that way,
he was able to begin to work,
begin to draw,
begin to think and come to life.
To me, that says everything
about the Friedmans,
who they were, their bond.
NARRATOR:
William died of a heart attack
on November 2, 1969.
Though Elizebeth's career as a
codebreaker was long over,
codebreaking itself was becoming
a critical part
of keeping the nation safe.
The U.S. government had created
the National Security Agency,
the NSA, in 1952,
and charged it with collecting
cryptographic communications
and strengthening
the nation's codes.
It would become the largest,
most secretive,
and far-reaching arm of
U.S. intelligence gathering.
HOUGHTON:
Even though we're not fighting
a shooting war,
we are keeping secrets,
and a lot of them,
and not letting the American
public know
what the government is doing
in its name.
Elizebeth felt that it was going
too far,
collecting too much information,
becoming too intrusive,
violating too much privacy.
Some of the same themes that
will basically pester the NSA
for the next several decades.
NARRATOR:
Even as intelligence gathering
grew into something
Elizebeth could hardly
recognize,
her methods formed the basis of
codebreaking
for decades to come.
FAGONE:
She helped to create an
immensely powerful
new science of code breaking.
♪
And so there's still a good
portion of her DNA
in codebreaking today, even
though it's been mathematized
and done on computers.
She laid a foundation
for what happens
at American intelligence
agencies every day today.
NARRATOR:
Elizebeth struggled in her final
years as her savings dried up.
She died on October 31, 1980,
in a nursing home in New Jersey.
She took her secret life
to the grave.
The government kept the files
detailing Elizebeth Friedman's
history-making work
locked away for 62 years.
In 2008,
decades after her death,
they were finally declassified.
GREENFIELD:
If we could miss something as
big as Elizebeth,
who is crucial
in two world wars,
who fights crime,
who fights the mob,
if we missed her,
who else are we missing?
♪
♪
ANNOUNCER:
"American Experience:
The Codebreaker"
is available on DVD.
To order, visit ShopPBS
or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.
"American Experience"
is also available
with PBS Passport
and on Amazon Prime Video.
♪
♪
(radio static crackles,
intermittent beeping)
♪
(waves crashing)
NARRATOR:
In March of 1942,
German U-boats prowled the vast
Atlantic Ocean in wolf packs,
attacking scores
of Allied transport ships
as they headed towards
war-torn Europe.
(mechanical whirring)
(torpedo releasing)
(explosion)
In less than three months,
the Nazi submarines had sunk
more than a million tons
of desperately needed supplies
and killed
thousands of soldiers.
The U-boat captains
had a secret weapon
encrypted messages sent by
Nazi spies in South America
had provided them
with the coordinates
of the targeted ships.
ROSE MARY SHELDON:
We're talking about networks
all over South America,
an entire front in
the Second World War.
NARRATOR:
But America had on its side
one of the most skilled
codebreakers in the world
Elizebeth Friedman.
DAVID HATCH:
She was a suburban mom.
Nothing really to mark her
as anything unusual.
But she lived a double life.
NARRATOR:
In World War I,
Friedman had trained
the first team of codebreakers
for the U.S. military.
During Prohibition,
she had taken on
the most powerful gangsters
in the country
and brought down
an international
rum-running operation.
BARBARA OSTEIKA:
The gangsters
put a hit out on Elizebeth,
and the Coast Guard puts
a protection detail on her.
NARRATOR:
Now, as she decrypted
the intercepted messages
on her desk,
she knew everything
she had learned in her career
had led to this moment.
AMY BUTLER GREENFIELD:
She was somebody who had
the ability to see beyond
what most other people could.
She could see things starting
to unlock in front of her eyes.
NARRATOR:
She was one woman
fighting a secret army.
Her success or failure
could determine
the outcome of the war.
JASON FAGONE:
Elizebeth Friedman was
a code-breaking Quaker poet
who hunted Nazi spies,
and there's nobody like her
then or since.
(car horns honking,
trolley clanking)
♪
NARRATOR:
Elizebeth Smith Friedman's life
was unexpectedly set on course
during a visit to the bustling
city of Chicago in 1916.
Twenty-three and full of dreams,
she was hoping to escape
the life she
had been raised to expect.
FAGONE:
Elizebeth came from
a large Quaker family in
small-town Indiana,
and from a very young age,
she felt like she didn't fit in.
She even hated her own name.
She called it
"the odious name Smith."
And she hated it
because she believed that
whenever she was introduced
as Miss Smith,
she would be seen as
something so ordinary,
and she didn't
want to be ordinary,
she wanted to be extraordinary.
She wanted an adventurous life.
♪
NARRATOR:
Her mother, Sopha,
had delivered ten children,
the first when she was only 17.
Elizebeth, born in 1892,
was the youngest.
FAGONE:
Elizebeth often felt
pity for her,
because Sopha's life had been
completely overtaken,
it seemed to Elizebeth, by
childbearing and child rearing.
She didn't seem to be able to
pursue any kind of life
of the mind, and to Elizebeth
that was horrifying,
because Elizebeth was
a very bookish kid.
She loved to read,
she loved poetry.
She wrote her own poetry.
GREENFIELD:
Her father was a
Civil War veteran.
He saw his youngest
as a difficult child,
and their relationship
absolutely was difficult.
Her father did not support
her going to college.
He was against
further education,
particularly for women.
She manages to
talk him into this,
and he says she can have
the money, but at 6% interest.
She has to pay it all back.
NARRATOR:
In college, Elizebeth studied
Greek and English literature.
When she discovered Shakespeare,
she became fascinated
by the intricacies of language,
sparking a passion that
would drive her ambitions.
After graduation,
Elizebeth pursued one
of the few careers available
to women at the time
and accepted a teaching job
at a small Indiana school.
She found the work uninspiring,
and quit after just a year.
In June of 1916,
she headed for Chicago
in search of a new job.
After a week of effort,
she found nothing.
(trolley bell chimes)
With no income
and no job prospects,
Elizebeth had no choice but
to return home in defeat.
On her last day in the city,
she indulged in a visit
to the Newberry Library
to see a rare treasure
Shakespeare's first folio,
printed in 1623.
FAGONE:
She's looking at this book
of Shakespeare.
And the librarian notices
and says,
"You're interested in
Shakespeare, aren't you?"
And Elizebeth says,
"Well, yes."
And the librarian says,
"You know, it's funny,
there's an odd, wealthy man
"who keeps coming to
the library,
"and he's looking for somebody
"to help him with this project,
"to find some kind of secret
that he thinks
is hidden in this book."
NARRATOR:
An hour later,
George Fabyan was standing at
her table.
At 6'4", 250 pounds,
the wealthy industrialist
towered over her.
FAGONE:
He walks right up to Elizebeth
and the first thing
he says to her is,
"Would you like to
come out to Riverbank
and spend the night with me?"
She has no idea
what to say to this.
It's the most
indelicate question
that anyone
has ever posed to her.
And he grabs her
under the elbow,
lifts her up
she's tiny, he's huge
and he frog marches her
out the door
to a waiting limousine,
which takes them to
the railway station.
(train clattering on track)
(birds chirping)
NARRATOR:
Soon, Elizebeth was wandering
the grounds of Fabyan's
vast Riverbank estate,
nestled on 350 acres
of rolling hills in
Geneva, Illinois.
Strolling the Japanese garden,
she was filled with a mix of
astonishment and curiosity
about the tycoon's
eccentric kingdom.
FAGONE:
George Fabyan had so much money
that he could do essentially
anything that he wanted.
And what he wanted to do was
to build a playground
for science.
He would go out and hire
some of the leading scientists
of the day,
bring them to Riverbank,
essentially collecting
these scientists,
and he would set them loose
and tell them to be spectacular,
tell them to make breakthroughs,
tell them to
unlock the secrets of nature.
NARRATOR:
What captured most of
Fabyan's attention, however,
was a literary project focused
on proving
that the works of
William Shakespeare
had been written by
another author
the Elizabethan philosopher
and scientist, Francis Bacon.
VINCE HOUGHTON:
Fabyan had this belief
that William Shakespeare
didn't write Shakespeare.
That actually Francis Bacon
had written a code
within the Shakespearean plays
that demonstrated that
Shakespeare was not the author,
that Bacon actually was.
NARRATOR:
Fabyan assigned Elizebeth
the job of ferreting out
the secret messages he believed
Bacon had implanted in the text.
Excited by the challenge,
she first had to master
a method of encoding messages
invented by Francis Bacon
in 1623.
In the Bacon system,
each letter of the alphabet
was assigned a combination
of the letters A and B,
in groups of five.
HOUGHTON:
Essentially what he did
is he said,
"Okay, I'm going to take
"every letter of the alphabet
and break it down
into a binary system
of As and Bs."
The letter A would turn into
five As, A-A-A-A-A.
The letter B was A-A-A-A-B.
The letter C and so on.
This can be represented
any way you wanted to,
as long as there's
two different things
you're using to represent
the binary system.
And this is
what the legend was
that the first Shakespeare folio
had this code written
in two different
typefaces throughout.
NARRATOR:
Once the differences
in the typeface were identified,
and the letters
sorted into clusters of five,
a hidden message
would be revealed.
♪
The work was tedious,
but Elizebeth discovered
she had the patience to
stare at characters on a page
for hours on end.
FAGONE:
What Elizebeth was
required to do
was peer through
a magnifying glass
and try to discern
very subtle variations
in the fonts on
photographic enlargements
of Shakespeare's plays.
And that was how she
was going to break the code
and rewrite the history
of English literature.
♪
NARRATOR:
Her work with the
Shakespeare manuscripts
would bring her together
with the young man who was
photographing and enlarging
the Shakespeare texts,
William Friedman.
Genetics was
his field of expertise.
Photography was his hobby.
At Riverbank,
he easily stood out.
SHELDON:
William always wore
a white starched shirt,
which in that heat, I don't know
how he didn't perspire to death
but he always looked
very together, very cool.
His hair was always
combed perfectly.
This was a man
who knew how to dress.
♪
FAGONE:
There are a lot of photos of
just Elizebeth
and you can tell that William
is gazing down at his camera
into the glass
and seeing an image of her
and probably smiling.
She was unlike anyone
he had ever met.
He was very quickly
falling in love.
NARRATOR:
The couple were an
unlikely match
She was a Quaker
from the Midwest
and he was a Jewish immigrant
from Russia.
HATCH:
Late in his life,
one of William Friedman's
colleagues
asked him how
he got into cryptology.
According to the story,
he had a sly smile
on his face and he said,
"I was seduced."
NARRATOR:
Working across from each other
day by day,
they began digging into
Fabyan's collection
of codebreaking books,
exchanging insights and ideas.
HOUGHTON:
And so Elizebeth was able to
bring William into the fold
and say, "Look, you can take
your very mathematical,
"scientific approach to
understanding codes and ciphers,
"I can bring my poetry
"and language skills,
and together
we'll be unstoppable."
NARRATOR:
As they began to master
rudimentary skills,
however, they saw
little indication
of embedded codes in
the Shakespeare manuscripts.
Every now and then,
there will be a letter
that is slightly different.
Now, it could be just because
the way the typeface
struck the paper.
There might be
a little tail off a letter
or a letter might be
a little wider.
They're random marks and they
can be made by any typesetter,
especially back in
the 16th century,
and so they're really
rather meaningless.
Now they both agreed that
the central project at Riverbank
had no scientific validity.
It was all a pipe dream,
it was a kind of delusion.
NARRATOR:
Disheartened by their
revelation,
they saw no future
in codebreaking.
Still, they saw a future
with each other.
In May of 1917,
Elizebeth and William
stole away from Riverbank
to get married in Chicago.
FAGONE:
William's family was shocked
and appalled by the marriage.
They wanted to see him marry
a Jewish woman.
His brother later said that
if William had been living
in Pittsburgh at the time,
in the close-knit
Jewish community there,
he would have been exiled.
The two of them go ahead,
and despite the differences
in their background,
despite the family opposition,
despite the lack of money,
despite all the many reasons
why they should not get married,
they do.
NARRATOR:
The newlyweds hoped
to start a new life
away from Riverbank.
World events, however,
would upend their plans.
A month before they wed,
the United States
had entered the "Great War"
in Europe
a war unlike anything
that had come before,
in part because of
the invention of the radio.
(static buzzes)
Suddenly, the air was full of
messages relaying information
that could win or lose a battle,
destroy a regiment,
or sink a ship
(radio beeping)
All of it easily intercepted
by anyone with an antenna.
FAGONE:
The invention of radio
completely transformed
the value of codebreaking.
(explosion echoes)
So it put an incredible premium
on cryptography,
on strong codes and ciphers,
because now that those messages
were flying through the air,
they had to be protected.
The problem for America is that
on the eve of World War I,
the United States
was completely unprepared
to break codes in the war.
HOUGHTON:
The United States
had no code-breaking
agency or bureau
in the United States military.
It just didn't exist.
There was no NSA,
there was C.I.A.,
the military branches
had their own
very, very small
intelligence agencies.
We're talking
about dozens of people,
not thousands, in this case.
NARRATOR:
At Riverbank, George Fabyan saw
an opportunity
to serve his country
and to enhance his reputation.
He established
the first dedicated
codebreaking unit in America
and, much to their disbelief,
placed Elizebeth and William
in charge.
Soon, the War, Navy, State,
and Justice Departments
were sending thousands
of secret messages
to Riverbank for decryption.
HOUGHTON:
So, William and
Elizebeth Friedman
at this point hadn't really
done this systematically
for very long.
They'd kind of played with it
a little bit.
But all of a sudden, they're
being asked to break codes
for the United States military
in a world war.
Talk about on-the-job training,
this is as deep as
on-the-job training gets.
(cipher ticking)
NARRATOR:
The couple scrambled to expand
their knowledge of codebreaking:
starting with
the most fundamental concepts,
like the difference
between a cipher and a code.
HOUGHTON:
A code is when you take a word
or even a phrase
and you replace it
with another word or a phrase.
So if we have the word "gun,"
we might say
every place the word "gun" is,
we're going to
put "Bob" instead.
That way you're able
to replace the words,
but if somebody
intercepts your message,
they may not actually know
there's a secret message there,
because it reads like
plain text.
A cipher, on the other hand,
is taking individual letters
or groups of letters,
and changing them
through some process,
through some algorithm,
into other letters,
into numbers, into symbols,
into anything,
so that you can
mix up the message
and make it unreadable.
♪
NARRATOR:
Using a method that had been
around for hundreds of years,
they began decrypting messages
using frequency analysis.
HOUGHTON:
This is what's called
a frequency chart.
This is what allows
a codebreaker
to very effectively look through
an enciphered message
and say, "Okay, look,
there's a lot of Ns,
"there's a lot of Gs,
there are a lot of Qs,"
so the likelihood
is those are going to be
some of these very common
letters
in the English language
Es, Ts, Ns, As.
If we understand this in
a very mathematical way,
it can help us
to attack secret messages
and break them down
and understand
what they actually mean.
NARRATOR:
Elizebeth quickly discovered
that she was quite good at
spotting patterns
hidden in the texts.
Before long, though,
William and Elizebeth
reached the limits
of what was known about
codes and ciphers,
and they began inventing
their own methods.
They figured out methods of
solving secret messages
that had never been
imagined before.
The first eight months
of World War I
this sounds incredible
but it's completely true
Elizebeth, William, and
their colleagues at Riverbank
broke all messages for
every part of the U.S. military
and the Department of Justice.
NARRATOR:
They documented their
breakthroughs in eight volumes
known as the
Riverbank Publications,
which established
a mathematical foundation
to the principles of cryptology.
HATCH:
Prior to the publications
at Riverbank
from Elizebeth and William,
cryptology had been thought of
as a field for linguists,
for people with knowledge
about foreign cultural areas
and perhaps math
might be a tool.
But the Riverbank Laboratories'
publications
turned cryptology
from language to statistics.
NARRATOR:
In an age when codebreaking
was becoming a weapon of war,
Elizebeth and William
were forging
a new science of immense power.
It was a heady time
for Elizebeth.
She was training the first
generation of codebreakers
for the U.S. military.
The couple were so captivated
by cryptology,
for fun, they embedded
codes everywhere,
even the officer trainee
class photo.
As the group gathered,
they instructed
everyone assembled how to pose.
And if you're just
looking at the picture,
you're like, man,
whoever decided to shoot this
wasn't very disciplined.
A good chunk of
the people in the photograph
are looking forward,
but a good chunk
are looking to the side.
It turns out that
each person in the photo
stands for
a letter in
Bacon's biliteral cipher.
So the people who are
looking off to the side
are the B form of the cipher,
and the people who are looking
straight ahead are the A form.
And when you put it
all together,
the people in Bacon's cipher
spell out the phrase
"knowledge is power,"
which is one of Bacon's mottos
and a motto that William and
Elizebeth adopted as their own.
And it's not written in letters
but it's written in people.
NARRATOR:
The Friedmans' work at Riverbank
was an eye-opener for
the U.S. military.
Six months into the war,
the Army established its own
cipher bureau in Washington.
With the workload
at Riverbank dwindling,
William signed up for
military duty
as a field codebreaker
in Europe.
Elizebeth wanted to
do field work as well,
but she could not;
women were excluded
from serving at the front.
HOUGHTON:
Being left behind had to be
incredibly difficult
for Elizebeth.
Not only is
the man that she loves
being sent off to fight a war,
but this was her field.
She taught William
how to break codes and ciphers.
This was a key way to
move forward in your career.
William could do it,
she couldn't.
♪
NARRATOR:
And worse still,
she would be on her own
at Riverbank.
FAGONE:
It was a terrifying time
for her.
She let it be known
in letters to William
that George Fabyan was
not treating her well,
that he was pressuring her.
There's a reference in
one of William's letters
to the fact that
Fabyan might have
sexually harassed Elizebeth,
might have propositioned her.
William was very angry,
he called Fabyan
"that nameless rascal"
in that letter
and said he wanted to hurt him,
to beat him up.
And so when they were reunited,
they were highly motivated
to get the hell out of there.
NARRATOR:
At war's end, William used
his military contacts
to line up a job in Washington.
He arrived in Washington
with a reputation earned
on the battlefield.
Elizebeth arrived in Washington
as William's wife.
Technological innovations
were fueling a global race
to create ever-more
advanced devices
for making and breaking codes.
The post-war world
was still a dangerous place.
In 1921, William went to work
for the Army Signal Corps
developing new cipher machines.
Elizebeth
was also offered a job
but at half of William's salary.
She took the position,
but left after a year.
She believed her
codebreaking days were over.
♪
In 1923, Elizebeth
gave birth to a daughter,
soon followed
by the birth of a son.
Codebreaking unexpectedly
entered Elizebeth's life again
in 1925
when a Coast Guard officer
knocked on the door of
her suburban home
with an urgent request.
He explained that the Coast
Guard's network of radio towers
had intercepted
hundreds of encrypted messages,
but no one knew
how to break them.
Decrypting the messages
might help them
gain the upper hand against
a deadly adversary.
The Prohibition Act,
signed into law
several years earlier,
had triggered an explosion of
illegal trafficking in alcohol.
Mobsters and gangsters
ruled the streets.
OSTEIKA:
Murder was rampant,
and it became not just murder of
gangster on gangster,
but they were starting to murder
anybody who opposed them.
The federal police didn't even
really understand
the concept of organized crime.
FAGONE:
A massive black market rises up,
and it's controlled by
gangsters,
racketeers, and mafiosi.
And very quickly,
they make a mockery out of
the Coast Guard.
NARRATOR:
The Coast Guard was charged with
stopping the deluge of liquor
coming in by sea,
but it only had 200 boats to
patrol 5,000 miles of coastline.
The rum runners,
on the other hand,
had unlimited resources.
Huge ocean-going vessels
served as mother ships
that stored millions of dollars'
worth of liquor
in their holds.
A fleet of smaller crafts,
called black ships,
would divvy up the cargo and
transport it back to shore,
logistics made possible by
the use of shortwave radios
and sophisticated codes.
The Coast Guard officer pleaded
with Elizebeth for help.
She was no teetotaler,
but Elizebeth saw the damage
organized crime
was doing to the country.
During her first three months
on the job,
she single-handedly decrypted
two years' worth
of backlogged messages.
GREENFIELD:
It's basically Elizebeth and a
secretary filing her decrypts,
and she's doing all of that work
during those years.
She says she ends up looking
at about 25,000 intercepts
a year.
That's just astonishing.
It's really a war.
NARRATOR:
Elizebeth, however, was not
just decrypting the messages,
she was weaponizing the data she
was gathering.
OSTEIKA:
What Elizebeth does
is she begins
the development
of strategic intelligence,
which nobody has done
to this point.
And what that means is she takes
the information
that she's obtaining in these
broken codes and ciphers,
which are basically the plans
and intentions of the gangsters.
And she begins to figure out who
owns the ships,
where a ship is scheduled
to leave from,
where those ships are going,
who's meeting those ships.
All of these arrangements were
made with wireless radio.
She was able to explain
basically to the U.S. government
and all of its federal law
enforcement agencies
what organized crime
looked like,
how they were doing their job,
and how to stop them.
And that is really visionary.
NARRATOR:
By 1931, Elizebeth's work was so
indispensable
the Coast Guard approved her
plan to build
an official codebreaking unit
one of only a handful of such
units in the country
and the first to be run
by a woman.
FAGONE:
She was allowed to hire junior
codebreakers and train them.
She was given a raise to $3,800
a year,
which is not a lot of money,
but a bump for her.
And she got a new title along
with it.
She was called the
"cryptanalyst in charge"
essentially the chief
codebreaker for the Coast Guard.
♪
NARRATOR:
For a mother with young
children, a home to run,
and a husband who worked equally
long hours,
it was an exhausting time.
A decade into Prohibition, the
crime syndicates had grown
into multinational businesses
run with exacting efficiency.
But with Elizebeth's
intelligence in tow,
the U.S. government could
finally
take the mobsters to court.
Elizebeth became the key witness
in a series
of sensational trials,
starting with the prosecution
of CONEXCO,
the largest rum-running
enterprise in the world.
They had the network from
the manufacturer
of the liquor to the final
distribution of that liquor
to speakeasies and nightclubs.
When the government went after
CONEXCO,
it would be like the government
going after Walmart today.
NARRATOR:
With a virtual monopoly on
bootlegging in the Pacific
and the Gulf of Mexico,
CONEXCO supplied liquor
to the most notorious mobster
in the country, Al Capone.
Within a year,
the U.S. government indicted
CONEXCO's top rank,
which included Capone's brother.
In 1933,
at the trial in New Orleans,
prosecutors called upon
Elizebeth to testify
against some of the most
dangerous men in the country.
There were a lot
of prohibition agents
who had already been killed
in the line of duty.
SHELDON:
There are these plainclothes
people that she doesn't know
that are there to keep her from
being whacked by the bad guys.
But it wouldn't have occurred to
her not to testify against them.
These people had to be put away,
that was the whole point
of breaking the codes.
(gavel pounds)
NARRATOR:
When Elizebeth took the stand,
she was grilled mercilessly
by Al Capone's attorneys
who worked to undermine her
credibility.
FAGONE:
Whenever Elizebeth tried
to explain
how she solved the messages,
these six lawyers men
Would often stand up and object
and say that it was some kind
of witchcraft,
that code breaking was not
science,
that Elizebeth was
just making a guess.
She got so fed up with
the repeated objections
of the defense attorneys
that she asked a judge
if she could have access
to a blackboard.
And Elizebeth proceeded to give
a class in codebreaking.
And by the time
she was finished,
the defense attorneys
had nothing else to say.
OSTEIKA:
They must have been thinking
they were going to be able
to bowl her over
and make her testimony
irrelevant.
And instead she takes control
of that
and, you know, seals the deal.
She gets the conviction.
NARRATOR:
Elizebeth became
a national celebrity.
One newspaper praised her
"class in cryptology."
Another described her as
"a pretty woman who protects
the United States."
Reporters expressed surprise
that one woman could take down
some of the most dangerous
gangsters in the country.
HOUGHTON:
This is juicy stuff,
these are murderers
and these are people
who will become household names
in America.
And then along comes this woman
who is the key witness
at the trial
to get these guys thrown
in prison.
They don't talk about her
skills,
they don't talk about her
brains,
her ability to break these
codes,
and to bring these gangsters
to justice.
They talk about how she looks,
how she's dressed,
that she's this dainty,
little woman who is bringing
these big Al Capone-type
mobsters to justice.
NARRATOR:
William was delighted that his
wife was finally getting
the recognition she deserved.
"I'm as proud as I can be,"
he told her.
As Elizebeth's work was seeing
the light of day,
William's was burrowing deeper
into the shadows.
By the late fall of 1939,
Elizebeth knew something was
terribly wrong with her husband.
FAGONE:
He developed mood swings
that's what Elizebeth called
them,
mood swings or down swings.
Elizebeth was trying to figure
out what was going on.
She assumed that he was working
on a very difficult project
at work.
She didn't know what it was.
He didn't tell her
and he couldn't tell her.
NARRATOR:
William's work
for Army intelligence
was classified top secret.
He was breaking into the
encryption machines
of America's enemies.
The machines had reached
a new level of complexity.
Many were considered
unbreakable.
(plane engines droning)
(bombs whistling)
(explosion)
With the start of the Second
World War in Europe,
William's work reached
a new level of urgency.
GREENFIELD:
There's Blitzkrieg.
You see Paris fall.
You see that Britain is left
standing almost alone.
You see that the Japanese
are starting to make overtures
to be joined in alliance with
Germany and with Italy.
It's looking very bad
and William,
in addition, as a Jewish man,
is aware that terrible things
are happening
to Jewish people in Germany.
So I think the weight
was colossal.
NARRATOR:
William was trying to pry open a
Japanese machine called Purple,
a device he had never seen
or even had diagrams for.
FAGONE:
William and his team at the Army
worked around the clock
to try to reverse engineer these
Japanese cipher machines
because if they could,
then they would essentially be
able to read minds
of the Axis powers,
Japan and Nazi Germany.
HOUGHTON:
William had to keep
all that inside.
He had a small group of people
he worked with
that he could talk to,
but they all worked for him.
And because he internalized
all this stuff,
it just burned him up inside
until he finally broke.
NARRATOR:
William's team finally cracked
Purple in September of 1940.
Three months later,
he had a complete breakdown
and checked himself
into the psychiatric unit
of Walter Reed General Hospital.
Elizebeth watched in dismay
as he sank deeper and deeper
into a depression.
FAGONE:
William at that point was still
the main breadwinner
in the household.
He made much more money than
Elizebeth did.
And so the fact of him
being in the psych ward,
the uncertainty about his future
created a much bigger
uncertainty
about both of their lives.
NARRATOR:
Every day for the nearly three
months he was hospitalized,
Elizebeth made the exhausting
trip to see her husband.
GREENFIELD:
She is absolutely essential
to William's recovery.
The medical establishment just
let them sort it out themselves.
And William says later that
she was the person
who sent down the rope to the
terrible morass that he was in.
She pulled him out of the swamp.
She did it by willpower,
she did it by faith in him.
NARRATOR:
After he was discharged,
he returned to his job
at the Army.
But he would struggle with
clinical depression
for the rest of his life.
FAGONE:
Elizebeth and William had
always been equals, a team.
After William's breakdown
in 1941,
he would never quite
be the same.
And so Elizebeth would have
to step up.
From now on she would,
in many ways,
have to be the stronger
of the two.
(planes droning,
explosions echo)
♪
NARRATOR:
In December 1941,
after a surprise Japanese attack
at Pearl Harbor,
the U.S. military immediately
ramped up
its codebreaking capabilities.
Elizebeth's team had just
shifted from the Coast Guard
to the Navy.
Now a military operation,
the Navy placed
a uniformed officer
with much less experience
in charge of the unit.
SHELDON:
The Navy had a rule that women
couldn't be in charge of men,
and so she had to take a
secondary position
to a man who wasn't as good
as she was.
FAGONE:
She had to deal with the pain
and the frustration
of losing leadership of
something that she had created,
that she had built
and that was really her baby.
NARRATOR:
The unit's assignment was
to monitor communications
between a Nazi spy ring
in South America
and the German high command.
GREENFIELD:
There had been a high amount
of German emigration
to South America
in the early 20th century.
There were places that had
German towns
with German street names,
German newspapers,
German schools
(German music playing)
In addition, you had homegrown
fascist movements.
You had movements in Brazil,
in Paraguay, and other countries
where you see real similarities
with what is going on
with Hitler's Germany
and what's happening
in Mussolini's Italy.
NARRATOR:
Decoding messages written
in German
wasn't a problem for Elizebeth.
She was now so skilled
at recognizing
the various statistical
properties of foreign languages,
a translator could do the rest.
In her rum-runner days,
she had even decrypted messages
in Chinese.
Among the decrypted messages,
one name appeared over and over:
Sargo.
She doesn't know it yet,
but she's starting to suspect
she's onto something big,
and she is.
Sargo is the code name
for a man named
Johannes Siegfried Becker.
And Becker is the SS's main man
in South America.
He is part of Hitler's elite.
NARRATOR:
As Elizebeth began to decode
Sargo's messages,
she made a startling
revelation
his network was transmitting
the locations of Allied ships
to U-boats in the Atlantic.
HOUGHTON:
One of the most important
intelligence targets
for the Germans
is information about Allied
shipping,
because it would be so easy
for the Germans
to pick off these supply ships
one-by-one
or to take out entire convoys
all at once
if they had accurate information
about what route they were
taking that they could knock the
English out of the war.
And without the English,
the war's essentially over.
(rapid beeping)
NARRATOR:
In March of 1942,
Elizebeth decrypted a series of
ominous dispatches
about the largest of the Allied
supply ships, the Queen Mary.
With her record-breaking speed
and size,
the Queen Mary's military value
was so great,
Adolph Hitler was offering
$250,000
to the U-boat captain who could
bring her down.
On this trip, more than 8,000
men stood to lose their lives
if the ship was sunk.
Guided by the secret messages,
the U-boats found the Queen Mary
off the coast of Brazil.
But before they could strike,
Elizebeth's decrypts were
relayed to the ship's captain.
He was able to take
evasive maneuvers
and bring the ship safely
to port.
(ship horn blares)
♪
As soon as Elizebeth started
unlocking Sargo's messages,
the balance in the Atlantic
began to tip.
DAVID HATCH:
The information could be given
to American forces first for a
ship to take evasive action,
and also for
the hunter-killer teams
that the Americans had
in the South Atlantic.
And many U-boats were sunk based
on this kind of information.
(splash, explosion)
HOUGHTON:
The work that Elizebeth Friedman
is doing
is some of the most important
work of the Second World War.
It is allowing the supply line
to exist.
NARRATOR:
Then, without warning,
the Brazilian police started
rounding up the Nazi spies,
driving Sargo further
underground.
Within days,
the airwaves went silent.
HOUGHTON:
One of the worst things that 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.
NARRATOR:
Elizebeth was stunned to learn
that her work
had been tripped up
by one of her own.
The Brazilians were conducting
the arrests
at the behest of the
American FBI director
J. Edgar Hoover.
HOUGHTON:
Hoover wants the glory,
Hoover wants the headlines.
That was really stupid
of him to do.
This is really life and death.
Hoover is now completely cutting
us off from
this life-saving intelligence
that's allowing us
to keep our convoys safe
in the Atlantic Ocean.
This puts Elizebeth
and her team back at square one.
NARRATOR:
Sargo escaped and immediately
rebuilt the network.
The spies set up
15 new circuits,
each adopting a far more
complex system of codes.
Month after month,
the unsolved messages piled up.
Elizebeth suspected that the
codes were being generated
by a highly complex machine
called the Enigma,
used by the
German Intelligence Services.
There were several models
of the Enigma.
The British were using a newly
invented decoding device
to crack into the version used
by the German military.
The machine Elizebeth was facing
was slightly less intricate,
but not by much.
Her tools were still only pencil
and paper.
Day after day, she waded through
the messages.
After two months, she spotted a
chink in the Enigma's armor.
She intercepted a cache of
28 messages
all sent in the same key,
a careless mistake
made by the spies.
The breakthrough enabled her
to make inroads
into the machine's system.
She lined up the messages
one below the other
in a technique called solving
"in depth."
HOUGHTON:
When you solve in depth
and you put papers
next to each other
or one on top of the other
and you're looking at
what is the first letter in each
of these messages,
what is the second letter in
each of these messages,
once you have the knowledge that
you're dealing with the same key
every day,
then you can actually start
breaking down words
and understanding what letters
are turning into others.
(typing)
GREENFIELD:
I think that Elizebeth would be
the first to say
that you are always looking
for the mistake
that the other side is making.
You find a little doorway that's
been left open just a smidge
and that's where you attack
and that's where you go in.
NARRATOR:
Finally, she was able to follow
Sargo's activities again.
The decrypted messages laid bare
ominous new developments
in South America.
GREENFIELD:
There is a coup in Argentina,
a fascist coup,
in the summer of 1943.
At the end of that,
Sargo is really on the inside.
In Bolivia, again,
he is working with people
who want to turn the government
toward the Nazis,
and in December of 1943,
lo and behold, there's
a fascist coup in Bolivia.
And this is scary stuff
for the United States.
HOUGHTON:
The fear is that the Germans
will start a front in
South America.
This could be a dramatic
game changer
that could make it very
difficult for us
to fight the war overseas,
because we'd be worried
about fighting the war at home.
NARRATOR:
From her tiny office in
Washington,
Elizebeth shadowed
Sargo's every move.
Any which way they turned,
his spies were outflanked.
HOUGHTON:
In the end, Elizebeth is able to
give information to the Allies
which allows them to break up
the spy ring
and do it in such a way
that the Germans have no idea
that the spy ring was broken up
because their codes
had been broken.
NARRATOR:
German backed revolutions in
Bolivia and Chile were crushed.
Argentina's relationship
with Germany splintered.
Within months,
the Nazi threat in the Western
Hemisphere was eliminated.
Sargo went into hiding.
He would never rebuild his
network again.
Elizebeth's work in
South America
was an astonishing testament
to the power of codebreaking.
But it would be a private
and lonely victory.
She had signed a Navy oath
promising her silence
until death.
She could tell no one.
Not even William.
And she could do nothing as
J. Edgar Hoover took credit
for her crowning achievement.
He took all the decrypts
Elizebeth had sent
All 4,000 of them
and had them stamped with
FBI identification numbers,
erasing Elizebeth and her team
from the official record.
Elizebeth just had to kind of
grin and bear it,
and after a while she wasn't
grinning so much anymore.
It kind of ate at her,
but there was very little that
she could do.
NARRATOR:
In her Christmas card in 1944,
she wrote friends
that she was just carrying on a
routine Navy job.
William added a PS:
"Elizebeth was, is,
and continues to be
the most fascinating woman
I've ever known."
♪
NARRATOR:
World War II ended
in August 1945.
A year later,
Elizebeth's unit was disbanded.
She was 54 years old
and out of a job.
Codebreaking by pencil and paper
had become a thing of the past.
Computers were the future.
GREENFIELD:
The post-war era will be like
nothing Elizebeth has ever seen,
and she knows that.
She knows it's changing.
She can see that her era
is ending.
NARRATOR:
William continued to work
for the government.
In the early 1950s, he suffered
a series of heart attacks,
and struggled
with mental illness.
He was so depressed that
he was unable to even start
his hand to move
on a pad of paper at the office,
and so Elizebeth would put her
hand on top of his
and move the pencil for him.
And in that way,
he was able to begin to work,
begin to draw,
begin to think and come to life.
To me, that says everything
about the Friedmans,
who they were, their bond.
NARRATOR:
William died of a heart attack
on November 2, 1969.
Though Elizebeth's career as a
codebreaker was long over,
codebreaking itself was becoming
a critical part
of keeping the nation safe.
The U.S. government had created
the National Security Agency,
the NSA, in 1952,
and charged it with collecting
cryptographic communications
and strengthening
the nation's codes.
It would become the largest,
most secretive,
and far-reaching arm of
U.S. intelligence gathering.
HOUGHTON:
Even though we're not fighting
a shooting war,
we are keeping secrets,
and a lot of them,
and not letting the American
public know
what the government is doing
in its name.
Elizebeth felt that it was going
too far,
collecting too much information,
becoming too intrusive,
violating too much privacy.
Some of the same themes that
will basically pester the NSA
for the next several decades.
NARRATOR:
Even as intelligence gathering
grew into something
Elizebeth could hardly
recognize,
her methods formed the basis of
codebreaking
for decades to come.
FAGONE:
She helped to create an
immensely powerful
new science of code breaking.
♪
And so there's still a good
portion of her DNA
in codebreaking today, even
though it's been mathematized
and done on computers.
She laid a foundation
for what happens
at American intelligence
agencies every day today.
NARRATOR:
Elizebeth struggled in her final
years as her savings dried up.
She died on October 31, 1980,
in a nursing home in New Jersey.
She took her secret life
to the grave.
The government kept the files
detailing Elizebeth Friedman's
history-making work
locked away for 62 years.
In 2008,
decades after her death,
they were finally declassified.
GREENFIELD:
If we could miss something as
big as Elizebeth,
who is crucial
in two world wars,
who fights crime,
who fights the mob,
if we missed her,
who else are we missing?
♪
♪
ANNOUNCER:
"American Experience:
The Codebreaker"
is available on DVD.
To order, visit ShopPBS
or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.
"American Experience"
is also available
with PBS Passport
and on Amazon Prime Video.
♪
♪