Who Was the Woman Behind American Codebreaking?

comes in. She's about to give up, and then she's discovered and hired by this really eccentric tycoon, makes a major shift in her life and realizes she has this remarkable ability to break codes. She then goes on to become one of the greatest code breakers in history, helps the US win World War One, helps US defeat the Nazis in World War Two, and plays a major role in building the foundation for the intelligence agencies in the

USA today. Boom, what do you think about this? I'd watched that movie, yeah, and it should be a movie. But here's the thing, it's all true and thanks to the years of research and writing by Jason Fagoni, we now have a brilliant book. It's called The Woman who smashed codes and it tells the story of Elizabeth Smith Friedman. I can't stop thinking about this story, so let's dive ina.

Hey there, podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend Mangesh Ticketer and on the other side of the soundproof glass obsessing over his new decoder ring and what's he doing. He's he's like he's communicating with us in some sort of new language of signals. He and he's always so impressive. Mango, that's our that's our friend and

producer Tristan McNeil. Now today we're talking about one of the most fascinating people history almost forgot and honestly might have forever had it not been for the book we're talking about today. I know it's it's just this incredible story. And when you started telling me about it, I'll be honest, I really didn't think it could be true. I mean, like this poet learning code breaking and then taking down Nazis and gangsters and cracking codes with pretty much this

relative ease, like it just sounded too good. And especially since you know, we've done a lot of stories and I've never really heard of Elizabeth Smith Friedman before I know it's it's honestly why I can't stop talking about that story. You really haven't stopped talking about it for a while. Well, I'm thrilled we finally have the right person on the line to talk about this story, and that's the author of The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Jason Fagoni. So, Jason,

welcome to Part Time Genius. Hey, thanks, guys, I'm glad to be here. Well, Jason, I want to jump straight into this this really bizarre break that Elizabeth got, you know, becoming a code breaker, And of course we want to ask you about how you even stumbled into this story. But first, can you set the scene a little bit and just talk about what her early life was like before she got this big break. Yeah. So it's one

of these kind of classic American tales. You have a a hundred years ago, a young woman in her early twenties is bored with her life and board with her job. She lives in a small town, uh in Midwest, in rural Indiana where she's from. She's teaching high school and for a bright young woman in nineteen fifteen, nineteen sixteen, this is kind of the end of the line right there, there is not really um a lot of opportunity beyond

teaching school. Elizabeth was extremely intelligent, ambitious, and brave, and she decided in June nine, sixteen, to take a risk. She quit her job teaching school and she moved to the big city, to Chicago, to look for something more unusual. And that was really all she wanted, was something a little bit more unusual. That brought her to a library in Chicago, the Newberry Library that happened to have a rare volume of Shakespeare from sixteen twenty three was the

Shakespeare First Saffolio. And she happened to love Shakespeare. She had studied Shakespeare in school. She was a poet by training, literature scholar, and she just kind of wanted to see this rare book. She she hadn't had any luck finding a job in Chicago. She spent about a week, week and a half they're looking for work, had no luck.

She was about ready to go back home and move in with her parents back in Indiana, but she made this one final stop at this library to see this Shakespeare book, and she happened to have a chance meeting there with an eccentric tycoon named George Fabian that that ended up transforming her life, but not just her life, Uh, it ended up changing the shape of the twentieth century. And to be clear, like she hadn't studied any code breaking, right, Like she was um more a liberal arts type, is

that right? Yeah, absolutely she was. She was a poet in a literature person. So and this is one of the surprising things about the story and one of the things that pulled me in from the from the first day I began to read her letters, is that I think we we kind of think of code breakers as mathematicians. We have this image of the code breakers as someone

like allan turning professional mathematician, math professor. But the fact is code breakers often come from unusual places because the core thing about code breaking is it's really about seeing patterns. The code breaking is the science of solving a secret message without knowing the key. Um. It's akin to if you've ever solved the cryptogram and the in the puzzle page in the paper. Um. Elizabeth was doing this at a sort of more sophisticated level than than most people.

But it's the same principle. You you you sort of take a block of letters that looks like gobbledygook. You chop them into their constituent parts, you whirl them around, count them and measure them and rearrange them into their original order. And um, Elizabeth was a genius at seeing patterns. Even though she wasn't mathematically trained, she she had a genius for seeing patterns. And that, uh, that's one of the things that made her one of the one of

the most important code breakers of her era. And before she was doing the code breaking, that obviously, you know, changed the world. And in many ways, it was an interest first project. I mean, can you talk a little bit about Fabian because he seemed like such a bizarre character, and and how this meeting came to be, and and and what she was actually asked to do in her

first assignment with him. So Elizabeth went to this library, the Newberry Library, to see this rare book of Shakespeare, and she having to fall into conversation with the librarian there who saw that she was interested in Shakespeare. The librarian comes over and says, you know, it's funny, but there's this odd, rich guy who keeps coming to the

library looking at the same book of Shakespeare. He's convinced that there are secret messages embedded inside inside this book that have been planted there by the true author of Shakespeare's plays. He thinks that the true author is actually this guy who is a contemporary of Shakespeare's named Francis Bake. So the librarian is telling Elizabeth this, and the librarian says, uh, this rich guy, George Fabian. He says he's been looking

for a research assistant. Would you be interested in something like that? Elisabeth says, oh, sure, you know, maybe possibly. The librarian makes a phone call to the George Fabian. George Fabian ends up coming to the library immediately, bringing bringing his chauffeurg limousine. He pulls up in front of the Newberry Library and this limo and he tumbles out of the limousine and Elizabeth Smith looks at George Fabian for the first time, and what she sees is an

enormous human being. He is six foot for two pounds, big iron gray beard. Uh. He just he just sort of stomps towards her. Uh. He has big red face, and he's sort of full of energy and intent, and he's basically towering over her. Because Elizabeth is very petite. She's about five ft three and about a hundred and ten pounds um. And he looks at her and he says, would you like to come to Riverbank and spend the night with me? This is you know, this is a

completely scandalous question. Uh. You know, Elizabeth's from this from a fairly devout Quaker family, and and um, and she doesn't even know what to say to this. She doesn't know what Riverbank is, and said she she kind of stammers reply, and she says, well, sir, I don't have anything to to sleep in. I don't have any of my nightclothes or my or my or my toiletries or anything like that. And he says, oh, don't mind that.

We'll we'll set you up with all of that. Come on, and and and this guy, George Fabian, grabs her by the arm and sort of walks her out to his limousine and and takes her to the Chicago and Northwestern train station. And from there, Uh, she has brought to this place called river Bank. And what river Bank is is one of the most bizarre institutions in America at that time, nineteen sixteen. So George, baby, and it turns

out is a Chicago textile multimillionaire. He's made his fortune by selling different kinds of cloth, and he has kind of a marketing genius for selling different kinds of cloth to department stores. Um. Classic kind of self made guys. He's a high school dropout, he's not educated, but he has a lot of money, and he has kind of the ability in the Gilded Age to build a kingdom around himself and to and to kind of set the

rules for everybody in his orbit. And um, he's a lot like someone like Andrew Carnegie or William Randolph Hurst, these these guys with that era who just had more money than God. What distinguished George Fabian from those guys is that, you know, instead of spending his money on French Impressionist paintings or you know, building a big castle, what really interested George Fabian was discovering the secrets of nature. He was really into science. He wanted to discover things

about nature that had never been discovered. And so he turned his private estate, which was called River Bank, into a kind of half rich man's fantasy land and half private scientific laboratory, very much like Thomas Edison's Menlo Park, New Jersey or Nikola Tesla's Lab in New York. It was a place where, you know, a single committed person with a lot of money had built a scientific laboratory

and institution to investigate secrets of nature. And there was all kinds of experiments happening at Riverbank to There was genetics experiments, agriculture experiments, acoustical experiments, and then there was this project that George Fabian wanted Elizabeth Smith to work on, which was the Bacon Cipher Project, the project of discovering these secret messages inside the works of Shakespeare, ripping them out and translating them into the plain text, and revealing

the secrets of this Shakespeare book to the world. And that's that's what he told Elizabeth he wanted her to do when he went that day, when he met her in the library and whisked her off on the train to Riverbank. He wanted her to help him discover the secrets that were indebted in Shakespeare and sort of sort of transformed the history of English literature. It's just it's

just unbelievable to think about. I think about the number of hours, Mango, that you and I spent just sitting in libraries hoping that some eccentric tycoon would come along and discover us and lisk us away and it just it never happened, but it was. It's it's fascinating to read about it, to to think about our fantasy of that. But yet, so so that project, that's Shakespeare project didn't

exactly go you know, anywhere big from there. But but but can you tell us, like, how did she end up making this transition from trying to figure out the code within Shakespeare and seeing if there was any truth to this too what she eventually ended up doing and some of the very serious code breaking. Sure, that's a great question. So so she's brought out to Riverbank, knowing nothing about code breaking. She's immediately plunged into this project

to find secret messages in Shakespeare. And she can't find them. And she's there for months and months and months, and she's still having having trouble, you know, discovering these secret messages. Ultimately she concludes that it's all a wild goose chase, it's all kind of a grand delusion. The secret messages aren't actually there. What's happening is that George Fabian and the people who believe what he believe are kind of

seeing what they want to see. This is the thing about human beings is that we're we're very good at seeing patterns. Were all kind of born to do it. And sometimes we're so good at seeing patterns that we end up seeing patterns that aren't really there, right, and uh, and this is what was happening. They thought they saw these messages in the works of Shakespeare that weren't really there.

Elizabeth had to figure this out. Um. But what that experience did is, you know, being dropped into this kind of delusion. It made her very interested and well, if I wanted to find patterns that really were there, and if I wanted to be sure that they were there, how would I do that? How would I develop a method? How would I develop a system to make sure that

I wasn't tricking myself? And so, beginning in this kind of world of delusion um inspired her to try to create a true method and a true scientific system for

discovering patterns in in these blocks of gobbledygook. And that's what launched her on her code breaking career, sort of in confluence with this other thing that happened, which is a year after she got to River Bank, America, entered World War One, so April nineteen seventeen, you know, America enters the war, and at that point, you know, it's amazing for me to go back and learn this history because you know, I had always kind of assumed that

the American intelligence community that we that we know today that's mighty and powerful, the National Security Agency, the CIA, the FBI. I had always assumed that these institutions are always kind of always powerful and had always existed. But you know, in nineteen seventeen, when America entered World War One, there really was no American intelligence community. There was no n s A, there was no CIA, and the FBI

was very young. And one of the things that you need to do when you're going to war is, you know, you need to read the secret messages that the enemy is sending. You need to know what they're saying and what they're doing so you can have an advantage. The thing is, you know, when America went to World War in World War One in nineteen seventeen, uh, it had

no ability to do that. There were maybe five people in the entire United States who even knew what a code or a cipher and so, uh it just so happened that some of these five people were Elizabeth and her colleagues at Riverbank Laboratories, this bizarre private institution run by a crazy rich guy on the Illinois Prairie. It's one of these things, you know, truth is stranger than fiction,

and American history is very, very weird. It gets very very weird, very very fast when you get beyond the surface. So what happened is, you know, through the urgency of war, the necessity of war, you know, the War Department, the Army realized they didn't have any code breakers and they needed code breakers very quickly. So, uh, just out of desperation, they ended up kind of annexing Riverbank Laboratories, which became

kind of the first national security agency. The War Department and other departments of the U. S. Government began to send uh, secret messages that they couldn't read out to Riverbank, and Elizabeth and her colleagues they're working for this crazy tycoon, would solve the messages and send them back to Washington. And for the first eight months of World War One, UM Riverbank, Elizabeth and her colleagues, they're handled the entire

code breaking burden for the U. S. Government. While it was at war, which is which is incredible to think about, because you know, you've got to realize Elizabeth is four years old at this time, and she has just learned about code breaking in the last year, but all of a sudden she was the expert and she had to perform. Welcome back to Part Time Genius. We're chatting with Jason Fagoni,

the author of The Woman who Smashed Codes. So, Jason, the whole thing about um, that code breaking really wasn't a thing before is is just kind of stunning to be because I always think about like things in the paper, like the cryptograms, or you think about like uh, Lewis Carroll and anagrams and people playing with words and in crazy ways, But that this art isn't the thing is is just kind of amazing. She also wasn't alone in this endeavor, right, She had a sort of a love

interest and partner during this time exactly. She met a young scientist there named William Friedman. And and again it's one of these kind of classic American tales, two young people from very different worlds. Elizabeth was, you know, a Quaker girl from the Midwest. William Friedman was a Jewish scientist, from Pittsburgh. Um, he had been brought to Riverbank to perform genetics experiments. He was breeding fruit flies. Ah, he was trying to breed different varieties of corn and wheat

that might take root in different kinds of soil. But the thing about William Freedman is that he he had a talent for photography and a lot of the original work on the Bacon Cipher project. This, this project of finding secret messages in Shakespeare depended on enlarging photographs of uh, the original Shakespeare manuscript, the six Stafolio. So so because William was good with camera and he knew how to develop Prince and in dark Ram, George Fabian roped him

into this project. And so William Friedman began to work with Elizabeth Smith on the Shakespeare project and and they both kind of looked at each other around the same time and had this had this epiphany which was, Um, everybody at this place is completely crazy except for us. You know, we are the we might be the only sane people here, and we need to, uh, we need to form a bond to kind of to protect ourselves from these lunatics. And while all of this craziness was

swirling around them. Elizabeth and William did something extremely important, which is, together they invented the modern science of cryptology, which today is at the core of our intelligence agencies. So this is a remarkable thing. You know, in the span of about two or three years, starting in nineteen they invented new techniques of code breaking UM that had not been known in America. They wrote papers together, they worked across from each other in the same room, at

the same desk, solving puzzles with pencil and paper. You gotta remember, this is before the era of computers. This is all pencil and paper. You're just sitting there with pencil paper in your mind. And because so little was known about code breaking in America, UM, they they very quickly had to invent new techniques. They had to become scientists, and they had to become explorers. And they did that. Uh. And they were able to do it because they just

had this They had this bond, this link. You know, there's something kind of miraculous seemed to happen when they worked together. They made each other better UM and and very quickly they started to consider themselves a duo and and a team. UM. After they were married, William even even came up with the name he called them. He

called them the Freedman Combination. And you know, and it's interesting because because these papers that they wrote together are known as the Riverbank Publications, and uh uh you know, they've historically been credited to William alone. You know, it's only his name that's on the papers. But I went back and I looked at the early drafts of these publications, which are in the New York Public Library, uh, in

their Manuscripts and Archives division. And when you look at the drafts, you see that Elizabeth's handwriting has all over them. In fact, you know her her her name is even typed on some of the type scripts as the author of certain sections of the papers. So I think that for several of the papers, especially the early, the early papers, Elizabeth was every bit the co author, and in fact, William considered her to be the co author too. He

referred to the papers as our papers. And uh. The thing that kind of seals the deal from me is that, you know, uh, in his personal archive, which is at a private library in Virginia, he has uh he he kept his own personal copies of the River Bank Publications and on one of them. He actually writes Elizabeth's name as a co author on the cover, even though it's not there in the printed version, and so so she was. She was the co founder I think of modern American cryptology. Wow.

And you know when you talk about that, that impact that they had, and I guess finally the War Department wakes up to the fact that maybe they need more than just five people at this weird estate in the middle of nowhere and and decides to start their own code breaking units. But but that doesn't mean the end

of it for for William and Elizabeth. Can you talk a little bit about what you know Elizabeth specifically was up to in between the world wars, because she was still very much involved in this world Sure, right, So you're right, the War Department comes to the conclusion that maybe it's not the best idea to have a crazy tycoon handling all of the code breaking bird and forward the United States. Uh, they started, they start to build

code breaking teams and capacities in Washington. What happens is, eventually, uh, George Fabian sort of reveals his insanity. He begins to spy on the Freedman's while they're still at Riverbank. He surveils them, he intercepts them, nail. He becomes very controlling. There's a suggestion that he might have sexually harassed Elizabeth while William was serving in France briefly during World War One. William comes back from the war, they both get out

of there. They make their escape. They essentially pack up their things in the middle of the night because they're terrified of Fabian and they moved to Washington, d C. And this is where they spend the rest of their careers and so um. Initially they're working in Washington, d C. Together starting they both they both start working for the army, and at first they're working in the same room just like they were before, designing new codes for the Army

news safer codes for for the use of the dough boys. UM. Pretty quickly, Elizabeth gets bored with that and she quits. She she stays at home and starts to write children's books, which was a long ambition of her. She wanted to write a children's book about the history of the alphabets and show sort of the wonders of the alphabet and the system of of of written communication to it's and

young adults. And she also had gave birth to their first child around that time, Barbara daughter, and uh soe Elizabeth is kind of out of the game, right she she's at home, she's writing children's books, she's recovering from labor, and she is a mother. And this is kind of what she thinks she's going to do for the rest rest of her life and her career. But what happens is that men from the government show up on her

doorstep and ask herself puzzles for America. And this is this is exactly these are her words, by the way, this is how she put it. She she was kind of a complaint all of her life. She said that men from the government keeps showing up on my doorstep asking me to selve puzzles, and the only way the only way to make them go away is to say yes and agree to do these projects. The problem for Elizabeth is that she was just so good at what she did um she and she had such an unusual

set of skills that she became indispensable. And so the government really could not afford to leave her alone. And so at every stage of her career, and men from the government were showing up on our doorstep asking her to confront some kind of challenge for which they were unprepared and and the challenge in nine the first men from the government who showed up on her doorstep in DC.

We're from the U. S. Treasury Department, specifically the U. S. Coast Guard, and they were asking Elizabeth to help them fight the war against organized crime because of prohibition. What the Coast Guard needed to make any progress in in this war against uh these rum runners was code breaking. And by the way, these were not gentlemen run runners, right, the gentleman rum runners, the guys sort of the the small time entrepreneurs with a boat. Yeah, they were out

of the game by nineteen twenty four. They were. They were edged out. They were forced out by organized crime, by these mafias. And so, uh so, what the Coast Guard needed to make any progress was code breaking. They needed someone like Elizabeth to come in look at the intercepted radio messages, you know, solve them and light up this dark and underworld too, that the Coast Guard would be able to catch these boats and put these guys on trial. And that's exactly what she started to do.

Starting she became an expert in this discipline of radio intelligence, which is intercepting the radio messages, solving the codes, using the information to map the hit and network the darkened

underworld to throw light on it. And then once she had solved the messages of these rum runners, a lot of the times she would be called to testifying court against them, which is incredible to think about, because you know, it's this badite woman five ft three, you know, walking to the front of a courtroom, you know, in a pink dress and a pink hat with a flower pinned to the brim, and she's sitting in the witness box staring down, you know, in one case, more than twenty

agents of an organized crime syndicate and explaining to a jury exactly what code breaking is and exactly how she solved these messages, because she had to be able to convince a jury that it was real science, that the words that she was saying, the rum runners were saying, we're her actual words, that she really was kind of reading their thoughts, and that there was a science to it. And so, uh So, Elizabeth became, for a brief time in the in the early nineteen thirties, a front page story.

Uh and it was kind of an irresistible story for reporters because you know they would they would describe her as sort of like, uh, a small woman in a pink dress who protects the United States or or you know, a pretty little woman in a in a philly prank pink dress. Um, and she and she would find herself on the front page all of a sudden and testifying

in these spectacular trials. Wow. Yeah, And I think you said at one point she was decoding up to what like twenty five thousand messages in a year, So not only was she good at this, but she was incredibly fast. Yes, it was an astonishing volume of stuff. And and again this is before computers, so so a lot of the job was just this kind of daily grind of of

cranking through paper. So, Jason, I want to get into uh jed or Hoover and how the FBI messed up so many things and and all that story is fascinating, But before that, can you tell us a little bit about how you found the story and how you reported it because it obviously has uh, you know, a ton of work went into this incredible book. Sure, so the genesis of the story was really the Edward Snowden, Uh

leaks in. So after the Snowden story broke, I started reading about the n s A, right, and I think, um, the history of the n s A. Where did it come from? And like a lot of Americans, I think I didn't really know much about the n s A. And when you start reading about the history of the n s A, all roads lead to William Friedman, Elizabeth's husband.

He's considered to be the godfather of the n s A. That today, if you go to n s A headquarters in Fort Meade, Uh, there's an outside of the auditorium that is named for William is a bronze bust of his head. So William is like the guy, the guy with the n s A. UM. But I also read I also read that he that he had a wife who was a codebreaker herself, and I thought that was interesting, right, like a husband and wife codebreaker. That's that's kind of unusual.

And I went looking for more information about Elizabeth, but there wasn't really much that I could find. And so one day I drove down from my from my house outside of Philly to the library in Lexington, Virginia, where the Freedman's left their personal papers before they died and William left, uh, you know, reams of stuff, boxes and

boxes and boxes and boxes. Elizabeth left a smaller amount of material, but she still left twenty two boxes full of full of documents, and um, I asked if I could see them, And so I started reading reading her stuff, starting with Box one, File one. And you know, immediately when I started reading her letters, I was just I was just taken with her voice, you know, on on the page a hundred years ago, reading reading reading her words in her own hand. And she's just so sort

of funny, witty, warm, sometimes sort of biting, sarcastic. She could be very savage on the bag sometimes and um, and I was just captivated with with her voice. But you know, the more I read in those twenty two boxes, the more I realized that, um, you know, not only was this the story of uh, you know, a remarkable woman, um who had an amazing kind of dramatic, kind of irresistibly you know, cinematic career. I mean, a code breaking

Quaker poet who caught gangsters. It's it's it's kind of irresistible, right, But I also realized that, you know, she was really a hidden woman behind the birth and the growth of the intelligence uh community in America, because she really was present at the beginning of a lot of things that that today are very important. And so I thought it was you know, it was both kind of like a you know, an incredible just human story that hadn't been told, but I also thought it was it was important in

terms of the bigger picture of American intelligence. That the thing about the twenty two boxes that I found at the library that Elizabeth had left was, uh, there was nothing in World War about World War Two in those boxes, so there was essentially a gap between nineteen thirty nine and so what she did during World War Two, what I found in those records is that, um, she was

hunting Nazi spies. So after Hitler invaded Poland, Nazi spies began spreading out into the Western hemisphere, and uh, most of them set up shop in South America. South America was a good place for them to be because it was kind of upper grabs, it was neutral, uh, and it was close to North America. So it was a good listening post for Nazi spies to gather intelligence about

what America was doing and what Britain was doing. There were also a lot of sort of right wing movements in individual South American countries that kind of resembled fascism, So there was some natural sympathy for the fascist cause. They're also millions of German columnists already living there, so Nazis had kind of a natural advantage. It was fertile

soil for Nazi spies to set up. And and what they did is when they when they went to South America, they started to build clandestine radio stations, pirate radio stations, and they would transmit their intelligence reports back to Berlin and Hamburg um over the radio. And uh. It was the FBI's job, Jagger Hoover's job at that point, to try to stop these Nazi spies. The problem was he wasn't very good at it. So um. There's a famous story. The FBI created a whole new division in to try

to go after Nazi spies in South America. It was called the s I S. And the first couple of FBI agents who went to South America, they got off the plane and they were immediately spotted by the locals and and made for FBI guys. You know, the locals. The locals looked at them and they they looked like FBI guys they had seen in the movies. They had the snap brim hats and then you know, uh, you know, the square jaws and everything, and they were really pale.

They didn't have they didn't speak the languages. Um. You know, there's a story about one of the guys who had taken a language course in New York in preparation for his posting to South America. The the FBI had taught him Spanish, and then he was posted to Brazil and he got off the plane in Brazil, you know, disappointed to discover that the language that's spoken in Brazil is

mainly Portuguese and not spanning. So these guys were completely lost, right the FBI, Yeah, they were never they were never going to be able to find these Nazi spies using kind of old school FBI techniques of developing confidential informants and that sort of thing. What they really needed was code breaking, right, they needed a technical advantage. They needed to intercept these radio messages, uh, solve the messages and light up the darkened underworld by by kind of stealing

the thoughts directly from the lips of the spies. Um. But they couldn't do that because the FBI didn't have Because the FBI didn't have a code breaking team, they had no code breaking compa city, They had no ability uh to break codes and to read the messages of what these Nazi spies were saying. But Elizabeth Friedman did because you know, she had spent the last fifteen years uh kind of doing target practice against rum runners and

drug smuggles. She she had developed this expertise at intercepting radio messages, solving them and mapping these underworld networks because that had been her job during the twenties and thirties to to fight smuggling and so UM, it wasn't that she set out to hunt Nazi spies. It's just that she she happened to have the right set of skills the right moment, you know, and in she was ready

to go. And so so what ended up happening is the FBI relied on Elizabeth and UM and the code breaking team that she had built within the Coast Guard UH code breakers that she had trained she had led UM relying on them to as as kind of the technical back end of this of this hunt for Nazi

spies in South America. Elizabeth and her team monitor these clandestine radio circuits used by Nazi spies, solve the messages, and provide the translated English plain texts to allied intelligence agencies, including the Army, the Navy, the FBI, and also British intelligence. And by the end of the war, they had monitored about fifty different UH clandestine radio circuits used by the Nazis,

solved four thousand messages. You know, these messages were incredibly important in ultimately destroying these Nazi spy rings in South America and eliminating a dangerous threat. You know, Elizabeth and her teammates really brought these Nazi spies to Ruin Pick to pick their networks apart, piece by piece, destroyed them,

you know, neutralized the threat. And then after the war, Jagger Hoover you know, stuck up his hand and went out to the public on kind of a publicity campaign taking credit for all of that, and he said, you know, America, the FBI saved you for on this dangerous Nazi spy invasion in South America, and UH, You're welcome. And that's kind of the story that has been told ever since, is that is that the FBI did UH, did all of the hard dangerous, brave. Uh, you know, brilliant work

of catching these Nazi splies of South America. But I think the truth is that the real driver was Elizabeth Freedman. It was this. It was this American mother of two who figured out how to sweep the Western hemisphere free of undercover Nazis. And uh, and yet she never got the credit for it because because Hoover got out there in front. Welcome back to Part time Genius. We're chatting

with Jason Fagoni, the author of The Woman who Smashed Codes. Okay, Jason, So she, you know, helps through World War One obviously de codes, know what, as you said, twenty five thousand messages a year in between the world wars at times, and and helped defeat the Nazis in World War Two. It's just an unbelievable story. And then you said, after all of this, she and William kind of come back to the Shakespeare project later in their lives, and and

why was this? Yes? So after the war, Uh, William was one of the people who helped form the National Security Agency that the team that he had created and built at the Army, which during World War Two achieved essentially the impossible by breaking the Japanese diplomatic code, which was called Purple, which she gave the Allies a huge

advantage and probably shortened the war. Yeah, he did all these heroic things during World War Two, and then after the war helped to create the n s A. His his army unit was kind of absorbed into this thing that became the n s A. But as the n s A kind of began to grow, um it it grew beyond what what he uh felt like he could bear. Um. He became a critic internally of some of the n s AS policies and it's uh it's directions. He he became concerned that that too many documents were being classified.

Um he felt like the NISA was collecting too much information. He felt like they would never ever be able to sift all the information they were collecting for actionable intelligence and UH and it really troubled him and uh and and throughout the nineteen fifties, as the Cold War UH kind of sharpened in d C, atmosphere of paranoia grew. Um William became more and more despairing about his relationship

with this organization and with the government more broadly. That he that he felt he had always served very loyal loyally and um, you know it this kind of culminated in this famous, famous day in eight when the n s A sent agents to the personal home of William and Elizabeth Freedman and removed documents and books from their from their private library, uh, saying saying that they were classified and needed needed to be moved to a higher level of classification the free you know, A lot of

the a lot of the materials were so old that they dated back to the First World War. UH. William was baffled, you know that that the n s A would uh would want to classify these things because they were so old and there they were really of only historical interest, he thought. But um, you know, they they found this to be kind of intolerable, a uh, you know,

an invasion of their privacy. And um, I think it motivated him and and and probably Elizabeth too to pull away from from government work more and more and back to personal projects. And so one of the personal projects

that they could could talk about that they could work on. Uh. In this atmosphere of kind of deepening paranoia, security and classification was something that had nothing to do with government codebreak all is something that's something that went back to, uh to their original kind of wild goose chase of

their youth at Number Bank Laboratories. So so you know, they and what they did is they went back to this, uh, to this theory that George Fabian had always tried to get them to prove this theory that that Francis Bacon had inserted secret messages in the works of Shakespeare and

uh and they just demolished it. They used all of their ability, all of their uh, all of their kind of savagery on the page to to sort of go through every piece of piece of purported evidence for for this theory and uh and just and just destroy it page by page. And it is wonderful. And they wrote

it together. Um, it's a very funny book. It's it's it's a very uh sort of precise book and uh and and that was the thing that brought them back together working together after decades of of kind of growing growing apart because of their uh, you know, increasingly important purity duties for the United States. Wow. Well, I have to say, Jason, in reading this book, this is this is one of those history books that as you're reading it, you can almost see and feel the blood, sweat and

tears that went into this project. It's not only beautifully written, but you can tell just all of the the intense amount of research that you've done to put into this book, and and for that, I honestly, I just want to say thanks, because it is one of the best books I've read in a long time. And I do hope our our readers will check out The Woman who Smashed Codes.

It's an incredible story. So Elizabeth died in nineteen eighty at the age of eighty eight, mostly unacknowledged for her foundation laying cryptographic word, but you know you stumbled into her story and and for that and all the work you put into this, I just want to say thanks. Oh, thank you guys. I I really appreciate your um. I don't know your questions were great. It's clearly that you paid a lot of paid a lot of attention to the book and and honestly, it was it was a

joy doing the research. It was it was one of those projects that every journalist and every writer hopes to stumble across, and I feel lucky to have to have gotten to do it. M H. Welcome back to part time genius. Now we've learned a ton today, but you know, we can't wrap this thing up without a good old

fashioned backed off. So you want to kick us off, mango, Yeah, definitely. So. I know Jason talked about this a little bit earlier, but I loved reading about how Elizabeth and William taught their kids the basics of cryptography, like as early as

seven years old. So when their daughter Barbara was off at sleepaway camp, she'd send home letters and code, and the Freedman's would use codes and ciphers and their Christmas cards and sometimes they even had cipher parties where their guests would have to solve the cipher just to figure

out what would be served for dinner. Wow, that's pretty awesome, And actually it's kind of neat to see this coming back in a way with like these brave gout type places that people will go with their friends to play. Have you seen these exit the room things? Yeah, yeah, exactly. I've never been to one, but they seem pretty interesting.

All right. Well, I know we've been talking about the woman who Smashed Codes, but there was another book published this fall that's more generally about women code breakers, and it's called Code Girls. The Untold Story of the American women code breakers of World War Two, and it's by Liz Mundy, So I think i'll share just a couple of facts from that. And it does tell the story of the more than ten thousand college students and school teachers, among other women who were recruited to really be the

backbone of our intelligence efforts. But one of the things I thought was so interesting is that it was a huge, huge advantage for the Allied powers because unlike the Allied Powers who put all of these women to work, the Access Powers didn't do the same. And their estimates that it shortened the war by as many as two or

three years. Oh wow, that's incredible. So one of the more strange figures that Elizabeth took down was this woman known as Doll Lady, and she discovered the secret code hidden in the letters of this New York woman named Beelvolye Dickinson, who was acting as this Japanese spy. It's an amazing story. So Dickinson owned a doll shop and would send letters to an address in Buenos Aires, and

she'd be talking about various dolls in her collection. But Elizabeth realized that her references to like English dolls and foreign dolls were actually a way to communicate about the Allies. And the doll lady was eventually sentenced to ten years in prison and find after being charged with espionage. She got that doll lady. Wow, what a strange character. I know, it just confirms my theories that adults who love dolls shouldn't be trusted. That it's a good that's a good one.

I go, maybe we'll do a whole episode on that at some point. All right, Well, back to Monday's books. So she writes about how the branches of military were different from one another and who they allowed to be code breakers and who they didn't. So the Navy, for example, didn't allow non whites. They didn't want Jewish women, they didn't want African American women. The Army, on the other hand, did allow non whites. However, not surprisingly, these groups were segregated.

And it was really frustrating from Moundy as she was doing the research because there's no substantial records out there other than a few photos, and you can actually see these in Monday's book, and you know, it shows a room full of African American code breakers, most of them

being women. So, as Jason explained to us, by the early nineteen twenties, there were only three code breaking units in the government and fewer than fifty employees, and about half of those employees worked for the State Department, and the Army and Navy had the other two. But in nine the Secretary of State decided to shut down the State Department's unit because, as he put it, quote, gentlemen do not read each other's mail. Wow, what a strange thing,

all right. Well, one of the other things Monday shows and Code Girls is that unlike this common notion that there are all these big and exciting kind of ah ha moments in code breaking, it's actually much more similar to a marathon. And she does a great job of showing how they were working often around the clock, just

looking for patterns and searching and searching. And it really was this marathon work that had played a huge role in helping to shorten the war, as I mentioned earlier, because the Allies just had a much better idea of what the Japanese and Germans We're planning to do each step along the way. And I bet you want a carbo load before each stage. With that definitely definitely. So I know we like to talk about the best job titles,

so I had to tell you about uh. When Elizabeth was tapped to head up the Coast Guards codebreaking team, not only was she the first woman to run a US government code breaking unit, but she was also given a business card that said cryptanalyst and charge US Coast Guard. That's one of the best titles I've ever heard. I cannot beat that. So I'm gonna give you today's fact off Mango. Thank you, thank you. All Right, that's it for today's show. A special thanks to Jocelyn Sears for

her excellent research help with this episode. Now, if you want to share any of your favorite code breaking facts, you can always email us at part Time Genius at how stuff Works dot com or call us on our seven fact hop line one eight four four pt Genius. You can also hit us up on Facebook or Twitter, and don't forget to let us know if you'd like to come on to play a quiz with us sometime.

Thanks for listening, Yeah, thanks again for listening. Part Time Genius is a production of How Stuff Works and wouldn't be possible without several brilliant people who do the important things we couldn't even begin to understand. Christa McNeil does the editing thing. Noel Brown made the theme song and does the mixy mixy sound thing. Jerry Rowland does the exact producer thing. Gay Bluesier is our lead researcher, with support from the Research Army including Austin Thompson, Nolan Brown

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