Written by Lorna Shuman, Illinois State Museum, Curator of Education

Elizebeth Smith Friedman outwitted mobsters, bootleggers, and uncovered Nazi spy rings. Born in 1892 to Quaker parents in Indiana, she studied literature in college. While studying Shakespeare folios at the Newberry Library in Chicago she landed her first job in 1916. The librarian at the Newberry introduced Friedman to Colonel George Fabian. The Colonel was a rich industrialist determined to uncover secret codes hidden within the Shakespearean documents. He hired her at Riverbanks Laboratories in Geneva, IL where she worked alongside William Friedman, a geneticist, and photographer. Together they studied Shakespeare, not finding any codes, but instead a love for code-breaking and each other. 

As WWI approached, Colonel Fabyan established the first code-breaking unit putting Friedman and William in charge. They developed their own methods of decrypting based on math instead of linguistics. The U.S. government soon came calling, Friedman trained the first team of codebreakers in WWI while William broke codes on the war’s front. After the war, they moved to Washington D.C. for William’s work with U.S. Army intelligence. Friedman left the office to become a mom, but never gave up code-breaking. She loved deciphering codes so much that even her notes and cards to family and friends had codes for them to break.

In 1925, that all changed when the U.S. Coast Guard came knocking on her door for help. They need her to decipher coded radio messages around illicit alcohol and organized crime. She decrypted about 25,000 messages a year while creating some of the first strategic intelligence gatherings. Her work became so essential that in 1931 the Coast Guard approved her plan to develop a code-breaking unit putting her in charge, the first woman to run such a unit. Her code-breaking made her the key witness in court cases to bring down Al Capone and international rum operations. Fed up with objections and defensive attorneys calling her work “witchcraft” and “foolishness,” she set up a blackboard and gave a class in court on how deciphering works. Her instruction silenced the attorneys and got the convictions.

When WWII started, her unit moved under the Navy and a military officer she had to train was placed in charge. The unit was assigned to monitor communication between spy rings in South America and Nazi high command. She decrypted messages transmitting the location of Allied ships in the Atlantic Ocean to U Boat captains who were destroying the ships. On behalf of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Brazil began arresting the spies, giving away that the code had been broken. The radio waves went silent. When they started up again, she had to break new codes that were more complex in order to keep the Allied ships safe. With mere pen and paper, she decrypted some of the most important codes during the war. Within a year after the war ended, her unit was disbanded. She signed a Navy Oath of Silence until her death, sitting silently as J. Edger Hoover took credit for the decryption and erased Freidman and her team from the official record.

Because her work was classified and she was forbidden to speak about her service to the U.S., her work was often attributed to men: her husband, colleagues, the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover. Her husband, William Friedman, was considered one of the greatest codebreakers of all time, but in truth, they were the dynamic duo of codebreaking. She helped to create code-breaking methods that formed the basis and theory of decrypting today, giving rise to many U.S. intelligence agencies. She died in 1980 taking her secrets with her, upholding her oath. 

In 2008, the files detailing her work were declassified and her story could finally be told.