Code Girls, page 7
The other factor that led to women’s involvement was the advent of code breaking for serious wartime uses. Like medicine, code breaking often makes advances during times of violent conflict, when life-and-death necessity becomes the mother of invention, technology drives innovation, and government funds are freed up. Military cryptanalysis certainly had been around before World War II—in the United States it tended to be an occasional affair, used during the Revolutionary and Civil Wars and then dismantled—and also was rather leisurely in the days when communications were too slow to affect combat in real time. Things picked up in World War I, when militaries started using radio to direct troops, ships, and—soon—aircraft. But despite its growing importance, cryptanalysis often was not a job that career military men wanted, at least not at the outset. Officers understood that it was better for their careers to spend a war in the theater, being shot at and commanding men, rather than sitting safely behind a desk. And so wartime, exactly when code breaking was most needed, was exactly when women were invited to pinch-hit.
It also helped that cryptanalysis in its formative stages was an occupation without fame or prestige, not yet a recognized or even a known field of endeavor. While it had existed in Europe for centuries, where furtive bureaus operated in the shadows to monitor diplomatic missives, cryptanalysis for quite some time—particularly in the United States—also tended to be an obscure and even slightly crackpot profession, more of a hobby or amateur calling. This lack of renown or regulation—the fact that it had not yet been established as a man’s field, or even a field—created a wide crack through which women could enter. To do so, it helped to have a high tolerance for the clandestine and irregular, a lack of squeamishness about reading words intended for other people, and a willingness to embrace the unknown. A little bit of desperation was also not a bad thing.
All of these qualities were characteristic of Elizebeth Smith, who in 1916 was a restless midwesterner with a strong desire to get beyond the horizons of her own small known world and no field of endeavor, yet, that she had latched onto to her satisfaction. The youngest of nine children, she grew up in Indiana and as a young woman had hoped her father, a Quaker, might facilitate her admission to a renowned Quaker college like Swarthmore. Her father, however, was “uninterested in my going to college,” as Elizebeth later put it, so “by my own efforts” she gained admittance to the College of Wooster in Ohio, borrowing the tuition money from her father, who charged her 6 percent interest. After two years she transferred to Hillsdale College in Michigan, majoring in English and studying Latin, Greek, and German. Elizebeth, whose mother chose an unusual spelling for her first name to ensure that her daughter was never called “Eliza,” spent a year teaching and serving as principal at a small country school, and decided to seek a more “congenial way of earning my living.” In the summer of 1916 she traveled to Chicago and stayed with friends on the South Side. Dispirited after breaking off an engagement with “a handsome young poet and musician,” she had no clear idea what she wanted to do and knew only that it should not be “run of the mill.”
A visit to a Chicago employment agency proved fruitless. But the agency did suggest she visit the Newberry Library, where there might be some sort of job involving a 1623 folio of one of Shakespeare’s plays. Elizebeth was “stunned” to learn that such a thing as an original folio of Shakespeare’s work existed, and she resolved to see it, regardless of whether there was a job attached. She took the L—Chicago’s rapid transit—to the Newberry. Her first sight of a Shakespearean manuscript, she later wrote, prompted the kind of thrill that an archaeologist might feel at stumbling upon the tomb of a pharaoh. She was smitten and began chatting up a friendly librarian to see if there was in fact a position that might permit her to work around magnificent original documents like that.
As luck would have it, there was. It wasn’t at the Newberry, but rather at the estate of a wealthy man named George Fabyan, who was looking for someone to “carry on research” on a literary project involving Sir Francis Bacon. He specifically wanted a woman who was “young, personable, attractive and a good talker.” The librarian called up Fabyan then and there. He had an office in the city, and before long a limousine pulled up, “and in came this whirlwind, this storm, this huge man and his bellowing voice could be heard all over the library floor,” Elizebeth later recalled. Her potential employer was a textile merchant whose family had made a fortune in cotton goods—a hyperactive, wild-eyed person of myriad scientific enthusiasms and no scientific training. Thanks to his wealth, Fabyan was able to indulge his many curiosities. He was incubating any number of so-called research projects at a place he called Riverbank Laboratories, a suburban “think tank” located on an estate in Geneva, Illinois.
At the library, George Fabyan asked Smith if she would be willing to go out to Riverbank and spend the night. She protested that she did not have a change of clothes, and he told her he’d lend her some. When she agreed, he swept her into the limo, which drove them to the Chicago and North Western railroad station. Before she knew it, Elizebeth was sitting on a commuter train wondering, “Where am I? Who am I? Where am I going?”
Smith was fascinated and slightly repelled by Fabyan, who was large, bearded, and unkempt. Despite having a reputation at college for “volubility,” she feared he must think her a “demure little nobody” and resolved to correct that impression. Aware that she was in the company of a multimillionaire, she resolved to be well-spoken and proper, and her idea of well-spoken and proper seems to have been lifted out of a Gothic romance. When Fabyan asked, “What do you know?” she leaned her head against the train window, looked at him “quizzically” through half-lidded eyes, and replied in her best Jane Eyre: “That remains, sir, for you to find out.” Fabyan roared with laughter; he seemed to consider it an ideal answer. Another car was waiting at their destination, and presently Elizebeth Smith found herself installed in a guest bedroom at Riverbank, where there was a full fruit bowl and a pair of men’s pajamas. She proceeded downstairs to a formal dinner whose attendees included her new boss: Elizabeth Wells Gallup, another former schoolteacher, who was living at the Riverbank estate and was a crank of the first order.
Gallup belonged to an international cabal of similarly minded cranks, who subscribed to the notion that Sir Francis Bacon was the true author of the plays and sonnets of William Shakespeare. Bacon, an English statesman and philosopher who ran Queen Elizabeth I’s printing press—among many occupations—was one of a number of Renaissance thinkers who dabbled in secret writing. In the sixteenth century Bacon had invented something called a “biliteral” cipher, with which—as he put it—it is possible to make anything signify anything. Bacon had shown that all you need are two characters or two symbols—A and B, say—to make any letter of the alphabet and spell out any word. For example, AAAAA can stand for A, AAAAB for B, AAABA for C, AAABB for D, and so forth. Communicating a full range of facts and ideas using only two symbols is slow and unwieldy, but it can be done. You could do the same with images—sun and moon, apples and oranges, men and women—or, if you happen to be a man who runs the queen’s printing press, with thin printed letters and fat ones. It was the same binary principle on which a number of more modern systems were also built: Morse, with its dots and dashes, and digital computers, with their 0s and 1s, are also binary systems.
Gallup—elderly, aristocratic, mild-mannered, fanatical—was convinced that Bacon had used a biliteral cipher to thread a message confessing his authorship through the printed type of Shakespeare’s First Folio. She had met Fabyan through a mutual acquaintance, and he had been instantly enamored of the earthshaking significance of her thesis. Gallup liked to inspect the typography of the folio with a magnifying glass, and she aimed to assemble a coterie of young women to apprentice with her and master her methods—bankrolled, of course, by Fabyan. For his part, her benefactor was fond of inviting reputable scholars to soirees at Riverbank and liked to offer lantern displays—the early version of a PowerPoint presentation—in an effort to impress them and persuade them of the Baconian thesis. It would be Elizebeth Smith’s job to help with research and to deliver these lectures, serving as the public face and PR engine of the Baconian effort. Fabyan believed that debunking William Shakespeare’s authorship would be the crowning intellectual achievement of the twentieth century and would make his own name famous for all time.
Elizebeth accepted, though the dark side of her employer soon announced itself. Fabyan insisted upon dictating what clothes she wore, compelling her to buy her hats and dresses at Marshall Field’s, the high-end Chicago department store, where the offerings were more expensive than she could afford. The Riverbank estate itself was both pastoral and Mad Hatter eccentric: Fabyan and his wife, Nelle, had purchased some three hundred acres of Illinois landscape, where they engaged Frank Lloyd Wright to renovate the villa they lived in, and installed or rehabbed other dwellings, including the “Lodge,” where Elizabeth Wells Gallup lived with her sister, Kate Wells. On the grounds Fabyan had installed a Dutch windmill, which he brought over piece by piece from Holland; a working lighthouse; a Roman-style bathing pool fed by spring water; a Japanese garden; a giant rope spider’s web for recreational climbing; and something he called the Temple de Junk, in which he stored random things he found in the unclaimed packages that he liked to buy up: shoes, bottles, glass photography plates of nudes. He had what Elizebeth described as a “passion for furniture which swung on supports.” The Fabyan marital bed was suspended from chains, as were divans and chairs in the drawing room of the villa. Outdoors were hammocks, and a hanging wicker chair installed near a fireplace that Fabyan kept lit, even in summer, to repel mosquitoes. He liked to sit in that chair, chain-smoking and poking the fire, surrounded by guests. If somebody said something he disagreed with, he would stand and, as he put it, give them hell. Fabyan, a loud man who cursed freely, called it his “hell chair.”
Nelle Fabyan had passions of her own, including animal husbandry. On the grounds were a herd of prize cattle that was always being sent off to competitions; a bull imported from Scotland that was said to have cost $30,000; an open-air zoo; and a pet male chimpanzee named Patsy. The estate was divided by a thoroughfare, on one side of which were the living quarters and on the other, the research area. A river, the Fox, ran through it.
Fabyan had little formal education, and the resulting insecurity seems to have propelled him to, as Elizebeth put it, try to “break the back of the academic world” by proving mainstream scholars wrong in any number of ways. Pathologically inclined to self-aggrandize, Fabyan liked to call himself a colonel even though he wasn’t one; it was an honorific bestowed upon him by the governor of Illinois. At the estate, he favored a costume of leather bootees and a Prince Albert riding habit with split tails on the cutaway coat, though he did not, in fact, ride. Otherwise careless of his appearance, on the train going to and from his Chicago office, he would light a match and burn off stray threads in his fraying cuffs.
His ambition in creating Riverbank Laboratories was to “wrest the secrets of nature” from not only literary manuscripts but acoustics and agriculture as well. Toward that end, Fabyan also had hired a number of young men. One of these was William Friedman, fresh from graduate work in genetics at Cornell, now engaged to conduct experiments in the Riverbank fields and gardens, sowing oats along some scheme Fabyan had read about that had to do with planting them during the dark of the moon. Friedman, the son of Jewish Russian émigrés, had studied agricultural science because it came with a scholarship, but he had other eclectic interests. He was living on the second floor of the windmill, where he had a studio and was doing experiments with fruit flies to test the Mendelian laws of heredity. A natty young polymath, he made a hobby of photography and before long was engaged to make enlargements of the folio pages, for inspection by Gallup and Smith.
In this singular setting, with its batty but open-minded atmosphere of inquiry, William Friedman and Elizebeth Smith soon sensed the absurdity of the Bacon theory. They realized that Gallup “dwelt only among those who agreed with her premise,” as Elizebeth put it, and that nobody else seemed able to spot the typographic patterns she claimed to, which in truth were just the results of printers repairing and reusing old type. But they became drawn into the world of codes and ciphers. Fabyan had amassed a rare collection of books about cryptic writings, written over the centuries by individuals who trafficked in ways of making communications secret and unintelligible to others. If the Bacon theory was a dead end, the subject of cryptanalysis itself was fully legitimate and would prove increasingly vital, thanks in large part to Elizebeth and William.
Codes have been around for as long as civilization, maybe longer. Virtually as soon as humans developed the ability to speak and write, somebody somewhere felt the desire to say something to somebody else that could not be understood by others. The point of a coded message is to engage in intimate, often urgent communication with another person and to exclude others from reading or listening in. It is a system designed to enable communication and to prevent it.
Both aspects are important. A good code must be simple enough to be readily used by those privy to the system but tough enough that it can’t be easily cracked by those who are not. Julius Caesar developed a cipher in which each letter was replaced by a letter three spaces ahead in the alphabet (A would be changed to D, B to E, and so forth), which met the ease-of-use requirement but did not satisfy the “toughness” standard. Mary, Queen of Scots, used coded missives to communicate with the faction that supported her claim to the English throne, which—unfortunately for her—were read by her cousin Elizabeth and led to her beheading. In medieval Europe, with its shifting alliances and palace intrigues, coded letters were an accepted convention, and so were quiet attempts to slice open diplomatic pouches and read them. Monks used codes, as did Charlemagne, the Inquisitor of Malta, the Vatican (enthusiastically and often), Islamic scholars, clandestine lovers. So did Egyptian rulers and Arab philosophers. The European Renaissance—with its flowering of printing and literature and a coming-together of mathematical and linguistic learning—led to a number of new cryptographic systems. Armchair philosophers amused themselves pursuing the “perfect cipher,” fooling around with clever tables and boxes that provided ways to replace or redistribute the letters in a message, which could be sent as gibberish and reassembled at the other end. Some of these clever tables were not broken for centuries; trying to solve them became a Holmes-and-Moriarty contest among thinkers around the globe.
Many Renaissance cryptographers perceived (as counterparts in the Middle East had done before them) that the alphabet itself has underlying mathematical properties: six vowels, twenty consonants, some of these much more frequently used than others. Cipher systems often are created by juxtaposing or “sliding” two or more alphabets against each other so that B in one alphabet lines up with, say, L in the other, and C with M, D with N, et cetera. One of these, the Vigenère square, developed in the 1500s and named for the French diplomat Blaise de Vigenère, achieves this by creating a twenty-six-by-twenty-six-square letter table, in which twenty-six alphabets are stacked on top of one another, each alphabet beginning with a different letter, with a keyword telling which alphabet to select for each letter to be changed. America’s great innovator Thomas Jefferson dabbled in secret systems, inventing a cipher wheel that could transform one letter into a new one; it was discovered in his personal papers more than a hundred years after his death.
During the American Revolutionary War, many code systems were employed not only by diplomats and statesmen but also by spies and traitors. Sometimes, of course, diplomats and statesmen were the spies and traitors. Jefferson and Ben Franklin at times used coded language, as did Benedict Arnold. During the American Civil War, the military began to experiment with codes and ciphers. Union commanders sent messages by means of a soldier working a little handheld disk. The disk changed each letter to a new one, and the new one would be transmitted by a soldier waving a big flag in the direction of the intended recipient, in a signaling cipher called wigwag. Confederates used a cipher so complicated that they became confused by it. Sometimes they also would intercept Union messages, publish them in the newspaper, and invite readers to submit solutions.
Elizebeth Smith and William Friedman were fascinated by this history—and by each other. They took long bicycle rides, swam in the Roman pool, drove through the countryside in a Stutz Bearcat. Theirs was an early example of what sociologists nowadays call homogamy, which is marriage between equals. Elizebeth found William to be sleek and sophisticated; he found her vibrant, smart, and dynamic. The two married in May 1917, less than a year after they met, and Elizebeth moved into the windmill.
Despite the newly married pair’s skepticism about Gallup, the soirees continued, though the topic expanded beyond Bacon to encompass codes and ciphers and their solution. From time to time, Fabyan liked to summon a University of Chicago English literature professor, an amateur cryptanalyst, John Manly, and pit him against Elizebeth Friedman. Cryptanalysis at that time was a parlor game. The operation gained a certain cachet: Movie stars sometimes came to tour Riverbank. The Friedmans developed genuine expertise, attracted freelance assignments, and won acclaim when they decoded a batch of correspondence that helped expose a conspiracy between Hindu separatists and German agents trying to foment revolution against the British in India. Elizebeth was disappointed that William was the one who got to testify in the trials (during which one defendant was shot dead); though they had done the work as a team, she had to stay behind because, as she put it, “someone had to oil the machinery at Riverbank.”
