CHAPTER 5

The Escape Plot

Elizebeth with William in his army lieutenant’s uniform, around 1918.

(George C. Marshall Research Foundation)

To be your North Star—Billy Boy—I’d like to be!”

She wrote “North Star” on the page of the letter without knowing what it meant or how she wanted him to respond. It was just a pair of words that captured a tug of attraction toward William Friedman, a chemistry that made her curious: a small, persistent tilt in his direction, like a plant bending toward a patch of sun.

Elizebeth first noticed it when she was home in Indiana watching her mother die, and writing to him at Riverbank, telling him—what? I don’t love you but “I miss you infinitely.” I am not sure I love-you love you but “I shall work for you” if you ask. I have dreamed about you but I don’t remember what the dream was. “Anyway, Billy Boy, like me just a little bit always. I want you for the dear good friend you are, if nothing more. I want, oh, so much, for us both to ‘achieve.’ ”

Before any feelings of passion, this is what Elizebeth expressed to William: a vague desire for the both of them to win. “Work hard on the letter tests—for my sake! You must win—because I want you to!” She saw his talent and was starting to understand the size of her own abilities. She sensed that the two of them were more powerful together than they were alone. That excited her, if not the thought of romance, a relationship, making love. When they kissed for the first time it didn’t do much for her, as she would recall later in a poem:

There was a time when for my love I did not care

The hot wooing, the passionate kisses

left me cold.

I yielded to him

because he was good to me.

And compassion led me to return his kisses

when his longing eyes and eager heart spoke,

“I wish you cared as I.”

She wasn’t sure what to do when he started talking about marriage in early 1917. The ice cracked on the Fox River, spring picked the lock of winter, the water moved, and William Friedman spoke to her about the pros and cons of a potential union, obstacles and advantages, in a careful, unemotional tone, as if discussing a job opportunity. (He confessed later that he was simply trying to hold back the flood of his feelings, lest the dam burst and he embarrass himself.) He did not get down on his knees and propose, and his hesitation gave her the room to respond in kind, to examine the idea with detachment, to let the possibility of marrying him drift past at a distance like a harmless puff of cloud.

She could see a case for marrying him and a case against. If she did choose to marry, her family and neighbors back home would likely be confused—nice Quaker girls didn’t marry Jewish boys in Indiana—but she had made more of a break with her family than William had. She had fought hard for the freedom to choose her own path.

Most of the time, talking it over that spring, Elizebeth and William agreed that getting married would be silly. There were too many barriers: family differences, religion, money. Incredibly, Fabyan was still paying them both the same salary as when they started, thirty dollars a month, despite their massive new responsibilities, and some months he didn’t pay at all. If they did decide to get married, where would they live? In William’s windmill? The prospect of being a married couple at Riverbank seemed absurd to both of them, as much of a fantasy as the perpetual motion machine and the messages from Bacon’s ghost.

At the same time, they weren’t sure they wanted to stay at Riverbank anyway.

The longer they lived here, the more concerned Elizebeth and William became about Fabyan’s dark side, his need to control the people around him. He seemed to take special pleasure in humiliating William. Once, while both men were traveling in Washington, Fabyan demanded that William fetch a newspaper from a street vendor. William pointed out that papers were available at the hotel desk; Fabyan bellowed that he wanted one from the street. William obliged. Later, when William showed up to dinner in a freshly pressed evening suit, Fabyan, who was dressed shabbily, forced William to change into more casual clothes to match. “It just didn’t go down to be treated like chattels,” Elizebeth said. “We were sick and tired of Fabyan’s scheming and dishonesty. Fabyan always came out ahead, and we always came out at the other end.”

Fundamentally Elizebeth and William were two ambitious people. Why should something with a risk in it give me an exuberant feeling? She wanted to live a daring life, and he wanted to “make a mark in something,” he told her. “Perhaps it will be Genetics.” He expressed to Elizebeth “my ambition to know one little thing better than any other person, to be a pioneer in that field and to blaze new trails for the rest to follow. Why I feel that way, I don’t know—it’s just in me and will have to come out in some form or other.” Riverbank had launched them on an incredible adventure, but now it was holding them back, and they sensed that if they were ever going to escape, they needed to do it together.

On a cool, rainy Monday in May 1917, they went missing from Riverbank.

It wasn’t like them to skip work. The hours ticked away without them, the cows eating grass in the field, the fruit flies multiplying in jars. When the pair returned that evening, William was dressed in a dark blazer, light-colored striped pants, and a striped tie, and Elizebeth wore a simple gown of white lace. Colleagues gathered around and the couple shared the happy news: They had gone to Chicago and gotten married. A rabbi named Hersh performed the ceremony.

The wedding announcement ran on the front page of the May 23 Geneva Republican, next to a story about a Selective Service bill just passed by Congress, requiring men ages twenty-one to thirty-one to register for the military draft. “Mr. Friedman came to Riverbank soon after his graduation from Cornell University and was employed for some time on experimental work in the Riverbank greenhouses,” the paper wrote of William. “He later took up the work in connection with the Bacon research studies.” As for Elizebeth: “Miss Smith’s home is in Indiana. She is a college graduate and a splendid reader. She and Mr. Friedman have lectured on the Bacon cipher before colleges, schools and clubs.” The article didn’t mention that Elizebeth was instrumental in convincing him to “take up the work.”

She married him without being in love. She admitted this later in her diary, after picking up a novel called The Prairie Wife and reading the opening line of the book’s woman narrator: “Splash! . . . That’s me falling plump into the pool of matrimony before I’ve had time to fall in love!” Elizebeth recognized that sentence as one “I might myself have spoken.” She married William because he was a good person, and he wanted it with such overwhelming intensity, and she trusted that the rest would come soon, certainly soon, because so much had already happened in the shortest time. It had been almost exactly a year since the Colonel met Elizebeth in Chicago and whisked her off to this patch of prairie. “I am learning to take things as they come,” she wrote in the diary soon after the marriage ceremony, taking stock of how her life had been transformed in a flash:

To be mangled and torn and castigated and macerated in soul—to wish passionately day after day only to die . . . and then to be brought, by a miracle, to a new place—to work that is absorbing, fascinating—to a place where I forget and find peace, glorious peace—and oh, miracle of miracles, to Love! Ah, Heaven is good! Truly, truth is stranger than fiction! I could not have believed it possible, but here am I. Is it possible I am to have them after all—Youth and Love, and Life?

The reaction to their marriage in Pittsburgh was just as they had feared. When William traveled back home briefly to tell his parents, his mother collapsed at the news that her son had married a shiksa. He told Elizebeth about it in a wire to Riverbank.She read it and felt sick. “I am cast into a whirl of remorse, pain, and sorrow for you,” Elizebeth wrote to him. “Oh, Billy, Billy, what have we done?” She told her family in later years that when she visited her in-laws in Pittsburgh, William’s mother would sit and weep. “You would have thought that Bill had committed murder,” Max Friedman, one of William’s brothers, later recalled. “If he had still been living in Pittsburgh he would have been ostracized.”

But William didn’t live in Pittsburgh anymore. He lived in Illinois, in a rich man’s windmill. And now Elizebeth did, too. She moved from Engledew Cottage into the windmill. He made room for her journals and papers and books and brought her up the steps to the second floor. It was humid and cramped, and it smelled of soil, but it was theirs.

That summer the military was sending teams around the country to recruit volunteers. Fabyan invited the army to Riverbank in July. He ordered his employees to build a wooden stage at the highest point of the lawn next to the Villa, and a recruiting tent next to the stage. Three thousand people came from Geneva and surrounding towns, clogging the roads with horse-drawn buggies and automobiles, a prairie traffic jam.

A U.S. Army captain stood on the stage, tall and clean-shaven, with a hank of brown hair gelled to a stiff peak, wearing a uniform of olive drab wool with gold piping and black dress shoes. “Better to go and die than not to go,” he cried. “Women, plead with your sons and brothers and sweethearts.” The captain said that anyone who spoke of peace should be shot as a traitor. At the end of the speech, a boy from Elgin stood and walked to the recruiting tent. The crowd cheered, and more boys stood and followed him. A bit later, Fabyan invited the guests to tour his model trenches for a fee of twenty-five cents per person, to be donated to the Red Cross. He raised more than three hundred and fifty dollars. Men in bowler hats and women holding parasols stood at the edge of the trenches, peering down. Children ventured inside and played in the mud.

William did not volunteer for the army that day, but he was starting to think about it, partly out of guilt—he was a healthy male in wartime—but also out of concern for himself and Elizebeth, their future together. He wondered if he could use his codebreaking skills to get commissioned as an officer. The army paid more than Fabyan. It laid out clear paths to promotion. And there were army bases all over the country and the world. When the time came for the couple to leave Riverbank, they could leave with good prospects.

He began to pester Fabyan about it, asking the boss to reach out to his contacts in Washington and recommend him to the Army Signal Corps, Joseph Mauborgne’s section. William said he wanted to go to France and apply his code and cipher knowledge closer to the fighting. Fabyan always waved him off. William was needed in his present position. He should forget about the army and concentrate on his work.

Frustrated, William took matters into his own hands, writing to Joseph Mauborgne and asking if the army had any use for his abilities. At the same time Elizebeth wrote to the navy to inquire about codebreaking positions. They waited for replies. Months passed. Nothing.

It wasn’t until later that the Friedmans learned the truth. They heard it from Mauborgne and others who had been desperately trying to reach them the whole time. Fabyan was intercepting the Friedmans’ mail. He had taken the job offers that arrived for them from Washington, put them in a drawer, and responded himself, informing Washington that the Friedmans were unavailable.

Also, one army officer who visited Riverbank for cryptologic training told William he discovered secret listening devices in the classrooms. Bugs. It seemed obvious that Fabyan didn’t place the bugs to spy on the students. The students didn’t know anything. It would have been pointless. The only logical explanation was that Fabyan had been spying on the Friedmans, in order to anticipate their movements and prevent them from ever leaving his Garden of Eden. It’s made honest bees out of them, this constant supervision: Fabyan was surveilling his young employees as if they were two honeybees in his colony, under glass.

A tiny slip of paper fluttered down to Elizebeth. She was outdoors at Riverbank with William and Mr. Powell, the gentle University of Chicago publicity agent, the three of them working in the grass, the fresh air. She picked up the paper and saw a line of cursive written in light pencil. It was from William. “My dearest, I sit here studying your features. You are perfectly beautiful!! B.B.” Billy Boy. She hid the note so Mr. Powell wouldn’t see it, later pressing it between two pages of her diary. “My heart sang,” she wrote there, “carolling bursts of ecstasy.”

She wasn’t pretending anymore or yielding to William out of kindness. She was the one throwing her arms around him in the cottage when Mrs. Gallup wasn’t looking and pulling him into a kiss. “My Lover-Husband,” she called him now:

TONIGHT MY LOVER-HUSBAND and I made a tryst with the future.

THE GOAL IS set; will we win? We planned it all—cheek to cheek—facing the swelling power of the new moon—

“WONDER-GIRL,” HE SAID, “It shall be all for You—only for You!”

AS I HELD him close and caught my breath in the intensity of hope, he said—“Dear Heart! You are not crying?”

AND I REPLIED—“NO dear, only praying.” And this was my prayer:

“OH SPIRIT WITHOUT and Within, keep me sweet! Keep me working on & on & keep me well—keep the Fire Burning!”

Their work started to dry up in the summer and fall of 1917. Each new parcel from Washington was lighter, containing fewer intercepted messages to solve. Something had changed. Fabyan paced and fretted. He raged in the hell chair.

It turned out that the War Department had recently launched a codebreaking unit of its own, under the command of a twenty-eight-year-old lieutenant named Herbert O. Yardley, a scrawny Indiana native who had become entranced with cryptology after reading library books that told about the old black chambers of Europe. “Why did America have no bureau for the reading of secret diplomatic code and cipher telegrams of foreign governments?” Yardley asked himself. “Perhaps I too, like the foreign cryptographer, could open the secrets of the capitals of the world.”

Fearless and charming, and a shark at poker, Yardley considered his new bureau to be an American black chamber, and he had no trouble convincing the War Department to let him solve messages that would have otherwise been shipped to Riverbank, seven hundred miles away. Known officially as MI-8, and based at the Army War College in Washington, Yardley’s bureau had shattered Fabyan’s near monopoly on American codebreaking.

Fabyan, aware that he was losing influence and power by the day, now came up with a plan to win it back. He knew the military needed many more codebreakers than it could locate and train quickly, both to work for Yardley’s Washington bureau and for the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in France. America needed a codebreaking school, and here was Riverbank, already set up as a university of sorts. He invited the army to send men to Riverbank for training. The army took him up on it.

The first students arrived in November 1917, four young lieutenants destined for the war front. They knew nothing about codes and ciphers. They were, as an NSA historian would later say, “as dumb as anyone just off the street.” Fabyan asked Elizebeth and William to teach them.

The Friedmans had never taught a class before. They had no lesson plans and a grand total of one year of codebreaking experience. There was nothing to do but to do it.

“What was taught was taught,” Elizebeth later recalled, “and we taught it with what we had.”

The first four students soon became eighty young officers in training sent from the Army War College, many accompanied by their wives. There wasn’t enough space to house the visitors at Riverbank, so the Colonel booked the largest hotel in the nearby town of Aurora, and William and Elizebeth taught class there every day, lecturing in the morning and correcting problem sets in the afternoon. They started with the biliteral cipher of Francis Bacon and moved on to more contemporary methods of encryption and decryption, using actual messages from the Spanish-American War and German intercepts from the first two years of the Great War. Mrs. Gallup sat off to the side during the classes, observing but not teaching.

The students knew that after graduating, many of them would be going straight to war, deployed to France as code and cipher officers with the AEF, and others would be assigned to similar work in Washington. This awareness of ordeals ahead made Riverbank seem that much sweeter. It was like being stationed in paradise. Fabyan provided the students with daily box lunches with fresh food from the farm, organized outings into the countryside, and threw parties where the single men could mingle with local girls, including a lavish military ball that ushered the golden-haired daughters of Geneva into the arms of the uniformed officers. At least four of the officers’ wives took the classes and completed the course. The Colonel commended the women for their “excellent work” in a letter to the War Department, though he did not list their own names but instead the names of their husbands.

On the last day of the course, in late February 1918, the students and instructors gathered outside the hotel for a photo, lining up in two rows that stretched from one end of the building to the other. In the photo, William, Elizebeth, and Fabyan sit front and center, William looking off to the right; the army men take stiff poses, some of them angling their heads 45 degrees to either side, some looking straight on. The significance of this curious feature of the photograph escaped almost all who viewed it at the time: Each person stood for a letter of ciphertext in the biliteral cipher. The ones looking to the side were the b-form of the cipher. The ones looking straight on were the a-form. United they spelled out the motto of Francis Bacon, the phrase chiseled into stone by the Colonel above the Acoustics Lab door: KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.

For the rest of his years, William would keep an enlargement of this photo beneath the glass surface of his work desk, glancing at it most every day of his life. It was a reminder of a more innocent moment, a time before two dark and interrelated forces began to draw boxes around his days, shaping his path and Elizebeth’s, too. War was one. Justifiable paranoia the other.

William finally raised enough of a stink with Fabyan that the boss said he could leave Riverbank on the condition he return to Riverbank when the war was over. He entered the army as a first lieutenant in the signal corps, an officer but a low-ranking one. He was headed to France to ply his code and cipher abilities with the AEF. An army photographer snapped his official portrait in a darkened room with a lamp to the left, illuminating the left half of his face and body. In the picture, he looks serious and delicately handsome. His ears seem to stick out more than usual. He liked it and gave Elizebeth a framed copy as a gift. In May 1918 they said goodbye, Elizebeth smiling through her tears, and Lieutenant Friedman boarded a train to Chicago on the way to his destination, American General Headquarters (GHQ), in the farming town of Chaumont, France.

Elizebeth wanted to go with him. She saw no reason why she should not be allowed to serve in France as an AEF cryptologist. But the army told Elizebeth that “I, a mere woman, could not follow to pursue my ‘trade,’ ” so she stayed behind at Riverbank, continuing to break codes in the Lodge with the other brain workers of the estate. In her diary she wrote original poems about war, exploring “the heartache of separation from the Dear One overseas” and recognizing that she needed to take care of herself, to preserve an inner mental space that was solid and clear (“a calm Whole, a unified peace”), and all the while reading the time-lagged stream of letters that arrived from William weeks or even months after he sent them, the envelopes stamped with the red mark of the AEF censor before crossing the ocean to the prairie.

She could tell from his letters that he missed being able to talk to her about a puzzle when he got stuck. For security reasons, he had to speak vaguely and omit all technical details. “The work is so hard,” he wrote, “and the results so very, very meagre. Sometimes I fear that I haven’t got it in me at all. I cannot explain to you—but just imagine yourself at work absolutely in the dark, up against the most baffling problem, with no data to base speculation upon, no guiding generalizations, except the most vague and unreliable—Oh, I tell you Honey, it’s going to be an awfully hard task to make good.”

At the same time it was clear from the letters that William’s reputation was growing in the army, that some days solutions appeared to him “out of the clear blue,” startling his colleagues. “On Saturday Col. M brought around a visitor, some Col—I don’t remember his name. When he came to my desk he introduced me and said, ‘He is our wizard on Code.’ Dearest, I was quite embarrassed, and didn’t know what to say.” Col. M was his commander, Frank Moorman, and William made it a point to tell Elizebeth that Moorman admired the Riverbank Publications, hoping she would feel proud of her work on them. “Love-girl,” he wrote, “yesterday at conference Major M passed around our R.K. pamphlet”—Riverbank No. 16, Methods for the Solution of Running-Key Ciphers—“and said that he went through it with much interest and that it was the best thing he had seen on the subject.”

William told her not to worry about his physical safety. Chaumont was far enough from the trenches and the firefights that he felt there was no danger of needing the .45 pistol that he carried on his hip.

Like the other officers, William lived in a billet, the private home of a French woman he called Madame. It was so dark in the French countryside at night that during his first weeks he had trouble finding his billet and had to use cigarettes as torches. In the day he worked in a building behind GHQ known as the Glass House, surrounded by the other AEF codebreakers and radio operators. The Germans used a field cipher based on six letters: A, D, F, G, V, and X. A message might look like FAXDF ADDDS DGFFF, or DDFAX SDGVV AFAFX. William spent a lot of time fiddling with these six-letter nonsense messages, groping for the light cord in the darkened room of the cryptograms. The men in his section preferred to work alone, which he found baffling. “You know how much ‘group work’ counts in our business,” he wrote to Elizebeth. “What can one person alone accomplish?”

He tried drinking French wine and didn’t care for the taste. Lemonade was more to his liking. At the officers’ club he kept to himself, nursing highballs in a plush chair in front of a roaring fire, except when the men dragged him into a poker game, which he always regretted, losing money each time he played. The Midas of codes had no talent for reading human faces. In this he was the opposite of Herbert Yardley, leader of the MI-8 codebreaking unit in Washington, who also spent time in France during the war. William met Yardley there for the first time and thought he seemed fake. “I must confess to considerable distaste for Y. Frankly, I didn’t like him at all,” he wrote to Elizebeth. “He acted like a wooden Indian.”

Feeling lost and out of place, and wishing the army had permitted his wife to serve in Chaumont, he walked back to his billet in the dark at the end of the night and spent hours writing to her. He had placed a picture of her next to an oil lamp and each time he struck a match to light the lamp he looked at the picture and said, out loud, “Hello, you darling! Hello, Rita Bita Girl,” then lit the flame and started to write, imagining he was back in bed with her at Riverbank, stroking her hair, talking in baby talk. He fantasized about spanking her. “Do you miss your Biwy Boy, my darling? Have you been naughty? Do you need to be spanked? You little ‘imp.’ ” He said that was as far as he dared to go, with the censor reading every word, and promised that someday he would cable her “some real stuff which may burn the insulation of the wires.”

During these months in Chaumont, four thousand miles from home, William became tormented by feelings of inferiority and romantic inadequacy that would never completely go away, gnawing at him for the rest of his life. He worried he was too unprosperous for Elizebeth, too interested in science instead of money, too effeminate. He apologized for “the many imperfections in my makeup.” He asked for reassurance that he was a “good lover”: “You have told me that, haven’t you?” One day he happened to meet Colonel Parker Hitt, the Texas codebreaker now posted to France, and needed to crane his neck up to look at him: “He actually towered above me.” He went to sleep at night with the windows open and often dreamed of his wife, a recurring dream where she was leaving him because she didn’t love him anymore, then he woke up in a sweat and lunged for his pen and a piece of paper to copy it down: “You didn’t yike me at all,” he wrote, baby talking, “and I was all broken up.” He begged her forgiveness for leaving her alone at Riverbank with “no money and a lot of debts” and promised to pay more attention to her happiness. “When we were together,” he wrote, “I was particularly mean not to take you out more often, even though we couldn’t ‘afford’ it, or even though there was lots of work to do. The Spring Time of love was ours—and I failed to make it all that it should have been for you. I owe it to you—and you shall have it all a thousandfold over when we are together once again. ‘Afford it’ or not.”

Against these anxieties and regrets William possessed only one weapon: language, wordplay. Every day he felt he was losing a little more of his wife and every day he felt he must fight to win her back, so he labored over his letters, making corrections, emendations, fixing rare grammatical mistakes, turning the pages 90 degrees and adding sentences at right angles in the margins, trying to find the magic incantation of symbols to crush the globe flat and cheat the distance between them. He filled the pages with encoded messages of devotion he had every reason to believe she would understand. “This cable will read apparently harmless—but each letter and punctuation mark on it is but a group standing for a whole phrase which I wish I had the power to vary—but have not. The phrase is ‘I love you!’ It has two alternates—‘I adore you!’ and ‘I worship you!’ So if those tiny flashes of electricity can talk to you they will whisper to you over and over again, with an infinite permutation of expression my message of love for you.” It was a lover’s code:

A = I love you! / I adore you! / I worship you!

B = I love you! / I adore you! / I worship you!

C = I love you! / I adore you! / I worship you!

 !  = I love you! / I adore you! / I worship you!

 .  = I love you! / I adore you! / I worship you!

Elizebeth wrote long letters back to him. In one envelope she enclosed a lock of her hair.

Her letters don’t exist today. It’s likely she destroyed them after the war. Still, they left traces in William’s: sentences of hers that he quoted, questions she asked that he answered.

A frequent topic was their future at Riverbank. Should they stay there or leave? What should they do about George Fabyan? The man was relentless; all through William’s deployment, Fabyan had been writing him in Chaumont, asking that he return to Riverbank at the soonest opportunity. The Friedmans discussed this issue with caution, abbreviating Riverbank as R., George Fabyan as G.F., and the Bacon Cipher project as B.C. It occurred to them that Fabyan might have friends in the censor’s office and they didn’t want the rich man prying into the conversation any more than he already had.

Elizebeth tried to tell William in her letters that she no longer felt safe at Riverbank. She made a vague reference to Fabyan’s “excesses,” causing William to say he didn’t understand: “How and where did you learn of these?” When William told Elizebeth he wanted to have children with her, she replied that it wasn’t safe to have children at Riverbank. “You are perfectly right,” he agreed. “When we are ‘safe,’ the children.”

On September 21, 1918, she revealed something to him in a letter. All that survives is William’s reaction: “Honey, I could have committed several crimes after reading what it had to say about that old nameless rascal. I was upset all day as a result. To think that he would do such a thing after all we have done.” Elizebeth later confided to friends that Fabyan made sexual advances while William was in France.

William encouraged her to leave Riverbank if she was unhappy: “Honey, don’t be afraid to take a step. You have ability and more brains than any other woman I’ve known. You can fill any job a woman can and many jobs that men fill.”

The German lines collapsed in October 1918, British and American troops advancing and seizing territory. The roads around Chaumont began to fill with convoys of emaciated German prisoners of war. On November 10 at GHQ, a group of American soldiers huddled around a newspaper, laughing and shouting: The Kaiser had abdicated his throne. The war was over, the Allies had won. Three miles away the men of the AEF Gas Defense School blew up bombs and fired rockets in celebration, thunderclaps disturbing the sky. The dazed citizens of Chaumont wandered into the street and hung lanterns in their windows.

As William’s colleagues drank and sang, he stayed indoors at his billet and wrote to Elizebeth, vomiting a great pent-up mass of insecurities and dreams onto the page. “Dearest Woman in the Universe,” he began, “This is surely a fateful day.” Then he made a series of promises, talking about what their lives would be like when he got home. He said he didn’t want her to be consumed by housework. As a child he had seen his mother exhausted by her cleaning duties. “Home does not entail a spotless kitchen and a faultless parlor,” William wrote. “Home does entail the presence of hearts that beat in unison—whether the shelter be a hovel or a palace.” He was offering her the same freedom to pursue her intellectual ambitions that she had always extended to him—but did she really mean that? In her private heart did Elizebeth wish that her husband had more of a bank account and less of a brain? “Elsbeth, my Dearest, when you say that you want me to go on with my research work—blaze the trail and all that—do you realize that those chaps, poor fortunate-unfortunates, are usually not bank presidents? I should be happy, I think, with a fair share of the comforts and goods of this world, if I could continue with my studies, and unless I am seriously mistaken—and I don’t think I am—you are not the woman to be hankering after life’s luxuries and fineries. If you were, we would never have been attracted to one another.”

That night, after 11 P.M., the oil in his lamp burned out and he went to bed. In the morning he learned of the Armistice and added a line to the bottom of the letter: “Honey, it’s all over now.”

At Riverbank she heard it from the news well before she received his letter, and she began a letter of her own, which William then quoted back to her. “The signing of the Armistice had one result—my indulging in thoughts, last night . . . dear, intimate things that burn one up with a fire of longing and ache of wanting you,” Elizebeth wrote. “I must not again.”

William replied, “What shall I say of the thrills that took possession of me on reading those words? I, too, have indulged in thoughts. . . . Ah, Dear One, when shall we too live them over again?”

He then broke some bad news: The army wasn’t releasing him yet. He had to stay in Chaumont to write a secret history of the code and cipher work as a technical reference for future army use. He might be there for months.

This is when Elizebeth finally decided to leave Riverbank. She packed a bag in stealth without telling Fabyan and slipped onto a train for Indiana, reasoning that with the war over and no urgent messages to decipher, Fabyan could do without her for a bit, whether he liked it or not.

To pass the time in Huntington, she got a temporary job in the local library, a two-story building of limestone with a special room of materials about railroad engineering. She helped farmers find books and opened letters from the men in her life.

Some of these letters were job offers, eager replies to inquiries she had already sent. The Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington wanted Elizebeth to join its Code and Signal Section. Also, an officer in the War Department thought her Riverbank training would be “of the greatest value” in the MID; he was none other than John Manly, the Chaucer expert who used to argue with Elizebeth about the Bacon Ciphers and once shoved her on the shoulder. Manly now worked with Herbert Yardley. “Most of the work handled here necessitates a thorough knowledge of Spanish or German,” Manly wrote. “Women who can think in either of these languages are needed as cryptographers at $1400 per annum.”

William wrote to her, of course. He seemed as effusive and insecure as ever. He asked her if she knew how small an electron is, using that as the basis of an extended riff about the incomprehensible size of his love for her. He said he had gotten her a piece of lingerie in Paris, a silk teddy, custom sewn, with the help of an army captain who told him what measurements to use (“Can’t two perfectly ’spectable married men get together on designing a perfectly proper—even if private—piece of woman’s apparel?”), and he ruminated on their postwar future. Fabyan had demanded that William return to Riverbank at once: “You have had a long enough vacation,” Fabyan wrote, “your salary has been going on and I do want you to get back at the earliest possible moment.” But William worried that if he and Elizebeth did resume working at the estate, and Fabyan forced them to continue probing the Bacon Ciphers, it would destroy their credibility as cryptologists and make it hard to find other jobs. “I refuse to have anything to do with the B.C.,” William wrote. “I think that whole business would be an excellent experiment for a psychologist. . . . Furthermore, I shall keep you away from it too. Nothing but unhappiness, and accusations, and unfruitfulness have ever come out of the whole business. Aside from our deep, and perfect love, the greatest treasure which life holds, we have found little else at R. but heartache, and argument, and unhappiness.”

By the end of the letter he came around to the idea that they should leave Riverbank forever. “I don’t want to flatter ourselves, but [Fabyan] is going to have one fine time trying to replace the Friedman Combination!” He signed off one letter with a love note in cipher, written using a type of transposition cipher called a “rail fence”:

(George C. Marshall Research Foundation)

To find the hidden message, start on the upper left, with I. Read down that column, ILOVE, then start at the bottom of the next column to the right and read up, YOUVE, and then down again, up again, down, up.

George Fabyan also sent Elizebeth letters while she was in Indiana. She dug her nail into the wax and his black words uncoiled.

“I am wondering how you are and what you are doing,” he wrote with a strained politeness that barely masked his fury, “and if your vacation has not been long enough to suit you.” He liked to sign his name in a flourish of blue colored pencil, making the widest line possible, the tip round and blunt. Elizebeth didn’t understand how anyone could bear writing with an unsharp pencil. It was barbarism.

He asked her in several different ways to come back, alternating charm with threats. He attempted a strategy of divide-and-conquer, suggesting that if Elizebeth committed to returning to Riverbank, it wouldn’t necessarily bind William to do the same. (When Elizebeth relayed this to her husband in France, William was enraged: “Does he suppose you’d live at R. and I at Chicago!! . . . any man who attempts to sow dissension and create unharmony between man and wife, in that manner, is a scoundrel.”) He tried to impress Elizebeth with his power, recounting a recent conversation with the head of MID in Washington, who had offered to hire all the women codebreakers at Riverbank, including her. “I told him that I would see them in hell before any girl whom I was interested in went to Washington under existing conditions,” Fabyan wrote.

Finally, he tried being reasonable, addressing the Friedmans as a couple, through Elizebeth. “I am an old man going down hill; you are young people climbing up and it is for you to decide whether your opportunity lies at Riverbank or elsewhere.” He said he wanted to talk it over with Elizebeth in person, in Chicago, given the “rather unsatisfactory” and slow nature of mail.

Elizebeth shot back in a letter, “I am inclined to agree with you that in most cases, correspondence is rather unsatisfactory. But with you I confess it has some advantages—for, you see, in conversation you insist on doing all the talking! Now I suppose you are going to retort, ‘This, from a woman?’ ”

She finally got the letter she’d been waiting for in early February 1919: William was coming home. The army was done with him in France. “Won’t our reunion be better than any honeymoon you can think of? I love you! I love you! I love you, love you love you!!”

He arrived in New York City two months later, in April, on a ship with other returning troops. Elizebeth went to New York to meet him, and they saw each other for the first time in a year.

They stayed in the East for a few weeks in rented rooms, thinking about what to do next.

Elizebeth knew she couldn’t go back to Riverbank. Her husband, for reasons she didn’t quite understand, had always found Fabyan at least slightly entertaining, but to her, the man was a scoundrel. As for William, he didn’t want to be in the military anymore. He hated knowing that the army could send him anywhere in the world on a whim, separating him once again from his wife. The little he had seen of war convinced him there was no glory in it, once telling Elizebeth in a letter, “The War will not make better men or women out of us.” If he could choose his own path, he confessed, he would unwind the last few years of his professional life and return to his first love, genetics. Maybe he could continue his plant and fruit-fly experiments at a university, or failing that, join a corporation and make some money.

Elizebeth agreed that William’s “extraordinary gift of scientific analysis” should be properly appreciated and rewarded, and she encouraged him to get his discharge from the army, in April. After that they traveled so William could meet with potential employers. Elizebeth figured she would find work of her own wherever he landed. She noticed that the corporate executives who interviewed him were invariably amazed at his knowledge of codes and ciphers: “Everybody said, ‘But where has this been all these years? Here we have this wonderful science all opened up for us now and where has it been hiding?’ ”

Strangely, however, no company offered William a job. Wherever the Friedmans went, a telegram would arrive from Fabyan, commanding them to give up the search: “Come back to Riverbank, your salary is still going on.” The only way he could have known their whereabouts was if he had dispatched a spy. It was logical to conclude that Fabyan was threatening William’s potential employers. “He had us followed,” Elizebeth said. “He opened our mail.”

Feeling defeated and not seeing any other options, the Friedmans told the Colonel they would return to Riverbank if he let them live in their own house in Geneva, gave them both a raise, and allowed them to question Mrs. Gallup’s theory based on hard evidence. He agreed and welcomed them back home.

Fabyan didn’t keep his promises. The raises never materialized. He continued to ignore and even suppress criticism of the Bacon Ciphers. When a famous type designer wrote a report showing how Mrs. Gallup misunderstood the printing practices of Shakespeare’s era, Fabyan shoved the report into a drawer, even though he himself had paid for it to be written. (The Friedmans stumbled across the mothballed report years later in the Library of Congress.) Worst of all, he maneuvered to deny William credit for a crowning scientific achievement, his paper “The Index of Coincidence and Its Applications in Cryptography,” written in 1920.

William had noticed that in any piece of English text, a letter sometimes appears directly atop the same letter in the line below—d on top of d, w on w, q on q. William discovered that the frequency of this “coincidence” could be measured, and it was distinct for each language, a kind of signature. In English, a coincidence happens exactly 6.67 percent of the time. Seven columns out of 100 contain an alignment. This insight married modern statistics with cryptology for the first time, and by doing so, kicked open a door that couldn’t be closed. “The Index of Coincidence” and its offspring would lead directly to important feats of codebreaking in the Second World War. Instead of putting William’s name on the cover, Fabyan had the paper published first in France; people got the idea that a French cryptologist was the author.

William and Elizebeth were enraged by “Fabyan’s skullduggery”—Elizebeth scrawled this and other angry phrases in the margins of Fabyan’s letters to William, annotating his duplicity, keeping a file of his lies—and within a year of returning to Riverbank they felt desperate to escape, reaching out to associates in Washington. This time they sent and received letters at their own address in Geneva, avoiding Fabyan’s surveillance net. Joseph Mauborgne of the army leapt at the chance to hire the Friedmans and promised to create positions for both of them at once. “We feel that it would be a great misfortune if the Friedman family were to retire to some other kind of a job,” Mauborgne wrote.

The Friedmans accepted the offer in December 1920. William was afraid to tell Fabyan, and he worried what the Colonel might do to his friend Mauborgne, too. William warned Mauborgne, “He is as powerful as he is ruthless.” They all dreaded the rich man’s reaction. “I expect a lively row when the news breaks upon Colonel Fabyan’s portly frame and expect that no little of his fury will be vented upon me,” Mauborgne wrote to William. “Perhaps you had better fix up that side of it—if you can.”

Elizebeth wanted to leave in the middle of the night without telling Fabyan. William found this overly cruel. She begged him to reconsider: If they wanted to escape, she said, they had to be just as tricky as Fabyan.

So together the Friedmans planned a clandestine operation: “our secret plot to be able to get away without getting our throats cut,” Elizebeth called it. One morning they loaded all of their possessions into a car they had managed to borrow, cleaned out the house they’d been renting in Geneva, locked all the doors, drove to Riverbank, and located the Colonel. They showed him the car with all their luggage. They said they were leaving on the three o’clock train and their decision was final.

They thought he’d explode, turn red and scream, maybe try to restrain them. Instead, with an eerie calmness, Fabyan smiled and wished them well. It was so out of character that William assumed he must have already decided to seek his revenge at a future moment of his choosing.

There would be time to worry about that later. For now, they were giddy as they traveled east to Washington. They thought they were free. William believed that “after a very limited number of years,” Riverbank “will disappear from the Earth and be but a black memory.” He was grateful to escape and eager to work with his wife in a new city, keeping the Friedman Combination intact, as he had talked about during the war: “Oh, you are some partner, I’ll say! . . . and to think you love poor me!”

Elizebeth’s professional intentions were a little different. She thought leaving Riverbank might unshackle her from William to some degree. At times there, working at his side, she had felt pressure to compete, but the war had inflated William’s renown to the point where she couldn’t possibly keep up, and she figured that no one in Washington would expect her to match him. There was relief in that. As she put it later, “By the end of the war I was more or less known as a military cipher expert, but I was better known as the wife of my husband,” who had “made a reputation so startling that I regarded the task of catching up to him as being altogether hopeless.” But if she believed she would never again rival her husband, she was wrong. In the nation’s capital, she was about to carve her own path, her own name, with a set of blades that would one day turn out to be just the right shape for dismembering the plans of Nazis.