William Friedman gripped the sides of a jeep as it shook and rumbled up the twisting incline to the laboratory of the Nazi scientist. The codebreaker was in a small town in Bavaria miles from any battlefield, ascending a mountain called Feuerstein. The jeep continued to climb. Looking backward William could see the intact homes and shops of the town below, growing smaller in the distance. Up ahead, the Laboratorium Feuerstein loomed into view. The impression was of reaching a castle on a mountaintop. The building was enormous. Red Cross signs were painted on the roof, a ruse to pass off the institute as a hospital and prevent RAF pilots from dropping bombs.
Dr. Oskar Vierling, an engineer from a poor family, had run this place. Before the war Vierling specialized in acoustics research, investigating the properties of sound and inventing new kinds of instruments; his “electrochord,” an electrical organ, was a favorite of the Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, who adapted the instrument for party rallies, using it to play forceful blasts of chords at predetermined spots in his speeches. In the late 1930s the Nazis insisted that Vierling focus his activities on war machines, and the Laboratorium Feuerstein, named after the mountain which it crowned, began to fill with scientists and assistants under the Doktor’s direction, as many as two hundred people.
The Allies wanted to know what Vierling had invented during the war, particularly any devices related to intelligence or cryptology, so they had dispatched William Friedman, along with a dozen colleagues from army intelligence, to make an inventory of the laboratory. Earlier the defeated Nazis had ordered Vierling to destroy all of his inventions, but he had hidden his favorites in a locked room in the basement and was now glad to show them to the Americans.
The interior of the lab was cavernous, Gothic. William felt like a character in a murder mystery, about to meet an intricate demise. He analyzed Vierling’s prototypes. There was a machine said to encrypt the human voice the way that Enigma encrypted text, and a device for scrambling speech to make it unrecognizable to anyone listening on a wiretap. There was an “acoustic torpedo,” a machine that shot bullets of sound; a coating for submarines that made them invisible to radar; and a “speech stretcher,” an audio playback device that sped or slowed a recording without changing the pitch. It was hard for William to avoid drawing a comparison between Vierling and George Fabyan, the American robber baron who built a deviant temple to science—this place was like a Nazi Riverbank. Inside the Laboratorium Feuerstein, William ate a brief supper of hot dogs, potatoes, coffee, and crushed peaches, and he stayed late into the evening with his American colleagues, the topics of their conversations growing spookier, starting with Albert Einstein and the theory of relativity before veering off to more occult topics like the possibility of extrasensory perception.
Vierling’s laboratory was only one target of TICOM, the mission to lock down the intelligence secrets of the war. The Allies deployed six TICOM teams to Europe starting in April 1945, each containing eight to fifteen intelligence personnel from both the United States and Britain. William’s team began its work in late July. The mission carried him for hundreds of miles across southern Germany, France, and Czechoslovakia. He took notes. He had spent the war in office buildings. This was his first look at the landscape of physical battle, and it filled him with “a heavy feeling of sadness” difficult to describe. The German countryside was intact, the plots of wheat and rye and barley ripening, the green forests seemingly untouched, but the people were broken, and the machines were broken. The highways between cities were full of what the army called DPs: displaced persons. Mothers and fathers walked along the road with their children, carrying personal belongings on their backs or hauling small quantities of wood in handcarts, to burn for fuel. Wrecked trucks and tanks had been tipped into ditches, and women wept in the backs of clattering wagons.
He ate a C-ration for the first time, canned meat and beans. It didn’t agree with his stomach. He ate Spam. He stayed at an army installation code-named BARN and thought that if it had been up to him he would have named it something less boring, like LEPIDOPTERA, the scientific name for a butterfly, but then he thought about it some more and realized that LEPIDOPTERA would be more difficult for soldiers to remember and they might end up getting lost. He rode at slow speed through the firebombed cities of the Reich, through Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Aschaffenburg, and Würzburg, feeling like an ant crawling across the body of a dead child. “The destruction to be seen in cities such as these should be noted by anybody who believes in war,” he wrote, “because it can tell more about what happens in modern warfare than reams of literature.” More than once, while scouring an abandoned Nazi garrison, the men on William’s team found copies of his own cryptologic publications from years past, translated into German or French by the Nazis. This was hardly a surprise, given the ubiquity of William’s contributions to the science, and the men got a kick out of it, grinning as they showed him these discoveries—and the bibliophile in William could not resist taking these extremely rare documents as souvenirs and keeping them for his own library—but it was the strangest compliment. Imagine walking into the devil’s library and seeing your book on his shelf.
William always believed the war was worth fighting. But he saw it as a grim duty, not a crusade, and his experience of fighting the war had permanently destroyed his faith in the way the world was put together. Earlier that year, his daughter asked him in a letter if he believed in Zionism, the project to create a Jewish homeland. He said no. “Zionism is only one of many virulent forms of a detestable disease known as ‘nationalism,’ ” William wrote to Barbara. “The sooner we realize that we are all God’s children regardless of color, race, creed, nationality, etc., the better for all nations and the world as a whole.” He didn’t believe in nations anymore, not even his own. This is what he had tried to tell his daughter. The world is very fragile, more fragile than it is healthy to believe if you want to get out of bed and make it through the day.
William did not sleep well the night before he visited Hitler’s alpine lair: Kehlsteinhaus, the Eagle’s Nest, a meeting center and getaway built by the party in 1939 and given to the Führer as a gift on his fiftieth birthday. An army friend of William’s made steak sandwiches with raw onion at 1 A.M., and the cryptologist woke to the smell and downed the steak with Scotch. At 8 A.M. he rode in the army staff jeep at the front of a fifty-vehicle convoy to the town of Berchtesgaden, overlooking the Austrian Alps. The path to the lair went straight up a mountain for four and a half miles, no guardrails to prevent an errant car from plummeting several thousand feet to the valley. The driver kept the jeep in first gear all the way.
The convoy reached a plateau with a parking area at the base of the lair, and William entered a hundred-foot-long tunnel protected by two enormous, heavily ornamented bronze gates. The tunnel was wide enough for three automobiles and brightly lit with electric lamps. At the far end of the tunnel, an elevator shaft the height of a fifteen-story building rose the rest of the way, to the mountain’s pinnacle. The elevator operator was the same German who had worked for Hitler and his deputies all during the war. William talked to him for a bit. “He gave us a little speech in his defense, saying that he was assigned to the job—the Nazis wouldn’t let him get away, etc., etc.”
The ride to the top took three minutes. Then William and his fellow officers were led through a passageway and into the first chamber of the lair, a small, wood-paneled dining room where Hitler held banquets with visiting world leaders. The Führer didn’t visit often—the long automobile climb made him impatient, and the change in atmospheric pressure disagreed with his constitution—but Goering and Ribbentrop spent a lot of time at the Kehlsteinhaus, and Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun, loved to entertain friends here. She lugged her Scottish terriers up the mountain and let them romp in the thin air. She threw a wedding party for her sister and the groom, an SS captain later shot by Hitler for desertion.
Beyond the dining room and down a few stairs was an octagonal room with thick granite walls and a 360-degree view of the Alps. From this height the mountains appeared at eye level, jagged triangles of green and blue, like incisors rising from earth’s jaw, “indescribably beautiful,” William thought. A third room contained a fireplace of red marble, a gift from Mussolini. Most of the furniture was intact. The Americans milled around like tourists atop the Empire State Building, unsure what to do with themselves after the first minute or two. William took pictures and wished he had brought a film camera.
The group descended in the elevator and drove a mile back down the mountain to a level area where the Nazi party had built Hitler a separate residence, a private house. The front of the house was a twenty-five-foot-wide plate-glass window with no glass in it. The building had been almost completely destroyed by an RAF blockbuster bomb and by subsequent visits from American soldiers, who wrecked what was left of the house before the army stopped them. William thought it was a shame. “I think it is too bad that this whole installation was not left absolutely intact to serve as an everlasting and terrible monument to the folly of a people led to perdition by a madman’s lust for power.”
The floor of Hitler’s house was littered with chunks of rock and marble. William reached down and picked up a piece. When he got home, he decided, he would keep it on his desk, as a reminder. “I shall have it made into a paper-weight.”
That day, back in the States, Elizebeth was in Michigan, visiting her sister. She stayed at a hotel in Ann Arbor that brought her a bowl of ice in the afternoon. She looked at this simple object, this bowl of smoking ice, the unthinkable luxury of it, in wonder and awe, and remembered that it was not normal for humans to spend their afternoons trapped inside a 100-degree building in Washington, sweating through their clothes, solving puzzles to save the free world. She remembered she was alive.
One evening she read an issue of The New Yorker straight through.
Germany was only the first leg of William’s TICOM mission. The second leg took him to Bletchley Park, headquarters of British codebreaking, in late July. He arrived there on July 28, eight days before America dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan.
As he had done on his previous visit to Bletchley, William kept a detailed diary. One entry described a meeting with Alan Turing: “At 1535 a visit with Dr. Turing. He is leaving GC&CS, to my surprise. Says he’s going into electronic calculating devices and may come to the U.S. for a visit soon. Invited him to visit us if he comes to Washington.” This turned out to be the final encounter of William Friedman and Alan Turing. The two geniuses would never see each other again. In 1952, the British government stripped Turing’s security clearance on grounds that he was a homosexual, and officials coerced him into taking estrogen injections. Turing’s maid later found him dead of an apparent suicide, a half-eaten apple by the side of his bed, traces of cyanide in his blood. A government witch hunt had destroyed one of the war’s greatest heroes.
William’s goal in England in July 1945 was to learn how the war had looked to his Nazi adversaries, the code and cipher experts employed by the Reich. He read cryptologic materials seized by British intelligence and observed interrogations of Nazi prisoners. Twice he visited a manor in the country village of Beaconsfield, noting that he could “say no more.” This was a POW camp where he encountered at least three high-value German POWs, including two of Nazi Germany’s top cryptologists, Dr. Wilhelm Fricke and Erich Hüttenhain. William didn’t conduct the interrogations but he did observe and suggest questions. After listening to the POWs and analyzing the documents, William concluded that Germany had never lost faith in the security of the Enigma machine. They thought Enigma was unbreakable all the way to the end. He was proud to learn that Nazi codebreakers had never managed to defeat America’s best cipher machine, the SIGABA, which he had invented with Frank Rowlett.
He had a lot of downtime in England. The pace of things in the codebreaking offices had slowed. The buildings seemed to be emptying out. At night he took Amytals and crawled into bed. One evening a friend took him to a burlesque show in London, the famous Les Folies-Bergère. They sat in two plush seats in the front row. The women wore g-strings and glittery, spangly tops, and William admired the looks of intense concentration on their faces, their cool self-possession. “The girls devote their complete and absorbed attention to their work—not even a glance or a wink at any member of the audience.”
Once or twice in the slack moments of the days, the British asked him to tell stories about crazy old George Fabyan and his merry band of conspiracy theorists. People seemed to love the Riverbank stories, and William loved to tell them. It was funny how he felt more and more generous toward Fabyan by the year. You get older and want to connect to the people who understand. You try to speak with the young and find that something is wrong with your ears. They use their own slang, their own code, and you start to feel nostalgic about your former enemies, who at least shared the same intense moment on earth and spoke words you could understand. Besides, if not for George Fabyan, William would not now be carrying a piece of Adolf Hitler’s smashed marble floor in his pocket.
It had all begun in the most bizarre fashion.
William was in London on August 6, 1945, the first day of the nuclear age. He was asleep and dreaming in his room at the Hunt Hotel when the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima and destroyed it in seconds, its people and its history, like a page torn from a book. A latch opened in the American B-29 at sixteen minutes after midnight, London time, which was 8:16 A.M. Hiroshima time, and the soldiers on the plane became the first humans to see, from a safe distance, what this technology could do to a living city. “Here was a whole damn town nearly as big as Dallas,” the radio operator of the Enola Gay later recalled, “one minute all in good shape and the next minute disappeared and covered with fires and smoke.” Above Japan, the plane peeled away from the mushroom cloud, while in London the cryptologist’s eyeballs darted frantically behind closed eyelids. He was having a sex dream about Enid, the wife of his friend Stub. When he woke in the morning, he felt confused. He had never thought about Enid that way. He wrote in his diary that he would have to tell her. She’d think it was funny.
It took a while for the news to reach London, and William was busy with his work, so he didn’t hear about Hiroshima until breakfast on the morning of August 7. He went to lunch that day with Eddie Hastings, the Royal Navy captain who had visited the Friedmans’ house on the day of Pearl Harbor, and after drinking a few martinis in befuddled silence, William and Hastings spoke about the bomb. They were in agreement. They didn’t understand why it was necessary to kill so many civilians merely to demonstrate the bomb’s power. Hastings thought “it was [a] serious mistake to drop the first one on a big city—should have stated the case, given warning, dropped 1st one on a vacant area & then make renewed call to surrender,” William recorded in his diary. “I think he is right. Early reports indicate over 350,000* people wiped out in Hiroshima—perfectly ghastly, no matter who the enemy may be.” He added, “We all here agree that this new weapon represents the last call on man to give up war—or else!”
The second atomic bomb fell two days later, on Nagasaki.
At home in Washington, waiting for the war to end and for her family to come home, Elizebeth sat on the porch in the evening and wrote letters to the children and William, taking breaks to go upstairs and listen to radio bulletins. The weather turned cool and rainy. Each time she wrote to William she had to use a different address because he seemed to be moving all over the place. She worried he wasn’t getting her letters. His letters reached her after a time lag of seven or eight days, which meant that their letters were crossing midstream.
On August 7, when the radio carried news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the news didn’t bother Elizebeth as much as it did William. She wrote to her husband that day, “Everyone is saying this will end the war P.D.Q.”—pretty damn quick. “I wonder! Much too good to be true, say I.”
The morning after the Nagasaki bombing, August 10, William got up in his London hotel, shaved, showered, ate a breakfast of bacon and egg, and took a bus to one of the city offices of his British colleagues. It was a bright day and the sun felt good on his face. After lunch he decided to get out and watch some tennis at a nearby public court, a mixed-doubles match, and he was enjoying the high quality of play when at 1 P.M. a U.S. Army lieutenant came running to tell him the Japanese had accepted surrender terms presented to the emperor. Unofficially, the war was over.
Word reached Elizebeth at the Naval Annex that day, and at 7:30 P.M. she started a new letter to her husband, writing at the top, “A day we will remember!” She told him she was getting tired of managing everything at home, fixing things around the house, sopping up after a small flood in the basement, getting the car ready for its annual inspection (“the fenders cost $30, the other work $13”), “all chores and no play with my Sweetheart. But maybe if V.J. comes true, we can both go play for a long vacation.”
“By the time this reaches you,” William wrote four days later, “the end of the war will be a fact.” He said he was sorry she was tired and knew it was hard to be alone. He suggested sweeping the leaves from the sewer inlet on the side of the house to prevent rainwater from backing up and leaking into the basement. William also replied to a warm letter from John Ramsay, who had asked his father which books he should read to educate himself in spare hours at the Army Air Corps barracks. William recommended So Little Time, a war novel by J. P. Marquand (“so good”), and ended the ten-page letter by praising his son’s vocabulary: “You’ve improved remarkably in penmanship and format. You do yourself proud, in fact. I found only one or two orthographic irregularities or aberrations (misspellings, to you!). They are of no consequence. Dad.”
Japan surrendered unconditionally on August 14. President Truman declared a two-day holiday for federal workers. A crowd of 75,000 gathered at the White House, ringing bells, blowing horns. Elizebeth stayed in and tried to recover from a stomach bug, drinking clear consommé and ginger tea. “Bobbie, darling,” she wrote to her daughter, who was scheduled to return from Panama in September, “I sure am counting days—only 23 more and you will be here! Oh, frabjous, frabjous day!”
She watched the lights come on in America. Gas stations resumed normal operations. The newspapers said nylon hose would be available soon. Shoes by Christmas. The military was starting to release large numbers of personnel who were no longer needed. Arlington Hall ordered a 50 percent staff cut by September 31 and another 25 percent cut by December 31. The Naval Annex in Washington had been emptying for weeks and was down to a skeleton force, quieter than Elizebeth had ever seen it. The temporary workers, including most of the WAVES, no longer necessary in peacetime, had been released without so much as a thank-you cake, and permanent employees were escaping the Annex for offices in more modern buildings.
Elizebeth knew she needed to make a decision about her future, about what to do with her postwar life. Her superiors at the coast guard said they wanted her to stay, to keep her code-breaking unit together in peacetime and return to smuggling investigations, but she couldn’t see the point. There wasn’t a lot of smuggling traffic anymore.
She noticed with detached amusement that American intelligence officials were scrambling to cast themselves and their agencies in a favorable light so that they might keep their jobs in peacetime. “The O.S.S. is starting a deluge of publicity,” Elizebeth wrote to William, mentioning the wartime spy agency of Wild Bill Donovan, for whom she had worked in the early months of the war. “Fight against extinction, I suppose.”
Elizebeth heard a radio interview with a New York man who taught cryptology classes. He was discussing the importance of codebreaking to the Allied victory. Elizebeth knew him to be a minor figure and wondered, in an offhand way, how he ever got the spotlight.
She turned fifty-three years old on August 26, a cold Sunday. Her coast guard colleague, Lieutenant Jones, came over with his wife, Gertrude, and Elizebeth Friedman, secret hunter of Nazis, cooked a dinner of minced clams in cheese sauce, a tossed French salad, and hot borscht that everyone agreed tasted wonderful in the cold evening. William spaced out his birthday presents to Elizebeth over four days, starting the previous Friday with a cable from Bletchley Park. ABSENCE ON YOUR BIRTHDAY DARLING SADDENS ME BUT HOPE FLORAL AMBASSADOR . . . WILL VOUCHSAFE UNDYING LOVE. On Saturday a mutual friend hand-delivered a box of perfume to her door. Sunday morning, a dozen roses came, along with one of his business cards. The front said only, MR WILLIAM F. FRIEDMAN, and on the back he had written, “I love you! I love you! I love you! Bill.” The next day, Monday, a letter arrived from William, written eight days earlier and timed to reach her right now. “I find it hard to tell you how much I miss you and love you—you’re the most wonderful person to have for wife, helpmate, lover, and all,” he wrote. “Save some special kisses for me when I get back. . . . I miss you.”
She realized how tricky it must have been to coordinate all these gifts and messages across the distances of the war, the disrupted postal and cable lines, and land them to her at the exact moment of his choosing, around her special day. The timing alone was a performance of devotion.
“Dearest,” Elizebeth wrote, “what a darling you are!”
He was ready to come home “very soon,” he told her in a letter from London three days after her birthday. He said he was already thinking about what would come next for him and for the family. He wanted to make the kind of money that would give them the freedom to travel and pursue their dreams. National security concerns had always prevented William from profiting from the cipher machines he invented, but the war was over now. Surely he would be permitted to patent his ideas and commercialize them? When he was finished describing these thoughts to Elizebeth he rotated the sheet of paper and filled the side margin: “I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU! VERY MUCH (I shall have that printed as a border on my special stationery to you.)”
Four days after that, on September 2, in Tokyo Bay, General Douglas MacArthur accepted the Japanese surrender aboard the battleship USS Missouri. Elizebeth heard Truman say on the radio, “It is our responsibility—ours, the living—to see to it that this victory shall be a monument worthy of the dead who died to win it.” She agreed that there was no point in having fought a war to preserve freedom if people used that freedom to start more wars. She wondered if William heard the same Truman broadcast. “You are the dearest and best husband any woman ever had!” she wrote on September 4. “Roses lasted until today. All, all my love, Elsbeth.”
Around September 12, in Prestwick, England, William finally boarded an army transport plane. He flew to the Azores, then Bermuda, then New York, each minute of the long flights an agony of anticipation. It was raining when he landed in New York and got on a train for Washington. The sky when he stepped out of Union Station was a slab of gray and the air was violent with fat drops that followed him to his office at Arlington Hall. Arlington Hall was like Bletchley Park had been, emptier than he ever remembered it, big empty rooms and echoing hallways and a handful of people carrying boxes around and packing up files. He could not concentrate on anything because he knew he would see Elizebeth soon. He waited out the day and it was still raining like crazy when he left the heavily guarded military facility and shoved his dripping luggage in a taxi and rode home, to the house at 3932 Military Road.
Elizebeth opened the door. She cried out in joy. His clothes were wet. His mustache was wet. She reached up and threw her arms around him and squeezed as hard as she could.
The months after V-J Day were a period of limbo for U.S. intelligence. All the agencies were thinking about how to extend the gains of the war and also justify their own existence in peacetime, when the government would surely contract. The future of cryptology was especially murky.
It was obvious to William and many others that there ought to be a centralized cryptologic function in America, one agency that gathered intelligence from wireless signals and broke the codes that must be broken. As an elder in the cryptologic community, a person who had not only invented many of its tools but also built a successful organization within the army to apply those tools, William was involved in these discussions at the highest levels—discussions that would give birth, in 1952, to the National Security Agency. In the meantime he entered a phase of furious personal documentation, writing technical descriptions of his cipher machines and applying for new patents in hopes of commercializing the inventions.
Elizebeth was documenting, too; not for commerce but rather for teaching and history. At the Naval Annex she sorted through the voluminous files of her coast guard unit, tens of thousands of intercepts, worksheets, memos, translations, and decrypts. Working with Lieutenant Jones and other colleagues, she produced a detailed technical account of their unit’s work between 1940 and 1945, a 329-page book that detailed all forty-eight of the Nazi clandestine radio circuits and how the coast guard broke the codes. The book was secret, meant only for other intelligence agencies to use as a reference and perhaps also for historians of codebreaking in the far future. Five copies were printed, with dark green covers, and every page of every copy was stamped TOP SECRET ULTRA.
With the technical history complete, Elizebeth was told to mark a percentage of the unit’s documents for preservation and destroy the rest. She decided to keep four thousand decrypts—the typed, solved messages from the forty-eight Nazi radio circuits. These she organized for transport to the classified areas of the National Archives in Washington. The phrase “government tombs” occurred to her. That’s what it felt like. She was burying her experiences in Uncle Sam’s mausoleum.
When the task was done, Elizebeth prepared to leave the Naval Annex for the last time. The navy forced her and all other departing workers to sign secrecy oaths that demanded their silence unto death. They could never tell anyone what they did in the war, under penalty of prosecution, for as long as they lived. They could not even tell their grandchildren.
At the end of her final workday, Elizebeth walked down the stairs from the second floor to the first, went out past the turnstile where the first marine guard stood watch, then past the second marine guard, to the other side of the barbed-wire fences, until she was standing on the sidewalk on Nebraska Avenue. She crossed the street, paused for a few seconds, and looked back at the grubby, flat-roofed building where she had spent her war. She knew in that moment that she would never again return “to that particular form of endeavor”—breaking codes for the coast guard. “I was back in the world-at-large once more,” she wrote later. “It was the end of a Period, an Era.”
She was still a coast guard employee, and soon Elizebeth found herself back at her old desk in her old prewar office in the Treasury Annex, near the White House. But she had an exit plan. She was only going to stay long enough to complete a single job. At the Naval Annex she had sorted and filed the records of her clandestine war against the Nazis. Now, at Treasury, she needed to do the same for her smuggling cases of the 1920s and ’30s. The smuggling records had been gathering dust during the war—“thrilling records in many respects, detective stories of high interest in many cases,” Elizebeth recalled. “The past had been rich in accomplishments. I should see that everything was prepared for posterity to comprehend, if posterity should ever choose to examine the archives.”
From the late fall of 1945 to summer 1946, Elizebeth conducted her last campaign for the United States: organizing and indexing the paper archive of her cat-and-mouse tussles with rum lords and drug gangs. Because the records were old and contained no national secrets, she was allowed to keep personal copies for her own library. Then, the task complete, she recommended to Treasury that the department abolish her coast guard unit, along with her job, on the grounds that it served no national purpose in peacetime. They obliged. On August 14, 1946, the coast guard notified her that, “In view of the curtailment of cryptanalytic activities previously performed by the U.S. Coast Guard, it has been necessary to effect a reduction in personnel,” and she was hereby terminated at the close of September 12, 1946. Her salary at the time, the most she ever earned, was $5,390, or $67,000 in today’s dollars.
J. Edgar Hoover used his influence to expand the FBI after the war. Elizebeth used it to get out of the game.
She had never really wanted to be a government employee anyway. It was only the constant requests from “people on my doorstep” that had gotten her into it in the first place. Now, with the war over, her thoughts turned to projects and desires she had put on hold to serve her country. She still wanted to finish her long-in-progress children’s book about the history of the alphabet. She wanted to visit Barbara at Radcliffe and see how John Ramsay was living at the Army Air Corps base in Biloxi, Mississippi. And she wanted to reconnect with William and find a way to collaborate with him. The Friedmans had lived for years in an awkward and isolating silence, working in separate but adjacent government bunkers, afraid to speak freely even in their own home. No more! Goodbye to that! They wanted to work together on something again, and they had the perfect idea.
Elizebeth and William had never lost their fascination with the varieties of occult theories they first encountered in their youth at Riverbank; they never stopped wondering why people believed things that weren’t true. The previous December, when the war was still on, they had attended a sold-out Washington show by the Amazing Dunninger, the foremost mentalist of the day. A New Yorker with a poof of brown hair and a tuxedo, Dunninger was both debunker and illusionist; he explained onstage how spirit mediums usually worked, showed that he was not using any of those tricks—and then read the minds of audience members anyway. William and twenty-five other intelligence men planted themselves here and there throughout the crowd at Constitution Hall in an attempt to learn his methods and “came away with theories as to how it’s done, but no proof,” Elizebeth wrote in a letter to her daughter. “The mere fact that Dunninger is still going strong is proof that human beings, the credulous dears, want to believe in the mysterious and supernatural.”
It had not escaped Elizebeth and William that many people continued to believe the theory that the two of them had rejected in their earliest days at Riverbank, way back in 1917: that Francis Bacon placed cipher messages in Shakespeare’s plays. The community of Bacon obsessives was still around, alive and kicking, publishing new articles and arguments. After Mrs. Gallup died in 1934, followed by George Fabyan in 1936, the Baconians lost two of their most famous and energetic proponents, but others picked up the torch. In 1938 the son of Teddy Roosevelt, Theodore Jr., asked the Friedmans for an opinion on a cipher system devised by an economist named Dr. Walter McCook Cunningham. Roosevelt Jr. was vice president of the Doubleday publishing firm and Dr. Cunningham had submitted a manuscript about his cipher. The method was based on anagrams, and the Friedmans quickly recognized it as bunk. To demonstrate the cipher’s folly, they applied Cunningham’s method to a page from Julius Caesar to produce the following message, which they sent to Roosevelt Jr.:
Dear Reader: Theodore Roosevelt is the true author of this play but I, Bacon, stole it from him and have the credit. Friedman can prove that this is so by this cock-eyed cypher invented by Doctor C.
The experience got them thinking that they should lay out their skeptical arguments in a book of their own, explaining once and for all why these ideas about secret messages in Shakespeare were only fantasies. The Friedmans obtained a pittance of a book deal from a British publisher (advance on royalties: 250 pounds) and went to work. For the sake of the project, they decided to sell their beloved house on Military Road and bought a spacious, high-ceilinged house on Capitol Hill within walking distance of two libraries where they needed to do research, the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Library of Congress. Many who live on Capitol Hill are lobbyists. The Friedmans moved there to be close to libraries.
They transported their own precious books and papers to the new house, reassembling their private library in the den of the second floor, and rehung the axe on the wall as a warning to potential book thieves. And together, researching and writing, they galloped back through the past, weighing the arguments of Baconians and cutting them to pieces. In their hands The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined became a story about the drug of self-delusion and the joy of truth. One section analyzed the cipher system of a French general that had revealed the secret phrase IF HE SHALL PUBLISH. The Friedmans showed that the cipher could just as easily have produced the text IN HER DAMP PUBES. George Fabyan received the full brunt of their scrutiny. The Friedmans wrote that while Fabyan possessed “great natural gifts of energy and dynamism,” he was a salesman, not a scientist, and suppressed facts he didn’t like. As for Mrs. Gallup, “a sincere and honourable woman, and no fraud,” she “found in her texts what she wanted to find” and “was therefore at the mercy of the promptings of her expectant mind.”
The Friedmans wrote with a ruthless honesty because that’s who they were as people. Still, working on the book made them realize how much they owed the misguided mentors of their youth. In the preface they thanked Mrs. Gallup, “whose work on the question of Shakespearean authorship aroused our life-long interest in the subject,” and they thanked Fabyan, too—for introducing them to Mrs. Gallup. They were genuinely grateful. Elizebeth said she and her husband had decided to “give the devil his due,” and in later years Elizebeth even went as far as admitting, “Vile creature that he was in many ways, George Fabyan really launched two or three things that were of vital importance to this country,” which was true. For all his malice and superstition, Fabyan threw enough money at actual scientists to accelerate the discovery of actual knowledge. He funded investigations of Nature with a fortune that other tycoons would have spent on yachts and jewels. He succeeded in creating the first real code-breaking institution in America, Riverbank Laboratories, an idea factory christened by wartime realities. It not only forged a new science of immense power; it also spawned a love affair that spread the science and ultimately sharpened it into an antifascist weapon. The modern-day universe of codes and ciphers began in a cottage on the prairie, with a pair of young lovers smiling at each other across a table and a rich man urging them to be spectacular.
Until she started researching the book in 1946, Elizebeth always insisted that her life in secret writing was an accident, a series of unpredictable chases, mazes, escapes, and detective capers. Now, viewing her life from a distance, she understands there might be order in it after all, a taut line stretching back through the decades and terminating at that mad place on the prairie.
To help herself write vividly about Riverbank, Elizebeth sits in the new house on Capitol Hill. She closes her eyes. She tries to imagine herself thirty years earlier, in the summer of 1916, a young woman at a rich man’s estate, unmarried and free, her whole life in front of her.
A fragrance of overripe banana wafts up. William’s fruit flies in the windmill.
The fire pit at night. The chemical reek of a mortar bursting near the ordnance lab. Fatty pork on her dinner plate from pigs slaughtered at Fabyan’s word.
Silver blade of river, dome of prairie sky.
She remembers riding bicycles with her friend William Friedman, rushing past lawns and flowers thickened with summer rain, a blur of green and pink. She remembers the low Illinois sun streaming through the windows of the Lodge as she works there with Mrs. Gallup, struggling to see what the older woman saw, squinting through a magnifying glass at a page of Shakespeare, trying and failing to free the imprisoned ghost of Francis Bacon.
Mrs. Gallup and Fabyan keep telling her, try harder. The messages are there.
And there comes a day when Elizebeth just thinks: no.
There is nothing wrong with me. What’s wrong is with other people.
This is the moment that hurls her out to the rest of her life. The savaging of Nazis, the birth of a science: It begins on the day when a twenty-three-year-old American woman decides to trust her doubt and dig with her own mind.
The room is dark but her pencil is sharp. An envelope of puzzles arrives from Washington, sent by men who have the largest of responsibilities and the tiniest of clues. With William she examines the puzzles. He is game, he looks at her with eyes like little bonfires, he is in love with her. She is not in love yet but she would not be ashamed to fall in love with such a bright and kind person. She stares at the odd blocks of text and starts to flip and stack and rearrange them on a scratch pad, a kindling of letters, a friction of alphabets hot to the touch, and then a flame catches and then catches again, until she understands that she can ignite whenever she wants, that a power is there for the taking, for her and for anyone, and nothing will ever be the same. The ribs of a pattern shine through. Something rises at the nib of her pencil and her heart whomps away. The skeletons of words leap out and make her jump.