Spying on spies, p.1
Spying on Spies, page 1
Elizebeth on her way to testify in federal court, 1934 (George C. Marshall Foundation)
The illustrations in this book were made with pen, ink, and watercolor wash.
Library of Congress Control Number 2023021301
ISBN 978-1-4197-6731-9
eISBN 978-1-64700-978-6
Text and illustrations © 2024 Marissa Moss
Edited by Howard W. Reeves
Book design by Heather Kelly
Published in 2024 by Abrams Books for Young Readers, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
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TO THE TRULY BRILLIANT
LISA KABORYCHA,
BECAUSE KNOWLEDGE IS POWER
CONTENTS
1 THE MOST FAMOUS CODE-BREAKER IN THE WORLD
2 A RESTLESS QUESTION MARK
3 THE WORLD OF RIVERBANK
4 THE CIPHER SCHOOL
5 REAL CODE-BREAKERS
6 A ROMANCE IN CODE
7 WHO CAN YOU TRUST?
8 ESCAPE FROM RIVERBANK
9 A SPECIAL AGENT
10 CODES AT HOME
11 THE KEY WOMAN OF THE T-MEN
12 CATCHING CRIMINALS
13 WAR AGAIN?
14 ENIGMA, THE IMPOSSIBLE MACHINE
15 THE UNITED STATES—AND ELIZEBETH—IN THE WAR
16 THE SOUTH AMERICAN ENIGMA
17 UNIT 387
18 AVOIDING THE FBI
19 CRACKING ENIGMA
20 WHEN TO ACT ON INTELLIGENCE
21 LISTENING TO THE GESTAPO
22 THE DOLL LADY
23 THE LAST SPIES
24 A LIBRARY OF CODES
25 ONE FINAL CODE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
WHAT ARE CODES? WHAT ARE CIPHERS?
GLOSSARY
TIMELINE
NOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX OF SEARCHABLE TERMS
Elizebeth may have looked like your average housewife of the time, but in 1934 she was the most famous codebreaker in the world, written up with splashy headlines in magazines and newspapers. A radio reporter at NBC gushed in May that year, “I’ll confess, Mrs. Friedman, I was thunderstruck the other day when I met you for the first time. I simply wasn’t prepared to find a petite, vivacious young matron bearing the formidable title of cryptanalyst for the US Coast Guard. How did you ever get interested in the highly technical science of codes and crypts?”
Crypts? Elizebeth thought. Like where you bury people? She knew the reporter meant “decrypting.” But she didn’t bother to correct the effusive interviewer. She tried to stay calm and professional, as always.
“I never thought of my job as terribly unusual until the newspapers stumbled upon what I do for the government.” She wished they had never found out. Testifying in high-profile criminal cases had suddenly made her a major public figure. Which was exactly what someone who spied on people didn’t want. Elizebeth worked every day with important secrets. She wanted to be a secret herself, but the press wouldn’t leave her alone.
Elizebeth took the telegram that had just been delivered and wrote on the bottom of it, “Ad absurdum!” Each question was more ridiculous than the last. She wasn’t going to waste her time answering any of them. Instead, she filed away the request in her growing library of codes and ciphers.
Barbara hadn’t expected her mother to answer the telegram. She knew how irritating all this attention was for her. It was more than annoying to Barbara, though. It was scary. Even Elizebeth admitted that “after those smugglers got out of prison, some of them were in very, very mean moods.”
Eleven-year-old Barbara knew her mother’s work was important. But Elizebeth was often gone, testifying in one major trial after another, facing down vicious mobsters—the kind of mobsters who killed witnesses to keep their mouths shut. Barbara didn’t want her mother to be found at the bottom of a river one day.
Even when Elizebeth was home, she spent long hours at her office, often working so late on the many, many messages she needed to decode that her kids didn’t see her—or their dad, who had a similar job—for dinner. A nearby restaurant would deliver the meal to them instead. Barbara and her younger brother, John, would eat by themselves. They were used to it.
Elizebeth could see the worry on her daughter’s face. “It’s OK,” she reassured her. “I’m doing exactly what I was meant to do. And you know how hard it was for me to get here.”
Barbara did know. Elizebeth had often told her the story of how all this had started. It wasn’t a story she shared with reporters, however. It was the story of how a “petite, vivacious” young woman got started in code-breaking. It happened almost twenty years ago, in Chicago of all places, the home of some of the most violent criminals Elizebeth now faced, including the notorious mobster Al Capone.
Elizebeth Smith had been a stubborn little girl. She was the youngest child of ten in a Quaker family, living in the Indiana countryside. Her father was a dairy farmer. By the time she came along, most of her siblings were out of the house, starting their own lives. Elizebeth felt like nobody expected anything of her, the last one left at home. But she wanted more than being a wife and a mother, the roles most women played in the early 1900s. She felt like a “restless mental question mark,” eager for a challenge.
She wanted to broaden her world, to ask a million questions and find some answers. That meant going to college. It was a strange ambition in her family. Only one sister had bothered to study. Her father thought his children should be practical. How did college help farmers, after all?
When her father refused to pay for college tuition, Elizebeth talked him into lending her the money at a steep interest rate of 6 percent. She took in sewing in her dorm room to pay for her expenses. All the scrimping and saving was worth it, though. Her classes opened her mind, introducing her to philosophy, literature, history, and languages. Elizebeth carried her journal with her everywhere, writing down things she noticed, ideas that struck her. She felt like she was getting closer to the answers, to the truth. But she had so many more questions!
She noticed how people used “polite” language to hide the truth. Rather than calling a man “drunk,” they would say he was “indisposed.” Someone hadn’t “died”; they had “passed away.” Elizebeth hated this use of flowery language to cloak reality. She thought it was hypocritical. As she wrote in her journal, using such “pretty” words only meant “we glide over the offensiveness of names and calm down our consciences.” Elizebeth didn’t want to soothe her mind. She wanted to look at the world with critical sharpness. She wanted the bare truth, even if it was ugly, even if it hurt. Maybe especially if it hurt—that made it more interesting!
Elizebeth didn’t know it then, but this attitude would turn out to be a big help when she finally found the work she was meant to do. After graduating from college, though, Elizebeth felt like nothing about her was valued. A degree in English in 1915 certainly didn’t open any doors for her. Jobs for women were tough to get and mostly meant teaching or nursing. Elizebeth had imagined using language, her knowledge of literature, in some kind of skillful way, but the only work she could find was as a substitute principal at her hometown high school. After a miserable year, Elizebeth quit and left for Chicago, where a college friend lived. She thought she would have more luck finding an interesting job in a big, bustling city.
But day after day after day, nobody would hire her. Women were supposed to get married and raise a family. Period. Elizebeth had other ideas. “I am never quite so gleeful as when I am doing something labeled as an ‘ought not.’ Why is it? Am I abnormal? Why should something with a risk in it give me an exuberant feeling inside me? I don’t know what it is unless it is that characteristic which makes so many people remark that I should have been born a man.”
Elizebeth kept knocking on doors, applying for jobs. But at every office she walked into, she was quickly turned away. After days of doors slamming shut on her, she was ready to do the unthinkable. Ready to give up, to go home to her parents and admit she had been wrong to even try for a different life. But before leaving the big city, she decided to give herself one last treat.
Chicago offered a lot of culture, and Elizebeth headed to the Newberry Library, a beautiful building with an entrance like a medieval cathedral. The first thing she noticed was a sign about the collection’s rare edition of William Shakespeare’s plays. For her, that was like discovering a treasure right next door when she had thought such a thing couldn’t be “any nearer to me than the moon.”
She headed to where the First Folio was on display, a magnificently large book, printed only seven years after Shakespeare’s death. Seeing it filled her with awe, like the feeling “that an archaeologist would have, when he suddenly realized after years of digging that he was inside the tomb of a great pharaoh.”
A librarian noticed her quiet intensity,
standing so still in front of the book. She asked Elizebeth about her interest in Shakespeare. Elizebeth explained that she had come to the city to find a job, hoping to use her knowledge of English literature for some kind of research. The librarian knew of just the thing! George Fabyan, a wealthy Chicago businessman, often came to admire the First Folio. He thought the book contained secret messages proving that the plays had really been written by Sir Francis Bacon, not by William Shakespeare at all. He’d been looking for an assistant to help crack the code.
Elizebeth had read about the theories questioning the true authorship of Shakespeare’s work. She thought they were ridiculous, completely without evidence. But any job was better than going back home a failure.
The librarian rushed off to call Mr. Fabyan. And before Elizebeth had time to think about it, the man himself was there, towering over her. Fabyan was a bear of a man, tall and broad with a thick beard and mustache. He spoke with authority, a wealthy man who was used to being obeyed. “He wasted no time,” Elizebeth wrote in her memoir. “He didn’t wish to talk to me at the library but at once invited me to his estate . . . and [to] spend the night.” Elizebeth was shocked by the offer. She was a single woman and the two had just met, “but he was the kind of man who did not take no for an answer.” And she was the kind of woman who liked to take risks.
Still, she objected that she didn’t have a toothbrush with her, much less a change of clothes. Fabyan assured her that all “necessaries” would be provided. He whisked her off in his limousine. The car would take them to the Chicago train station. Another car would pick them up at the station in Geneva, Illinois, and take them to Riverbank, a large estate complete with laboratories, houses, stables, gardens, a swimming pool, a zoo, even a Dutch windmill that had been taken apart in the Netherlands and rebuilt, piece by piece, in its new home. It was a small village, dedicated to research on a variety of projects. Fabyan explained that he used his vast fortune to explore the unanswered. The Baconian cipher was one of many eccentric obsessions.
Once aboard the train, Elizebeth wondered what she was doing. All the time in the car, she hadn’t said a word, while Fabyan had kept up a steady stream of words. She didn’t even know the terms of the job being offered. Yet here she was, sitting across from a very large man with an even larger personality. She realized that she “probably appeared a demure little nobody to him.”
He leaned toward her, jabbing his nose within inches of her own. “Well,” he bellowed, “WHAT DO YOU KNOW?”
Elizebeth leaned back as far as she could. Something hard and fierce sparked in her. It was how she had always coped with bullies. She gave Fabyan a sideways look as she answered with steely quiet, “That remains, sir, for you to find out.”
Fabyan sat back and roared with laughter, utterly charmed. He wanted someone whip-smart and determined for the job. Elizebeth was exactly the right person.
The Riverbank Cipher School was intent on proving that Bacon was the real author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare. Fabyan was convinced that the woman leading the work, Elizabeth Wells Gallup, was absolutely right, but she needed help.
At dinner there that first night, Elizebeth met the other “researchers.” One young man stood out as the only person close to her own age. William Friedman was neatly dressed in a suit with a bow tie. He sat next to Elizebeth and explained his work on genetics, doing different experiments to improve crop growth.
Elizabeth Wells Gallup was also formally dressed. Elizebeth called her a fine lady, a “real aristocrat.” Gallup was a former English teacher and was certain that William Shakespeare was not the real author of all the plays and poems he said he’d written. She had presented her “proof” to visiting professors but hadn’t been able to convince them. She needed Elizebeth’s help to show more clearly exactly how the Baconian cipher worked in all of the so-called Shakespearean manuscripts. The code was clear proof: hidden statements by Bacon of his authorship.
Elizebeth thought Gallup was lovely, and she was relieved to have a job, a place to live. But the more she worked on the supposed code, the more she got the sinking feeling that Gallup was absolutely wrong. Instead of proving anything, Gallup was seeing exactly what she wanted to see, finding secret messages that weren’t really there.
Elizebeth kept working, though, teaching herself how to analyze and solve codes and ciphers, honing her instincts and noticing patterns. Gallup was no help, but she found a new partner in William, the young man she’d met that first night at dinner. Fabyan asked the young scientist to help with the Baconian cipher project, as well, using his photography skills to enlarge the pages so that looking at the details of the texts would be easier. William, who, like Elizebeth, had no coding background, saw the same problem she did—that there was actually no code at all.
As the two youngest people at Riverbank, Elizebeth and William not only worked together, they spent their free time together. The estate provided bicycles, and they rode all over the three-hundred-acre property, enjoying the strange projects Fabyan funded. There was a giant tuning fork that turned out to be useful for the US military for some top secret reason. Another lab developed a soundproofing material that was used on at least one auditorium’s walls. There was no common thread between all the labs. Fabyan had wide interests, from science to literature and history. Most of the projects didn’t turn into anything useful, but Fabyan supported them all wholeheartedly. And for some reason, the work on the Baconian cipher project was especially important to him.
Elizebeth just wished it mattered more to her. It all seemed like a silly hoax. With William’s support, she decided to focus on real codes and ciphers. She justified this work to Gallup by saying that if she figured out how to crack them, she could bring this knowledge to the Bacon work. What she really hoped was that once she had evidence of what real codes looked like and how they worked, she could convince Gallup there was no actual code hidden in the texts.
Like Elizebeth, William had a sharp, logical mind. Like her, he wanted the truth, no matter what it was. Working with ciphers meant looking for patterns, recognizing the most common letters and letter formations, knowing which words would most likely be used for writing about a particular subject. Both Elizebeth and William had the attention to detail, the focus, and the sheer instinct necessary for solving codes and ciphers. They had also read an enormous amount. Being steeped in language made it easy for them to look at a pattern such as B_G D_G S_ _ _S _TI _ _ and fill in the missing letters: “Big dog sits still.”
Supposedly, the Baconian cipher used letter forms to hide meaning. Some letters had serifs, others didn’t, and according to Gallup, that was how meaning was hidden in the text. Serif letters are those with little decorative lines sticking out. This font is serif. Sans serif letters are cleaner, with no extra lines. This font is sans serif. In the Baconian cipher, a serif letter would be replaced with “b,” a sans serif with “a.” These sequences of “aaaa” or “aaba” or “aaab” all stood for different letters in the alphabet, which would spell out a secret message. At least Gallup was convinced it did. The message she was finding over and over again was Bacon’s claim to be the real author of the plays.
Elizebeth didn’t see it quite so neatly. First of all, it wasn’t always clear if a letter was serif or sans serif. How can you tell with the letter O, for example? Even more confusing, the printers of the folios used a range of typefaces or fonts, not just two. So interpretation became subjective rather than logical, a no-no for code-breaking. Gallup made the code work for her by interpreting letters in ways that fit her ideas of what she wanted the secret messages to be—the opposite of how code-breaking should work.
Elizebeth and William knew they had to work with the actual text in front of them, not the meaning they wanted to find. The bare truth, as Elizebeth put it, was what really mattered. But Gallup—and Fabyan—refused to listen to them. Even when Elizebeth presented strong arguments disproving any code, Fabyan insisted she was wrong. As Elizebeth said in a later interview, he “wasn’t really sincere about the disproving because when anybody tried to convince him that he was wrong, he managed to get around them.” He was so vocal about Bacon’s true authorship that a Hollywood producer sued him in 1916, arguing that Fabyan’s loose talk smeared the producer’s planned movies based on Shakespeare’s plays.
