All of these qualities were characteristic of Elizebeth Smith: This description of Elizebeth Friedman’s life and background is drawn primarily from “Elizebeth Friedman Autobiography at Riverbank Laboratories, Geneva, Illinois” in the National Cryptologic Museum Library’s David Kahn Collection, DK 9-6, in Fort Meade, MD; “Elizebeth Smith Friedman Memoirs—Complete,” at the George C. Marshall Foundation, in Lexington, VA, in the Elizebeth Smith Friedman Collection, http://marshallfoundation.org/library/digital-archive/elizebeth-smith-friedman-memoir-complete; “Interview with Mrs. William F. Friedman conducted by Dr. Forrest C. Pogue at the Marshall Research Library, Lexington, Virginia, May 16–17, 1973,” http://marshallfoundation.org/library/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2015/06/Friedman_Mrs-William_144.pdf; and oral history interviews with Elizebeth Friedman on November 11, 1976, NSA-OH-1976-16, NSA-OH-1976-17, and NSA-OH-1976-18.
Bacon, an English statesman and philosopher: An excellent description of Bacon, the biliteral cipher, Riverbank, and the photo are in William H. Sherman, “How to Make Anything Signify Anything,” Cabinet, no. 40 (Winter 2010–2011), www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/40/sherman.php. My discussion is also indebted to a talk William Sherman gave at the George C. Marshall Foundation, “From the Cipher Disk to the Enigma Machine: 500 Years of Cryptography” (George C. Marshall Legacy Series sequence on Codebreaking, Lexington, VA, April 23, 2015), and an exhibit he curated at the Folger Shakespeare Library titled Decoding the Renaissance: 500 Years of Codes and Ciphers (Washington, DC, November 11, 2014, to February 26, 2015).
Toward that end, Fabyan also had hired: Many sources and biographies of William Friedman have been consulted. In addition to the Elizebeth Friedman memoirs cited in the first note to this chapter, some of the most useful are Rose Mary Sheldon’s “The Friedman Collection: An Analytical Guide” to the George C. Marshall Foundation’s extensive William F. Friedman collection, http://marshallfoundation.org/library/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2014/09/Friedman_Collection_Guide_September_2014.pdf; the foundation’s brief introduction to its series on code breaking, “Marshall Legacy Series: Codebreaking,” George C. Marshall Foundation, http://marshallfoundation.org/newsroom/marshall-legacy-series/codebreaking/; and The Friedman Legacy: A Tribute to William and Elizebeth Friedman (Washington, DC: Center for Cryptologic History, National Security Agency, 2006), https://www.nsa.gov/resources/everyone/digital-media-center/video-audio/historical-audio/friedman-legacy/assets/files/friedman-legacy-transcript.pdf.
Codes have been around for as long as civilization, maybe longer: William Friedman discusses the history of codes and ciphers in Friedman Legacy. Also see David Kahn, The Codebreakers (New York: Scribner, 1967); and Stephen Budiansky, Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II (New York: Free Press, 2000), 62–68.
Armchair philosophers amused themselves pursuing the “perfect cipher”: Robert Edward Lewand, “The Perfect Cipher,” Mathematical Gazette 94, no. 531 (November 2010): 401–411, points out that the Vigenère square, invented in 1586, enjoyed a “good long run” as the le chiffre indéchiffrable in that no attacker could divine the keyword, until it was solved almost three hundred years later by two “Victorian polymaths,” the English mathematician Charles Babbage and a Prussian Army officer, Friedrich Wilhelm Kasiski, within about ten years of each other.
During the American Civil War: A good discussion of Civil War cryptography is in RG 0457, 9032 (A1), Box 1019, “Notes on History of Signal Intelligence Service.”
Among those who visited Riverbank during this time: Betsy Rohaly Smoot, “An Accidental Cryptologist: The Brief Career of Genevieve Young Hitt,” Cryptologia 35, no. 2 (2011): 164–175, DOI: 10.1080/01611194.2011.558982.
Known as the “Hello Girls,” these were the first American women: Jill Frahm, “Advance to the ‘Fighting Lines’: The Changing Role of Women Telephone Operators in France During the First World War,” Federal History Journal, no. 8 (2016): 95–108.
The interwar period was not an auspicious time for American code breaking: RG 38, Box 109, “Resume of Development of American COMINT Organization, 15 Jan 1943.”
Yardley was a genial and charismatic man: Frank Rowlett, oral history interview in 1976, NSA-OH-1976-1-10, 87–89. That his employees were mostly women is in RG 0457, 9032 (A1), Box 1019, “Notes on History of Signal Intelligence Service,” 44.
Stimson in 1929 shuttered the operation: This comment has been cited far and wide, including in David Kahn, “Why Weren’t We Warned?” MHQ: Quarterly Journal of Military History 4, no. 1 (Autumn 1991): 50–59, and Friedman Legacy, 200.
“Our impression—and I think it was a mistaken one—was that”: Solomon Kullback, oral history interview on August 26, 1982, NSA-OH-17-82, 9–11.
Even this influx wasn’t enough, however, and it occurred: Susan M. Lujan, “Agnes Meyer Driscoll,” NCVA Cryptolog, special issue (August 1988): 4–6.
Born in 1889 in Illinois, Meyer attended Otterbein College: Kevin Wade Johnson, The Neglected Giant: Agnes Meyer Driscoll (Washington, DC: Center for Cryptologic History, National Security Agency, 2015), https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic-heritage/historical-figures-publications/publications/assets/files/the-neglected-giant/the_neglected_giant_agnes_meyer_driscoll.pdf.
In the War Department’s “general address and signature” code: RG 0457, 9002 (A1), Box 91, SRH 344, “General Address and Signature Code No. 2.”
She hacked the nut jobs, broke enemy devices and machines that inventors: Colin Burke, “Agnes Meyer Driscoll vs the Enigma and the Bombe,” monograph, http://userpages.umbc.edu/~burke/driscoll1-2011.pdf.
Impressed, Hebern lured Agnes away to help him develop a better one: That Agnes was dissatisfied with her advancement prospects is suggested in Johnson, Neglected Giant, 9.
“Friedman was always two, three [pay] grades ahead of her”: Captain Thomas Dyer’s pay grade comment quoted in Johnson, Neglected Giant, 21. That Dyer felt she was “fully his equal” is in Steven E. Maffeo, U.S. Navy Codebreakers, Linguists, and Intelligence Officers Against Japan, 1910–1941 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 68.
In 1920 George Fabyan wrote a complimentary letter: RG 38, Box 93, “COMNAVSECGRU Letters Between Col Fabyan of Riverbank Laboratories and US Navy Oct 1918–Feb 1932.”
In her own civilian post, Agnes would go on to train: Edwin T. Layton, Roger Pineau, and John Costello, And I Was There: Pearl Harbor and Midway—Breaking the Secrets (New York: Morrow, 1985), 33.
Japan had defeated Russia in 1905 and it clearly wanted: David Kahn, “Pearl Harbor and the Inadequacy of Cryptanalysis,” Cryptologia 15, no. 4 (1991): 275, DOI: 10.1080/0161-119191865948.
By then, a “research desk” had been set up: Kahn, “Why Weren’t We Warned?” 51.
She cursed like a—well, like a sailor: Layton et al., And I Was There, 58.
The tiny Navy team—Driscoll, one or two officers: Elliot Carlson, Joe Rochefort’s War: The Odyssey of the Codebreaker Who Outwitted Yamamoto at Midway (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2011), 40.
“The reason you’re not getting anywhere”: Layton et al., And I Was There, 46.
“Mrs. Driscoll got the first break”: Robert J. Hanyok, “Still Desperately Seeking ‘Miss Agnes’: A Pioneer Cryptologist’s Life Remains an Enigma,” NCVA Cryptolog (Fall 1997): 3.
Her success “was the most difficult cryptanalytic task ever performed up to that date”: RG 0457, 9002 (A1), Box 36, SRH 149, “A Brief History of Communications Intelligence in the United States,” by Laurance F. Safford, 11.