So were other agencies. As more and more messages began traveling by cable and radio, any number of government entities found themselves with communications they wanted to penetrate and puzzle out, as well as systems they needed to protect. Fabyan decided to make Riverbank the place where the U.S. government could outsource these cryptologic efforts. To their astonishment, William and Elizebeth—newly self-taught, both still in their twenties—found themselves running the shop. They proceeded to build a cipher department with as many as thirty employees, among them scientists and language majors, translators and stenographers. According to Elizebeth, the team began to perform “all code and cipher work for the government in Washington,” receiving intercepts from the Army, the Navy, the State Department, the Justice Department, the postal service, and others. The staff studied all manner of correspondence—one message Elizebeth worked hard on turned out to be a Czechoslovakian love letter—and produced a series of books called the Riverbank Publications.
Meanwhile countries such as France and England were far ahead in maintaining real cryptanalytic bureaus, descended from the black chambers, as Europe’s clandestine government code-breaking shops were called in their Renaissance heyday. It was in fact a message the British decoded—the Zimmermann telegram—that (along with Germany’s declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare) helped bring the United States into World War I. German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann sent an internal coded message to Germany’s minister to Mexico, instructing him to offer the president of Mexico the territories of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico if Mexico would ally with the German cause and invade its northern neighbor. The British broke the message in January 1917; the United States was appalled; America, as George Fabyan had foreseen, went to war.
Fabyan himself did not join the fighting, but he did enjoy the trappings of military life. At one point he had trenches dug on the Riverbank property, and—as America prepared an expeditionary force to be sent to the killing fields of France—he looked for ways to play a part. The U.S. military by now was beginning to declare some independence from its eccentric benefactor; when military intelligence officials asked Fabyan to move his cryptanalytic unit to D.C., he refused, and so the War Department began quietly to build its own small code-breaking bureau, bringing in none other than John Manly, the Chicago professor who had matched wits with Elizebeth, and Herbert O. Yardley, a former telegraph code clerk for the State Department. To retain his influence, Fabyan offered at his own expense to set up a training school at Riverbank, where military officers and others could take a crash course in code techniques. Before they departed for Europe, the trainees—seventy-one of them, plus William and Elizebeth and Fabyan and a few others—lined up for a panoramic photograph in front of the Aurora Hotel, where the trainees were staying. Each was told to look either to the side or straight ahead. They were creating a biliteral cipher spelling out “Knowledge is power,” one of Francis Bacon’s favorite phrases. Unfortunately they didn’t have quite enough people, so they could spell out only “Knowledge is powe.” There was also a typo in the sense that one man looked the wrong way.
Among those who visited Riverbank during this time was another female initiate: Genevieve Young Hitt, whose husband, an Army officer named Parker Hitt, had done pioneering cryptanalytic work decoding Mexican military and government communications that were picked up by American radio trucks operating on both sides of the border and sent to him at his post in Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Much like William Friedman, Parker Hitt had married an educated woman who shared his interests. Genevieve, the daughter of a doctor, had attended Saint Mary’s Hall School in Texas, where she studied English, botany, chemistry, and astronomy and was evaluated by her principal as having “ladylike deportment, and Christian character.” Her ladylike ways did not prevent her from helping her husband with his cryptanalytic eavesdropping. Genevieve also solved test problems for a manual that Parker authored, one of the first U.S. military cryptanalytic training handbooks, and mastered his “strip cipher” device, a means of lining up alphabets, which she demonstrated on her Riverbank visit.
When Parker Hitt left for Europe, Genevieve Hitt took over the code room at Fort Sam Houston in Texas. Her job entailed coding and decoding intelligence dispatches, maintaining control of codebooks, and breaking intercepted messages. Like Elizebeth Friedman, she found military brainwork to be refreshingly different from the idle and decorative life she had been brought up in. When she was sent to Washington to retrieve some secret material—requiring eight days round-trip on a train—she wrote to her mother-in-law that “at times I have to laugh. It is all so foreign to my training, to my family’s old fashioned notions about what and where a woman’s place in this world is, etc., yet none of these things seem to shock the family now. I suppose it is the War. I am afraid I will never be contented to sit down with out something to do, even when this war is over and we are all home again.”
She noted with a bit of gloating, “Well, I got what I went after, and then some—and I can’t help feeling a little puffed up about it,” and continued by reflecting, “This is a man’s size job, but I seem to be getting away with it, and I am going to see it through.”
Parker Hitt, hearing about her work, wrote to congratulate her. “I am rather expecting to find you commanding Fort Sam Houston on my return… Good work, old girl!”
Like William Friedman, Parker Hitt was a champion of women and a believer in women’s intellectual abilities as well as their bedrock stamina. In Europe, Parker Hitt was charged with overseeing battlefield communications for the Army’s Signal Corps. The Americans, British, and French strung phone lines around Europe and needed telephone operators to connect the calls. Switchboard operation was women’s work, and male soldiers refused to do it. French operators were not as adept as American ones, so the Signal Corps recruited U.S. switchboard operators who were bilingual in English and French and loaded them into ships bound for Europe. Known as the “Hello Girls,” these were the first American women other than nurses to be sent by the U.S. military into harm’s way. The officers whose calls they connected often prefaced their conversations by saying, “Thank Heaven you’re here!” Parker Hitt pushed for the Hello Girls to be allowed to prove their competence and courage. They did so, remaining at their posts even when ordered to evacuate during bombing in Paris, and moving to the front lines, where they worked the switchboards during explosions and fires.