Elizebeth Friedman also wanted to serve her country. In 1917 she wrote the Navy asking to work in intelligence, but Fabyan, unbeknownst to the Friedmans, opened their mail and censored any letters that might weaken his grip on his star code-breaking team. For quite some time he also prevented the Army from contacting William, though eventually the U.S. Army managed to commission William as a first lieutenant. In May 1918, William, too, was sent to France, where he performed valuable service, developing codes for front-line use. He also studied German codes and began to immerse himself in the European tradition of cryptography, which is the term for code making, and cryptanalysis, the term he coined for code breaking. (The word “cryptology” embraces both.)
After the armistice, William Friedman had become one of the few people in the country who understood how to disguise military communications, something the United States knew it needed to get better at. The Army endeavored to hire both Friedmans, offering William a salary of $3,000 and Elizebeth a position at half that, $1,520. The Friedmans were eager to extricate themselves from Fabyan, whom Elizebeth regarded as a “vile creature.” They accepted six-month contracts and in early 1921 gladly moved to Washington, where they attended the theater several times a week, found a house in the suburbs they loved, enjoyed the milder mid-Atlantic weather—a welcome change from Illinois—and worked on strengthening the Army’s signaling systems. William Friedman was hired full-time and would stay with the Army Signal Corps for more than thirty years.
The interwar period was not an auspicious time for American code breaking, however. While other countries continued to run black chambers—during World War I, England’s Royal Navy had a secret operation called Room 40, which later merged with Army intelligence and became the Government Code and Cypher School—U.S. military intelligence maintained only a tiny “cipher bureau,” funded jointly by the War and State Departments. The operation was run by Herbert O. Yardley, the former telegraph clerk, who taught himself cryptanalysis and in 1919, at age thirty, set up shop in New York. He called it the Code Compiling Company and ran it out of a house at 141 East Thirty-Seventh Street. Yardley’s employees were mostly women—foreign-language teachers plucked from the New York City public school system—who often were escorted to their job interviews by nervous parents wondering what their daughters would be doing, exactly, in an unmarked midtown brownstone.
Yardley was a genial and charismatic man of irregular habits who drank often, slept late, worked in his undershirt, and had an affair with an employee whom he later married. But he was effective. His triumph came when he broke a diplomatic code that gave the United States access to the Japanese negotiating position during the 1921–1922 Washington naval conference. During this uneasy interwar period, major governments were negotiating how much naval tonnage certain countries would be accorded. Yardley ascertained that the Japanese would accept less tonnage than they were publicly holding out for, a major intelligence coup and one the United States and Great Britain took advantage of. But when Herbert Hoover was elected U.S. president in 1928, Henry Stimson—Hoover’s new secretary of state—was shocked to learn that Yardley’s bureau was penetrating the private diplomatic missives of other countries. Stimson in 1929 shuttered the operation, cutting off State Department funding and primly explaining that gentlemen do not read one another’s mail—something European gentlemen did all the time, of course, and had been doing for hundreds of years.
Yardley, outraged and out of a job, in 1931 published a tell-all called The American Black Chamber, which became a bestseller in the United States and Japan. The U.S. Army managed to retain a shoestring code-breaking operation by moving the outfit to Washington, keeping mum about it, and putting William Friedman in charge. Already engaged in making codes for the Army, Friedman would now break them as well, heading up a unit called the Signal Intelligence Service. He inherited Yardley’s files as well as a fierce contempt for his predecessor, never losing an opportunity to disparage Yardley in an official memo or history and ridicule his code-breaking abilities.
Elizebeth Friedman, having given birth to their first child, thought she now might stay home and peacefully write a book for children on the origin of the alphabet. But there were so few people who could do what she could—and so many entities who needed her skills—that this plan did not last. In 1924, Edward Beale McLean, publisher of the Washington Post, engaged the Friedmans to develop a code for his private use. They accepted with the idea that William would direct and Elizebeth, typical of wives of the time, would do most of the day-to-day work. It promised to be a cozy project involving joint work by the fireplace in the evenings; the problem came when McLean proved reluctant to pay. They abandoned the project, as Elizebeth put it, “weary of very wealthy men and their dealings in money matters.”
If Elizebeth seemed consigned to second fiddle, she soon found herself carving out a niche far more high-profile than that of her husband. The Great War was over, but a new war was beginning: the war against alcohol and the criminals who sold it to a thirsty public. In 1919, the Anti-Saloon League succeeded in pushing through the Eighteenth Amendment. Prohibition outlawed the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcohol, but—importantly—did not outlaw its consumption. This meant American citizens could drink alcohol if they could find a way to get it. This loophole created a tempting criminal opportunity. Foreign distillers partnered with American gangsters to ship contraband alcohol to U.S. shores. Elaborate maritime operations evolved, in which a ship carrying a big cargo of alcohol would station itself in international waters, out of reach of American law enforcement, and use coded radio messages to communicate with smaller boats, which would douse their lights and dart out to collect a shipment. It was called rumrunning, and it was a wildly profitable endeavor, lucrative on the level of modern-day drug cartels. Criminals, by the way, are another constituency that very much like to use codes.