Against these crime syndicates, Elizebeth Friedman—slender, sleepy-eyed, adventurous, dashing—became the government’s secret weapon. Her law enforcement career began in 1927 when the Coast Guard asked William Friedman to decipher the rumrunners’ messages. He was busy with his Army work, so they turned to her. This, as Elizebeth wryly put it, became a pattern: “If we can’t have William Friedman we will make use of his brains through his wife.” The Department of Justice made her a “special agent,” a flexible title that permitted her to work at home, where the Friedmans now had two children. When her workload increased and she felt obliged to move into an office, she hired a housekeeper and a nurse. Variously employed by the Justice and Treasury Departments, the Customs Bureau, the Coast Guard, and other agencies—responsibility for enforcing Prohibition bounced around—she broke the rumrunning messages, resulting in successful prosecutions in which she was called to testify as an expert witness in court. After Prohibition was repealed, she worked on other cases involving smuggling and organized crime, testifying against criminals dangerous enough that she sometimes needed government protection. Once when she was late getting home, William joked to their children that perhaps their mother had been “taken for a ride.” At the Coast Guard, she trained men and built an antismuggling cryptologic unit.
Needless to say, the spectacle of a lady law enforcement code breaker proved irresistible to the news media. In the 1930s Elizebeth Friedman attracted articles with headlines like KEY WOMAN OF THE T-MEN, LOCAL MATRON DECODES CRYPTIC MESSAGE FOR TREASURY DEPARTMENT, and THE WOMAN ALL SPIES IN U.S. FEAR. Elizebeth felt the coverage was “lurid” and resented it. She noted that one article called her a “pretty middle aged woman,” while another portrayed her as a “pretty young woman” in a frilly pink dress. Both depictions dismayed her. She also knew—after Yardley’s American Black Chamber debacle—the harm that can come when cryptanalytic achievements are revealed. The publicity made colleagues jealous and created unease in a small intelligence community already wary of public notice.
She also ran into sexist condescension. She sometimes gave her husband old Coast Guard intercepts to use for training his own Army cryptanalysts. For her pains, some of her husband’s trainees suspected William was secretly doing Elizebeth’s work. “Our impression—and I think it was a mistaken one—was that much of her success was a result of Mr. Friedman’s effort,” one of his trainees, Solomon Kullback, later admitted. “We thought… that Mr. Friedman really was responsible in working with her on a lot of these problems.” The newspapers, in contrast, liked to put it about that Elizebeth had trained William. But in fact—while they did play up their presence as Washington’s premier cryptologic team, and liked to send cryptographic Christmas cards and hold dinner parties in which guests had to solve a cipher to move to the next course—the two could not always discuss their real work with each other, because both were deciphering secret material for different branches of a growing federal bureaucracy whose agencies were distrustful and often at odds.
The U.S. Navy, meanwhile, was developing its own female secret weapon, as part of a code-breaking operation that, true to the prevailing climate, was kept jealously separate from the Army or any other rival entity. Upon America’s entry into World War I, the country had struggled to quickly enlarge its modest career Navy, and created a men’s naval reserve that permitted civilian men to serve during wartime, often as specialists with expertise in areas such as math or science. Even this influx wasn’t enough, however, and it occurred to Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels to wonder aloud whether there was any law “that says a yeoman must be a man.” Remarkably, there was not. Nowhere in the Naval Reserve Act of 1916 did it say that a naval yeoman had to be male.
Thanks to that loophole, American women were permitted to enlist in the naval reserves during World War I, and the designation “Yeoman (F)” was created. The move was controversial, even shocking, to the public, but many more women hastened to enlist than the Navy had expected. To the women’s disappointment, they were not allowed to serve on ships (nurses, who were in a different category, could do so) but mostly worked as clerks and stenographers, facilitating the towering stacks of paperwork that the naval bureaucracy generates—the original yeoman’s work. During the first global conflict of the twentieth century, eleven thousand American women served as Yeoman (F)—also called yeomanettes.
Among these was Agnes Meyer, a brilliant young teacher who would become one of the great cryptanalysts of all time. Born in 1889 in Illinois, Meyer attended Otterbein College, and then Ohio State University, where she studied mathematics, music, physics, and foreign languages. For what it’s worth, she was extremely beautiful, with long hair that she swept into a chignon, and an angular, chiseled face. She was heading up the Math Department at Amarillo High School, in Texas, when the United States declared war on Germany in 1917. Enlisting at age twenty-eight, one of the first women to do so, she quickly became a Chief Yeoman, the highest rating available to a woman. She started out as a stenographer but soon was assigned to the Navy’s postal and censorship office, reviewing U.S. telegrams and letters to make sure they didn’t contain security breaches. The Navy transferred her to its code and signal section at a time when the unit’s purpose was protecting naval communications—encoding America’s own messages. Like William Friedman, Agnes Meyer got her start making codes, which is the best possible training for learning how to break them.
After the Great War ended, Agnes Meyer was discharged along with the other reservists. (Congress, ungratefully, amended the reservist law to make sure it included the word “male.”) Her abilities were such that the Navy promptly hired her back as a civilian. As part of her duties, she was given the task of testing what were known as “nut jobs”: machines marketed by inventors offering so-called foolproof enciphering systems.