On an upper floor, occupying the back of one wing of the Munitions Building, a handful of rooms had been allocated to the U.S. Army’s code-breaking operations, which had grown considerably in the past year but were still modest enough to be contained in such a small space. One room held a bank of office machines used for tasks like sorting and collating; others held locked file cabinets with intercepted messages. In most of the others, people sat quietly at tables, heads down, sometimes smoking or drinking coffee, working with pencils on lined or crosshatched paper. Apart from the machines, the offices consisted of the usual government-issue assortment of scuffed desks, battered cabinets, and rotary phones. Somewhat by chance, the U.S. Navy’s code-breaking force was located in an adjacent wing. While capable of cooperation, the rival code-breaking units were still marked by infighting, paranoia, and personality clashes. Unlike the Navy’s code breakers, the Army team was mostly civilian, a hodgepodge of mathematicians, ex-schoolteachers, linguists, and clerical workers. While the Navy tackled Japanese naval ciphers, the Army code breakers were attempting to penetrate systems used by military and diplomatic officials in Italy, Germany, Japan, and Mexico.
It was clear enough that sooner or later the United States would formally enter what was shaping up to be a second world war, and on this Friday afternoon, in the heat of late summer, the atmosphere in the rooms was thick with urgency.
At the center of the Army’s operation was William Friedman. Originally hired to ensure that the U.S. Army developed codes that were more sophisticated and secure than wigwag, Friedman had learned to break codes better than almost anybody in the world. He had hired most of the people in this office. The people laboring at the tables revered him. Friedman’s Army superiors sometimes called him Bill, but the people who worked for him always called him Mr. Friedman. Sometimes in private they called him “Uncle Willie,” but none would have dared to do so in his presence. He was sensitive, easily offended. Meticulous in his work habits, he was good about entrusting important jobs to capable others but did not give compliments easily. An excellent tennis player and ballroom dancer, he had a thin mustache and liked to wear a bow tie and two-tone shoes, and he was fanatic about precision; he hated it when people used “repeat” as a noun and insisted they say “repetition.”
Friedman, now in his late forties, was a legend among the still-small global community of people involved in the making and breaking of codes and ciphers. After leaving Riverbank he had assembled one of the few known libraries on the topic. The literature included Cours de Cryptographie by General Marcel Givierge of France; Manuale di Crittografia by General Luigi Sacco of Italy; and Elements of Cryptography by a French captain, Roger Baudouin, that had been smuggled out of France just before Paris fell. Friedman had written many of the most important treatises himself—top secret monographs including Elements of Cryptanalysis, The Principles of Indirect Symmetry of Position in Secondary Alphabets and Their Application in the Solution of Polyalphabetic Substitution Ciphers, and his masterwork: The Index of Coincidence and Its Applications in Cryptanalysis. He also had written training manuals that were treated as kinds of bibles.
Over the course of a decade Friedman had assembled a tiny band of acolytes. In 1930, shortly after the abrupt closure of Herbert Yardley’s office, his bosses had given him funds to hire three young mathematicians: Frank Rowlett, a southerner who was teaching in Rocky Mount, Virginia, best known for its production of moonshine; and Abraham Sinkov and Solomon Kullback, friends who had attended high school and City College of New York together. Friedman wanted his staff to be young, because he knew it would take them years to master their discipline. Together with John Hurt, a Virginian who knew Japanese and could translate deciphered Japanese messages into English, the men had spent nearly a decade studying Friedman’s methods of “attacking” codes and ciphers. Funding was never abundant, and in the worst of the Depression, they sometimes had to supply their own penny pencils and bring in scrap paper from home.
As the staff expanded, Friedman had done something else: He had begun hiring women. There were several reasons for his willingness to do so. One was plain availability. In the 1930s—well before the war started—Roosevelt’s New Deal had begun drawing women workers to Washington, where the expanding federal government proved more of an equal opportunity employer than the private sector. Discrimination existed in government hiring, to be sure, but for a woman, the advantage of applying for a federal job was that it entailed taking a standard civil service examination. Women took the same exam men did. Federal agencies were given access to test scores and made job offers accordingly. The 1920 census found that nearly 40 percent of employed people in Washington were female.
Equally important was that William Friedman was the sort of man who liked working with intelligent women, as evidenced by his own marriage to Elizebeth, now employed at the Coast Guard as both a code breaker and what might today be called a communications security consultant. At the moment, the Coast Guard’s mission was enforcing “neutrality,” which meant that Elizebeth’s unit was deluged with message traffic from all sorts of ships plying the Atlantic. A valuable utility player for other agencies as well, Elizebeth also designed the code-making unit for the Coordinator of Information—the nation’s new spy service—soon to be renamed the Office of Strategic Services.
Elizebeth’s example was even more valuable to her husband than William Friedman knew. In October 1939, following the outbreak of war in Europe, the Army had given him the funds to further enlarge his cryptanalytic staff. One of these early hires was a woman named Wilma Berryman, who had been attracted to the field thanks to Elizebeth’s renown. Berryman hailed from Beech Bottom, West Virginia, and graduated with a math degree from Bethany College. Though she had been trained to teach high school math, during the Depression the only job she could find was teaching first grade to a classroom of forty-five children. When her husband took a job in Washington, Berryman went to work in the payroll office of the department store Woodward & Lothrop—near the pocketbook shelves—then at the Census Bureau, and at a succession of other agencies. But when she read in the Washington Evening Star about Elizebeth Friedman’s exploits (the article also mentioned William, but it was the wife’s example that struck her) it awakened something in her. She began to envision another future.