Elizebeth Friedman: Hoover Took the Credit

Posted by by Female Obscura

She broke the Nazi spy codes with pencil and paper. J. Edgar Hoover put the FBI’s name on the work.

By 1943 she had dismantled a Nazi spy network across South America. The public was told the FBI did it.

She had done it herself, with a pencil, a legal pad, and a small team of Coast Guard cryptanalysts she had trained.

Her name was Elizebeth Smith Friedman.

She was America’s first female cryptanalyst, and for most of the century almost no one knew she existed. The credit for her greatest work went to J. Edgar Hoover. The blame for the one disaster in it went to her.

The woman who built the unit

Elizebeth Smith was born in Huntington, Indiana, on 26 August 1892, the youngest of ten children, into a Quaker family. She studied English literature, loved Shakespeare, and fell into codebreaking by accident when a millionaire named George Fabyan hired her in 1916 to hunt for secret messages in Shakespeare’s plays. There were none. But at Fabyan’s Riverbank estate she learned to break ciphers, and she met William Friedman, whom she married in 1917.

When the United States entered the First World War, the country had no codebreaking service. The Friedmans built the first one. Elizebeth trained the earliest generation of American military cryptanalysts.

In 1925 the Coast Guard came to her. Prohibition had put a fortune on the water, and the smuggling syndicates were encrypting their radio traffic. She built the Coast Guard’s cryptanalytic unit and ran it, the first woman to lead such an operation. Over the next decade she and one clerk broke an estimated twelve thousand encrypted messages. Her work produced 650 prosecutions. She testified as an expert witness in 33 cases, sending rum rings, including one tied to Al Capone in New Orleans, and international drug smugglers to court.

For the same contract work, she was paid half her husband’s salary.

The demotion

After Pearl Harbor, the Navy absorbed her Coast Guard unit. The military would not let a civilian, let alone a woman, lead an intelligence operation, so the team she had built and trained was handed to a younger, less skilled male lieutenant, and she was moved to a secondary seat inside her own unit.

From there she took on the hardest work of her life. German agents across South America were reporting Allied ship movements to Berlin, and Berlin was passing them to the U-boats hunting in the Atlantic. Friedman decrypted the traffic. She read a spy codenamed SARGO calling out the position of the Queen Mary, which was carrying more than eight thousand American servicemen, in time to reroute it. The Reich’s most effective agent in the hemisphere, an SS officer named Johannes Siegfried Becker, was working to turn Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and their neighbours fascist. Friedman tracked him where every other agency had failed.

She did it against Enigma. The Germans in South America enciphered their messages on Enigma machines. In Britain, breaking Enigma took Alan Turing and rooms full of electromechanical machinery. Friedman broke three separate Enigma machines with pencil and paper, and her unit fed four thousand decrypted messages into the war.

The man who took it

In the middle of that work, in 1942, the transmissions she had been reading for two years suddenly went dark. Her targets had discovered they were being watched.

The reason was J. Edgar Hoover. Hungry for a headline, the FBI director had used the intelligence Friedman’s team was gathering to send agents into South America and arrest the sources, not understanding that the arrests would warn the entire network. The spies went silent and came back with harder ciphers. Months of her progress were destroyed. Friedman said nothing and started over, and by the end of 1942 she had broken the new codes too.

Then Hoover took the story. As the war closed, the FBI ran a publicity campaign casting itself as the force that had crushed the Nazi threat in the Americas. Hoover worked with the Hollywood director Frank Capra on a propaganda film, The Battle of the United States, that presented the Bureau as the sole hero of the South American operation. Neither the film nor the articles Hoover placed mentioned Friedman’s cryptanalytic unit at all. The FBI then re-catalogued the Coast Guard’s intelligence reports under its own filing system, so that on paper the work looked like the Bureau’s.

Friedman could not answer. Like every wartime codebreaker she had signed an oath of secrecy that bound her until death, and she kept it. She titled her unpublished memoir Footnote to History.

Written out

Her husband, William, became famous. He is remembered as a godfather of the National Security Agency. Elizebeth was filed away. A 1956 profile that praised William’s honors described her, in passing, as an “assistant cipher clerk.”

She died on 31 October 1980, still bound by the oath, still uncredited. The proof of what she had done sat classified in government vaults. Only when those wartime records were declassified after the turn of the century, the key files in 2008, did the authorship come back into daylight: the decrypts were hers, the network was hers, the FBI’s version was a story.

The recognition has started to arrive, decades late. The Senate passed a resolution in her honor in 2019. The Coast Guard is naming a ship after her. None of it reached her.

This is the Matilda Effect in its plainest form. A woman does the work in silence, a powerful man attaches his institution’s name to it, and the false version is the one that reaches the history books. The difference here is that the state made the silence a legal condition of the job, and she kept faith with it to the grave while the lie was told over her.

We find them. We tell their stories. The archive grows. The silence shrinks. Enter the archive.

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