Elizebeth Smith Friedman Was the U.S. Government’s First Woman Codebreaker. She Cracked Nazi Codes, Saved 8,000 Lives and Pioneered Modern Codebreaking

For decades, Elizebeth Smith Friedman worked in near-total secrecy, cracking codes that shaped the outcome of two world wars. Recently declassified, the full extent of her story is still coming to light

In the summer of 1916, Elizebeth Smith Friedman (1892–1980) walked into the Newberry Library in Chicago looking for work. She recently graduated from coed Hillsdale College in Michigan with a degree in English literature and a passion for Shakespeare. As the youngest of nine surviving children, she applied to college against her father’s wishes and was one of two siblings to attend college. Though her father did not believe that women should attend college, she convinced him to loan her the money for tuition—reportedly at six percent interest. The librarian who interviewed her made a phone call that would change the course of U.S. intelligence history.

From Shakespeare Scholar to Codebreaker

Noting Friedman’s study of Shakespeare, the librarian called George Fabyan, a wealthy textile entrepreneur who owned Riverbank Laboratories, a private think tank in Geneva, Illinois. Fabyan was convinced that English philosopher Sir Francis Bacon had secretly authored Shakespeare's plays and hired Friedman to help find the hidden codes he believed would prove it. Friedman joined a small team working on decoding messages that were supposedly contained within Shakespeare’s plays and poems. The theory never held up, but the work gave Friedman something far more consequential: a finely trained eye for pattern, frequency, and cipher—a disguised or coded way of writing.

At Riverbank, she met William Friedman, a geneticist who shared her growing skepticism of the Baconian theory and her fascination with cryptology, which is the study of writing and solving codes. They married in 1917. When the United States entered World War I, Riverbank became the first codebreaking facility in the country capable of solving enciphered, or coded, military messages, and the Friedmans were in charge. Until the U.S. Army’s Cipher Bureau was created in 1919, Friedman, her husband, and their small team conducted all codebreaking for every part of the U.S. government, developing methods still in use today. After the war, Friedman stepped away from government work to write and start a family. She had two children, Barbara in 1923 and John Ramsay in 1926.

Pencil, Paper, and 12,000 Broken Codes

During Prohibition in the early 1920s, the illegal business of smuggling liquor, known as rum-running, had grown into sophisticated criminal enterprises. Rum runners used radio transmitters and advanced encryption to coordinate operations across thousands of miles of coastline. The Coast Guard intercepted hundreds of coded messages but had no one to decode them. In 1925, they turned to Friedman, who would later become the Treasury Department's and Coast Guard's first codebreaker, working initially with nothing but a pencil, paper, and one clerk. Over the next several years, Friedman decoded more than twelve thousand rum-running messages, petitioned Coast Guard commanders to create an official cryptanalytic unit for studying and breaking codes, trained a team of cryptanalysts in the latest methods, and served as a star witness in over thirty federal prosecutions in smuggling cases.

By the late 1930s, Friedman and her team, Coast Guard Unit 387, turned their attention to German communications. They became the first Americans to learn the secrets of Germany's Enigma machine. Similar to typewriters, Enigma machines encoded messages using a series of interchangeable rotors, which rotated every time a key was pressed to keep the code constantly changing. Based on their work, the Coast Guard began supplying the U.S. Army, Navy, and State Department with crucial information about Nazi spy networks tracking U.S. and British shipping routes.

Beginning in 1940, Friedman started intercepting German communications originating from radio stations in South America and the United States. Messages that at first looked similar to intercepted smuggling messages turned out to be Nazi intelligence transmissions containing sensitive information about Allied shipping routes and U.S. industrial output. By late 1941, Friedman and her team of twenty-three analysts transferred to the U.S. Navy, where she led a full counterespionage operation against Nazi spy networks in the Western Hemisphere.

Seizing twenty-nine separate radio stations, her unit pieced together the structure of a Nazi espionage network spanning South America. In March 1942, she decoded information that revealed German U-boats were tracking the troopship RMS Queen Mary, on which Adolf Hitler had placed a bounty of one million Reichsmarks. The decoded messages reached the ship's captain in time for him to evade attack, saving more than eight thousand lives. By the end of the war, her unit had decoded four thousand messages and cracked three separate Enigma machines.

No Longer a Footnote

Until the early 2000s, records detailing the work of Coast Guard Unit 387 and Friedman’s involvement in codebreaking messages from German military intelligence remained classified. Her husband William received the Presidential Medal for Merit, the Presidential National Security Medal, and was celebrated as the father of the National Security Agency. Lieutenant Commander Leonard Jones, whom Friedman trained, received the Legion of Merit and the Order of the British Empire for the unit's work, while she received a raise. As Friedman was a civilian, her name rarely appeared on official memos, and much of what is documented about her work was found through the inclusion of her initials “ESF” at the bottom of decoded messages. Friedman titled the draft of her unfinished memoir Footnote to History, reflecting her personal humility and the lack of visibility her work received in her lifetime due to its Top Secret classification.

After William died in 1969, Friedman spent years compiling papers documenting their lives and work. The extensive collection of correspondence, government files, personal investigations, personal materials, newspaper clippings, and journals is housed at the George C. Marshall Foundation in Lexington, Virginia. When Friedman died in 1980, her ashes were spread over her husband’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery with their joint headstone reading “Knowledge is Power.”

Sources

1. "Elizebeth S. Friedman: 1999 Hall of Honor Inductee,” National Security Agency/Central Security Service. Accessed May 30, 2026.
2. Ann Todd, "Elizebeth Smith Friedman," Naval History 36, no. 2 (April 2022), U.S. Naval Institute.
3. David S. Rosen, “The Long Blue Line: Mrs. Friedman—the Coast Guard’s ‘Cryptologist-in-Charge’ and NSC namesake,” February 7, 2022, United States Coast Guard.

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Meredith Herndon | Read More

Meredith Herndon is the writer and editor for the Smithsonian American Women's History Museum.