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The work of Elizebeth Smith Friedman, America's first female cryptanalyst, brings down Al Capone, breaks up a Nazi spy ring in South America, and lays the foundation for the National Security Agency (NSA).
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00:00In March of 1942, German U-boats prowled the vast Atlantic Ocean in wolf packs,
00:27attacking scores of Allied transport ships as they headed towards war-torn Europe.
00:39In less than three months, the Nazi submarines had sunk more than a million tons
00:44of desperately needed supplies and killed thousands of soldiers.
00:51The U-boat captains had a secret weapon.
00:54Encrypted messages sent by Nazi spies in South America
00:58had provided them with the coordinates of the targeted ships.
01:03We're talking about networks all over South America, an entire front in the Second World War.
01:09But America had on its side one of the most skilled codebreakers in the world, Elizabeth Friedman.
01:18She was a suburban mom, nothing really to mark her as anything unusual, but she lived a double life.
01:27In World War I, Friedman had trained the first team of codebreakers for the U.S. military.
01:34During Prohibition, she had taken on the most powerful gangsters in the country and brought down an international rum-running operation.
01:42The gangsters put a hit out on Elizabeth, and the Coast Guard puts a protection detail on her.
01:50Now, as she decrypted the intercepted messages on her desk, she knew everything she had learned in her career had led to this moment.
01:58She was somebody who had the ability to see beyond what most other people could.
02:06She could see things starting to unlock in front of her eyes.
02:11She was one woman fighting a secret army.
02:15Her success or failure could determine the outcome of the war.
02:19Elizabeth Friedman was a codebreaking Quaker poet who hunted Nazi spies.
02:26And there's nobody like her then or since.
02:49She might have raised one.
02:50She might have turned in front and a secret foist with cancer and a social framework.
02:55Elizabeth Smith Friedman's life was unexpectedly set on course during a visit to the bustling city of Chicago in 1916.
03:25Twenty-three and full of dreams, she was hoping to escape the life she had been raised to expect.
03:33Elizabeth came from a large Quaker family in small-town Indiana, and from a very young age, she felt like she didn't fit in.
03:45She even hated her own name. She called it the odious name Smith.
03:49And she hated it because she believed that whenever she was introduced as Miss Smith, she would be seen as something so ordinary.
03:59And she didn't want to be ordinary. She wanted to be extraordinary. She wanted an adventurous life.
04:05Her mother, Sofa, had delivered ten children, the first when she was only 17.
04:17Elizabeth, born in 1892, was the youngest.
04:21Elizabeth often felt pity for her, because Sofa's life had been completely overtaken, it seemed to Elizabeth, by childbearing and childrearing.
04:34She didn't seem to be able to pursue any kind of a life of the mind.
04:38And to Elizabeth, that was horrifying, because Elizabeth was a very bookish kid. She loved to read. She loved poetry. She wrote her own poetry.
04:49Her father was a civil war veteran. He saw his youngest as a difficult child, and their relationship absolutely was difficult.
05:04Her father did not support her going to college. He was against further education, particularly for women.
05:09She manages to talk him into this. And he says she can have the money, but at 6% interest. She has to pay it all back.
05:23In college, Elizabeth studied Greek and English literature.
05:27When she discovered Shakespeare, she became fascinated by the intricacies of language, sparking a passion that would drive her ambitions.
05:36After graduation, Elizabeth pursued one of the few careers available to women at the time, and accepted a teaching job at a small Indiana school.
05:50She found the work uninspiring, and quit after just a year.
05:57In June of 1916, she headed for Chicago in search of a new job.
06:01After a week of effort, she found nothing.
06:06With no income, and no job prospects, Elizabeth had no choice but to return home in defeat.
06:15On her last day in the city, she indulged in a visit to the Newberry Library to see a rare treasure.
06:21Shakespeare's first folio, printed in 1623.
06:28She's looking at this book of Shakespeare, and the librarian notices and says,
06:34you're interested in Shakespeare, aren't you?
06:37And Elizabeth says, well, yes.
06:38And the librarian says, you know, it's funny, there's an odd wealthy man who keeps coming to the library, and he's looking for somebody to help him with this project, to find some kind of secret that he thinks is hidden in this book.
06:54An hour later, George Fabian was standing at her table.
06:58At six foot four, 250 pounds, the wealthy industrialist towered over her.
07:06He walks right up to Elizabeth, and the first thing he says to her is, would you like to come out to Riverbank and spend the night with me?
07:15She has no idea what to say to this. It's the most indelicate question that anyone has ever posed to her.
07:20And he rubs her under the elbow, lifts her up. She's tiny, he's huge, and he frog marches her out the door to awaiting the machine, which takes them to the railway station.
07:32Soon, Elizabeth was wandering the grounds of Fabian's vast riverbank estate, nestled on 350 acres of rolling hills in Geneva, Illinois.
07:56Strolling the Japanese garden, she was filled with a mix of astonishment and curiosity about the tycoon's eccentric kingdom.
08:09George Fabian had so much money that he could do essentially anything that he wanted.
08:15And what he wanted to do was to build a playground for science.
08:20He would go out and hire some of the leading scientists of the day, bring them to Riverbank, essentially collecting these scientists.
08:28And he would set them loose and tell them to be spectacular, tell them to make breakthroughs, tell them to unlock the secrets of nature.
08:39What captured most of Fabian's attention, however, was a literary project focused on proving that the works of William Shakespeare had been written by another author.
08:48The Elizabethan philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon.
08:55Fabian had this belief that William Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare, that actually Francis Bacon had written a code within the Shakespearean plays that demonstrated that Shakespeare was not the author that Bacon actually was.
09:09Fabian assigned Elizabeth the job of ferreting out the secret messages he believed Bacon had implanted in the text.
09:19Excited by the challenge, she first had to master a method of encoding messages invented by Francis Bacon in 1623.
09:27In the Bacon system, each letter of the alphabet was assigned a combination of the letters A and B in groups of five.
09:36Essentially what he did is he said, okay, I'm going to take every letter of the alphabet and break it down into a binary system of A's and B's.
09:44The letter A would turn into five A's, A-A-A-A-A-A-A. The letter B was A-A-A-A-B. The letter C and so on.
09:53This can be represented any way you want it to, as long as there's two different things you're using to represent the binary system.
10:03And this is what the legend was, that the first Shakespeare folio had this code written in two different typefaces throughout.
10:11Once the differences in the typeface were identified and the letters sorted into clusters of five, a hidden message would be revealed.
10:31The work was tedious, but Elizabeth discovered she had the patience to stare at characters on a page for hours on end.
10:39What Elizabeth was required to do was peer through a magnifying glass and try to discern very subtle variations in the fonts on photographic enlargements of Shakespeare's plays.
10:55And that was how she was going to break the code and rewrite the history of English literature.
10:59Her work with the Shakespeare manuscripts would bring her together with the young man who was photographing and enlarging the Shakespeare texts, William Friedman.
11:13Genetics was his field of expertise. Photography was his hobby.
11:19At Riverbank, he easily stood out.
11:23William always wore a white starched shirt, which in that heat, I don't know how he didn't perspire to death, but he always looked very together, very cool.
11:33His hair was always combed perfectly. This was a man who knew how to dress.
11:37There are a lot of photos of just Elizabeth, and you can tell that William is gazing down at his camera into the glass and seeing an image of her and probably smiling.
11:56She was unlike anyone he'd ever met.
11:58He was very quickly falling in love.
12:04The couple were an unlikely match.
12:07She was a Quaker from the Midwest, and he was a Jewish immigrant from Russia.
12:13Late in his life, one of William Friedman's colleagues asked him how he got into cryptology.
12:20According to the story, he had a sly smile on his face, and he said, I was seduced.
12:33Working across from each other day by day, they began digging into Fabian's collection of code-breaking books, exchanging insights and ideas.
12:42Instead, Elizabeth was able to bring William into the fold and say, look, you can take your very mathematical, scientific approach to understanding codes and ciphers.
12:53I can bring my poetry and language skills, and together we'll be unstoppable.
12:58As they began to master rudimentary skills, however, they saw little indication of embedded codes in the Shakespeare manuscripts.
13:06Every now and then there will be a letter that is slightly different.
13:13Now, it could be just because of the way the typeface struck the paper.
13:17There might be a little tail off a letter, or a letter might be a little wider.
13:22They're random marks, and they can be made by any typesetter, especially back in the 16th century.
13:29And so they're really rather meaningless.
13:31Now they both agreed that the central project at Riverbank had no scientific validity.
13:38It was all a pipe dream. It was a kind of delusion.
13:41Disheartened by their revelation, they saw no future in code-breaking.
13:47Still, they saw a future with each other.
13:51In May of 1917, Elizabeth and William stole away from Riverbank to get married in Chicago.
13:57William's family was shocked and appalled by the marriage.
14:04They wanted to see him marry a Jewish woman.
14:08His brother later said that if William had been living in Pittsburgh at the time, in the close-knit Jewish community there, he would have been exiled.
14:17The two of them go ahead, and despite the differences in their background, despite the family opposition, despite the lack of money, despite all the many reasons why they should not get married, they do.
14:30The newlyweds hoped to start a new life away from Riverbank.
14:36World events, however, would upend their plans.
14:41A month before they wed, the United States had entered the Great War in Europe.
14:48A war unlike anything that had come before, in part because of the invention of the radio.
14:57Suddenly, the air was full of messages, relaying information that could win or lose a battle, destroy a regiment, or sink a ship.
15:07All of it easily intercepted by anyone with an antenna.
15:11The invention of radio completely transformed the value of code breaking.
15:18So it put an incredible premium on cryptography, on strong codes and ciphers, because now that those messages were flying through the air, they had to be protected.
15:31The problem for America is that on the eve of World War I, the United States was completely unprepared to break codes in the war.
15:39The United States had no code breaking agency or bureau in the United States military.
15:47It just didn't exist.
15:49There was no NSA.
15:50There was no CIA.
15:52The military branches had their own very, very small intelligence agencies.
15:57We're talking about dozens of people, not thousands in this case.
16:01At Riverbank, George Fabian saw an opportunity to serve his country, and to enhance his reputation.
16:10He established the first dedicated code breaking unit in America, and much to their disbelief, placed Elizabeth and William in charge.
16:19Soon, the war, Navy, State, and Justice Departments were sending thousands of secret messages to Riverbank for decryption.
16:29So William and Elizabeth Friedman, at this point, hadn't really done this systematically for very long.
16:36They kind of played with it a little bit.
16:38But all of a sudden, they're being asked to break codes for the United States military in a world war.
16:43Talk about on-the-job training. This is as deep as on-the-job training gets.
16:47The couple scramble to expand their knowledge of code breaking, starting with the most fundamental concepts, like the difference between a cipher and a code.
17:02A code is when you take a word or even a phrase, and you replace it with another word or a phrase.
17:09So if we have the word gun, we might say every place the word gun is, we're going to put Bob instead.
17:14That way, you're able to replace the words.
17:18But if someone intercepts your message, they may not actually know there's a secret message there because it reads like plain text.
17:24A cipher, on the other hand, is taking individual letters or groups of letters and changing them through some process, through some algorithm, into other letters, into numbers, into symbols, into anything, so that you can mix up the message and make it unreadable.
17:38Using a method that had been around for hundreds of years, they began decrypting messages using frequency analysis.
17:48This is what's called a frequency chart.
17:52This is what allows a code breaker to very effectively look through an enciphered message and say,
17:57OK, look, there's a lot of Ns. There's a lot of Gs. There are a lot of Qs.
18:02So the likelihood is those are going to be some of these very common letters in the English language, E's, T's, N's, A's.
18:11If we understand this in a very mathematical way, it can help us to attack secret messages and break them down and understand what they actually mean.
18:20Elizabeth quickly discovered that she was quite good at spotting patterns hidden in the texts.
18:29Before long, though, William and Elizabeth reached the limits of what was known about codes and ciphers, and they began inventing their own methods.
18:38They figured out methods of solving secret messages that had never been imagined before.
18:45The first eight months of World War I, this sounds incredible, but it's completely true.
18:50Elizabeth, William, and their colleagues at Riverbank broke all messages for every part of the U.S. military and the Department of Justice.
18:59They documented their breakthroughs in eight volumes, known as the Riverbank Publications, which established a mathematical foundation to the principles of cryptology.
19:12Prior to the publications at Riverbank from Elizabeth and William, cryptology had been thought of as a field for linguists,
19:22for people with knowledge about foreign cultural areas, and perhaps math might be a tool.
19:32But the Riverbank laboratory's publications turned cryptology from language to statistics.
19:44In an age when code breaking was becoming a weapon of war, Elizabeth and William were forging a new science of immense power.
19:53It was a heady time for Elizabeth.
19:56She was training the first generation of code breakers for the U.S. military.
20:01The couple were so captivated by cryptology, for fun, they embedded codes everywhere.
20:07Even the officer trainee class photo.
20:10As the group gathered, they instructed everyone assembled how to pose.
20:15And if you're just looking at the picture, you're like, man, whoever decided to shoot this wasn't very disciplined.
20:23A good chunk of the people in the photograph are looking forward, but a good chunk are all looking to the side.
20:29And it turns out that each person in the photo stands for a letter in Bacon's biliteral cipher.
20:38So the people who are looking off to the side are the B form of the cipher, and the people who are looking straight ahead are the A form.
20:44And when you put it all together, the people in Bacon's cipher spell out the phrase knowledge is power, which is one of Bacon's mottos and a motto that William and Elizabeth adopted as their own.
20:57And it's not written in letters, but it's written in people.
21:06The Freedmen's work at Riverbank was an eye-opener for the U.S. military.
21:11Six months into the war, the Army established its own cipher bureau in Washington.
21:18With the workload at Riverbank dwindling, William signed up for military duty as a field code breaker in Europe.
21:25Elizabeth wanted to do field work as well, but she could not.
21:30Women were excluded from serving at the front.
21:33Being left behind had to be incredibly difficult for Elizabeth.
21:37Not only is the man that she loves being sent off to fight a war, but this was her field.
21:44She taught William how to break codes and ciphers.
21:47This was a key way to move forward your career.
21:51William could do it. She couldn't.
21:53And worse still, she would be on her own at Riverbank.
22:03It was a terrifying time for her.
22:08She let it be known in letters to William that George Fabian was not treating her well, that he was pressuring her.
22:18There's a reference in one of William's letters to the fact that Fabian might have sexually harassed Elizabeth, might have propositioned her.
22:26William was very angry. He called Fabian that nameless rascal in that letter and said he wanted to hurt him, beat him up.
22:34And so when they were reunited, they were highly motivated to get the hell out of there.
22:41At war's end, William used his military contacts to line up a job in Washington.
22:47He arrived in Washington with a reputation earned on the battlefield.
22:51Elizabeth arrived in Washington as William's wife.
22:56Technological innovations were fueling a global race to create ever more advanced devices for making and breaking codes.
23:03The post-war world was still a dangerous place.
23:10In 1921, William went to work for the Army Signal Corps, developing new cipher machines.
23:17Elizabeth was also offered a job, but at half of William's salary.
23:22She took the position, but left after a year.
23:27She believed her code-breaking days were over.
23:38In 1923, Elizabeth gave birth to a daughter,
23:43soon followed by the birth of a son.
23:46Code-breaking unexpectedly entered Elizabeth's life again in 1925,
23:56when a Coast Guard officer knocked on the door of her suburban home with an urgent request.
24:01He explained that the Coast Guard's network of radio towers had intercepted hundreds of encrypted messages,
24:08but no one knew how to break them.
24:11Decrypting the messages might help them gain the upper hand against a deadly adversary.
24:17The Prohibition Act, signed into law several years earlier,
24:23had triggered an explosion of illegal trafficking in alcohol.
24:28Mobsters and gangsters ruled the streets.
24:35Murder was rampant.
24:38And it became not just murder of gangster on gangster,
24:42but they were starting to murder anybody who opposed them.
24:48The federal police didn't even really understand the concept of organized crime.
24:56A massive black market rises up,
25:00and it's controlled by gangsters, racketeers, and mafiosi.
25:05And very quickly, they make a mockery out of the Coast Guard.
25:11The Coast Guard was charged with stopping the deluge of liquor coming in by sea.
25:17But it only had 200 boats to patrol 5,000 miles of coastline.
25:22The Rum Runners, on the other hand, had unlimited resources.
25:28Huge, ocean-going vessels served as motherships that stored millions of dollars' worth of liquor in their holds.
25:35A fleet of smaller crafts, called black ships, would divvy up the cargo and transport it back to shore.
25:43Logistics made possible by the use of shortwave radios and sophisticated codes.
25:50The Coast Guard officer pleaded with Elizabeth for help.
25:54She was no teetotaler, but Elizabeth saw the damage organized crime was doing to the country.
26:00During her first three months on the job,
26:05she single-handedly decrypted two years' worth of backlogged messages.
26:10It's basically Elizabeth and a secretary filing her decrypts.
26:16And she's doing all of that work during those years.
26:19She says she ends up looking at about 25,000 intercepts a year.
26:25That's just astonishing.
26:27It's really a war.
26:29Elizabeth, however, was not just decrypting the messages.
26:34She was weaponizing the data she was gathering.
26:36What Elizabeth does is she begins the development of strategic intelligence,
26:43which nobody has done to this point.
26:46And what that means is she takes the information that she's obtaining in these broken codes and ciphers,
26:55which are basically the plans and intentions of the gangsters,
26:59and she begins to figure out who owns the ships,
27:05where a ship is scheduled to leave from,
27:09where those ships are going,
27:12who's meeting those ships.
27:15All of these arrangements were made with wireless radio.
27:18She was able to explain basically to the U.S. government and all of its federal law enforcement agencies
27:26what organized crime looked like,
27:29how they were doing their job,
27:32and how to stop them.
27:35And that is really visionary.
27:36By 1931, Elizabeth's work was so indispensable, the Coast Guard approved her plan to build an official code-breaking unit.
27:47One of only a handful of such units in the country, and the first to be run by a woman.
27:54She was allowed to hire junior code-breakers and train them.
27:58She was given a raise to $3,800 a year, which is not a lot of money, but a bump for her.
28:05And she got a new title along with it.
28:08She was called the Crypt Analyst in Charge,
28:10essentially the chief code-breaker for the Coast Guard.
28:13For a mother with young children, a home to run, and a husband who worked equally long hours,
28:25it was an exhausting time.
28:28A decade into Prohibition, the crime syndicates had grown into multinational businesses run with exacting efficiency.
28:38But with Elizabeth's intelligence in tow,
28:40the U.S. government could finally take the mobsters to court.
28:45Elizabeth became the key witness in a series of sensational trials,
28:50starting with the prosecution of Conexco,
28:53the largest rum-running enterprise in the world.
28:57They had the network from the manufacture of the liquor
29:03to the final distribution of that liquor to speakeasies and nightclubs.
29:08When the government went after Conexco, it would be like the government going after Wal-Mart today.
29:16With a virtual monopoly on bootlegging in the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico,
29:22Conexco supplied liquor to the most notorious mobster in the country, Al Capone.
29:27Within a year, the U.S. government indicted Conexco's top rank, which included Capone's brother.
29:38In 1933, at the trial in New Orleans, prosecutors called upon Elizabeth to testify against some of the most dangerous men in the country.
29:47There were a lot of prohibition agents who had already been killed in the line of duty.
29:54There are these plainclothes people that she doesn't know that they are there to keep her from being whacked by the bad guys.
29:59But it wouldn't have occurred to her not to testify against them. These people had to be put away. That was the whole point of breaking the codes.
30:07When Elizabeth took the stand, she was grilled mercilessly by Al Capone's attorneys, who worked to undermine her credibility.
30:20Whenever Elizabeth tried to explain how she solved the messages, these six lawyers, men, would often stand up and object and say that it was some kind of witchcraft, that code breaking was not science, that Elizabeth was just making a guess.
30:36She got so fed up with the repeated objections of the defense attorneys that she asked a judge if she could have access to a blackboard.
30:43And Elizabeth proceeded to give a class in code breaking. And by the time she was finished, the defense attorneys had nothing else to say.
30:54They must have been thinking that they were going to be able to bowl her over and make her testimony irrelevant.
31:03And instead, she takes control of that and, you know, seals the deal. She gets the conviction.
31:09Elizabeth became a national celebrity. One newspaper praised her class in cryptology. Another described her as a pretty woman who protects the United States.
31:23Reporters expressed surprise that one woman could take down some of the most dangerous gangsters in the country.
31:30This is juicy stuff. These are murderers and these are people who have become household names in America.
31:36And then along comes this woman who is the key witness at the trial to get these guys thrown in prison.
31:45They don't talk about her skills. They don't talk about her brains, her ability to break these codes and to bring these gangsters to justice.
31:54They talk about how she looks, how she's dressed, that she's this dainty little woman who is bringing these big, you know, Al Capone type mobsters to justice.
32:03William was delighted that his wife was finally getting the recognition she deserved.
32:09I'm as proud as I can be, he told her.
32:15As Elizabeth's work was seeing the light of day, Williams was burrowing deeper into the shadows.
32:22By the late fall of 1939, Elizabeth knew something was terribly wrong with her husband.
32:29He developed mood swings. That's what Elizabeth called the mood swings or down swings.
32:37Elizabeth was trying to figure out what was going on.
32:40She assumed that he was working on a very difficult project at work.
32:45She didn't know what it was. He didn't tell her and he couldn't tell her.
32:50William's work for Army Intelligence was classified top secret.
32:57He was breaking into the encryption machines of America's enemies.
33:01The machines had reached a new level of complexity.
33:05Many were considered unbreakable.
33:07With the start of the Second World War in Europe, William's work reached a new level of urgency.
33:22There's Blitzkrieg. You see Paris fall. You see that Britain is left standing almost alone.
33:35You see that the Japanese are starting to make overtures to be joined in alliance with Germany and with Italy.
33:44It's looking very bad. And William, in addition, as a Jewish man, is aware the terrible things are happening to Jewish people in Germany.
33:56So, I think the weight was colossal.
34:00William was trying to pry open a Japanese machine called Purple, a device he had never seen or even had diagrams for.
34:11William and his team at the Army worked around the clock to try to reverse engineer these Japanese cipher machines.
34:19Because if they could, then they would essentially be able to read minds of the Axis powers, Japan and Nazi Germany.
34:26William had to keep all that inside. He had a small group of people he worked with that he could talk to, but they all worked for him.
34:36And because he internalized all this stuff, it just burned him up inside until he finally broke.
34:42William's team finally cracked Purple in September of 1940.
34:47Three months later, he had a complete breakdown and checked himself into the psychiatric unit of Walter Reed General Hospital.
35:02Elizabeth watched in dismay as he sank deeper and deeper into a depression.
35:08William, at that point, was still the main breadwinner in the household.
35:13He made much more money than Elizabeth did.
35:16And so, the fact of him being in the psych ward, the uncertainty about his future created a much bigger uncertainty about both of their lives.
35:28Every day for the nearly three months he was hospitalized, Elizabeth made the exhausting trip to see her husband.
35:35She is absolutely essential to William's recovery.
35:40The medical establishment just let them sort it out themselves.
35:46And William says later that she was the person who sent down the rope to the terrible morass that he was in.
35:58She pulled him out of the swamp.
36:01She did it by willpower. She did it by faith in him.
36:08After he was discharged, he returned to his job at the Army.
36:13But he would struggle with clinical depression for the rest of his life.
36:16Elizabeth and William had always been equals, a team.
36:23After William's breakdown in 1941, he would never quite be the same.
36:29And so, Elizabeth would have to step up.
36:32From now on, she would, in many ways, have to be the stronger of the two.
36:36In December 1941, after a surprise Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military immediately ramped up its code-breaking capabilities.
37:03Elizabeth's team had just shifted from the Coast Guard to the Navy.
37:09Now a military operation, the Navy placed a uniformed officer with much less experience in charge of the unit.
37:17The Navy had a rule that women couldn't be in charge of men, and so she had to take a secondary position to a man who wasn't as good as she was.
37:26She had to deal with the pain and the frustration of losing leadership of something that she had created, that she had built, and that was really her baby.
37:39The unit's assignment was to monitor communications between a Nazi spy ring in South America and the German high command.
37:47There had been a high amount of German immigration to South America in the early 20th century.
37:58There were places that had German towns with German street names, German newspapers, German schools.
38:04In addition, you had homegrown fascist movements. You had movements in Brazil, in Paraguay, and other countries where you see real similarities with what is going on with Hitler's Germany and what's happening in Mussolini's Italy.
38:23Decoding messages written in German wasn't a problem for Elizabeth.
38:30She was now so skilled at recognizing the various statistical properties of foreign languages, a translator could do the rest.
38:37In her Rum Runner days, she had even decrypted messages in Chinese.
38:43Among the decrypted messages, one name appeared over and over, Sargo.
38:49She doesn't know it yet, but she's starting to suspect she's onto something big, and she is.
38:56Sargo is the code name for a man named Johannes Siegfried Becker, and Becker is the SS's main man in South America.
39:07He is part of Hitler's elite.
39:10As Elizabeth began to decode Sargo's messages, she made a startling revelation.
39:15His network was transmitting the locations of Allied ships to U-boats in the Atlantic.
39:22One of the most important intelligence targets for the Germans is information about Allied shipping, because it would be so easy for the Germans to pick off these supply ships one by one, or to take out entire convoys all at once if they had accurate information about what route they were taking, that they could knock the English out of the war.
39:42They could knock the English out of the war, and without the English, the war is essentially over.
39:52In March of 1942, Elizabeth decrypted a series of ominous dispatches about the largest of the Allied supply ships.
40:00With her record-breaking speed and size, the Queen Mary's military value was so great, Adolf Hitler was offering $250,000 to the U-boat captain, who could bring her down.
40:16On this trip, more than 8,000 men stood to lose their lives if the ship was sunk.
40:23Guided by the secret messages, the U-boats found the Queen Mary off the coast of Brazil.
40:29But before they could strike, Elizabeth's decrypts were relayed to the ship's captain.
40:36He was able to take evasive maneuvers and bring the ship safely to port.
40:42As soon as Elizabeth started unlocking Sargo's messages, the balance in the Atlantic began to tip.
40:59The information could be given to American forces first for a ship to take evasive action, and also for the hunter-killer teams that the Americans had in the South Atlantic.
41:13And many U-boats were sunk based on this kind of information.
41:16The work that Elizabeth Friedman is doing is some of the most important work of the Second World War.
41:26It is allowing the supply line to exist.
41:32Then, without warning, the Brazilian police started rounding up the Nazi spies, driving Sargo further underground.
41:40Within days, the airwaves went silent.
41:43One of the worst things that you can do if you're chasing spies is to arrest them before you're done following them and watching them and seeing what they're doing.
41:55It's the easiest way for a country to know that you've broken their communication system, or that they have a leak somewhere, is if you round up all their spies.
42:04Elizabeth was stunned to learn that her work had been tripped up by one of her own.
42:09The Brazilians were conducting the arrests at the behest of the American FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover.
42:18Hoover wants the glory. Hoover wants the headlines. That was really stupid of him to do. This is really life and death.
42:25Hoover is now completely cutting us off from this life-saving intelligence that's allowing us to keep our convoys safe in the Atlantic Ocean.
42:32This puts Elizabeth and her team back at square one.
42:39Sargo escaped and immediately rebuilt the network.
42:44The spies set up 50 new circuits, each adopting a far more complex system of codes.
42:53Month after month, the unsolved messages piled up.
42:58Elizabeth suspected that the codes were being generated by a highly complex machine called the Enigma, used by the German intelligence services.
43:08There were several models of the Enigma. The British were using a newly invented decoding device to crack into the version used by the German military.
43:21The machine Elizabeth was facing was slightly less intricate, but not by much.
43:27Her tools were still only pencil and paper.
43:30Day after day, she waded through the messages. After two months, she spotted a chink in the Enigma's armor.
43:40She intercepted a cache of 28 messages, all sent in the same key. A careless mistake made by the spies.
43:48The breakthrough enabled her to make inroads into the machine's system.
43:54She lined up the messages one below the other, in a technique called solving in depth.
44:00When you solve in depth and you put papers next to each other or one on top of the other,
44:05and you're looking at what is the first letter in each of these messages, what is the second letter in each of these messages,
44:09once you have the knowledge that you're dealing with the same key every day, then you can actually start breaking down words and understanding what letters are turning into others.
44:20I think that Elizabeth would be the first to say that you are always looking for the mistake that the other side is making.
44:29You find a little doorway that's been left open just a smidge, and that's where you attack and that's where you go in.
44:40Finally, she was able to follow Sargo's activities again.
44:45The decrypted messages laid bare, ominous new developments in South America.
44:50There is a coup in Argentina, a fascist coup, in the summer of 1943.
45:01At the end of that, Sargo is really on the inside.
45:07In Bolivia, again, he is working with people who want to turn the government toward the Nazis,
45:13and in December of 1943, lo and behold, there is a fascist coup in Bolivia.
45:20And this is scary stuff for the United States.
45:24The fear is that the Germans will start a front in South America.
45:29This could be a dramatic game-changer that could make it very difficult for us to fight the war overseas,
45:36because we'd be worried about fighting the war at home.
45:38From her tiny office in Washington, Elizabeth shadowed Sargo's every move.
45:47Any which way they turned, his spies were outflanked.
45:53In the end, Elizabeth is able to give information to the Allies,
45:57which allows them to break up the spy ring and do it in such a way that the Germans have no idea
46:02that the spy ring was broken up because their codes have been broken.
46:05German-backed revolutions in Bolivia and Chile were crushed.
46:12Argentina's relationship with Germany splintered.
46:16Within months, the Nazi threat in the Western Hemisphere was eliminated.
46:22Sargo went into hiding.
46:25He would never rebuild his network again.
46:28Elizabeth's work in South America was an astonishing testament to the power of code-breaking.
46:40But it would be a private and lonely victory.
46:44She had signed a Navy oath promising her silence until death.
46:48She could tell no one, not even William.
46:52And she could do nothing as J. Edgar Hoover took credit for her crowning achievement.
46:59He took all the decrypts Elizabeth had sent, all 4,000 of them,
47:05and had them stamped with FBI identification numbers, erasing Elizabeth and her team from the official record.
47:13Elizabeth just had to kind of grin and bear it, and after a while she wasn't grinning so much anymore.
47:21It kind of ate at her.
47:25But there was very little that she could do.
47:27In her Christmas card in 1944, she wrote friends that she was just carrying on a routine Navy job.
47:40William added a P.S.
47:43Elizabeth was, is, and continues to be the most fascinating woman I've ever known.
47:57World War II ended in August 1945.
48:04A year later, Elizabeth's unit was disbanded.
48:09She was 54 years old and out of a job.
48:13Code-breaking by pencil and paper had become a thing of the past.
48:18Computers were the future.
48:20The post-war era will be like nothing Elizabeth has ever seen, and she knows that.
48:27She knows it's changing.
48:29She can see that her era is ending.
48:33William continued to work for the government.
48:37In the early 1950s, he suffered a series of heart attacks and struggled with mental illness.
48:43He was so depressed that he was unable to even start his hand to move on a pad of paper at the office.
48:52And so, Elizabeth would put her hand on top of his and move the pencil for him.
48:59And in that way, he was able to begin to work, begin to draw, begin to think, and come to life.
49:08To me, that says everything about the Freedmen, who they were, their bond.
49:17William died of a heart attack on November 2nd, 1969.
49:25Though Elizabeth's career as a code-breaker was long over,
49:29code-breaking itself was becoming a critical part of keeping the nation safe.
49:33The U.S. government had created the National Security Agency, the NSA, in 1952,
49:42and charged it with collecting cryptographic communications and strengthening the nation's codes.
49:48It would become the largest, most secretive, and far-reaching arm of U.S. intelligence gathering.
49:55Even though we're not fighting a shooting war, we're keeping secrets, and a lot of them,
50:00and not letting the American public know what the government is doing in its name.
50:05Elizabeth felt that it was going too far, collecting too much information,
50:10becoming too intrusive, violating too much privacy.
50:14Some of the same themes that will basically pester the NSA for the next several decades.
50:19Even as intelligence gathering grew into something Elizabeth could hardly recognize,
50:23her methods formed the basis of code-breaking for decades to come.
50:30She helped to create an immensely powerful new science of code-breaking.
50:35And so there's still a good portion of her DNA in code-breaking today,
50:43even though it's been mathematized and done on computers.
50:45She laid a foundation for what happens at American intelligence agencies every day, today.
50:55Elizabeth struggled in her final years as her savings dried up.
51:00She died on October 31, 1980, in a nursing home in New Jersey.
51:07She took her secret life to the grave.
51:10The government kept the files detailing Elizabeth Friedman's history-making work locked away for 62 years.
51:21In 2008, decades after her death, they were finally declassified.
51:27If we could miss something as big as Elizabeth, who is crucial in two world wars,
51:37who fights crime, who fights the mob, if we missed her, who else are we missing?
51:57American Experience The Code Breaker is available on DVD.
52:16To order, visit ShopPBS or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.
52:21American Experience is also available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video.
52:27American Experience is also available on DVD.
52:28American Experience is also available on DVD.
52:29American Experience is available on DVD.
52:30American Experience is available on DVD.
52:31American Experience is available on DVD.
52:32American Experience is available on DVD.
52:33American Experience is available on DVD.
52:34American Experience is available on DVD.
52:35American Experience is available on DVD.
52:36American Experience is available on DVD.
52:37American Experience is available on DVD.
52:38American Experience is available on DVD.
52:39American Experience is available on DVD.
52:40American Experience is available on DVD.
52:41American Experience is available on DVD.
52:43American Experience is available on DVD.
52:45American Experience is available on DVD.
52:47American Experience is available on DVD.
52:49American Experience is available on DVD.
52:50American Experience is available on DVD.
52:51American Experience is available on DVD.
52:52American Experience is available on DVD.
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