Elizebeth Smith Friedman

From Riverbank to the Navy

According to the NSA she was born in 1892. She graduated in English literature from Hillsdale College in Michigan. She was working at the Newberry Library in Chicago when, in 1916, George Fabyan recruited her to his Riverbank Laboratories. There she met William Friedman, whom she married in May 1917.¹

In 1923 she became a cryptanalyst for the US Navy, and later worked for Treasury Department bodies – the Bureau of Prohibition and the Bureau of Customs – as well as for the Coast Guard.¹

Against the smugglers

The NSA states that she solved more than 12,000 rum-runners’ messages. The Coast Guard dates this work to 1927–1930 and writes that she worked by hand on hundreds of code systems, and that her findings supported 650 federal prosecutions; she testified in 33 of them.^1,3

Her decoding of 23 messages in the case of the schooner ‘I’m Alone’ showed that the owner was American, which helped settle a dispute between Canada and the United States. Her work in 1933 led to the conviction of 35 smuggling ringleaders.¹

According to the Coast Guard historian David Rosen, in 1925 she received the badge of a Treasury special agent, and in 1931 she became the Coast Guard’s Cryptologist-in-Charge.²

Against German spies

During the Second World War Unit 387, in which she worked, comprised 23 Coast Guard codebreakers, including 12 women reservists (SPARs). According to Rosen it cracked 8,500 clandestine transmissions of German military intelligence from 65 spy rings in South America, North Africa and the Far East.²

A 2020 Coast Guard release states that she was part of the team that broke messages encrypted with the German Enigma, and that she uncovered a German spy ring in South America.³

Rosen writes that in mid-1941 FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover took full credit for decoding messages between German spies in New York and Latin America, although they had been decoded by the Coast Guard. His public statements that the codes had been broken led the Germans to change them.²

After the war and remembrance

After the war she created communications security systems for the International Monetary Fund. She died on 31 October 1980 in Plainfield, New Jersey, at the age of 88; in 1999 the NSA inducted her into the Cryptologic Hall of Honor.¹

On 7 July 2020 the Coast Guard announced that the eleventh Legend-class cutter would bear her name – ‘Friedman’.^2,3