Speaker 1: Guess what, mango? What's that? Will? All right? So tell
Speaker 1: me this doesn't sound like a great premise for a movie.
Speaker 1: About a century ago, a young woman from a small
Speaker 1: town in Indiana heads off to college to study poetry
Speaker 1: and philosophy. Now she does this against her father's will,
Speaker 1: by the way, So she finishes college, travels to Chicago
Speaker 1: to figure out what to do with her life. Already
Speaker 1: following so far, because here's where the crazy plot twist
Speaker 1: comes in. She's about to give up, and then she's
Speaker 1: discovered and hired by this really eccentric tycoon, makes a
Speaker 1: major shift in her life and realizes she has this
Speaker 1: remarkable ability to break codes. She then goes on to
Speaker 1: become one of the greatest code breakers in history, helps
Speaker 1: the US win World War One, helps US defeat the
Speaker 1: Nazis in World War Two, and plays a major role
Speaker 1: in building the foundation for the intelligence agencies in the
Speaker 1: USA today. Boom, what do you think about this? I'd
Speaker 1: watched that movie, yeah, and it should be a movie.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing, it's all true and thanks to
Speaker 1: the years of research and writing by Jason Fagoni, we
Speaker 1: now have a brilliant book. It's called The Woman who
Speaker 1: smashed codes and it tells the story of Elizabeth Smith Friedman.
Speaker 1: I can't stop thinking about this story, so let's dive ina.
Speaker 1: Hey there, podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm
Speaker 1: Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good
Speaker 1: friend Mangesh Ticketer and on the other side of the
Speaker 1: soundproof glass obsessing over his new decoder ring and what's
Speaker 1: he doing. He's he's like he's communicating with us in
Speaker 1: some sort of new language of signals. He and he's
Speaker 1: always so impressive. Mango, that's our that's our friend and
Speaker 1: producer Tristan McNeil. Now today we're talking about one of
Speaker 1: the most fascinating people history almost forgot and honestly might
Speaker 1: have forever had it not been for the book we're
Speaker 1: talking about today. I know it's it's just this incredible story.
Speaker 1: And when you started telling me about it, I'll be honest,
Speaker 1: I really didn't think it could be true. I mean,
Speaker 1: like this poet learning code breaking and then taking down
Speaker 1: Nazis and gangsters and cracking codes with pretty much this
Speaker 1: relative ease, like it just sounded too good. And especially
Speaker 1: since you know, we've done a lot of stories and
Speaker 1: I've never really heard of Elizabeth Smith Friedman before I
Speaker 1: know it's it's honestly why I can't stop talking about
Speaker 1: that story. You really haven't stopped talking about it for
Speaker 1: a while. Well, I'm thrilled we finally have the right
Speaker 1: person on the line to talk about this story, and
Speaker 1: that's the author of The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Jason Fagoni. So, Jason,
Speaker 1: welcome to Part Time Genius. Hey, thanks, guys, I'm glad
Speaker 1: to be here. Well, Jason, I want to jump straight
Speaker 1: into this this really bizarre break that Elizabeth got, you know,
Speaker 1: becoming a code breaker, And of course we want to
Speaker 1: ask you about how you even stumbled into this story.
Speaker 1: But first, can you set the scene a little bit
Speaker 1: and just talk about what her early life was like
Speaker 1: before she got this big break. Yeah. So it's one
Speaker 1: of these kind of classic American tales. You have a
Speaker 1: a hundred years ago, a young woman in her early
Speaker 1: twenties is bored with her life and board with her job.
Speaker 1: She lives in a small town, uh in Midwest, in
Speaker 1: rural Indiana where she's from. She's teaching high school and
Speaker 1: for a bright young woman in nineteen fifteen, nineteen sixteen,
Speaker 1: this is kind of the end of the line right there,
Speaker 1: there is not really um a lot of opportunity beyond
Speaker 1: teaching school. Elizabeth was extremely intelligent, ambitious, and brave, and
Speaker 1: she decided in June nine, sixteen, to take a risk.
Speaker 1: She quit her job teaching school and she moved to
Speaker 1: the big city, to Chicago, to look for something more unusual.
Speaker 1: And that was really all she wanted, was something a
Speaker 1: little bit more unusual. That brought her to a library
Speaker 1: in Chicago, the Newberry Library that happened to have a
Speaker 1: rare volume of Shakespeare from sixteen twenty three was the
Speaker 1: Shakespeare First Saffolio. And she happened to love Shakespeare. She
Speaker 1: had studied Shakespeare in school. She was a poet by training,
Speaker 1: literature scholar, and she just kind of wanted to see
Speaker 1: this rare book. She she hadn't had any luck finding
Speaker 1: a job in Chicago. She spent about a week, week
Speaker 1: and a half they're looking for work, had no luck.
Speaker 1: She was about ready to go back home and move
Speaker 1: in with her parents back in Indiana, but she made
Speaker 1: this one final stop at this library to see this
Speaker 1: Shakespeare book, and she happened to have a chance meeting
Speaker 1: there with an eccentric tycoon named George Fabian that that
Speaker 1: ended up transforming her life, but not just her life, Uh,
Speaker 1: it ended up changing the shape of the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: And to be clear, like she hadn't studied any code breaking, right,
Speaker 1: Like she was um more a liberal arts type, is
Speaker 1: that right? Yeah, absolutely she was. She was a poet
Speaker 1: in a literature person. So and this is one of
Speaker 1: the surprising things about the story and one of the
Speaker 1: things that pulled me in from the from the first
Speaker 1: day I began to read her letters, is that I
Speaker 1: think we we kind of think of code breakers as mathematicians.
Speaker 1: We have this image of the code breakers as someone
Speaker 1: like allan turning professional mathematician, math professor. But the fact
Speaker 1: is code breakers often come from unusual places because the
Speaker 1: core thing about code breaking is it's really about seeing patterns.
Speaker 1: The code breaking is the science of solving a secret
Speaker 1: message without knowing the key. Um. It's akin to if
Speaker 1: you've ever solved the cryptogram and the in the puzzle
Speaker 1: page in the paper. Um. Elizabeth was doing this at
Speaker 1: a sort of more sophisticated level than than most people.
Speaker 1: But it's the same principle. You you you sort of
Speaker 1: take a block of letters that looks like gobbledygook. You
Speaker 1: chop them into their constituent parts, you whirl them around,
Speaker 1: count them and measure them and rearrange them into their
Speaker 1: original order. And um, Elizabeth was a genius at seeing patterns.
Speaker 1: Even though she wasn't mathematically trained, she she had a
Speaker 1: genius for seeing patterns. And that, uh, that's one of
Speaker 1: the things that made her one of the one of
Speaker 1: the most important code breakers of her era. And before
Speaker 1: she was doing the code breaking, that obviously, you know,
Speaker 1: changed the world. And in many ways, it was an
Speaker 1: interest first project. I mean, can you talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about Fabian because he seemed like such a bizarre character,
Speaker 1: and and how this meeting came to be, and and
Speaker 1: and what she was actually asked to do in her
Speaker 1: first assignment with him. So Elizabeth went to this library,
Speaker 1: the Newberry Library, to see this rare book of Shakespeare,
Speaker 1: and she having to fall into conversation with the librarian
Speaker 1: there who saw that she was interested in Shakespeare. The
Speaker 1: librarian comes over and says, you know, it's funny, but
Speaker 1: there's this odd, rich guy who keeps coming to the
Speaker 1: library looking at the same book of Shakespeare. He's convinced
Speaker 1: that there are secret messages embedded inside inside this book
Speaker 1: that have been planted there by the true author of
Speaker 1: Shakespeare's plays. He thinks that the true author is actually
Speaker 1: this guy who is a contemporary of Shakespeare's named Francis Bake.
Speaker 1: So the librarian is telling Elizabeth this, and the librarian says, uh,
Speaker 1: this rich guy, George Fabian. He says he's been looking
Speaker 1: for a research assistant. Would you be interested in something
Speaker 1: like that? Elisabeth says, oh, sure, you know, maybe possibly.
Speaker 1: The librarian makes a phone call to the George Fabian.
Speaker 1: George Fabian ends up coming to the library immediately, bringing
Speaker 1: bringing his chauffeurg limousine. He pulls up in front of
Speaker 1: the Newberry Library and this limo and he tumbles out
Speaker 1: of the limousine and Elizabeth Smith looks at George Fabian
Speaker 1: for the first time, and what she sees is an
Speaker 1: enormous human being. He is six foot for two pounds,
Speaker 1: big iron gray beard. Uh. He just he just sort
Speaker 1: of stomps towards her. Uh. He has big red face,
Speaker 1: and he's sort of full of energy and intent, and
Speaker 1: he's basically towering over her. Because Elizabeth is very petite.
Speaker 1: She's about five ft three and about a hundred and
Speaker 1: ten pounds um. And he looks at her and he says,
Speaker 1: would you like to come to Riverbank and spend the
Speaker 1: night with me? This is you know, this is a
Speaker 1: completely scandalous question. Uh. You know, Elizabeth's from this from
Speaker 1: a fairly devout Quaker family, and and um, and she
Speaker 1: doesn't even know what to say to this. She doesn't
Speaker 1: know what Riverbank is, and said she she kind of
Speaker 1: stammers reply, and she says, well, sir, I don't have
Speaker 1: anything to to sleep in. I don't have any of
Speaker 1: my nightclothes or my or my or my toiletries or
Speaker 1: anything like that. And he says, oh, don't mind that.
Speaker 1: We'll we'll set you up with all of that. Come on,
Speaker 1: and and and this guy, George Fabian, grabs her by
Speaker 1: the arm and sort of walks her out to his
Speaker 1: limousine and and takes her to the Chicago and Northwestern
Speaker 1: train station. And from there, Uh, she has brought to
Speaker 1: this place called river Bank. And what river Bank is
Speaker 1: is one of the most bizarre institutions in America at
Speaker 1: that time, nineteen sixteen. So George, baby, and it turns
Speaker 1: out is a Chicago textile multimillionaire. He's made his fortune
Speaker 1: by selling different kinds of cloth, and he has kind
Speaker 1: of a marketing genius for selling different kinds of cloth
Speaker 1: to department stores. Um. Classic kind of self made guys.
Speaker 1: He's a high school dropout, he's not educated, but he
Speaker 1: has a lot of money, and he has kind of
Speaker 1: the ability in the Gilded Age to build a kingdom
Speaker 1: around himself and to and to kind of set the
Speaker 1: rules for everybody in his orbit. And um, he's a
Speaker 1: lot like someone like Andrew Carnegie or William Randolph Hurst,
Speaker 1: these these guys with that era who just had more
Speaker 1: money than God. What distinguished George Fabian from those guys
Speaker 1: is that, you know, instead of spending his money on
Speaker 1: French Impressionist paintings or you know, building a big castle,
Speaker 1: what really interested George Fabian was discovering the secrets of nature.
Speaker 1: He was really into science. He wanted to discover things
Speaker 1: about nature that had never been discovered. And so he
Speaker 1: turned his private estate, which was called River Bank, into
Speaker 1: a kind of half rich man's fantasy land and half
Speaker 1: private scientific laboratory, very much like Thomas Edison's Menlo Park,
Speaker 1: New Jersey or Nikola Tesla's Lab in New York. It
Speaker 1: was a place where, you know, a single committed person
Speaker 1: with a lot of money had built a scientific laboratory
Speaker 1: and institution to investigate secrets of nature. And there was
Speaker 1: all kinds of experiments happening at Riverbank to There was
Speaker 1: genetics experiments, agriculture experiments, acoustical experiments, and then there was
Speaker 1: this project that George Fabian wanted Elizabeth Smith to work on,
Speaker 1: which was the Bacon Cipher Project, the project of discovering
Speaker 1: these secret messages inside the works of Shakespeare, ripping them
Speaker 1: out and translating them into the plain text, and revealing
Speaker 1: the secrets of this Shakespeare book to the world. And
Speaker 1: that's that's what he told Elizabeth he wanted her to
Speaker 1: do when he went that day, when he met her
Speaker 1: in the library and whisked her off on the train
Speaker 1: to Riverbank. He wanted her to help him discover the
Speaker 1: secrets that were indebted in Shakespeare and sort of sort
Speaker 1: of transformed the history of English literature. It's just it's
Speaker 1: just unbelievable to think about. I think about the number
Speaker 1: of hours, Mango, that you and I spent just sitting
Speaker 1: in libraries hoping that some eccentric tycoon would come along
Speaker 1: and discover us and lisk us away and it just
Speaker 1: it never happened, but it was. It's it's fascinating to
Speaker 1: read about it, to to think about our fantasy of that.
Speaker 1: But yet, so so that project, that's Shakespeare project didn't
Speaker 1: exactly go you know, anywhere big from there. But but
Speaker 1: but can you tell us, like, how did she end
Speaker 1: up making this transition from trying to figure out the
Speaker 1: code within Shakespeare and seeing if there was any truth
Speaker 1: to this too what she eventually ended up doing and
Speaker 1: some of the very serious code breaking. Sure, that's a
Speaker 1: great question. So so she's brought out to Riverbank, knowing
Speaker 1: nothing about code breaking. She's immediately plunged into this project
Speaker 1: to find secret messages in Shakespeare. And she can't find them.
Speaker 1: And she's there for months and months and months, and
Speaker 1: she's still having having trouble, you know, discovering these secret messages.
Speaker 1: Ultimately she concludes that it's all a wild goose chase,
Speaker 1: it's all kind of a grand delusion. The secret messages
Speaker 1: aren't actually there. What's happening is that George Fabian and
Speaker 1: the people who believe what he believe are kind of
Speaker 1: seeing what they want to see. This is the thing
Speaker 1: about human beings is that we're we're very good at
Speaker 1: seeing patterns. Were all kind of born to do it.
Speaker 1: And sometimes we're so good at seeing patterns that we
Speaker 1: end up seeing patterns that aren't really there, right, and uh,
Speaker 1: and this is what was happening. They thought they saw
Speaker 1: these messages in the works of Shakespeare that weren't really there.
Speaker 1: Elizabeth had to figure this out. Um. But what that
Speaker 1: experience did is, you know, being dropped into this kind
Speaker 1: of delusion. It made her very interested and well, if
Speaker 1: I wanted to find patterns that really were there, and
Speaker 1: if I wanted to be sure that they were there,
Speaker 1: how would I do that? How would I develop a method?
Speaker 1: How would I develop a system to make sure that
Speaker 1: I wasn't tricking myself? And so, beginning in this kind
Speaker 1: of world of delusion um inspired her to try to
Speaker 1: create a true method and a true scientific system for
Speaker 1: discovering patterns in in these blocks of gobbledygook. And that's
Speaker 1: what launched her on her code breaking career, sort of
Speaker 1: in confluence with this other thing that happened, which is
Speaker 1: a year after she got to River Bank, America, entered
Speaker 1: World War One, so April nineteen seventeen, you know, America
Speaker 1: enters the war, and at that point, you know, it's
Speaker 1: amazing for me to go back and learn this history
Speaker 1: because you know, I had always kind of assumed that
Speaker 1: the American intelligence community that we that we know today
Speaker 1: that's mighty and powerful, the National Security Agency, the CIA,
Speaker 1: the FBI. I had always assumed that these institutions are
Speaker 1: always kind of always powerful and had always existed. But
Speaker 1: you know, in nineteen seventeen, when America entered World War One,
Speaker 1: there really was no American intelligence community. There was no
Speaker 1: n s A, there was no CIA, and the FBI
Speaker 1: was very young. And one of the things that you
Speaker 1: need to do when you're going to war is, you know,
Speaker 1: you need to read the secret messages that the enemy
Speaker 1: is sending. You need to know what they're saying and
Speaker 1: what they're doing so you can have an advantage. The
Speaker 1: thing is, you know, when America went to World War
Speaker 1: in World War One in nineteen seventeen, uh, it had
Speaker 1: no ability to do that. There were maybe five people
Speaker 1: in the entire United States who even knew what a
Speaker 1: code or a cipher and so, uh it just so
Speaker 1: happened that some of these five people were Elizabeth and
Speaker 1: her colleagues at Riverbank Laboratories, this bizarre private institution run
Speaker 1: by a crazy rich guy on the Illinois Prairie. It's
Speaker 1: one of these things, you know, truth is stranger than fiction,
Speaker 1: and American history is very, very weird. It gets very
Speaker 1: very weird, very very fast when you get beyond the surface.
Speaker 1: So what happened is, you know, through the urgency of war,
Speaker 1: the necessity of war, you know, the War Department, the
Speaker 1: Army realized they didn't have any code breakers and they
Speaker 1: needed code breakers very quickly. So, uh, just out of desperation,
Speaker 1: they ended up kind of annexing Riverbank Laboratories, which became
Speaker 1: kind of the first national security agency. The War Department
Speaker 1: and other departments of the U. S. Government began to
Speaker 1: send uh, secret messages that they couldn't read out to Riverbank,
Speaker 1: and Elizabeth and her colleagues they're working for this crazy tycoon,
Speaker 1: would solve the messages and send them back to Washington.
Speaker 1: And for the first eight months of World War One,
Speaker 1: UM Riverbank, Elizabeth and her colleagues, they're handled the entire
Speaker 1: code breaking burden for the U. S. Government. While it
Speaker 1: was at war, which is which is incredible to think about,
Speaker 1: because you know, you've got to realize Elizabeth is four
Speaker 1: years old at this time, and she has just learned
Speaker 1: about code breaking in the last year, but all of
Speaker 1: a sudden she was the expert and she had to perform.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Part Time Genius. We're chatting with Jason Fagoni,
Speaker 1: the author of The Woman who Smashed Codes. So, Jason,
Speaker 1: the whole thing about um, that code breaking really wasn't
Speaker 1: a thing before is is just kind of stunning to
Speaker 1: be because I always think about like things in the paper,
Speaker 1: like the cryptograms, or you think about like uh, Lewis
Speaker 1: Carroll and anagrams and people playing with words and in
Speaker 1: crazy ways, But that this art isn't the thing is
Speaker 1: is just kind of amazing. She also wasn't alone in
Speaker 1: this endeavor, right, She had a sort of a love
Speaker 1: interest and partner during this time exactly. She met a
Speaker 1: young scientist there named William Friedman. And and again it's
Speaker 1: one of these kind of classic American tales, two young
Speaker 1: people from very different worlds. Elizabeth was, you know, a
Speaker 1: Quaker girl from the Midwest. William Friedman was a Jewish scientist,
Speaker 1: from Pittsburgh. Um, he had been brought to Riverbank to
Speaker 1: perform genetics experiments. He was breeding fruit flies. Ah, he
Speaker 1: was trying to breed different varieties of corn and wheat
Speaker 1: that might take root in different kinds of soil. But
Speaker 1: the thing about William Freedman is that he he had
Speaker 1: a talent for photography and a lot of the original
Speaker 1: work on the Bacon Cipher project. This, this project of
Speaker 1: finding secret messages in Shakespeare depended on enlarging photographs of uh,
Speaker 1: the original Shakespeare manuscript, the six Stafolio. So so because
Speaker 1: William was good with camera and he knew how to
Speaker 1: develop Prince and in dark Ram, George Fabian roped him
Speaker 1: into this project. And so William Friedman began to work
Speaker 1: with Elizabeth Smith on the Shakespeare project and and they
Speaker 1: both kind of looked at each other around the same
Speaker 1: time and had this had this epiphany which was, Um,
Speaker 1: everybody at this place is completely crazy except for us.
Speaker 1: You know, we are the we might be the only
Speaker 1: sane people here, and we need to, uh, we need
Speaker 1: to form a bond to kind of to protect ourselves
Speaker 1: from these lunatics. And while all of this craziness was
Speaker 1: swirling around them. Elizabeth and William did something extremely important,
Speaker 1: which is, together they invented the modern science of cryptology,
Speaker 1: which today is at the core of our intelligence agencies.
Speaker 1: So this is a remarkable thing. You know, in the
Speaker 1: span of about two or three years, starting in nineteen
Speaker 1: they invented new techniques of code breaking UM that had
Speaker 1: not been known in America. They wrote papers together, they
Speaker 1: worked across from each other in the same room, at
Speaker 1: the same desk, solving puzzles with pencil and paper. You
Speaker 1: gotta remember, this is before the era of computers. This
Speaker 1: is all pencil and paper. You're just sitting there with
Speaker 1: pencil paper in your mind. And because so little was
Speaker 1: known about code breaking in America, UM, they they very
Speaker 1: quickly had to invent new techniques. They had to become scientists,
Speaker 1: and they had to become explorers. And they did that. Uh.
Speaker 1: And they were able to do it because they just
Speaker 1: had this They had this bond, this link. You know,
Speaker 1: there's something kind of miraculous seemed to happen when they
Speaker 1: worked together. They made each other better UM and and
Speaker 1: very quickly they started to consider themselves a duo and
Speaker 1: and a team. UM. After they were married, William even
Speaker 1: even came up with the name he called them. He
Speaker 1: called them the Freedman Combination. And you know, and it's
Speaker 1: interesting because because these papers that they wrote together are
Speaker 1: known as the Riverbank Publications, and uh uh you know,
Speaker 1: they've historically been credited to William alone. You know, it's
Speaker 1: only his name that's on the papers. But I went
Speaker 1: back and I looked at the early drafts of these publications,
Speaker 1: which are in the New York Public Library, uh, in
Speaker 1: their Manuscripts and Archives division. And when you look at
Speaker 1: the drafts, you see that Elizabeth's handwriting has all over them.
Speaker 1: In fact, you know her her her name is even
Speaker 1: typed on some of the type scripts as the author
Speaker 1: of certain sections of the papers. So I think that
Speaker 1: for several of the papers, especially the early, the early papers,
Speaker 1: Elizabeth was every bit the co author, and in fact,
Speaker 1: William considered her to be the co author too. He
Speaker 1: referred to the papers as our papers. And uh. The
Speaker 1: thing that kind of seals the deal from me is that,
Speaker 1: you know, uh, in his personal archive, which is at
Speaker 1: a private library in Virginia, he has uh he he
Speaker 1: kept his own personal copies of the River Bank Publications
Speaker 1: and on one of them. He actually writes Elizabeth's name
Speaker 1: as a co author on the cover, even though it's
Speaker 1: not there in the printed version, and so so she was.
Speaker 1: She was the co founder I think of modern American cryptology. Wow.
Speaker 1: And you know when you talk about that, that impact
Speaker 1: that they had, and I guess finally the War Department
Speaker 1: wakes up to the fact that maybe they need more
Speaker 1: than just five people at this weird estate in the
Speaker 1: middle of nowhere and and decides to start their own
Speaker 1: code breaking units. But but that doesn't mean the end
Speaker 1: of it for for William and Elizabeth. Can you talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about what you know Elizabeth specifically was
Speaker 1: up to in between the world wars, because she was
Speaker 1: still very much involved in this world Sure, right, So
Speaker 1: you're right, the War Department comes to the conclusion that
Speaker 1: maybe it's not the best idea to have a crazy
Speaker 1: tycoon handling all of the code breaking bird and forward
Speaker 1: the United States. Uh, they started, they start to build
Speaker 1: code breaking teams and capacities in Washington. What happens is, eventually, uh,
Speaker 1: George Fabian sort of reveals his insanity. He begins to
Speaker 1: spy on the Freedman's while they're still at Riverbank. He
Speaker 1: surveils them, he intercepts them, nail. He becomes very controlling.
Speaker 1: There's a suggestion that he might have sexually harassed Elizabeth
Speaker 1: while William was serving in France briefly during World War One.
Speaker 1: William comes back from the war, they both get out
Speaker 1: of there. They make their escape. They essentially pack up
Speaker 1: their things in the middle of the night because they're
Speaker 1: terrified of Fabian and they moved to Washington, d C.
Speaker 1: And this is where they spend the rest of their
Speaker 1: careers and so um. Initially they're working in Washington, d C.
Speaker 1: Together starting they both they both start working for the army,
Speaker 1: and at first they're working in the same room just
Speaker 1: like they were before, designing new codes for the Army
Speaker 1: news safer codes for for the use of the dough boys. UM.
Speaker 1: Pretty quickly, Elizabeth gets bored with that and she quits.
Speaker 1: She she stays at home and starts to write children's books,
Speaker 1: which was a long ambition of her. She wanted to
Speaker 1: write a children's book about the history of the alphabets
Speaker 1: and show sort of the wonders of the alphabet and
Speaker 1: the system of of of written communication to it's and
Speaker 1: young adults. And she also had gave birth to their
Speaker 1: first child around that time, Barbara daughter, and uh soe
Speaker 1: Elizabeth is kind of out of the game, right she
Speaker 1: she's at home, she's writing children's books, she's recovering from labor,
Speaker 1: and she is a mother. And this is kind of
Speaker 1: what she thinks she's going to do for the rest
Speaker 1: rest of her life and her career. But what happens
Speaker 1: is that men from the government show up on her
Speaker 1: doorstep and ask herself puzzles for America. And this is
Speaker 1: this is exactly these are her words, by the way,
Speaker 1: this is how she put it. She she was kind
Speaker 1: of a complaint all of her life. She said that
Speaker 1: men from the government keeps showing up on my doorstep
Speaker 1: asking me to selve puzzles, and the only way the
Speaker 1: only way to make them go away is to say
Speaker 1: yes and agree to do these projects. The problem for
Speaker 1: Elizabeth is that she was just so good at what
Speaker 1: she did um she and she had such an unusual
Speaker 1: set of skills that she became indispensable. And so the
Speaker 1: government really could not afford to leave her alone. And
Speaker 1: so at every stage of her career, and men from
Speaker 1: the government were showing up on our doorstep asking her
Speaker 1: to confront some kind of challenge for which they were
Speaker 1: unprepared and and the challenge in nine the first men
Speaker 1: from the government who showed up on her doorstep in DC.
Speaker 1: We're from the U. S. Treasury Department, specifically the U. S.
Speaker 1: Coast Guard, and they were asking Elizabeth to help them
Speaker 1: fight the war against organized crime because of prohibition. What
Speaker 1: the Coast Guard needed to make any progress in in
Speaker 1: this war against uh these rum runners was code breaking.
Speaker 1: And by the way, these were not gentlemen run runners, right,
Speaker 1: the gentleman rum runners, the guys sort of the the
Speaker 1: small time entrepreneurs with a boat. Yeah, they were out
Speaker 1: of the game by nineteen twenty four. They were. They
Speaker 1: were edged out. They were forced out by organized crime,
Speaker 1: by these mafias. And so, uh so, what the Coast
Speaker 1: Guard needed to make any progress was code breaking. They
Speaker 1: needed someone like Elizabeth to come in look at the
Speaker 1: intercepted radio messages, you know, solve them and light up
Speaker 1: this dark and underworld too, that the Coast Guard would
Speaker 1: be able to catch these boats and put these guys
Speaker 1: on trial. And that's exactly what she started to do.
Speaker 1: Starting she became an expert in this discipline of radio intelligence,
Speaker 1: which is intercepting the radio messages, solving the codes, using
Speaker 1: the information to map the hit and network the darkened
Speaker 1: underworld to throw light on it. And then once she
Speaker 1: had solved the messages of these rum runners, a lot
Speaker 1: of the times she would be called to testifying court
Speaker 1: against them, which is incredible to think about, because you know,
Speaker 1: it's this badite woman five ft three, you know, walking
Speaker 1: to the front of a courtroom, you know, in a
Speaker 1: pink dress and a pink hat with a flower pinned
Speaker 1: to the brim, and she's sitting in the witness box
Speaker 1: staring down, you know, in one case, more than twenty
Speaker 1: agents of an organized crime syndicate and explaining to a
Speaker 1: jury exactly what code breaking is and exactly how she
Speaker 1: solved these messages, because she had to be able to
Speaker 1: convince a jury that it was real science, that the
Speaker 1: words that she was saying, the rum runners were saying,
Speaker 1: we're her actual words, that she really was kind of
Speaker 1: reading their thoughts, and that there was a science to it.
Speaker 1: And so, uh So, Elizabeth became, for a brief time
Speaker 1: in the in the early nineteen thirties, a front page story.
Speaker 1: Uh and it was kind of an irresistible story for
Speaker 1: reporters because you know they would they would describe her
Speaker 1: as sort of like, uh, a small woman in a
Speaker 1: pink dress who protects the United States or or you know,
Speaker 1: a pretty little woman in a in a philly prank
Speaker 1: pink dress. Um, and she and she would find herself
Speaker 1: on the front page all of a sudden and testifying
Speaker 1: in these spectacular trials. Wow. Yeah, And I think you
Speaker 1: said at one point she was decoding up to what
Speaker 1: like twenty five thousand messages in a year, So not
Speaker 1: only was she good at this, but she was incredibly fast. Yes,
Speaker 1: it was an astonishing volume of stuff. And and again
Speaker 1: this is before computers, so so a lot of the
Speaker 1: job was just this kind of daily grind of of
Speaker 1: cranking through paper. So, Jason, I want to get into
Speaker 1: uh jed or Hoover and how the FBI messed up
Speaker 1: so many things and and all that story is fascinating,
Speaker 1: But before that, can you tell us a little bit
Speaker 1: about how you found the story and how you reported
Speaker 1: it because it obviously has uh, you know, a ton
Speaker 1: of work went into this incredible book. Sure, so the
Speaker 1: genesis of the story was really the Edward Snowden, Uh
Speaker 1: leaks in. So after the Snowden story broke, I started
Speaker 1: reading about the n s A, right, and I think, um,
Speaker 1: the history of the n s A. Where did it
Speaker 1: come from? And like a lot of Americans, I think
Speaker 1: I didn't really know much about the n s A.
Speaker 1: And when you start reading about the history of the
Speaker 1: n s A, all roads lead to William Friedman, Elizabeth's husband.
Speaker 1: He's considered to be the godfather of the n s A.
Speaker 1: That today, if you go to n s A headquarters
Speaker 1: in Fort Meade, Uh, there's an outside of the auditorium
Speaker 1: that is named for William is a bronze bust of
Speaker 1: his head. So William is like the guy, the guy
Speaker 1: with the n s A. UM. But I also read
Speaker 1: I also read that he that he had a wife
Speaker 1: who was a codebreaker herself, and I thought that was interesting, right,
Speaker 1: like a husband and wife codebreaker. That's that's kind of unusual.
Speaker 1: And I went looking for more information about Elizabeth, but
Speaker 1: there wasn't really much that I could find. And so
Speaker 1: one day I drove down from my from my house
Speaker 1: outside of Philly to the library in Lexington, Virginia, where
Speaker 1: the Freedman's left their personal papers before they died and
Speaker 1: William left, uh, you know, reams of stuff, boxes and
Speaker 1: boxes and boxes and boxes. Elizabeth left a smaller amount
Speaker 1: of material, but she still left twenty two boxes full
Speaker 1: of full of documents, and um, I asked if I
Speaker 1: could see them, And so I started reading reading her stuff,
Speaker 1: starting with Box one, File one. And you know, immediately
Speaker 1: when I started reading her letters, I was just I
Speaker 1: was just taken with her voice, you know, on on
Speaker 1: the page a hundred years ago, reading reading reading her
Speaker 1: words in her own hand. And she's just so sort
Speaker 1: of funny, witty, warm, sometimes sort of biting, sarcastic. She
Speaker 1: could be very savage on the bag sometimes and um,
Speaker 1: and I was just captivated with with her voice. But
Speaker 1: you know, the more I read in those twenty two boxes,
Speaker 1: the more I realized that, um, you know, not only
Speaker 1: was this the story of uh, you know, a remarkable woman,
Speaker 1: um who had an amazing kind of dramatic, kind of
Speaker 1: irresistibly you know, cinematic career. I mean, a code breaking
Speaker 1: Quaker poet who caught gangsters. It's it's it's kind of irresistible, right,
Speaker 1: But I also realized that, you know, she was really
Speaker 1: a hidden woman behind the birth and the growth of
Speaker 1: the intelligence uh community in America, because she really was
Speaker 1: present at the beginning of a lot of things that
Speaker 1: that today are very important. And so I thought it
Speaker 1: was you know, it was both kind of like a
Speaker 1: you know, an incredible just human story that hadn't been told,
Speaker 1: but I also thought it was it was important in
Speaker 1: terms of the bigger picture of American intelligence. That the
Speaker 1: thing about the twenty two boxes that I found at
Speaker 1: the library that Elizabeth had left was, uh, there was
Speaker 1: nothing in World War about World War Two in those boxes,
Speaker 1: so there was essentially a gap between nineteen thirty nine
Speaker 1: and so what she did during World War Two, what
Speaker 1: I found in those records is that, um, she was
Speaker 1: hunting Nazi spies. So after Hitler invaded Poland, Nazi spies
Speaker 1: began spreading out into the Western hemisphere, and uh, most
Speaker 1: of them set up shop in South America. South America
Speaker 1: was a good place for them to be because it
Speaker 1: was kind of upper grabs, it was neutral, uh, and
Speaker 1: it was close to North America. So it was a
Speaker 1: good listening post for Nazi spies to gather intelligence about
Speaker 1: what America was doing and what Britain was doing. There
Speaker 1: were also a lot of sort of right wing movements
Speaker 1: in individual South American countries that kind of resembled fascism,
Speaker 1: So there was some natural sympathy for the fascist cause.
Speaker 1: They're also millions of German columnists already living there, so
Speaker 1: Nazis had kind of a natural advantage. It was fertile
Speaker 1: soil for Nazi spies to set up. And and what
Speaker 1: they did is when they when they went to South America,
Speaker 1: they started to build clandestine radio stations, pirate radio stations,
Speaker 1: and they would transmit their intelligence reports back to Berlin
Speaker 1: and Hamburg um over the radio. And uh. It was
Speaker 1: the FBI's job, Jagger Hoover's job at that point, to
Speaker 1: try to stop these Nazi spies. The problem was he
Speaker 1: wasn't very good at it. So um. There's a famous story.
Speaker 1: The FBI created a whole new division in to try
Speaker 1: to go after Nazi spies in South America. It was
Speaker 1: called the s I S. And the first couple of
Speaker 1: FBI agents who went to South America, they got off
Speaker 1: the plane and they were immediately spotted by the locals
Speaker 1: and and made for FBI guys. You know, the locals.
Speaker 1: The locals looked at them and they they looked like
Speaker 1: FBI guys they had seen in the movies. They had
Speaker 1: the snap brim hats and then you know, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the square jaws and everything, and they were really pale.
Speaker 1: They didn't have they didn't speak the languages. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: there's a story about one of the guys who had
Speaker 1: taken a language course in New York in preparation for
Speaker 1: his posting to South America. The the FBI had taught
Speaker 1: him Spanish, and then he was posted to Brazil and
Speaker 1: he got off the plane in Brazil, you know, disappointed
Speaker 1: to discover that the language that's spoken in Brazil is
Speaker 1: mainly Portuguese and not spanning. So these guys were completely lost,
Speaker 1: right the FBI, Yeah, they were never they were never
Speaker 1: going to be able to find these Nazi spies using
Speaker 1: kind of old school FBI techniques of developing confidential informants
Speaker 1: and that sort of thing. What they really needed was
Speaker 1: code breaking, right, they needed a technical advantage. They needed
Speaker 1: to intercept these radio messages, uh, solve the messages and
Speaker 1: light up the darkened underworld by by kind of stealing
Speaker 1: the thoughts directly from the lips of the spies. Um.
Speaker 1: But they couldn't do that because the FBI didn't have
Speaker 1: Because the FBI didn't have a code breaking team, they
Speaker 1: had no code breaking compa city, They had no ability
Speaker 1: uh to break codes and to read the messages of
Speaker 1: what these Nazi spies were saying. But Elizabeth Friedman did
Speaker 1: because you know, she had spent the last fifteen years
Speaker 1: uh kind of doing target practice against rum runners and
Speaker 1: drug smuggles. She she had developed this expertise at intercepting
Speaker 1: radio messages, solving them and mapping these underworld networks because
Speaker 1: that had been her job during the twenties and thirties
Speaker 1: to to fight smuggling and so UM, it wasn't that
Speaker 1: she set out to hunt Nazi spies. It's just that
Speaker 1: she she happened to have the right set of skills
Speaker 1: the right moment, you know, and in she was ready
Speaker 1: to go. And so so what ended up happening is
Speaker 1: the FBI relied on Elizabeth and UM and the code
Speaker 1: breaking team that she had built within the Coast Guard
Speaker 1: UH code breakers that she had trained she had led
Speaker 1: UM relying on them to as as kind of the
Speaker 1: technical back end of this of this hunt for Nazi
Speaker 1: spies in South America. Elizabeth and her team monitor these
Speaker 1: clandestine radio circuits used by Nazi spies, solve the messages,
Speaker 1: and provide the translated English plain texts to allied intelligence agencies,
Speaker 1: including the Army, the Navy, the FBI, and also British intelligence.
Speaker 1: And by the end of the war, they had monitored
Speaker 1: about fifty different UH clandestine radio circuits used by the Nazis,
Speaker 1: solved four thousand messages. You know, these messages were incredibly
Speaker 1: important in ultimately destroying these Nazi spy rings in South
Speaker 1: America and eliminating a dangerous threat. You know, Elizabeth and
Speaker 1: her teammates really brought these Nazi spies to Ruin Pick
Speaker 1: to pick their networks apart, piece by piece, destroyed them,
Speaker 1: you know, neutralized the threat. And then after the war,
Speaker 1: Jagger Hoover you know, stuck up his hand and went
Speaker 1: out to the public on kind of a publicity campaign
Speaker 1: taking credit for all of that, and he said, you know, America,
Speaker 1: the FBI saved you for on this dangerous Nazi spy
Speaker 1: invasion in South America, and UH, You're welcome. And that's
Speaker 1: kind of the story that has been told ever since,
Speaker 1: is that is that the FBI did UH, did all
Speaker 1: of the hard dangerous, brave. Uh, you know, brilliant work
Speaker 1: of catching these Nazi splies of South America. But I
Speaker 1: think the truth is that the real driver was Elizabeth Freedman.
Speaker 1: It was this. It was this American mother of two
Speaker 1: who figured out how to sweep the Western hemisphere free
Speaker 1: of undercover Nazis. And uh, and yet she never got
Speaker 1: the credit for it because because Hoover got out there
Speaker 1: in front. Welcome back to Part time Genius. We're chatting
Speaker 1: with Jason Fagoni, the author of The Woman who Smashed Codes. Okay, Jason,
Speaker 1: So she, you know, helps through World War One obviously
Speaker 1: de codes, know what, as you said, twenty five thousand
Speaker 1: messages a year in between the world wars at times,
Speaker 1: and and helped defeat the Nazis in World War Two.
Speaker 1: It's just an unbelievable story. And then you said, after
Speaker 1: all of this, she and William kind of come back
Speaker 1: to the Shakespeare project later in their lives, and and
Speaker 1: why was this? Yes? So after the war, Uh, William
Speaker 1: was one of the people who helped form the National
Speaker 1: Security Agency that the team that he had created and
Speaker 1: built at the Army, which during World War Two achieved
Speaker 1: essentially the impossible by breaking the Japanese diplomatic code, which
Speaker 1: was called Purple, which she gave the Allies a huge
Speaker 1: advantage and probably shortened the war. Yeah, he did all
Speaker 1: these heroic things during World War Two, and then after
Speaker 1: the war helped to create the n s A. His
Speaker 1: his army unit was kind of absorbed into this thing
Speaker 1: that became the n s A. But as the n
Speaker 1: s A kind of began to grow, um it it
Speaker 1: grew beyond what what he uh felt like he could bear. Um.
Speaker 1: He became a critic internally of some of the n
Speaker 1: s AS policies and it's uh it's directions. He he
Speaker 1: became concerned that that too many documents were being classified.
Speaker 1: Um he felt like the NISA was collecting too much information.
Speaker 1: He felt like they would never ever be able to
Speaker 1: sift all the information they were collecting for actionable intelligence
Speaker 1: and UH and it really troubled him and uh and
Speaker 1: and throughout the nineteen fifties, as the Cold War UH
Speaker 1: kind of sharpened in d C, atmosphere of paranoia grew.
Speaker 1: Um William became more and more despairing about his relationship
Speaker 1: with this organization and with the government more broadly. That
Speaker 1: he that he felt he had always served very loyal
Speaker 1: loyally and um, you know it this kind of culminated
Speaker 1: in this famous, famous day in eight when the n
Speaker 1: s A sent agents to the personal home of William
Speaker 1: and Elizabeth Freedman and removed documents and books from their
Speaker 1: from their private library, uh, saying saying that they were
Speaker 1: classified and needed needed to be moved to a higher
Speaker 1: level of classification the free you know, A lot of
Speaker 1: the a lot of the materials were so old that
Speaker 1: they dated back to the First World War. UH. William
Speaker 1: was baffled, you know that that the n s A
Speaker 1: would uh would want to classify these things because they
Speaker 1: were so old and there they were really of only
Speaker 1: historical interest, he thought. But um, you know, they they
Speaker 1: found this to be kind of intolerable, a uh, you know,
Speaker 1: an invasion of their privacy. And um, I think it
Speaker 1: motivated him and and and probably Elizabeth too to pull
Speaker 1: away from from government work more and more and back
Speaker 1: to personal projects. And so one of the personal projects
Speaker 1: that they could could talk about that they could work on. Uh.
Speaker 1: In this atmosphere of kind of deepening paranoia, security and
Speaker 1: classification was something that had nothing to do with government
Speaker 1: codebreak all is something that's something that went back to,
Speaker 1: uh to their original kind of wild goose chase of
Speaker 1: their youth at Number Bank Laboratories. So so you know,
Speaker 1: they and what they did is they went back to this, uh,
Speaker 1: to this theory that George Fabian had always tried to
Speaker 1: get them to prove this theory that that Francis Bacon
Speaker 1: had inserted secret messages in the works of Shakespeare and
Speaker 1: uh and they just demolished it. They used all of
Speaker 1: their ability, all of their uh, all of their kind
Speaker 1: of savagery on the page to to sort of go
Speaker 1: through every piece of piece of purported evidence for for
Speaker 1: this theory and uh and just and just destroy it
Speaker 1: page by page. And it is wonderful. And they wrote
Speaker 1: it together. Um, it's a very funny book. It's it's
Speaker 1: it's a very uh sort of precise book and uh
Speaker 1: and and that was the thing that brought them back
Speaker 1: together working together after decades of of kind of growing
Speaker 1: growing apart because of their uh, you know, increasingly important
Speaker 1: purity duties for the United States. Wow. Well, I have
Speaker 1: to say, Jason, in reading this book, this is this
Speaker 1: is one of those history books that as you're reading it,
Speaker 1: you can almost see and feel the blood, sweat and
Speaker 1: tears that went into this project. It's not only beautifully written,
Speaker 1: but you can tell just all of the the intense
Speaker 1: amount of research that you've done to put into this book,
Speaker 1: and and for that, I honestly, I just want to
Speaker 1: say thanks, because it is one of the best books
Speaker 1: I've read in a long time. And I do hope
Speaker 1: our our readers will check out The Woman who Smashed Codes.
Speaker 1: It's an incredible story. So Elizabeth died in nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: at the age of eighty eight, mostly unacknowledged for her
Speaker 1: foundation laying cryptographic word, but you know you stumbled into
Speaker 1: her story and and for that and all the work
Speaker 1: you put into this, I just want to say thanks. Oh,
Speaker 1: thank you guys. I I really appreciate your um. I
Speaker 1: don't know your questions were great. It's clearly that you
Speaker 1: paid a lot of paid a lot of attention to
Speaker 1: the book and and honestly, it was it was a
Speaker 1: joy doing the research. It was it was one of
Speaker 1: those projects that every journalist and every writer hopes to
Speaker 1: stumble across, and I feel lucky to have to have
Speaker 1: gotten to do it. M H. Welcome back to part
Speaker 1: time genius. Now we've learned a ton today, but you know,
Speaker 1: we can't wrap this thing up without a good old
Speaker 1: fashioned backed off. So you want to kick us off, mango, Yeah, definitely. So.
Speaker 1: I know Jason talked about this a little bit earlier,
Speaker 1: but I loved reading about how Elizabeth and William taught
Speaker 1: their kids the basics of cryptography, like as early as
Speaker 1: seven years old. So when their daughter Barbara was off
Speaker 1: at sleepaway camp, she'd send home letters and code, and
Speaker 1: the Freedman's would use codes and ciphers and their Christmas
Speaker 1: cards and sometimes they even had cipher parties where their
Speaker 1: guests would have to solve the cipher just to figure
Speaker 1: out what would be served for dinner. Wow, that's pretty awesome,
Speaker 1: And actually it's kind of neat to see this coming
Speaker 1: back in a way with like these brave gout type
Speaker 1: places that people will go with their friends to play.
Speaker 1: Have you seen these exit the room things? Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: I've never been to one, but they seem pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: All right. Well, I know we've been talking about the
Speaker 1: woman who Smashed Codes, but there was another book published
Speaker 1: this fall that's more generally about women code breakers, and
Speaker 1: it's called Code Girls. The Untold Story of the American
Speaker 1: women code breakers of World War Two, and it's by
Speaker 1: Liz Mundy, So I think i'll share just a couple
Speaker 1: of facts from that. And it does tell the story
Speaker 1: of the more than ten thousand college students and school teachers,
Speaker 1: among other women who were recruited to really be the
Speaker 1: backbone of our intelligence efforts. But one of the things
Speaker 1: I thought was so interesting is that it was a huge,
Speaker 1: huge advantage for the Allied powers because unlike the Allied
Speaker 1: Powers who put all of these women to work, the
Speaker 1: Access Powers didn't do the same. And their estimates that
Speaker 1: it shortened the war by as many as two or
Speaker 1: three years. Oh wow, that's incredible. So one of the
Speaker 1: more strange figures that Elizabeth took down was this woman
Speaker 1: known as Doll Lady, and she discovered the secret code
Speaker 1: hidden in the letters of this New York woman named
Speaker 1: Beelvolye Dickinson, who was acting as this Japanese spy. It's
Speaker 1: an amazing story. So Dickinson owned a doll shop and
Speaker 1: would send letters to an address in Buenos Aires, and
Speaker 1: she'd be talking about various dolls in her collection. But
Speaker 1: Elizabeth realized that her references to like English dolls and
Speaker 1: foreign dolls were actually a way to communicate about the Allies.
Speaker 1: And the doll lady was eventually sentenced to ten years
Speaker 1: in prison and find after being charged with espionage. She
Speaker 1: got that doll lady. Wow, what a strange character. I know,
Speaker 1: it just confirms my theories that adults who love dolls
Speaker 1: shouldn't be trusted. That it's a good that's a good one.
Speaker 1: I go, maybe we'll do a whole episode on that
Speaker 1: at some point. All right, Well, back to Monday's books.
Speaker 1: So she writes about how the branches of military were
Speaker 1: different from one another and who they allowed to be
Speaker 1: code breakers and who they didn't. So the Navy, for example,
Speaker 1: didn't allow non whites. They didn't want Jewish women, they
Speaker 1: didn't want African American women. The Army, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: did allow non whites. However, not surprisingly, these groups were segregated.
Speaker 1: And it was really frustrating from Moundy as she was
Speaker 1: doing the research because there's no substantial records out there
Speaker 1: other than a few photos, and you can actually see
Speaker 1: these in Monday's book, and you know, it shows a
Speaker 1: room full of African American code breakers, most of them
Speaker 1: being women. So, as Jason explained to us, by the
Speaker 1: early nineteen twenties, there were only three code breaking units
Speaker 1: in the government and fewer than fifty employees, and about
Speaker 1: half of those employees worked for the State Department, and
Speaker 1: the Army and Navy had the other two. But in
Speaker 1: nine the Secretary of State decided to shut down the
Speaker 1: State Department's unit because, as he put it, quote, gentlemen
Speaker 1: do not read each other's mail. Wow, what a strange thing,
Speaker 1: all right. Well, one of the other things Monday shows
Speaker 1: and Code Girls is that unlike this common notion that
Speaker 1: there are all these big and exciting kind of ah
Speaker 1: ha moments in code breaking, it's actually much more similar
Speaker 1: to a marathon. And she does a great job of
Speaker 1: showing how they were working often around the clock, just
Speaker 1: looking for patterns and searching and searching. And it really
Speaker 1: was this marathon work that had played a huge role
Speaker 1: in helping to shorten the war, as I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: because the Allies just had a much better idea of
Speaker 1: what the Japanese and Germans We're planning to do each
Speaker 1: step along the way. And I bet you want a
Speaker 1: carbo load before each stage. With that definitely definitely. So
Speaker 1: I know we like to talk about the best job titles,
Speaker 1: so I had to tell you about uh. When Elizabeth
Speaker 1: was tapped to head up the Coast Guards codebreaking team,
Speaker 1: not only was she the first woman to run a
Speaker 1: US government code breaking unit, but she was also given
Speaker 1: a business card that said cryptanalyst and charge US Coast Guard.
Speaker 1: That's one of the best titles I've ever heard. I
Speaker 1: cannot beat that. So I'm gonna give you today's fact
Speaker 1: off Mango. Thank you, thank you. All Right, that's it
Speaker 1: for today's show. A special thanks to Jocelyn Sears for
Speaker 1: her excellent research help with this episode. Now, if you
Speaker 1: want to share any of your favorite code breaking facts,
Speaker 1: you can always email us at part Time Genius at
Speaker 1: how stuff Works dot com or call us on our
Speaker 1: seven fact hop line one eight four four pt Genius.
Speaker 1: You can also hit us up on Facebook or Twitter,
Speaker 1: and don't forget to let us know if you'd like
Speaker 1: to come on to play a quiz with us sometime.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening, Yeah, thanks again for listening. Part Time
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