Speaker 1: I guess we will. Oh yeah, so Will lost his voice,
Speaker 1: but he's waving vigorously at you, and he wants you
Speaker 1: to know that. We are doing a live dating a
Speaker 1: part time genius on July one at four pm in Philly.
Speaker 1: It's actually at the theater that's near and dear to
Speaker 1: my heart, the Trocadero, and it's all part of the
Speaker 1: Philly Podcast Festival. In fact, we're doing a double header
Speaker 1: with the wonderful guys from Ridiculous History. I'm sure you
Speaker 1: know them, Ben and Nol. They are so good. It's
Speaker 1: gonna be really fun and I can't wait to see you.
Speaker 1: So go to Philly podfest dot com pickup tickets, come
Speaker 1: meet us. I'd love to hang out anyway. For this
Speaker 1: week's classic episode, we're rewinding back to when we landed
Speaker 1: the wonderful Jason Fagoni on the program. He's this incredible
Speaker 1: writer and he has this extraordinary story about a woman
Speaker 1: who broke codes. It's honestly one of my favorite things ever.
Speaker 1: And he was actually living in Philly when we did
Speaker 1: this interview, so it ties back perfectly. Enjoy Guess what, Mango?
Speaker 1: What's that? Will? All right? So tell me this doesn't
Speaker 1: sound like a great premise for a movie. About a
Speaker 1: century ago, a young woman from a small town in
Speaker 1: Indiana heads off to college to study poetry and philosophy.
Speaker 1: Now she does this against her father's will, by the way,
Speaker 1: So she finishes college travels to Chicago to figure out
Speaker 1: what to do with her life. Already following so far,
Speaker 1: because here's where the crazy plot twist comes in. She's
Speaker 1: about to give up, and then she's discovered and hired
Speaker 1: by this really eccentric tycoon, makes a major shift in
Speaker 1: her life and realizes she has this remarkable ability to
Speaker 1: break code. She then goes on to become one of
Speaker 1: the greatest code breakers in history, helps the US win
Speaker 1: World War One, helps US defeat the Nazis in World
Speaker 1: War Two, and plays a major role in building the
Speaker 1: foundation for the intelligence agencies in the USA today. Boom,
Speaker 1: what do you think about this? I'd watched that movie. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it should be a movie. But here's the thing,
Speaker 1: it's all true, and thanks to the years of research
Speaker 1: and writing by Jason Pagoni, we now have a brilliant book.
Speaker 1: It's called The Woman Who Smash Codes, and it tells
Speaker 1: the story of Elizabeth Smith Friedman. I can't stop thinking
Speaker 1: about this story, so let's dive in ye day their
Speaker 1: podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson
Speaker 1: and as always I'm joined by my good friend Mangesh
Speaker 1: Ticketer and on the other side of the soundproof glass
Speaker 1: obsessing over his new Dacoda ring and what's he doing.
Speaker 1: He's he's like he's communicating with us in some sort
Speaker 1: of new language of signals. He and he's always so impressive. Mango,
Speaker 1: that's our that's our friend and producer Tristan McNeil. Now
Speaker 1: today we're talking about one of the most fascinating people
Speaker 1: history almost forgot and honestly might have forever had it
Speaker 1: not been for the book we're talking about today. I
Speaker 1: know it's it's just this incredible story. And when you
Speaker 1: started telling me about it, I'll be honest, I really
Speaker 1: didn't think it could be true. I mean, like this
Speaker 1: poet learning code breaking and then taking down Nazis and
Speaker 1: gangsters and cracking codes with pretty much this relative ease,
Speaker 1: Like it just sounded too good. And especially since you know,
Speaker 1: we've done a lot of stories and I've never really
Speaker 1: heard of Elizabeth Smith Friedman before. I know it's it's
Speaker 1: honestly why I can't stop talking about you really haven't
Speaker 1: stopped talking about it for a while. Well, I'm thrilled
Speaker 1: we finally have the right person on the line to
Speaker 1: talk about this story, and that's the author of The
Speaker 1: Woman Who Smashed Codes, Jason Foggoni. So, Jason, welcome to
Speaker 1: Part Time Genius. Hey, thanks, guys, I'm glad to be here. Well, Jason,
Speaker 1: I want to jump straight into this this really bizarre
Speaker 1: break that Elizabeth got, you know, becoming a code breaker,
Speaker 1: and of course we want to ask you about how
Speaker 1: you even stumbled into this story. But first, can you
Speaker 1: set the scene a little bit and just talk about
Speaker 1: what her early life was like before she got this
Speaker 1: big break. Yeah. So it's one of these kind of
Speaker 1: classic Americans els. You have a hundred years ago, a
Speaker 1: young woman in her early twenties is bored with her
Speaker 1: life and board with her job. She lives in a
Speaker 1: small town, uh in Midwest, in rural Indiana where she's from.
Speaker 1: She's teaching high school and for a bright young woman
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifteen, nineteen sixteen, this is kind of the
Speaker 1: end of the line right there. There is not really um,
Speaker 1: a lot of opportunity beyond teaching school. Elizabeth was extremely intelligent, ambitious,
Speaker 1: and brave, and she decided in June nineteen sixteen to
Speaker 1: take a risk. She quit her job teaching school and
Speaker 1: she moved to the big city, to Chicago, to look
Speaker 1: for something more unusual. And that was really all she wanted,
Speaker 1: was something a little bit more unusual. That brought her
Speaker 1: to a library in Chicago, the Newberry Library that happened
Speaker 1: to have a rare volume of Shakespeare from sixteen twenty
Speaker 1: three was the Shakespeare First Staffolio. And she happened to
Speaker 1: love Shakespeare. She had studied Shakespeare in school. She was
Speaker 1: a poet by training, literature scholar, and she just kind
Speaker 1: of wanted to see this rare book. She she hadn't
Speaker 1: had any luck finding a job in Chicago. She spent
Speaker 1: about a week, week and a half they're looking for work,
Speaker 1: had no luck. She was about ready to go back
Speaker 1: home and move in with her parents back in Indiana,
Speaker 1: but she made this one final stop at this library
Speaker 1: to see this Shakespeare book, and she happened to have
Speaker 1: a chance meeting there with an eccentric tycoon named George
Speaker 1: Fabian that that ended up transforming her life, but not
Speaker 1: just her life. Uh, it ended up changing the shape
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century. And to be clear, like she
Speaker 1: hadn't studied any code breaking, right, Like she was um
Speaker 1: more a liberal arts type, is that right? Yeah, absolutely
Speaker 1: she was. She was a poet in a literature person.
Speaker 1: So this is one of the surprising things about the story,
Speaker 1: and one of the things that pulled me in from
Speaker 1: the from the first day I began to read her
Speaker 1: letters is that I think we we kind of think
Speaker 1: of code breakers as mathematicians. We have this image of
Speaker 1: the code breakers as someone like Alan Turning, professional mathematicians,
Speaker 1: math professor. But the fact is code breakers often come
Speaker 1: from unusual places because the core thing about code breaking
Speaker 1: is it's really about seeing patterns. The code breaking is
Speaker 1: the science of solving a secret message without knowing the key. Um.
Speaker 1: It's akin to if you've ever solved the cryptogram and
Speaker 1: the in the puzzle page in the paper. Um. Elizabeth
Speaker 1: was doing this at a sort of more sophisticated level
Speaker 1: than than most people. But it's the same principle. You
Speaker 1: you you sort of take a block of letters that
Speaker 1: looks like gobbledygook, you chop them into their constituent parts.
Speaker 1: You whirl them around, count them and measure them and
Speaker 1: rearrange them into their original order. And Elizabeth was a
Speaker 1: genius at seeing patterns. Even though she wasn't mathematically trained,
Speaker 1: she she had a genius for seeing patterns, and that
Speaker 1: that's one of the things that made her one of
Speaker 1: the one of the most important code breakers of her era.
Speaker 1: And before she was doing the code breaking that obviously,
Speaker 1: you know, changed the world in many ways. It was
Speaker 1: an interesting first project. I mean, can you talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about Fabian because he seemed like such a
Speaker 1: bizarre character, and the and how this meeting came to be,
Speaker 1: and and and what she was actually asked to do
Speaker 1: in her first assignment with him. So Elizabeth went to
Speaker 1: this library, the Newbury Library, to see this rare book
Speaker 1: of Shakespeare, and she having to fall into conversation with
Speaker 1: the librarian there, who saw that she was interested in Shakespeare.
Speaker 1: The librarian comes over and says, you know, it's funny,
Speaker 1: but there's this odd, rich guy who keeps coming to
Speaker 1: the library looking at the same book of Shakespeare. He's
Speaker 1: convinced that there are secret messages embedded inside inside this
Speaker 1: book that have been planted there by the true author
Speaker 1: of Shakespeare's plays. He thinks that the true author is
Speaker 1: actually this guy who is a contemporary of Shakespeare's named
Speaker 1: Francis Bake. So the librarian is telling Elizabeth this, and
Speaker 1: the librarian says, uh, this rich guy, George Fabian. He
Speaker 1: says he's been looking for a research assistant. Would you
Speaker 1: be interested in something like that? Elisbath says, oh, sure,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe possibly. The librarian makes a phone call
Speaker 1: to George Fabian. George Fabian ends up coming to the
Speaker 1: library immediately, bringing bringing his chauffeurg limousine. He pulls up
Speaker 1: in front of the Newberry Library and this limo and
Speaker 1: he tumbles out of the limousine and Elizabeth Smith looks
Speaker 1: at George Fabian for the first time, and what she
Speaker 1: sees is an enormous human being. He is six foot
Speaker 1: for two pounds, big iron gray beard. Uh. He just
Speaker 1: he just sort of stomps towards her. Uh. He has
Speaker 1: big red face, and he's sort of full of energy
Speaker 1: and intent, and he's basically towering over her because Elizabeth
Speaker 1: is very petite. She's about five ft three and about
Speaker 1: a hundred and ten pounds um. And he looks at her,
Speaker 1: and he says, would you like to come to Riverbank
Speaker 1: and spend the night with me? This is you know,
Speaker 1: this is a completely scandalous question. Uh. You know, Elizabeth
Speaker 1: is from this from a fairly devout Quaker family, and
Speaker 1: and um, and she doesn't even know what to say
Speaker 1: to this. She doesn't know what Riverbank is, and so
Speaker 1: she kind of stammers reply. And she says, well, sir,
Speaker 1: I don't have anything to to sleep in. I don't
Speaker 1: have any of my nightclothes or my or my or
Speaker 1: my toiletries or anything like that. And he says, oh,
Speaker 1: don't mind that. We'll we'll set you up with all
Speaker 1: of that. Come on, and and and this guy, George Fabian,
Speaker 1: grabs her by the arm and sort of walks her
Speaker 1: out to his limousine and and takes her to the
Speaker 1: Chicago and Northwestern train station. And from there, Uh, she
Speaker 1: has brought to this place called river Bank. And what
Speaker 1: river Bank is is one of the most bizarre institutions
Speaker 1: in America at that time, nineteen sixteen. So George Fabian,
Speaker 1: it turns out, is a Chicago textile multimillionaire. He's made
Speaker 1: his fortune by selling different kinds of cloth, and he
Speaker 1: has kind of a marketing genius for selling different kinds
Speaker 1: of cloth to department stores. Um. Classic kind of self
Speaker 1: made guys. He's a high school dropout. He's not educated,
Speaker 1: but he has a lot of money, and he has
Speaker 1: kind of the ability in the Gilded Age to build
Speaker 1: a kingdom around himself and to and to kind of
Speaker 1: set the rule is for everybody in his orbit. And um,
Speaker 1: he's a lot like someone like Andrew Carnegie or William
Speaker 1: Randolph Hurst, these these guys of that era who just
Speaker 1: had more money than God. What distinguished George Fabian from
Speaker 1: those guys is that, you know, instead of spending his
Speaker 1: money on French Impressionist paintings or you know, building a
Speaker 1: big castle, what really interested George Fabian was discovering the
Speaker 1: secrets of nature. He was really into science. He wanted
Speaker 1: to discover things about nature that had never been discovered.
Speaker 1: And so he turned his private state, which was called Riverbank,
Speaker 1: into a kind of half rich man's fantasy land and
Speaker 1: half private scientific laboratory, very much like Thomas Edison's Menlo Park,
Speaker 1: New Jersey or Nicola 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 how penning at Riverbank too. There
Speaker 1: was genetics experiments, agriculture experiments, acoustical experiments, and then there
Speaker 1: was this project that George Fabian wanted Elizabeth Smith to
Speaker 1: work on, which was the Bacon Cipher Project, the project
Speaker 1: of discovering these secret messages inside the works of Shakespeare,
Speaker 1: ripping them out and translating them into the plain text,
Speaker 1: and revealing the secrets of this Shakespeare book to the world.
Speaker 1: And that's that's what he told Elizabeth he wanted her
Speaker 1: to do when he went that day, when he met
Speaker 1: her in the library and whisked her off on the
Speaker 1: train to Riverbank. He wanted her to help him discover
Speaker 1: the secrets that were embedded in Shakespeare and sort of
Speaker 1: sort of transformed the history of English literature. It's just
Speaker 1: it's just unbelievable to think about it. I think about
Speaker 1: the number of hours, Mango, that you and I spent
Speaker 1: just sitting in libraries hoping that some eccentric tycoon would
Speaker 1: come along and discover us and lisk us away. And
Speaker 1: it just never happened, but it was. It's it's fascinating
Speaker 1: to read about it, to to think about our fantasy
Speaker 1: of that. But yet, so so that project, that Shakespeare
Speaker 1: project didn't exactly go you know, anywhere big from there.
Speaker 1: But but but can you tell us, like, how did
Speaker 1: she end up making this transition from trying to figure
Speaker 1: out the code within Shakespeare and seeing if there was
Speaker 1: any truth to this too what she eventually ended up
Speaker 1: doing and some of the very serious code breaking. Sure,
Speaker 1: that's a great question. So so she's brought out to
Speaker 1: Riverbank knowing nothing about code breaking. She's immediately plunged into
Speaker 1: this project to find secret messages in Shakespeare. And she
Speaker 1: can't find them. And she's there for months and months
Speaker 1: and months, and she's still having having trouble, you know,
Speaker 1: discovering these secret messages. Ultimately, she concludes that it's all
Speaker 1: a wild goose chase, it's all kind of a grand delusion.
Speaker 1: The secret messages aren't actually there. What's happening is that
Speaker 1: George Fabian and the people who believe what he believed
Speaker 1: are kind of seeing what they want to see. This
Speaker 1: is the thing about human beings is that we're we're
Speaker 1: very good at seeing patterns. Were all kind of born
Speaker 1: to do it. And sometimes we're so good at seeing
Speaker 1: patterns that we end up seeing patterns that aren't really there, right,
Speaker 1: and uh, and this is what was happening. They thought
Speaker 1: they saw these messages in the works of Shakespeare that
Speaker 1: weren't really there. Elizabeth had to figure this out. Um.
Speaker 1: But what that experience did is, you know, being dropped
Speaker 1: into this kind of delusion, it made her very interested
Speaker 1: and well, if I wanted to find patterns that really
Speaker 1: were there, and if I wanted to be sure that
Speaker 1: they were there, how would I do that? How would
Speaker 1: I develop a method? How would I develop a system
Speaker 1: to make sure that I wasn't tricking myself? And so,
Speaker 1: beginning in this kind of world of delusion um inspired
Speaker 1: her to try to create a true method and a
Speaker 1: true scientific system for discovering patterns in in these blocks
Speaker 1: of gobbledygook. And that's what launched her on her code
Speaker 1: breaking career, sort of in confluence with this other thing
Speaker 1: that happened, which is a year after she got to
Speaker 1: River Bank, America entered World War One. So April nineteen seventeen,
Speaker 1: you know, America enters the war and at that point.
Speaker 1: You know, it's amazing for me to go back and
Speaker 1: learn this history because you know, I had always kind
Speaker 1: of assumed that the American intelligence community that we that
Speaker 1: we know today that's mighty and powerful, the National Security Agency,
Speaker 1: the CIA, the FBI. I had always assumed that these
Speaker 1: institutions are always kind of always powerful, and it had
Speaker 1: always existed. But you know, in nineteen seventeen, when America
Speaker 1: entered World War One, there really was no American intelligence community.
Speaker 1: There was no n s A, there was no CIA,
Speaker 1: and the FBI was very young. And one of the
Speaker 1: things that you need to do when you're going to
Speaker 1: war is, you know, you need to read the secret
Speaker 1: messages that the enemy is sending. You need to know
Speaker 1: what they're saying and what they're doing so you can
Speaker 1: have an advantage. The thing is, you know, when America
Speaker 1: went to World War in World War One in nineteen seventeen, uh,
Speaker 1: it had no ability to do that. There were maybe
Speaker 1: five people in the entire United States who even knew
Speaker 1: what a code or a cipher, and so, uh it
Speaker 1: just so happened that some of these five people were
Speaker 1: Elizabeth and her colleagues at Riverbank Laboratories. This bizarre private
Speaker 1: institution run by a crazy rich guy on the Illinois Prairie.
Speaker 1: It's one of these things, you know, truth is stranger
Speaker 1: than fiction, and American history is very very weird. It
Speaker 1: gets very very weird, very very fast when you get
Speaker 1: beyond the surface. So what happened is, you know, through
Speaker 1: the urgency of war, the necessity of war, you know,
Speaker 1: the War Department, the Army realized they didn't have any
Speaker 1: code breakers and they needed code breakers very quickly. So, uh,
Speaker 1: just out of desperation, they ended up kind of annexing
Speaker 1: Riverbank Laboratories, which became kind of the first national security agency.
Speaker 1: The War Department and other departments of the U. S.
Speaker 1: Government began to send uh, secret messages that they couldn't
Speaker 1: read out to Riverbank, and Elizabeth and her colleagues they're
Speaker 1: working for this crazy tycoon, would solve the messages and
Speaker 1: send them back to Washington. And for the first eight
Speaker 1: months of World War One, um Riverbank, Elizabeth and her colleagues,
Speaker 1: they're handled the entire code breaking burden for the U. S.
Speaker 1: Government while it was at war, which is which is
Speaker 1: incredible to think about, because you know, you've got to
Speaker 1: realize Elizabeth is years old at this time, and she
Speaker 1: has just learned about code breaking in the last year,
Speaker 1: but all of a sudden she was the expert and
Speaker 1: she had to perform Welcome back to Part Time. Genius
Speaker 1: were chatting with Jason Fagoni, the author of The Woman
Speaker 1: who Smashed Codes. So, Jason, the whole thing about um,
Speaker 1: that code breaking really wasn't a thing before is is
Speaker 1: just kind of stunning to be because I always think
Speaker 1: about like things in the paper, like the cryptograms, or
Speaker 1: you think about like uh, Lewis Carroll and anagrams and
Speaker 1: people playing with words in crazy ways. But that this
Speaker 1: art isn't the thing is is just kind of amazing.
Speaker 1: She also wasn't alone in this endeavor, right, She had
Speaker 1: a sort of a love interest and partner during this
Speaker 1: time exactly she met a young scientist there named William Friedman.
Speaker 1: And and again it's one of these kind of classic
Speaker 1: American tales, two young people from very different worlds. Elizabeth was,
Speaker 1: you know, a Quaker girl from the Midwest. William Friedman
Speaker 1: was a Jewish scientist from Pittsburgh, UM. He had been
Speaker 1: brought to Riverbank to perform genetics experiments. He was breeding
Speaker 1: fruit flies. Ah he was trying to breed different varieties
Speaker 1: of corn and wheat that might take root in different
Speaker 1: kinds of soil. But the thing about William Freedman is
Speaker 1: that he he had a talent for photography and a
Speaker 1: lot of the original work on the Bacon Cipher project. This,
Speaker 1: this project of finding secret messages in Shakespeare depended on
Speaker 1: enlarging photographs of uh, the original Shakespeare manuscript, this sixteen
Speaker 1: ft folio. So so, because William was good with camera
Speaker 1: and he knew how to develop Prince in a dark room,
Speaker 1: George Fabian roped him into this project. And so William
Speaker 1: Friedman began to work with Elizabeth Smith on the Shakespeare
Speaker 1: project and and they both kind of looked at each
Speaker 1: other around the same time and had this had this
Speaker 1: epiphany which was, um, everybody at this place is completely
Speaker 1: crazy except for us. You know, we are we might
Speaker 1: be the only sane people here, and we need to, uh,
Speaker 1: we need to form a bond to kind of to
Speaker 1: protect ourselves from these lunatics. And while all of this
Speaker 1: craziness was swirling around them, Elizabeth and William did something
Speaker 1: extremely important, which is together they invented the modern science
Speaker 1: of cryptology, which today is at the core of our
Speaker 1: intelligence agencies. So this is a remarkable thing. You know,
Speaker 1: in the span of about two or three years, starting
Speaker 1: in nineteen they into new techniques of code breaking UM
Speaker 1: that had not been known in America. They wrote papers together,
Speaker 1: they worked across from each other in the same room,
Speaker 1: at the same desk, solving puzzles with pencil and paper.
Speaker 1: You gotta remember, this is before the era of computers.
Speaker 1: This is all pencil and paper. You're just sitting there
Speaker 1: with pencil paper in your mind. And because so little
Speaker 1: was known about code breaking in America, UM, 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: a team. UM. After they were married. William even even
Speaker 1: came up with the name he called them. He called
Speaker 1: them the Freedman combination. And you know, and it's interesting
Speaker 1: because because these papers that they wrote together are known
Speaker 1: as the Riverbank Publications, and uh uh you know, they've
Speaker 1: historically been credited to William alone. You know, it's only
Speaker 1: his name that's on the papers. But I went back
Speaker 1: 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 draft you see that Elizabeth's handwriting is 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 Riverbank Publications, and
Speaker 1: on one of them he actually writes Elizabeth's name as
Speaker 1: a co author on the cup or, 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, and 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 burd and forward
Speaker 1: the United States. Uh, they start, 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 into two kids
Speaker 1: and young adults. And she also had gave birth to
Speaker 1: their first child around that time. Barbara daughter and uhe
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 asked 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 keep 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 yes,
Speaker 1: and agreed to these projects. The problem for Elizabeth is
Speaker 1: that she was just so good at what she did
Speaker 1: um she and she had such an unusual set of
Speaker 1: skills that she became indispensable, and so the government really
Speaker 1: could not afford to leave her alone. And so at
Speaker 1: every stage of her career, and men from the government
Speaker 1: were showing up on her doorstep asking her to confront
Speaker 1: some kind of challenge for which they were unprepared. And
Speaker 1: and the challenge in n The first men from the
Speaker 1: government who showed up on her doorstep in DC. We're
Speaker 1: 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 four. They were. They were
Speaker 1: edged out. They were forced out by organized crime, by
Speaker 1: these mafias, and so, uh so, what the Coast Guard
Speaker 1: needed to make any progress was code breaking. They needed
Speaker 1: someone like Elizabeth to come in look at the intercepted
Speaker 1: radio messages, you know, solve them, and light up this
Speaker 1: dark an underworld too, so 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 potite 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 rummer owners were saying,
Speaker 1: we're their actual words, that she really was kind of
Speaker 1: reading their thoughts in it. 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: jed or Hoover and how the FBI messed up so
Speaker 1: many things and and all of 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 I
Speaker 1: started 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 read that he that he had a wife who
Speaker 1: 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 and
Speaker 1: I was just captivated with with her voice. But you know,
Speaker 1: the more I read in those twenty two boxes, the
Speaker 1: more I realized that, um, you know, not only was
Speaker 1: 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 and
Speaker 1: in terms of the bigger picture of American intelligence. 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 colonists 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 paled,
Speaker 1: didn't They didn't speak the languages. Um. You know, there's
Speaker 1: a story about one of the guys who had taken
Speaker 1: a language course in New York in preparation for his
Speaker 1: posting to South America. The the FBI had taught him Spanish,
Speaker 1: and then he was posted to Brazil and he got
Speaker 1: off the plane in Brazil, you know, disappointed to discover
Speaker 1: that the language that's spoken in Brazil is mainly Portuguese
Speaker 1: and not Spanish. So these guys were completely lost, right
Speaker 1: the FBI, Yeah, they were never They were never going
Speaker 1: to be able to find these Nazi spies using kind
Speaker 1: of old school FBI techniques of developing confidential informants and
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. What they really needed was code breaking, right,
Speaker 1: They needed a technical advantage. They needed to intercept these
Speaker 1: radio messages, UH, solve the messages and light up the
Speaker 1: darkened underworld by by kind of stealing the thoughts directly
Speaker 1: from the lips of the spies. Um. But they couldn't
Speaker 1: do that because the FBI didn't have Because the FBI
Speaker 1: didn't have a code breaking team, they had no code
Speaker 1: breaking capacity. They had no ability uh to break codes
Speaker 1: and to read the messages of what these Nazi spies
Speaker 1: were saying. But Elizabeth Friedman did because you know, she
Speaker 1: had spent the last fifteen years UH kind of doing
Speaker 1: target practice against rum runners and drug smuggles. She she
Speaker 1: had developed this expertise at intercepting radio messages, solving them
Speaker 1: and mapping these underworld networks because that had been her
Speaker 1: job during the twenties and thirties, to to fight smuggling
Speaker 1: and so, um, it wasn't that she set out to
Speaker 1: to hunt Nazi spies. It's just that she she happened
Speaker 1: to have the right set of skills the right moment,
Speaker 1: you know, and in she was ready to go. And
Speaker 1: so so what ended up happening is the FBI relied
Speaker 1: on Elizabeth and UM and the code breaking team that
Speaker 1: she had built within the Coast Guard UH code breakers
Speaker 1: that she had trained she had led UM relying on
Speaker 1: them to as as kind of the technical back end
Speaker 1: of this of this hunt for Nazi spies in South America.
Speaker 1: Elizabeth and her team would monitor these clandestine radio circuits
Speaker 1: used by Nazi spies, solve the messages, and provide the
Speaker 1: translated English plain texts to Allied intelligence agencies, including the Army,
Speaker 1: the Navy, the FBI, and also British intelligence, and by
Speaker 1: the end of the war they had monitored about fifty
Speaker 1: different clandestine radio circuits used by the Nazis, solved four
Speaker 1: thousand messages. These messages were incredibly important in ultimately destroying
Speaker 1: these Nazi spy rings in South America and eliminating a
Speaker 1: dangerous threat. You know, Elizabeth and her teammates really brought
Speaker 1: these Nazi spies to Ruin Pick to pick their networks
Speaker 1: apart piece by piece, destroyed them, you know, neutralized the threat.
Speaker 1: And then after the war, Jagger Hoover you know, stuck
Speaker 1: up his hand and went out to the public on
Speaker 1: kind of a publicity campaign taking credit for all of that,
Speaker 1: and he said, you know, America, the FBI saved you
Speaker 1: from this dangerous Nazi spy invasion in South America, and uh,
Speaker 1: you're welcome. And and that's kind of the story that
Speaker 1: has been told ever since, is that is that the
Speaker 1: FBI did, uh, did all of the hard, dangerous, brave,
Speaker 1: uh you know, brilliant work of catching these Nazi spies
Speaker 1: in South America. But I think the truth is that
Speaker 1: the real driver was Elizabeth Friedman. It was this it
Speaker 1: was this American mother of two who figured out how
Speaker 1: to sweep the western hemisphere free of undercover Nazis. And uh,
Speaker 1: and yet she never got the credit for it because
Speaker 1: because Hoover got out there in front. Welcome back to
Speaker 1: Part time Genius. We're chatting with Jason Fagoni, the author
Speaker 1: of The Woman who Smashed Codes. Okay, Jason, So she,
Speaker 1: you know, helps through World War One, obviously lead decodes,
Speaker 1: you know, as you said, twenty five thousand messages a
Speaker 1: year in between the world wars at times, and and
Speaker 1: helped defeat the Nazis in World War Two. It's just
Speaker 1: an unbelievable story. And then you said, after all of this,
Speaker 1: she and William kind of come back to the Shakespeare
Speaker 1: project later in their lives, and and why was this? Yes?
Speaker 1: So after the war, Uh, William was one of the
Speaker 1: people who helped form the National Security Agency that the
Speaker 1: team that he had created and built at the Army,
Speaker 1: which during World War Two achieved essentially the impossible by
Speaker 1: breaking the Japanese diplomatic code which was called Purple, which
Speaker 1: she gave the Allies a huge advantage and probably shortened
Speaker 1: the war. Yeah, he did all these heroic things during
Speaker 1: World War Two and then after the war helped to
Speaker 1: create the n s A. His his army unit was
Speaker 1: kind of absorbed into this thing that became the n
Speaker 1: s A. But as the n s A kind of
Speaker 1: began to grow, um it it grew beyond what what
Speaker 1: he uh felt like he could bear. Um. He became
Speaker 1: a critic internally of some of the n s AS
Speaker 1: policies and it's uh it's directions. He he became concerned
Speaker 1: that that too many documents were being classified. Um he
Speaker 1: felt like the NSA was collecting too much information. He
Speaker 1: felt like they would never ever be able to sift
Speaker 1: all the information they were collecting for actionable intelligence. And
Speaker 1: uh and it really troubled him. And uh and and
Speaker 1: throughout the nineteen fifties, as the Cold War, UH kind
Speaker 1: of sharpened in d C and the 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 Friedman 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 that, um, you know, they they
Speaker 1: found this to be kind of intolerable, a 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,
Speaker 1: UH in this atmosphere of kind of deepening paranoia, security
Speaker 1: and classification was something that had nothing to do with
Speaker 1: government codebreaking all. Is something that's something that went back
Speaker 1: to UH to their original kind of wild goose chase
Speaker 1: of their youth at Number Bank Laboratory. So so you know,
Speaker 1: 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 together,
Speaker 1: working together after decades of of kind of growing growing
Speaker 1: apart because of their you know, increasing important security duties
Speaker 1: for the United States. Wow. Well, I have to say, Jason,
Speaker 1: in reading this book, this is this is one of
Speaker 1: those history books that as you're reading it, you can
Speaker 1: almost see and feel the blood, sweat and tears that
Speaker 1: went into this project. It's not only beautifully written, but
Speaker 1: you can tell just all of the the intense amount
Speaker 1: 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 it is one of the best
Speaker 1: books I've read in a long time. And I do
Speaker 1: hope our our readers will check out The Woman who
Speaker 1: Smashed Codes. It's an incredible story. So Elizabeth died in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty at the age of eighty eight, mostly unacknowledged
Speaker 1: for her foundation laying cryptographic word. But you know, you
Speaker 1: stumbled into her story and and for that and all
Speaker 1: the work you put into this, I just want to
Speaker 1: say thanks. Oh, thank you, guys. I I really appreciate
Speaker 1: your UM. I don't know, your questions were great. It's
Speaker 1: clearly that you paid a lot of paid a lot
Speaker 1: of attention to the book and and honestly it is um.
Speaker 1: It was a joy doing the research. It was. It
Speaker 1: was one of those projects that every journalist and every
Speaker 1: writer hopes to stumble across, and I feel lucky to
Speaker 1: have to have gotten to do it. Ye, welcome back
Speaker 1: to part time Genius. Now we've learned a ton today.
Speaker 1: But you know, we can't wrap this thing up without
Speaker 1: a good old fashioned fact off. So you want to
Speaker 1: kick us off, Mango, Yeah, definitely, So I know Jason
Speaker 1: talked about this a little bit earlier, but I loved
Speaker 1: reading about how Elizabeth and William taught their kids the
Speaker 1: basics of cryptography, like as early as seven years old.
Speaker 1: So when their daughter Barbara was off at sleepaway camp,
Speaker 1: she'd send home letters and code, and the Freedman's would
Speaker 1: use codes and ciphers and their um Christmas cards and
Speaker 1: sometimes they even had cipher parties where their guests would
Speaker 1: have to solve the cipher just to figure out what
Speaker 1: would be served for dinner. Wow, that's pretty awesome, And
Speaker 1: actually it's kind of neat to see this coming back
Speaker 1: in a way with like these breakout type places that
Speaker 1: people will go with their friends to play. Have you
Speaker 1: seen these people one of 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 Codebreakers of World War Two, and it's by Liz Mundy.
Speaker 1: So I think i'll share just a couple of facts
Speaker 1: from that, and it does tell the story of the
Speaker 1: more than ten thousand college students and school teachers, among
Speaker 1: other women who were recruited to really be the backbone
Speaker 1: of our intelligence efforts. But one of the things I
Speaker 1: 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 men named
Speaker 1: Velveolee 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 at
Speaker 1: that point. Alright, Well, back to Monday's books. So she
Speaker 1: writes about how the branches of military were different from
Speaker 1: one another and who they allowed to be codebreakers and
Speaker 1: who they didn't. So the Navy, for example, didn't allow
Speaker 1: non whites, they didn't want Jewish women, they didn't want
Speaker 1: African American women. The army, on the other hand, did
Speaker 1: allow non whites. However, not surprisingly, these groups were segregated.
Speaker 1: And it was really frustrating from Monday as she was
Speaker 1: doing the research because they there's no substantial records out
Speaker 1: there other than a few photos, and you can actually
Speaker 1: see these in Monday's book, and you know, it shows
Speaker 1: a room full of African American codebreakers, 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: of of showing how they were working often around the clock,
Speaker 1: just looking for patterns and searching and searching. And it
Speaker 1: really was this marathon work that had played a huge
Speaker 1: role 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 were planning to do each
Speaker 1: step along the way. And I bet you want a
Speaker 1: carbo load before you 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 Coastguards codebreaking team, not
Speaker 1: only was she the first woman to run a US
Speaker 1: government code breaking unit, but she was also given a
Speaker 1: 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 hot 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, Thanks again for listening. Part Time Genius
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Speaker 1: Do we do we forget Jason? Jason who