The Woman All Spies Fear: Chapters 12–18

It was a wretched pregnancy. The terrible nausea she had known as a child came galloping back, and it was relentless. According to family stories, she “could keep nothing on her stomach” for a full nine months.

Never a man short of advice, Fabyan recommended a cure of “warm barley gruel” and back exercises, including scrubbing floors.

“I have no desire to make a scrub woman out of Elizabeth [sic],” he declaimed, “but I know of nothing to take its place, providing it is conscientiously done.”

Elizebeth had X-rays instead. They revealed latent back issues made worse by pregnancy and childbirth.

On a shady knoll by the house, they relaxed in hammocks and swinging chairs like the ones they’d known at Riverbank.

At the time, Congress was about to pass a new immigration act that made it easy for so-called Nordic people to immigrate to the United States. The entry of others, including Jews, was sharply curtailed.

Some newspapers pointed to William as proof that Jewish immigrants were far from “undesirable.” Here was a man who had “rendered a great service to his country,” in both war and peace.

A doting mother, she kept records of her baby’s every accomplishment, as well as her cryptic babblings.

To be cheated, and to have no recourse, was painful.

But liquor smuggling was so lucrative that it encouraged powerful new gang alliances—and alcohol profits made those gangs almost untouchable.

She saw him as a “conscientious officer” who was in desperate need of help, and she listened to what he had to say.

Head of the Coast Guard’s Intelligence Section—and, for a time, its only member—he tracked every detail he could discover about the rumrunners’ vessels. On charts and lists, he recorded their names, their owners, their bearings, and their radio signals.

“I was...‘a loner’ as far as any assistance in the solution of secret messages was concerned,” she later said. Undaunted, she tackled the job with gusto.

Again and again, she made the garble of letters yield the true message.

Whenever she cracked one system, more challenging ones rose to take its place—and day after day, she was forced to grapple with them alone.

In just over three years, she solved a staggering twelve thousand secret messages for the Coast Guard and its allies in the Rum War.

One was a racketeer who controlled a crime syndicate worth $15 million a year.

As messages continued to pour in, she honed her powers still further.

By 1930, Elizebeth was one of the world’s top cryptanalysts, but most Americans had never heard of her. Some people even misspelled her job title as “Crypt Analyst,” which led to mix-ups. “I am...not a new sort of high-class mortician,” Elizebeth found herself explaining, with exasperated humor.

Some men later admitted they’d had “great misgivings” about working under a woman. These faded away after they actually met Elizebeth. She was a good teacher and a pleasant boss, and they were awed by her code-breaking skills.

All four of them had a great sense of humor, and they laughed themselves silly over family jokes and the antics of their much-loved cats and dogs.

Entire court cases could hang on her testimony. This was especially true of the cases against Conexco—a shadowy behemoth that controlled the rumrunning traffic on the West and Gulf Coasts.

It was officially registered in Canada as the Consolidated Exporters Corporation, a bland name that made it sound like a law-abiding company. In reality, Conexco worked with Al Capone’s gang and other mobsters to supply liquor to the underworld.

But for an outsider who had no idea how the system operated, it was next to impossible. Only a code breaker of Elizebeth’s caliber had a chance.

The code layers were much harder to crack, but with patience, analysis, and a flair for guesswork, she got there.

They suggested she was making things up to help the government’s legal team. Still on the witness stand, Elizebeth rebutted that idea. Her readings were “not a matter of opinion.” Instead, she relied on the science of cryptology.

Usually a stickler for accuracy, she was still being cagey about her true age, almost always making herself exactly one year younger.

Liquor became legal again. But judges were still catching up with the backlog of rumrunning cases, so the trials against the likes of Conexco continued.

When a blackboard was brought forward, Elizebeth gave the whole court a lesson in the basics of cryptology. Her off-the-cuff talk was lucid and convincing.

“I’ll confess, Mrs. Friedman, I was thunderstruck the other day when I met you for the first time. I simply wasn’t prepared to find a petite, vivacious young matron bearing the formidable title of Cryptanalyst for the United States Coast Guard.”

“I’ll confess, Mrs. Friedman, I was thunderstruck the other day when I met you for the first time. I simply wasn’t prepared to find a petite, vivacious young matron bearing the formidable title of Cryptanalyst for the United States Coast Guard.”

She did this because she had noticed a certain formality in Chinese communications. “I had a feeling that they would end messages in a conventional and habitual manner with phrases like ‘reply immediately.’ ‘send money,’ ‘send goods at once.’” Set phrases like this are a gift to a code breaker.

When Elizebeth shared her guess about “cable reply,” Chen thought it was plausible. But Chen questioned some of her other results, saying they made no sense in Cantonese.

When they landed at Chicago, it was dark, and she saw “Lake Shore Drive in myriad of lights...as thrilling as the New York skyline when coming in from sea in a ship.”

“The story came as a considerable shock to me,” she wrote, and she had an uncanny “feeling of being resurrected.”

Elizebeth returned to Washington not by plane, but by train. It took her half a week to cross the country. Swaying in sleeping berths and dining cars, she had plenty of time for thought.

As one of them told her, “To use an old war-time expression, your number is not up yet.” On the face of it, she seemed to agree with their stoic response.

In the future, she would say that the reason she had not flown on that 10:00 p.m. flight was “fate,” because it was “not her time to go.” Her children came to regard her as “an extreme fatalist,” who calmly looked peril in the eye.

In 1924, when William cracked an “unbreakable” Navy code machine, he was accused of garnering inside information from Elizebeth.

Still, Elizebeth and William continued to find themselves under scrutiny. And as time went on, the clouds of suspicion were harder to disperse.