Two remarkable lives

William and Elizebeth Friedman would be great subjects for a movie or Netflix mini-series. The cinematic potential of husband and wife code-breakers pitting their brains against the Nazis and Imperial Japan seems obvious.

The Friedmans were not just gifted codebreakers they were pioneers in cryptanalysis (William Friedman is credited with coining that term) and were instrumental in establishing the field as a scientific discipline in America. The National Security Agency named its main auditorium in their honor. Elizebeth has another hall named for her at the DOJ where she is remembered as a PIONEER OF INTELLIGENCE-LED POLICING.

They were married for nearly 52 years -- through two world wars and the Great Depression. They remained devoted to each other despite the added burden that working in the secret world imposed.

They never discussed their work with each other during the war which takes Need to Know and compartmentalization to unfathomable levels. How do you have work/life balance when work entails the fate of the Free World?

Before the first American set foot inside Bletchley Park, Elizebeth Freidman and her tiny unit in the Treasury Department had broken ciphers produced by several early versions of the Enigma machine.

While William worked for Army intelligence, his wife began her government career helping track down boot-leggers and rum-runners. Smugglers, like spies, need secure secret communications. Prohibition agents needed code-breakers to catch the law-breakers. In the 1920s and 1930s, Elizebeth Smith Friedman was the T-Men’s secret weapon.

When War came, she segued into tracking Nazi spies operating in South America.

In both her counterintelligence and law enforcement work, Friedman collaborated with the FBI. As is usually the case, “collaboration” meant that the work was shared while the vast majority of the publicity and glory went to the FBI and its director. The Bureau was quite willing to reveal sensitive code-breaking secrets to the public if it burnished the FBI’s image. That this would make future code-breaking difficult was of little concern to Hoover.