Riverbank Laboratories and World War I Elizebeth Smith began working at
Riverbank Laboratories in
Geneva, Illinois, in 1916. It was one of the first facilities in the U.S. established to study cryptography. Colonel
George Fabyan, a wealthy textile merchant, owned Riverbank Laboratories and was interested in
Shakespeare. Friedman was looking for a job and visited Chicago's
Newberry Library, where she talked to a librarian who knew of Fabyan's interest. The librarian called Fabyan, who appeared in his limousine and invited Elizebeth to spend a night at Riverbank, where they discussed what life would be like at Fabyan's
great estate located in Geneva, Illinois. Several U.S. government departments asked Riverbank Labs for help or sent personnel there for training. Among those was
Agnes Meyer Driscoll, who came on behalf of the
U.S. Navy. The Friedmans worked together for the next four years in what was the only cryptographic facility in the country, until
Herbert Yardley's so-called "
Black Chamber" was established as MI8, the Army's Cipher Bureau, in 1919. In 1921, the Friedmans left Riverbank to work for the
War Department in
Washington, D.C. Their previous efforts to leave had been thwarted by Fabyan, who intercepted their mail. In response, the Coast Guard hired Elizebeth Friedman, who had quit her job in 1922, on a temporary basis to decode their backlog of messages. From 1927 to 1939, the unit, which was of critical importance, was folded into the U.S. Coast Guard. Friedman solved the bulk of intercepts collected by Coast Guard stations in San Francisco and Florida herself. In June 1928, she was sent to teach C.A. Housel, stationed with the Coordinator of the Pacific Coast Details, how to decrypt rumrunners' messages. Under her teaching, Housel was able to decode 3,300 messages within 21 months. In October and November 1929, she was then recruited in
Houston, Texas, to solve 650 smuggling traffic cases that had been subpoenaed by the United States Attorney. In doing so, she decrypted 24 coding systems used by smugglers. Friedman's work was responsible for providing decoded information that resulted in the conviction of the narcotics-smuggling
Ezra Brothers. While working for the U.S. Coast Guard, the Bureau of Narcotics, the Bureau of Internal Revenue, the Bureau of Prohibition and Customs, and the Department of Justice, Friedman solved over 12,000 coded messages by hand in three years, resulting in 650 criminal prosecutions. One of the individuals Friedman helped to indict was
Al Capone. In 1930, Friedman proposed creating a team of seven people to handle the increasing workload involved in decrypting messages. Her proposal was finally approved in 1931, and she was put in charge of the only codebreaking unit in America ever to be managed by a woman. The vessel was flying the Canadian flag when it was sunk by for failing to heed a "
heave to and be searched" signal. The Canadian government filed a $350,000 suit against the U.S., but the intelligence gleaned from the twenty-three messages decoded by Friedman indicated
de facto U.S. ownership just as the U.S. had originally suspected. The true owners of the ship were identified and most of the Canadian claim was dismissed. The Canadian government sought Friedman's help in 1937 with an opium-smuggling gang, and she eventually testified in the trial of Gordon Lim and several other Chinese. Her solution to a complicated unknown Chinese enciphered code, in spite of her unfamiliarity with the language, was key to the successful convictions. One turned out to be an unrelated Swiss network, but the other two were used by
Johannes Siegfried Becker (codename: ’’Sargo’’), the SS agent who headed the operation, to communicate with Germany. Regarding Becker, biographer
Jason Fagone states: “Elizebeth was his nemesis. She successfully tracked him where every other law enforcement agency and intelligence agencies failed. She did what the FBI could not do.” Known as the "Doll Woman," her antique doll shop was her cover as she corresponded with Japanese agents using the names of women from her business correspondence. Her messages contained encoded material addressing naval vessel status in
Pearl Harbor. It won awards from the
Folger Shakespeare Library and the
American Shakespeare Theatre and Academy. In this book, the Friedmans dismissed
Baconians such as Gallup and
Ignatius Donnelly with such technical proficiency and finesse that the book won far more acclaim than did others that addressed the same topic. The work that Gallup had done earlier for Col. Fabyan at Riverbank operated on the assumption that Bacon wrote Shakespeare and used the
bi-literal cipher he invented in the original printed Shakespeare folios, employing "an odd variety of typefaces." The Friedmans, however, "in a classic demonstration of their life's work," buried a hidden Baconian cipher on a page in their publication. It was an italicized phrase which, using the different type faces, expressed their final assessment of the controversy: "I did not write the plays. F. Bacon." Friedman devoted much of her retirement life to compiling a library and bibliography of his work. In 1971, she donated her own papers, which are now known as The Elizebeth Smith Friedman Collection at the Marshall Foundation. Friedman belonged to civic organizations such as the
League of Women Voters and worked on behalf of
statehood for the District of Columbia. She was also a respected public speaker. == Personal life ==