Oral History – Elizebeth Smith Friedman, Two

The NSA’s Helpful Links section has declassified interviews with past members of the COMSEC and COMINT groups.

Elizebeth Smith Friedman has been interviewed at least a few times, but the transcripts aren’t all in the same location. I found the one conducted by Forrest C. Pogue (MAY 16,17, 1973) sitting on archive.org, which is I guess a mirror of the George C. Marshall Foundation file. I put my summary here.

More recently, I found another four transcripts on the NSA Oral History site. Three of them seem to be all from the same interview, since the dates are all the same. The fourth, while it has a later index number, was recorded earlier in the same year. Overall, they’re actually fairly disappointing. The R. Louis Benson file focuses just on the Coast Guard rumrunner history and is a summary of ESF’s answers (rather than a full transcript), while the Valaki transcripts are rambling and devoid of the information the interviewer had been hoping for.

Jan. 19, 1976, Benson
Nov. 11, 1976, Valaki 1
Nov. 11, 1976, Valaki 2
Nov. 11, 1976, Valaki 3

Jan. 19, 1976, R. Louis Benson
As mentioned above, this interview was conducted by Benson, at ESF’s home. The introductory paragraph says it was intended to “obtain information concerning the communications intelligence efforts of the U.S. Coast Guard, 1939-45 for the historical study, A History of U.S. Communications Intelligence Organization, Policy and Coordination During World War Two.”

It’s short, at 6 pages. Page one has ESF working from home as a consultant from the 20’s to ’33 (when prohibition was repealed, after which she tackled drug smuggling). Sometime between the late 20’s and 1930, she selected three college grads with math and physics backgrounds from the civil service list:

Vernon Cooley (NSA-retired, Washington DC, 931-8717)
Robert E. Gordon (deceased)
Hyman Hurwitz (current address unknown)

Later on, USCG regular officer, Lt. L.T. Jones was trained in cryptanalysis by the Army, and possibly after Pearl Harbor he headed the CG operation.

p. 2 – 1939-41 is labeled the “Neutrality Period.” This period was marked by the discovery of “suspicious international radio traffic.” Cooley, Gordon and Hurwitz remained in the unit. Solved messages were either passed on to Captain Farley, head of USCG communications, or given to Jones for circulation.

– Mentions of work for the OSS, and of training W.G.B. Blackburn of the FBI in an intensive 1.5 month course.
– The USCG officially merged with the U.S. Navy in 1941, and ESF’s group began unofficially merging with OP-20-G.
– Between ’42 and ’45, the unit was a full part of OP-20-G, and was tasked with intercepting, solving and translating clandestine German communications between Latin America and Germany.

p. 3 – “The greatest single USCG C/A effort was against a 4-letter group system that took 1-1 1/2 years to break” that turned out to be Enigma.

– Meeting William Stephenson, head of British Security Coordination (BSC), New York, and his officers Colonel Stratton (a famous astronomer) and Captain Kenneth Maidment.

p. 4 – ESF wasn’t impressed with the USCG C/A output between ’42-’45, saying that it was overworked to the point of overkill. However, they did identify Eva Peron as a Nazi agent.

– “She believes that Commander Jones had too narrow a view of USCG Comint operations and that his outlook was influenced by excessive concern as to what was best for him professionally. She and Jones frequently debated the proper mission of the unit.”

– Thought Safford had “some administrative skills” but nothing else. After Pearl Harbor, moved to a “non-job,” where he sat at his desk and complained about how he was being treated.
– Considered Wenger the brains of OP-20-G, “quiet and gentle.”
– Captain Earl Stone, headed 20-G thru much of the war – “a nice person.”
– Joseph and Jack Redman – “skilled communicators with a proper appreciation of Comint.”
– Commander Kramer and Lt. Parke – “skilled in their areas of specialization.”
– Major General Olmstead – “Very stupid.” ESF blames him for forcing William to retire from the reserves after his breakdown. The problem is that William left the reserves with an honorable discharge on Apr. 18, 1941, and Olmstead didn’t replace Mauborgne as Chief Signal Officer until Aug. 1941. Benson assumes that someone else forced the decision on William, but there’s no further information as to who.

p. 5 – FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover would have lunch at Harvey’s restaurant in D.C., where he had a regular table. There was always a bottle of wine placed before he arrived. During the meal, Hoover would walk around the restaurant, pouring wine for anyone he wanted to meet or talk to, and this included William at least once.

p. 6 – Footnote 10 – ESF can never forgive Safford for “claiming to have made certain cryptographic inventions which were in fact solely accomplished by her husband, or at least not in anyway with the assistance of Safford.” In the Forrest Pogue interview, she claimed that Rowlett falsely took credit for those inventions. Safford never worked directly with Will on any of the inventions, since Navy and Army rarely coordinated that closely prior to the end of WW II.

Nov. 11, 1976, Valaki 1
Conducted by Virginia T. Valaki, at ESF’s home. The following recordings show ESF as rambling, either unwilling or unable to answer certain questions, and primarily focused on talking about the rumrunner and Canadian drug smuggling cases. At one point, when trying to find some photos to show to Valaki, she admits to having thrown out a lot of papers and photos just a few days earlier.

p. 5 – Referring to George Fabyan and his projects at Riverbank – “vile creature that he was”, he deserves credit for supporting work on cryptography, acoustics and ordnance. She says the ordnance engineer was named Eisenhaur, but I can’t find anything on him. She calls him a country bumpkin who just wanted to fiddle with pieces of iron, but he succeeded in inventing several ordnance-related things for the Army.

p. 6 – Fabyan tried to create a perpetual motion machine.

p. 7 – The standard story of how she first met Fabyan.

p. 10 – Valaki wants to establish a connection between ESF and William working on the Bacon cipher, and the two of them teaching military-level cryptology to Army students. ESF rambles and never answers the question. Valaki mentions Parker Hitt and his Army manual, and Elizebeth needles Parker and his wife, Genevieve, for thinking they’d invented a new strip cipher, which had actually been described by Thomas Jefferson decades earlier. Fabyan volunteered Riverbank’s experts, Hitt arrived, and it all “just started happening.” ESF says she’d never read the classic books on cryptography.

p. 17 – Tape ends in mid-sentence as ESF talks about Fabyan getting Dr. J. A. Powell accepted as liaison officer for the American Forces in France.

Nov. 11, 1976, Valaki 2
Starts out with Elizebeth asking if Valaki wants a cigarette, and both of them saying that they’ve quit smoking for a while. Asking about who taught classes at Riverbank when the both of them had left – ESF veers off to talk about the bookkeeper, Cora Jensen. They talk about who got Fabyan’s books after he died. One book was worth $2,000, by an Italian author, name unknown. Then “Cora taught,” because anyone can teach if you have books and a series of lessons.

p. 2 – Fabyan died in 1934, left his books to his wife, who died in 1937. The collection went to the Library of Congress, but his wife was possessive of his reputation and probably would have destroyed anything incriminating or derogatory.

– Valaki keeps coming back to Riverbank – who taught, who was there, etc. ESF is very vague and rambling. No details, and had thrown away lots of papers recently.

p. 5 – Trying to talk about how they learned to solve running key ciphers, and ESF switches to solving the Hindu messages, which Fabyan got from Scotland Yard through “contacts.”

p. 8 – Moves to the rumrunner stories, with much more detail. The little bottles were “cute,” and were hidden in hollow stanchions and manholes on the ships. 60,000 cases on one ship.

p. 11 – Gordon Lim opium smuggling case. ESF called by the agents in Vancouver, British Columbia, asking her to be in B.C. in time for a court appearance the following Monday. She felt uneasy about the 10 PM flight, and insisted on getting the 4 PM flight instead. “The next day the Daily News here in Washington had this big flashing headline, “D.C. WOMAN ABOARD LOST PLANE.” And that […] 10 o’clock plane the night before it had crashed outside of Salt Lake City.”

p. 13 – Brief mentions of Ralph Van Deman and Parker Hitt. ESF knew of Van Deman, and had known of Parker’s earlier cipher work before meeting him.

p. 15 – Talking about Mauborgne, who had a quarrel with some other General, maybe Air Force, over bouncing radio signals across the atmosphere. Everything William did “emanated” from Mauborgne, but she wanted to know as little about her husband’s work as possible. Then some background on her getting started with the Customs Bureau and the Coast Guard.

p. 16 – Rambling talk about being in Treasury and asking for assistants in 1924, then building up her department to 1930, and becoming a civil service employee instead of just a consultant. Happy to not be under the stresses she could see in her husband.

p. 17 – Asking how she selected the two male assistants at the beginning – (cleaned up version) “Well, I asked that they have passed the civil-service examination on either mathematics, physics, or chemistry. In other words, it had to be one of the analytical sciences, they had to graduate. Mr. Free, I understand, just resigned from old age the other day. Well, not the other day-I don’t know-but some time ago. He may even have worked longer. He had served his time and gone. And Mr. ((pause)) … Funny, I can’t remember the tall skinny guy’s name. He died of a heart attack while he was driving his car down the Shirley Highway. And then there was a man named Horrich … I’m pretty sure that was his name, Horrich, who had been an analytical scientist in his college training, and he became something real, I believe it was in the Department of the Treasury. And he was gone. And finally at the end of World War II, everybody else had been taken care of; I mean, they had decided what they wanted to do. If they wanted to get out, they got out. If they wanted to stay in, in such-and-such an endeavor, they did, and all that. But at the end of World War II, the only person in that section was this young girl, whose specialty was Arabic.” ESF can’t remember the girl’s name, or what eventually happened to her.

– “You may have seen in the paper a couple of weeks ago about this American woman from Houston, Texas, going to Saudi Arabia to give the prince’s daughter a college education-personal friend of mine, Marjorie McCorquodale. She was a young newspaper woman in Houston, Texas. I was down there in 1927 – I literally brought a truckload of unsolved messages from the Gulf coast, all the way from Belize through Honduras, and I brought it all up to New York, that area, right there. All those messages were done. And it was just plain rum-runner stuff, and it took instead of a few days, I was gone for six weeks or more. And she, was a newspaper girl. Since then she’s been a big newspaper woman and in graduate school. Shakespeare at the University of Houston; was a PhD and head of English literature. I mean, oh, to hear her achievements and go on, and laid end-to-end they’d probably reach around the world.”

End of tape.

Nov. 11, 1976, Valaki 3
Tape starts in the middle of a conversation about Fabyan being capable of having his collection destroyed on his death just for laughs, or having an unsolvable riddle hidden in the middle of it.

p. 2 – Asked about Fabyan having correspondence with anyone, ESF mentions (J. Rives) Childs, partly because Childs was fairly aristocratic, and Fabyan wanted to prove himself as an equal in Childs’ eyes.

– Returning to Cora Jensen, Valaki says that Cora got married and changed her name to Tyzzer, based on correspondence between William and Riverbank in 1948. They talk about Fabyan’s secretary, Mrs. Cummings, who died in a car accident. Cummings was very loyal, and could have destroyed papers to protect her boss. There’s speculation that Mrs. Fabyan could have donated to the Library of Congress whatever was still in the collection that hadn’t been destroyed.

p. 4 – Valaki apparently talked to Childs about being at Riverbank, and he had felt at the time that his room had been bugged. Years later, he had asked William about that, and Will confirmed it. Valaki wonders why Fabyan would have bugged the rooms of the first four lieutenants to come to Riverbank for training, and Elizebeth doesn’t know.

p. 6 – Side chatter, the recorder is turned off then on again, and ESF is talking about first meeting Fabyan again. There’s talk of Gallup, the Bacon cipher, and descriptions of the estate and the activities there.

p. 8 – More attempts by Valaki to learn about the Riverbank pamphlets – how they were written and tested, if they’d been tested, but ESF either doesn’t know, or doesn’t remember.

p. 10 – Trying to determine how John Manly came into contact with Fabyan, but Manly was already at Riverbank when ESF got there.

p. 12 – Manly disproves Gallup’s claims of being able to read the Bacon cipher in the Shakespeare First Folio. Valaki asks, since Manly had been identified as an amateur cryptologer, if amateur cryptology was popular in the U.S. back then, and if people regularly communicated that way with each other. Elizebeth recommends that Valaki ask Lambros Callimahos that.

p. 13 – At one point, Riverbank hosted Army training for digging trenches, and there was something on a group of boys called the Fabyan Scouts. ESF says this didn’t last long, but it got into the newspapers, and that was the kind of publicity Fabyan chased after.

– Valaki mentions finding a newspaper story about a woman named Helen Moore, either an heiress or spiritualist (I can’t find anything on her) who was institutionalized for 2 years. Fabyan was her guardian and declared her sane and had her released. ESF doesn’t remember the story all that well, but can believe that Fabyan would have viewed himself capable of telling if someone was sane or not.

p. 14 – Valaki says she found an Army memo claiming that Fabyan couldn’t be trusted with secrets (ciphers) because he might publicize them. There’s a bit of chatting about how Fabyan might have been trying to use the Army to get them to accept the use of the Bacon cipher for communications. The conversation turns to Mauborgne, and his beef with someone about ground to air communications.

p. 15 – Elizebeth then talks about Mauborgne’s violin playing, making violins, and painting. Some of the etchings in ESF’s house were created by Mauborgne. He’d grown trees and selected the wood for making the cases, he made and sold his own violins. Kullback or Sinkov might know more.

p. 16 – More about Fabyan collecting works, mainly having his agents looking for interesting stuff for him. Apparently, Fabyan was actually interested in taking on Mauborgne’s violins and selling them for him as concert violins.

– The conversation changes to Childs and his wife until the end of the tape on page 19.

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One of the impressions I get from these interviews is that Elizebeth could be fairly vindictive against anyone that might have competed against, or slighted, her husband. I find it interesting that she sided with the Redman brothers, approving of their “views” on COMINT, as it applied to ousting Joseph Rochefort and the Pearl Harbor staff. This would have put her at odds with Admiral Nimitz, who wanted Washington out of the loop for intel coming directly to him from Hawai’i and Melbourne.