Elizebeth Smith Friedman (August 26, 1892 – October 31, 1980) was an American cryptanalyst and author who deciphered enemy codes in both World Wars and helped to solve international smuggling cases during Prohibition.

[2] On the staff at Riverbank was the man Elizebeth would marry in May 1917, William F. Friedman, a plant biologist who also became involved in the Bacon-Shakespeare project.

[1]: 67  When the United States entered World War I, Fabyan established a new Riverbank Department of Ciphers, with the Friedmans in charge, and offered their services to the government.

[11] 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.[12] Their previous efforts to leave had been thwarted by Fabyan, who intercepted their mail.

[10] Bootleggers and smugglers brought liquor and narcotics into the U.S., as well as items that would be heavily taxed if imported openly, such as perfume, jewels, and even pinto beans.

[14] 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.

[10] While early codes and ciphers were very basic, their subsequent increase in complexity and resistance to solution was important to the financial growth of smuggling operations.

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.

[20] The vessel was flying the Canadian flag when it was sunk by USCGC Dexter 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.

[21] 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.

[3] During World War II, Friedman's Coast Guard unit was transferred to the Navy, where they were the principal U.S. source of intelligence on Operation Bolívar, the clandestine German network in South America.

While the FBI was given responsibility for countering this threat, at the time, the one U.S. agency with staff experienced in detecting and monitoring clandestine spy transmissions was the Coast Guard, due to its earlier work against smugglers,[14] and Friedman’s team was its sole cryptoanalytic asset.

Friedman’s team remained the primary U.S. code-breakers assigned to the South American threat, and they solved numerous cipher systems used by the Germans and their local sympathizers, including three separate Enigma machines.

[22] 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.

She did what the FBI could not do.”[4] After the spy ring was broken, Argentina, Bolivia and Chile broke with the Axis powers and supported the Allies.

[14] In fact, Friedman was irritated by the "sloppiness" of the FBI,[4] for example in rounding up spies in South America, thus alerting the Nazis that their codes had been broken.

[1]: 243–247  At the end of World War II, Hoover began a public media campaign claiming that the FBI led the code-breaking effort that resulted in the collapse and arrest of the German spy network in South America.

This effort included a story in The American Magazine titled "How the Nazi Spy Invasion Was Smashed" and a publicity film called The Battle of the United States.

After World War II, Friedman became a consultant to the International Monetary Fund and created communications security systems for them based on one-time tapes.

[3] This "most extensive private collection of cryptographic material in the world" was donated to the George C. Marshall Research Library in Lexington, Virginia.

[1]: 336–337 [28] Friedman belonged to civic organizations such as the League of Women Voters and worked on behalf of statehood for the District of Columbia.

[1]: 150–151  In January 1941 he was admitted to the Neuropsychiatric Section at Walter Reed General Hospital in Washington, DC, where he spent two and a half months in a mental ward.