Elizebeth Friedman and the Lew Kim Yuen case

This is an undated transcription of a few (incomplete) pages of notes by ESF on the Lew Kim Yuen case. The memo (and other information in this blog post) can be found in Box 6, file 26 of the ESF Collection at the George C. Marshall Foundation library.

We worked under some pressure all the time trying to find out when the S/S Taythybius was due at Seattle carrying the very large amount of ''white stuff''-- heroin -- mentioned in the message. Corrections of letters-to-digits-to-Chinese-to-English had to be made because of errors, or ``garbles'' as it is known in the trade, after we had received an actual photostat of the original message seized in Portland, Oregon. But all that was possible to do was finished and turned over to the Bureau of Customs in Washington on February 12th. We later learned that the S/S Taythybius actually docked at Seattle on February 13th. The peculiar nature of the Chinese language, with its inability -- rather its complete lack of ability -- to express many sounds or even concepts makes for greater length of text in the Chinese version of a message. For example, the literal text of this message was perhaps five times the length of the final English translation, but this single message furnished to the Customs Agency forces in the Northwest area an enormous fund of information which could be linked in with the growing bulk of knowledge concerning the operation of narcotics smuggling by utilizing crew members of legitimate vessels operating in the Pacific.

Image source: Chris R. Pownall

My office determined that the letters were monoalphabetic encipherments for the digits 0 to 9:

Q	U	O	N	G	S	L	A	W	K
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	0

I had known and had in my possession a Chinese commercial dictionary -- code-book, if you prefer. It is actually a dictionary of 10,000 Chinese characters commonly used in business or commercial cable and telegraph, because obviously the Chinese characters themselves cannot be send in Morse or International signals. Each of these Chinese characters in this abbreviated dictionary has four-digit number-groups assigned to it and when the message is telegraphed it is the number-groups which were used. In this case, a simple cipher was used to convert the digits of the code-book into letters for sending. After my office had converted the four-letter groups into four-digit numbers each number-group was found in the small Chinese dictionary and sit down in columnar fashion the better to study the message for translation.

The memo continues on another page which is missing from the file. Here is a typed version of the encrypted message:

Here is one page from ESF's notes on the decryption of the message:

Here is the final decryption: