Elizebeth Friedman and the Gordon Lim case

The best source of information on this case is from the ESF Collection at the George C. Marshall Foundation library, Box 6, File 27, and from audio Tape 3 (dated June 5, 1974).

Gordon Lim was a wealthy Chinese businessman who lived in Vancouver, British Columbia. He was educated at Peking University, in China, and Oxford University in England. He owned a rare gem importing business, the Wat Sang Company, and was suspected for years of operating a large drug smuggling ring by the Canadian authorities. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) investigation headed by Corporal Haywood into Gordon Lim took 18 months. The The Canadian Department of Pensions and National Health requested the U.S. Coast Guard's help in tracking the operations of Gordon Lim. At the time, the Coast Guard was the enforcement branch of the U.S. Department of the Treasury which followed radio traffic of ships entering U.S. waters. According to a letter dated November 4, 1937, from Chief Sharman of the Narcotics Division in Ottawa to Commissioner Anslinger, of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in Washington D.C., over 40000 cables were examined by Canadian intelligence agents. Of all these, 26 were forwarded to Elizebeth Friedman's office for decryption.

According to Elizebeth Friedman's files, other aliases for Gordon Lim were: Lim (Lin?) Fong Duck, Lim Shik Yuen, Yuen Duck, and several variations on these names. For example, Canadian records list a steamship passage on ``The Empress of Japan'' from Vancouver to Hong Kong for a Mrs Gordon Lim and a Lim Fong, sailing March 10, 1934. This suggests Gordon Lim may have used one of these aliases when traveling to and from China.

In this case, over 40000 cables were examined by United States and Canadian intelligence agents. The decryption took months. In fact, according to an audio interview, Mrs. Friedman reported that her team did not even want to try, knowing the difficulty. However, she kept trying different possibilities and very gradually, over a period of months, made some progress. As an example of the progress made, she discovered that the Chinese commercial code used as a basis for the ciphers was in Cantonese.

Chinese characters were transmitted in groups of four numerals.

In Washington DC she was provided with an expert in Mandarin and made good progress. She flew to Vancouver to work with Canadian intelligence authorities, including a Cantonese expert named Mr. Yii Choong Leong, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, where all the messages were broken. The basic meaning of the messages was known. For example, one message might have described specific shipment which was later intercepted by authorities. Their job was to "reverse engineer" the encryption system used by Gordon Lim and his associates. In spite of the fact that the cables were in Chinese, a language unfamiliar to Mrs. Friedman, and used four different cryptosystems, she and her team were able to break the ciphers.

In his trial in January 1938, Lim was convicted of smuggled opium out of China to North America. At the same time, as a gun-runner, he exported large quantities of guns and ammunition from Canada into Hong Kong.

PS: As Elizebeth Friedman recalls in her audio interview of 1974, the RCMP discovered how Gordon Lim organized his opium shipments by accident. Lim's smuggling organization had one merchant seaman working for the Empress lines and one working for the Blue Funnel Lines. Both these shipping companies had routes from Hong Kong to Seattle and Vancouver. In one instant, a Blue Funnel Line freighter was backing out of dock when it got tangled in some rope with opium packets tied to it. It turned out that a seaman hired by Lim's group would hide packets of opium, tied to a long length of rope, in a hollow pipe on board a ship. When this reached about a mile from shore, the seaman would transfer the rope to a swimmer, who would swim it into the dock, often swimming underwater, with one end of the rope in his mouth, the other end trailing behind.