Elizebeth Friedman biography, "Divine Fire"

In previous posts on this blog (for example, Elizebeth Friedman and the Lew Kim Yuen case, Elizebeth Friedman and the Gordon Lim case, Elizebeth Friedman and the Holmwood case, and so on), I'm mentioned some of the events in Elizebeth Friedman's life. A timeline of ESF's life, based on her own partial memoir, is here (pdf),

While I did a lot of work on it, the mountain of effort is due to Katie Letcher Lyle, who created the almost finished manuscript years ago, through personal interviews she had with with Elizebeth Friedman herself. I'm grateful to Katie for inviting me to help polish up some technical details and hope you, the reader, enjoy the result, Divine Fire.

Sadly, Katie died suddenly in August 2016. There is a short obit included in the books' preface.

Recently, PBS has broadcast an hour long documentary based on Fagone's 2017 biography of ESF, The Woman Who Smashed Codes. You can find that documentary streaming on you computer here: The Codebreaker (aired 2020-01-11). The website says the streaming "Expires: 02/08/21". Jason Fagone gave a talk in 2018 on his book and it's been posted to youtube.
The pdf of Divine Fire is here.

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:

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.

Elizebeth Smith Friedman timeline

Elizebeth Smith Friedman was one of the greatest cryptographers in history. This post gives a brief chronology of some major events in her life. More details, based on her own partial memoir, is here.


1892 - August 26, Elizebeth Smith born in Huntington, Indiana.

1911 began to attended The College of Wooster (Ohio)

The College of Wooster

1913
ES left school at Wooster

1914
ES returned to school, but to Hillsdale College (Michigan)

Hillsdale College

1915, summer
Took degree in English from Hillsdale.
Started her first year teaching in a nearby school.
Also, served as principal.


1915, September
William Friedman starts working at Riverbank as a geneticist.

Riverbank acoustic lab, built 1918

1916, June
Quit teaching and looked for a new job. Went to Chicago to an
employment agency and also to visit the Newberry Library which had an original 1623 folio of Shakespeare.

Newberry Library, 1911

The librarian introduced her to Col Fabyan, who wanted to hire someone to look into ciphers connected with Bacon and Shakespeare


Met William Friedman

William Friedman, 1919

1917
ES's mother dies February 14 1917
US enters WWI April 6, 1917
ESF marries William Friedman May 21, 1917

William and Elizebeth Friedman, circa 1920

1918
Cipher Bureau created in Washington DC, headed by
Yardley, assisted by Manly

1923
Started working for US Navy (cheif of code building section) - January 1923
Moved to "Green mansion" - their home in Md, where they stayed until 1925.
Cassie was hired as cook, family caregiver, and housekeeper.
She was much loved by the Friedman family but, sadly, died in 1932 of cancer at the age of 39.
First child Barbara born - October 14, 1923.
ESF's father dies November 16, 1923.

"Green Mansion", circa 1925

Late 1925
EF called by CAPT Root and offered job as CG crypto special agent

1926
Son John was born, July 28, 1926

John Friedman, circa 1985

1927
EF began work with the United States Coast Guard's Intelligence Unit.
June, July: Went to CA to instruct CG personnel on methods of
decrypting traffic from rumrunners.

From "Listening to the Rumrunners": During May 1927-January 1930,
ESF decrypted, on her own, 3300 cipher messages
between rumrunner fleets on the west coast and
principals in Vancouver CA. They operated
about 25 black ships and 5 radio stations. They
used nearly 50 distinct cryptosystems, many employing
multiple encryptions.

The Malahat, circa 1930, was a rumrunner operating on the Pacific

1928
EF sent to Houston, Texas to solve some messages
which the District Attorney there had subpoenaed
from Western Union and which was expected to
produce evidence of value against defendants in
the liquor smuggling business who had been indicted
in the Southern District of Texas. A pile of
messages had been subpoenaed from Western Union
which was the size of a small truck.

Barbara, John, and Elizebeth Friedman, circa 1928

June 1930
EF appeared in one case in Texas for the trial of three men who were charged with not only conspiracy but the actual operation of smuggling of liquor from Belize, British Honduras, to the Texas coast.

1933
EF appeared as a witness in the Bert Morrison case, as it was known, in New Orleans.

1941
EF's Coast Guard unit was transferred to the Navy where they solved a difficult Enigma machine code used by German Naval Intelligence.

1950
EF worked as a security consultant for the International Monetary Fund.

Upon retirement from government service, she collaborated with her husband William Friedman on a book, "The Shakespearean ciphers examined" (Cambridge University Press, 1957).

William and Elizebeth Friedman

1969
William Friedman died November 12, 1969

ESF works on organizing WF's collected papers, and her own, at the
George C. Marshall Foundation.

1980
On October 31, Elizebeth Friedman dies in Plainfield, New Jersey.

(Some photos were found on the internet, others are courtesy of Craig Bauer, editor of Cryptologia, and the NSA Cryptologic Museum.)