Editor's Note: Reprinted from the Special Issue of Cryptologic Spectrum, December 1980.

Elizebeth Smith Friedman, the widow of William F. Friedman and herself a pioneer in U.S. cryptology, died on 31 October 1980 in Plainfield, New Jersey, at the age of 88. Coauthor (with her husband) of The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined and author of many technical papers, she was employed at various times by the U.S. Treasury Department, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, the Canadian government, and the International Monetary Fund. Mrs. Friedman served the U.S. as a cryptologist in both World Wars, and in the period between she won distinction for her work on international drug and liquor smuggling cases.

The youngest of nine children of John M. Smith, a Quaker dairyman and banker, and his wife Sopha Strock Smith, Mrs. Friedman was born in Huntington, Indiana, in 1892.^[59] She attended Wooster College briefly and graduated from Hillsdale College in Michigan, where she majored in English.

While working at the Newberry Library in Chicago in 1916, Mrs. Friedman was recruited by George Fabyan to work on his 500-acre estate – Riverbank – at Geneva, Illinois, to aid Mrs. Elizabeth Wells Gallup in her attempt to prove that Sir Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. Fabyan, a wealthy textile merchant who maintained laboratories in acoustics, chemistry, and genetics, had established a Department of Ciphers, which consisted of a staff of fifteen who lived on the estate.

It was at Riverbank that Elizebeth Smith met William F. Friedman, head of Fabyan's Department of Genetics at the time. They were married in May 1917 and worked together at Geneva, the only cryptologic laboratory in the country, solving messages that government agencies sent from Washington. During World War I, they developed courses in cryptology and trained U.S. Army officers and civilians.

After William Friedman's service with the American Expeditionary Force in Europe, the Friedmans returned to Riverbank, but in 1921 they moved to Washington where they both were employed by the War Department.

It was Elizebeth Friedman's own work for various branches of the government that brought her to prominence, first as assistant cryptanalyst for the War Department in 1921–22 and then as cryptanalyst for the U.S. Navy in 1923, which led to her work for the U.S. Treasury Bureau of Prohibition and Bureau of Customs. Most of her professional career was spent working against such international enterprises as smuggling and drug running. She broke up criminal syndicates and interrupted millions of dollars worth of illegal business. Although her work itself was not dangerous, on several occasions when she was called to testify, the government supplied her with bodyguards.

Her early career began during the era of Prohibition, when rumrunners turned to radio and encoded messages to control their offshore operations. Mrs. Friedman was established in the Coast Guard office in Washington, D.C., to work on rumrunners' traffic. In her first three years she solved 12,000 messages as special agent of the Bureau of Foreign Control, originally in the Department of Justice. In 1928 she was transferred to the Customs Investigative Service in the Bureau of Customs, Treasury Department, which eventually became the Bureau of Narcotics.

During 1928–30 her cases centered on smuggling operations in the Gulf of Mexico and on the Pacific Coast. She appeared as an expert witness in several cases in Galveston and Houston, Texas, and in New Orleans, Louisiana. In 1933 she was the star prosecution witness in the New Orleans Federal Court as cryptanalyst for the Coast Guard, testifying to her solutions of messages from the Consolidated Exporters Company, Prohibition's largest and most powerful bootlegging ring – messages that connected ringleaders to the actual operations of the rumrunning vessels. Her evidence at the trial indicted thirty-five rumrunners for conspiracy to violate the National Prohibition Act.

Her arguments for the establishment of a seven-man cryptanalytic section at headquarters was approved by Congress in 1931, and in the following years she solved not only bootlegging messages but also those of other highly organized smuggling gangs.

Another outstanding case involved messages of opium dealers. In 1937 the Canadian government sought her help. She went to Vancouver to testify in the trial of Gordon Lim and several other Chinese. Their secret messages dealing with opium smuggling were cast in a complicated system involving a code she solved without knowing Chinese. They were convicted and sentenced to seven years' imprisonment, where, as a Pacific Coast columnist observed, they would have plenty of time "to devise a code that a woman couldn't break."

In 1934 some of her solutions helped to extricate the United States from an embarrassing diplomatic tangle in the I'm Alone case, establishing a point of international law. The ship, built in Canada for the liquor trade, was sighted by a Coast Guard cutter on 23 March 1929, near the Louisiana coast. When the I'm Alone refused to honor the "heave to and be searched" signals, the cutter chased it into international waters and sank it with its Canadian flag still flying. Members of the crew were rescued, but for the loss of the vessel and its cargo, the Canadian government filed a claim against the United States for $365,000, based on the presumption that vessel and cargo were Canadian owned. American officials contended that the I'm Alone belonged to New Yorkers. International sentiments were aroused, and the U.S. embassy in Paris was stormed as a result of what was considered American high-handedness. However, with Elizebeth Friedman's decryption of twenty-three coded messages subpoenaed from telegraph company files addressed from Belize, British Honduras, to an unregistered code address in New York, the mystery was solved, the owner of the ship captured, and American ownership fully established.

Another case in which Mrs. Friedman's solutions proved crucial was the Doll Woman Case, solved in 1944. Mrs. Velvalee Dickinson, an antique doll dealer in New York City, was eventually found guilty of spying for the Japanese government. Suspicion of her activities while a member of the Japanese-American Society arose from a letter containing coded information hidden in obscure phrases about naval vessel movement in Pearl Harbor.

After her service as a cryptologist with the government in World War II, Mrs. Friedman, working as a consultant, created communications security systems for the International Monetary Fund.

The Friedmans' earlier interest in Shakespeare led to a lifelong battle against the doctrine supported by invalid decipherments of Shakespeare's plays, which others used to attempt to prove that Bacon was the author. They collaborated on a manuscript entitled "The Cryptologist Looks at Shakespeare," subsequently published as The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined, which won awards from the Folger Shakespeare Library (1955) and the American Shakespeare Theater and Academy. In this work, the Friedmans dismissed such Baconians as Mrs. Gallup and Mr. Ignatius Donnelly with a combination of technical skill and literary grace that won the book recognition far beyond those interested in the subject. It is generally regarded as the definitive work on the subject, if not the final word.

In 1938 Mrs. Friedman received an honorary LL.D. from Hillsdale College.

After her husband's death in 1969, Mrs. Friedman spent her retirement compiling a bibliography of his work and library for presentation to the George C. Marshall Research Library in Lexington, Virginia. It is considered the most extensive private collection of cryptologic material in the world.