Meet Elizebeth Smith Friedman, an incredible alumna (and mother) you may not have heard of before. Elizebeth (born 1892) graduated from Hillsdale in 1915 with a degree in English. While at Hillsdale, she joined Pi Beta Phi, studied Latin, Greek, and German, served as the literary editor of The Collegian, and fed her love for all things Shakespeare. A year after graduation, she moved to Geneva, Illinois, to work at Riverbank Laboratories and began studying cryptography–the art of solving codes. It was this work that planted the seeds that would grow into a very successful career in code-cracking.
Elizebeth began as a cryptanalyst for the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard, where she intercepted and deciphered codes to bust drug and rum-running rings not only in North and South America, but also overseas. During her three years with the Navy and Coast Guard, she and the team of expert cryptanalysts she led solved over 12,000 codes.
Soon after World War II broke out, Elizebeth’s skills and penchant for breaking South American codes led her and her team to become the sole cryptoanalytic asset for Operation Bolívar, the clandestine German network in South America. Over the course of the war, Elizebeth’s team decoded over 4,000 messages sent on 48 unique circuits using many different ciphers–including three infamous Enigma machines.
But Elizebeth wasn’t only a talented codebreaker; she was also a wife and mother. In 1917, Elizebeth married William F. Friedman, a cryptographer who also contributed heavily to cryptology, especially in World War II. Together they had two children, Barbara Friedman (born 1923) and John Ramsay Friedman (born 1926).
Elizebeth Friedman passed away on October 31, 1980, in Plainfield, New Jersey, at the age of 88. Her ashes were spread over her husband’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery.
