On the morning of December 7, 1941, it seemed as if the Japanese flew directly out of the rising sun. At the American naval base on Oahu, the U.S. Pacific fleet was riding defenseless at anchor. No antiaircraft guns were manned. A radar warning had been misinterpreted and ignored. At 7:55 a.m., the first bomb hit Pearl Harbor. Within two hours, eighteen U.S. ships had been sunk or badly damaged, 188 planes destroyed, and 2,323 servicemen and sixty-eight civilians killed. As the news hit the West Coast, frightened citizens worried that an attack on the U.S. mainland was next. The rest of the nation wondered how such devastation could have been allowed to happen. In the White House, President Franklin Roosevelt prepared a declaration of war against Japan in the wake of the "day that will live in infamy."

But in a modest house in Chevy Chase, Maryland, as William Friedman listened to the horrific radio reports, he had a very different response. As the story goes, he paced back and forth across the room and muttered over and over, "But they knew, they knew, they knew . . ."

In a defunct motel just off Route 32 from the Baltimore-Washington Parkway is the most unlikely of tourist spots: the National Security Agency's museum. The agency itself is so clandestine that the 1952 executive order creating it was classified, so purposely nondescript that it was thirty-seven years before anyone deigned to put a sign out front of its headquarters. "Next to the NSA," the Washington Post once explained, "the CIA is Geraldo Rivera."

Yet there sits the National Cryptologic Museum, a monument to the NSA's chief responsibility--intercepting and decrypting government and military signals. Cryptology is the science; cryptography is the art of writing the codes and ciphers thought to be unbreakable; cryptanalysis is the art of solving them. All one really needs to know about William Friedman, to start, is that he coined those terms, that he revolutionized the science, and that the tasks performed by, say, the Cray XMP-24 mainframe supercomputer on display at the museum were originally performed by an introspective man in a bow tie and two-toned shoes using a sharp pencil and an even sharper intellect. "He was a giant, and he's revered by everybody," says Jack Ingram, the museum's curator. "He definitely is second to none in the history of this business." Which is why Friedman, along with his wife Elizebeth, has a place in the National Cryptologic Museum's Hall of Heroes. The curious thing is this: toward the end of his career, Friedman himself began to question whether his contributions were really heroic at all.

He was born Wolfe Friedman in 1891 in Kishinev, Russia. His father, Frederic, a Romanian Jew from Bucharest, spoke several languages and served as an interpreter for the Russian postal service. But in the summer of 1892, anticipating the pogroms to come, Frederic Friedman sailed for America, establishing himself as a door-to-door salesman of sewing machines. His wife, Rosa, his son, and a daughter followed a year later, traveling steerage. They escaped just in time. Within a decade, hundreds of Jews would be killed and injured and 1,300 Jewish homes and businesses destroyed in Kishinev alone.

The household, which grew to include two more brothers and a resolutely Orthodox grandfather, settled in Pittsburgh, where they constantly struggled to meet their debts. Wolfe, who was renamed William by the time he was six, became a naturalized citizen and, like many American schoolboys at the time, a fan of Edgar Allen Poe. In particular, Friedman enjoyed Poe's short story "The Gold Bug," in which the author used an enciphered message as a clue to the discovery of buried treasure. Friedman was mesmerized by the tale, but he could find no better use for his newfound knowledge than the exchange of cryptic love notes with a classmate. He did, however, show an early interest in telegraphy, even going so far as to set up wires and instruments with two of his friends so they could send messages from home to home.

Over the next several years, Friedman continued to sample passions that might translate into a profession. After trying his hand in an ironworks after high school graduation, he decided farming was in his future and enrolled at Michigan Agricultural College. He stayed there six months, before his attentions turned to more scientific aspects of agriculture. He left the college and, in 1911, borrowed train fare and made his way to Ithaca, where he studied the new science of genetics in Cornell's College of Agriculture. The 1914 Cornellian noted that "Eugenics Bill," as he was known, "comes to his work with the inquiring mind of a thinker."

Fully expecting to pursue an academic life as an agricultural geneticist, Friedman enrolled as a graduate student on the Hill. But in the spring of 1915 he met George Fabyan, a wealthy textiles tycoon who ran a 500-acre farm just west of Chicago. Hoping to improve crop strains, Fabyan had gone hunting for a geneticist and found Friedman. "What do you raise on your estate?" Friedman asked when offered the job. "I raise hell!" replied Fabyan, whose grounds included a Japanese garden, a Roman bath, a Dutch windmill, a private zoo of bears, wolves, and coyotes, and a roving chimpanzee. All the furniture in the house hung on chains from the ceiling. When Fabyan wasn't surveying the scene from his favorite chair, which was suspended from a huge tree before a massive open-air fireplace, he could be found riding in a carriage pulled by a team of zebras.

Fabyan grew more than just crops on his estate; he grew knowledge. Though he had little formal education himself, the Colonel (as he called himself despite no military experience) hired others to do research in fields ranging from acoustics and perpetual motion to chemistry and cryptology. He called his farm on the Fox River "Riverbank Laboratories," explaining, "Some rich men go in for art collections, gay times on the Riviera, or extravagant living. But they all get satiated. That's why I stick to scientific experiments, spending money to discover valuable things that universities can't afford."

In the autumn of 1915, Friedman set up quarters in Riverbank's windmill as the director of the genetics laboratory. But he found himself drawn to another department on the estate, where Elizebeth Smith, an Indiana native and one of the few other young people at Riverbank, was among a group working on one of Fabyan's pet projects--an attempt to decipher messages supposedly hidden in the text of Shakespeare's plays revealing the true author as Francis Bacon. Intrigued by the field of study (if not necessarily convinced about the anti-Stratfordian goals), Friedman began to read the scant information that was available on codes and ciphers at the time.

Within two years, Smith was his wife and Friedman was head of Riverbank's Department of Ciphers. "When I came on cryptology, something in me found an outlet," he later recalled, adding that his initial interest stemmed from "an inherent curiosity to know what people were trying to write that they didn't want other people to read."

As World War I loomed, Colonel Fabyan--ever patriotic and impulsive--discovered that the U.S. military had no organization for intercepting enemy communications, let alone deciphering them. He offered the services of his crew, and, until a Cipher Bureau was set up in Washington, Friedman's department essentially served as the cryptologic service of the U.S. government. Having been drawn to the field by historical mystery, Friedman had now entered a world of moral ambiguity. "I was seduced," he said, "from an honorable profession to one with a slight odor."

During the early days of the war, Friedman trained eighty-four officers, who were then dispatched overseas to become the American force responsible for translating garbled cryptic messages into plain text. But the Friedmans themselves emerged as the last line of defense. When enemy messages arrived that the Army was unable to decipher, they were forwarded to Riverbank. The same was true for Allied attempts at creating codes, such as the time the British government made a final check of a proposed crypto-system by running it by the Friedmans. Though they received just six short messages (making decipherment all the more difficult), in a matter of hours the Friedmans solved the opening line: "This message is absolutely indecipherable."

Over the next months, Friedman began the process of revolutionizing what had long been more alchemy than science. He introduced the laws of probability and statistical analysis into the field, eventually publishing eight booklets on the subject, including "The Index of Coincidence and Its Application to Cryptography." "The results can only be described as Promethean," writes David Kahn in The Codebreakers, "for Friedman's stroke of genius inspired numerous, varied, and vital statistical tools that are indispensable to the cryptology of today." It quickly became clear that Friedman was much more useful near the front, and in July 1918 he was sent to Chaumont, the French headquarters of the American Expeditionary Forces. Commissioned as a lieutenant, he joined the German Code and Cipher Solving Section of Military Intelligence, a unit which emerged as a vital cog in the war machine.

After the war, Friedman returned to the War Department in Washington, D.C.; what was supposed to be a six-month assignment would last nearly thirty-five years. In late 1921, Friedman officially became Chief Cryptanalyst to the War Department, a post he was to occupy for a quarter of a century. "The vast American cryptologic establishment of today, with its thousands of employees, its far flung stations, its sprawling headquarters," writes Kahn, "this gigantic enterprise is a direct lineal descendant of the little office in the War Department that Friedman started all by himself."

While her husband was working for the War Department, Elizebeth was employed by the Treasury Department, unscrambling codes used by rum-runners during Prohibition. Eventually, the department decided to set up a full-time cryptologic unit, which she ran for eighteen years (she later established cryptographic communication for the International Monetary Fund and the OSS, predecessor to the CIA). Often, her role as an expert witness thrust her into the headlines: in 1938, she deciphered twenty-seven Chinese-code cablegrams, enabling Canada to break up an opium-smuggling ring. "My mother got a lot of press in those days, but not my father," says John Friedman, their second child and a 1950 Cornell graduate. "I knew he worked in the signal corps and had something to do with codes and ciphers, but I never realized how important that was. He was kind of a shadow man."

Occasionally, William Friedman escaped the shadows. As early as 1924, he testified before a congressional committee regarding coded telegrams exchanged between principals in the Teapot Dome scandal, which involved the sale of government properties for use by private developers and led to the imprisonment of the U.S. Secretary of the Interior and the resignation or expulsion of two other Cabinet members. Years later, another message decoded by Friedman foiled a massive Ohio State Prison escape plot. When the Smithsonian Institution needed a list of the thousand commonest words in the English language for burial in a time capsule, it turned to Friedman. When a millionaire died and left a series of codes and ciphers as his will, Friedman was called in.

Still, his primary focus was on the ultra-secret world of diplomatic and military cryptograms, and as the technical complexities of the job increased so did Friedman's ethical struggles. Promoted to major in 1924, he began to grapple with the clash of philosophies between military tradition (don't question authority) and the scientific process (question everything). An outgoing man, he constantly battled the need to watch what he said--even to his wife, whom he called his "divine fire." In 1927, at about the time he contributed an article on codes and ciphers for the Encyclopedia Brittanica and began work on a four-volume Elements of Cryptanalysis (which became the U.S. Army's cryptographic Bible), he began seeing a psychoanalyst regularly.

In June 1930, Friedman's focus became more covert when he was named head of the newly created Signal Intelligence Service (SIS), which was responsible for preparing Army codes and ciphers and intercepting and solving enemy cryptograms in wartime. One of Friedman's primary responsibilities was to train a new generation of experts, and so his staff grew as radio intercept stations were set up from Capitol Hill to the Philippines. In the words of Friedman biographer Ronald Clark (who also chronicled the lives of Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell), Friedman now headed "a small, dedicated band of specialists, working on the frontiers of knowledge, acquiring information which was vitally to affect the coming war."

In 1937, the U.S. encountered a diplomatic cipher used by the Japanese Foreign Minister to protect his most secret telegrams to and from his ambassadors. Two years later, with the U.S. readying for war with Japan, Friedman, by then a lieutenant colonel, was directed to work exclusively toward breaking the cipher--codenamed Purple. It would become the most famous crypto-system in history, due primarily to four factors: its remarkable complexity, the effort required to crack it, the enormous impact its decipherment had on the war, and the infamous event that its solution still failed to prevent.

For eighteen months, Friedman and a team of nineteen cryptanalysts, led by a former schoolteacher named Frank Rowlett, channeled their combined intellect at Purple. The hope, as always, was to find some regularities in the jumble of enciphered letters. The regularities would lead them to overriding laws regarding the cipher's general system; those laws might allow them to build a cipher machine that produced the cryptographic effects of Purple. "The task was not unlike that which Einstein faced in trying to find the regularities which revealed the natural laws of the Universe," writes Clark. "There was, however, one great difference. As Einstein described his efforts to discover God's laws, 'God is subtle, but he is not malicious.'" Purple was both.

Finally, after months of analysis, Friedman's team deduced the character of the Purple machine. With less than $700 worth of parts, they constructed a whirling assortment of dangling wires, and on September 25, 1940 (the day after Friedman's forty-ninth birthday), they produced the first significant, ungarbled Purple plain text. The message was a whopper, indicating that Japan was about to join Germany and Italy to form the Axis. Soon after, a deciphered telegram from Baron Oshima, the Japanese Ambassador in Berlin, revealed that Hitler was planning to attack Russia within six months.

Late in 1940, Friedman was promoted to full colonel in preparation for a visit to England, during which the U.S. was to trade cryptographic secrets with Britain. But the stress of the previous two years had taken its toll. In January 1941, he entered a neuro-psychiatric hospital ward, where he was diagnosed as suffering from extreme fatigue "due to prolonged overwork on a top secret project." Friedman spent ten weeks in the hospital, and upon returning home was informed that he was being honorably discharged by reason of physical disqualification. He protested, to no avail, and returned to his work as a civilian, to be restored to his former rank only after the war.

During the war, however, the deciphered Japanese messages proved to be even more valuable than expected. While the Purple disclosures (codenamed "magics") provided foreknowledge of Japanese moves, they were most effective, ironically, in the war against Germany. Believing the cipher unbreakable, Baron Oshima continued to use it in his dispatches from Berlin, listing German troop strength in the Balkans, describing new German jet fighters, even cabling a detailed description of Normandy defenses that proved invaluable on D-Day. It has been estimated that the breaking of Purple may have shortened the war by months, perhaps years, and saved millions of American lives.

But there was one fateful failure. By the autumn of 1941, the intercepted and deciphered magics indicated that Japan would likely soon attack British possessions in Asia and possibly U.S. possessions in the Pacific. In late November, Friedman's crew even decoded a message from the Japanese premier to Oshima directing the ambassador to inform Hitler that there was "an extreme danger that war may suddenly break out between the Anglo-Saxon nations and Japan through some clash of arms" and that this might "come more quickly than anyone's dreams."

Friedman expected war at any moment, as did Roosevelt. In fact, on the night of December 6, several cryptanalysts in the SIS went so far as to sleep at the headquarters fully clothed. Surely, American forces throughout the world, and particularly in the Pacific, were on special alert--if not before December 7, then certainly that morning, when it was dawn on the East Coast and the final part of a fourteen-part message was decoded announcing that U.S.-Japanese diplomatic negotiations had ended. Upon hearing that the message had reached Pearl Harbor too late to prevent widespread destruction of the U.S. Pacific fleet, Friedman's first reaction was disbelief. "My father had been agitated for a number of days," John Friedman recalls. "I had noticed that the first thing he usually did when he came home was turn on the radio and listen to news broadcasts. That Sunday morning, he got up late because he had worked very late. I was sitting on the living room floor reading the comic pages. He came down in his bathrobe, and he turned on the radio. All I remember when word came of the attack was that he left the room to get dressed."

The younger Friedman has no recollection of his father muttering in frustration ("They knew, they knew"). But the legend persists. Clearly, Friedman knew that the U.S. high command was nearly as well-informed about Japanese policy-making as the Japanese themselves, and he believed the deciphered messages leading up to Pearl Harbor were obvious warning signs that an attack was imminent. But he couldn't accept the notion, suggested by conspiracy theorists, that Roosevelt deliberately ignored the warnings as an excuse to enter the war. Friedman preferred to blame, as he told a later congressional investigation, a "series of accidents that contrived together to prevent due warning." Indeed, twenty years later Friedman wrote to an inquiring nephew, "there were no messages which can be said to have disclosed exactly where and when the attack would be made. Hence I do not see how President Roosevelt could have avoided the attack by advance knowledge from reading such messages."

It's possible that Friedman was more troubled by another piece of information revealed through Purple prose: the Americans knew, before the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that the Japanese were putting out peace feelers. "If I only had had a channel of communication to the President," Friedman would later say, "I would have recommended that he not drop the bomb--since the war would be over within a week."

Friedman once noted that "a necessary requirement for happiness, as a cryptanalyst, is a passion for anonymity." But in 1944, he was one of the first two members of the War Department to receive the Commendation for Exceptional Civilian Service. Two years later, President Truman awarded him the Medal For Merit, the nation's highest civilian honor. Only two people had ever been awarded both it and the National Security Medal, which Friedman received in 1955; the other was J. Edgar Hoover.

Friedman served as the top cryptanalyst for the Department of Defense after the war, and when the country's many cryptological resources were consolidated with the establishment of the National Security Agency, Friedman was named special assistant to the director. But he still felt overlooked and undercompensated. When he attempted to declassify certain patents on the valuable ciphering machines he had created years earlier, he encountered bureaucratic roadblocks. He became frustrated, both personally and financially, and took ill again. At one point, he entered the psychiatric unit of George Washington University Hospital for electroshock therapy.

In April 1955, Friedman suffered a heart attack while getting out of bed. Cardiograms showed that it was actually his second, the first having occurred a month or two earlier. Forty days later, he suffered a third; believing he was "worth more to the government alive than dead," the NSA convinced him to retire from active service. The following year, after months of legal wrangling, Congress voted to award him $100,000 in compensation for the cipher systems he invented but was unable to exploit commercially. In a letter to The New York Times that spring, the director of military intelligence proclaimed that Friedman should have gotten "a million, tax-free"; the Times called him "one of the most unjustly uncelebrated government employees in history."

He was also irreplaceable, which is why Friedman continued to work from his brick house on Capitol Hill, serving as a consultant for the NSA. He was sent on three top secret missions to Europe in 1957 and 1958, essentially attempts by the NSA to discover the extent of its ability to decipher messages sent by NATO allies. Described by his biographer as "the crowning achievement" of his career, "as important to America in the 1960s as his breaking of Purple had been to the country in the Second World War," the missions were nevertheless distasteful to Friedman. Says John Friedman, a former educational filmmaker now retired in Sanibel, Florida, "I think the thing that bothered him most was reading the allies' mail."

Increasingly, Friedman grew to question the profession to which he had devoted his life. He would mutter to himself, "How on earth did I get into this business?" Occasionally, he would quote Macbeth: "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?" His distaste evolved into outrage when, in 1958, three NSA agents confiscated forty-eight items from his personal cryptographic library, part of a growing practice of classifying as secret some of his earlier, published papers. His relationship with the agency deteriorated to such an extent that Friedman, who came to believe he was being singled out for harassment, claimed that the agency considered him its "greatest security risk." At times, Friedman became deeply depressed, but occasionally he wielded a sense of humor--as when he would walk in and out of secured areas wearing, on the mandatory identification badges, a picture not of himself but of William Shakespeare.

Ironically, Friedman, who felt so circumscribed by the restrictions of his profession, often found an escape in the very same field. Away from the pressures of the job, cryptology was, as it had been originally, a hobby. He sent out cryptographic holiday cards, created a cipher game for children called "The Game of Secrecy," and hosted dinner parties in which each course was served at a different restaurant discovered only by deciphering a code. He and his wife were essentially crypto-historians, collecting code books used during the Civil War, rare publications on cryptography dating from the 1500s, and even examples of shorthand from the likes of Benjamin Franklin--all of which are among the 3,000 items in the Friedman Collection of the George C. Marshall Research Library in Lexington, Virginia. When asked why he persevered in his attempts to crack historical ciphers, such as a late-career fascination with Mayan hieroglyphs, Friedman answered with a cryptic version of George Mallory's Mount Everest reply, "Because it is there." Said Friedman, "Because it hasn't been read."

In their later years, the Friedmans returned to the challenge that had first seduced them into the world of cryptology. In 1957, through Cambridge University Press, the Friedmans published The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined, in which they meticulously dissected the Baconian vs. Stratfordian issue. True to form, they hid their own cipher in an italicized phrase on page 257 of the book. Its deciphered conclusion: "I did not write the plays. F. Bacon."

In May 1969, Friedman suffered yet another heart attack, followed by a fatal one that November. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors, and while a number of senators and generals were in attendance, the greatest tribute may have come from a handful of surprise guests. "What was really interesting," says John Friedman, "was when they took his caisson through the cemetery, a bunch of Japanese newspaper photographers popped out from behind the trees and took pictures."

Brad Herzog '90 is a regular contributor to Cornell Magazine.

There is an art in devising ciphers, and an art in breaking them down," wrote William and Elizebeth Friedman in The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined. "But in setting out his results, a cryptologist is above all a man of science. The validity of his solutions depends on the same kind of objective tests as other scientists use, and the steps in his reasoning are subject to the same criteria. He, like them, goes through the whole process of observation, hypothesis, deduction and induction, and confirmatory experience."

Cryptograms can be codes or ciphers, each quite distinct. In code systems, a letter, word, sentence, or string of numbers stands for a specific word or phrase in the message. "Silver" might mean "attack at dawn," 7584 might translate to "police force." In a cipher system one letter usually (though not always) corresponds to one letter in the message. In a transposition cipher, the letters of the plain text message are rearranged, as in an anagram. So "CHARGE THE LINE" might be sent as "CANE RIGHT HEEL." In a simple substitution cipher, the letters of the message are replaced by other units. Thus "CHARGE THE LINE" might be "KOBFIM SOM DURM."

Both types of ciphers are controlled by what is called the key--the fact, for instance, that "K" stands for "C" in the above cipher. Sometimes the key is that simple; sometimes it is quite complicated. Occasionally it is remarkably obscure, tied perhaps to a specific word on a specific page of a second edition of a book that wasn't even published in the United States. But the key to the key is this: it must be ambiguous.

While smaller so-called cryptograms would seem easier to decipher, they are actually more difficult because they may offer various solutions. For example, "ABCDDEFGE" could be "solved" as "CHALLENGE," "BY OFFENSE," or "IS TO ORDER." The Friedmans estimated that about twenty-five letters are needed in a mono-alphabetic cipher before the cryptanalyst can be sure that his is the only possible answer. "Just as there is only one valid solution to a scientific or mathematical problem, so there is only one valid solution to a cryptogram of more than a very few letters which involves the use of a real key," the Friedmans explained. "To find two quite different but equally valid solutions would be an absurdity."

However, though he single-handedly turned cryptology from a craft, as his biographer put it, "run predominantly by guess and God to one in which certain scientific principles had to be rigorously followed," Friedman still believed intuition was a significant part of the process. "A cryptologist without creative insight," he claimed, "is only half a cryptologist."

For more than two hundred years, skeptics, academics, and conspiracy theorists have contended that Shakespeare's plays weren't actually written by Shakespeare, arguing that the Bard's origins and education are a flimsy foundation for such vast literary achievement. The result: a parade of would-be Shakespeare suspects, from Christopher Marlowe and Edward de Vere to Shakespeare's wife and even Queen Elizabeth. The eminent philosopher and politician Francis Bacon has been one of the more widely speculated candidates since a letter to Bacon was unearthed, late in the eighteenth century, stating, "The most prodigious wit that ever I knew . . . is of your Lordship's name, though he be known by another."

The first published Baconian theory appeared around 1856, and was soon followed by the creation of several societies and periodicals devoted to the claim. Among them, a new anti-Stratfordian tack appeared: the suggestion that ciphered messages embedded throughout the plays (apparently for the benefit of future cryptanalysts) proved Bacon's authorship. Several researchers delved into the mystery, including one who discovered in Love's Labours Lost the word "honorifica&endash;bilitudinitatibus," which forms the anagram "Hi ludi F. Baconis nati tuiti orbi." ("These plays, the offspring of F. Bacon, are preserved for the world.")

By 1916, the investigation had found its way to George Fabyan's Riverbank Laboratories, where it was led by a Baconian scholar named Elizabeth Wells Gallup. (Her assistants included Elizebeth Smith, the future Mrs. William Friedman.) Her examination centered on the fact that Bacon was an amateur cryptographer who had created what's known as a bilateral cipher involving the use of two letters to represent any letter in the alphabet. The letter A would be represented by aaaaa, the letter B by aaaab, the letter C by aaaba, etc. Gallup suspected the Shakespeare texts used this cipher in the form of different kinds of typeface. She hoped to determine which letters and fonts were of the "a" form and which of the "b," thereby discovering the hidden messages. Though the differences in letter types often seemed imperceptible, Gallup believed they could be seen more clearly with photographic enlargement of the text, which is how Friedman, a self-taught photographer, became involved. His early verdict on Gallup, according to his biographer, was that she was "sane and honest, but misled and gullible."

After the Friedmans left Riverbank, it was another thirty years before they returned to the Shakespeare controversy. In the interim, W. S. Melsome had added fuel to the Baconian fire with the 1945 publication of The Bacon-Shakespeare Anatomy, in which he identified references in Shakespeare's plays to works by Bacon not published during Shakespeare's lifetime. But the Friedmans focused their efforts on the various cryptographic theories. Within three years, they had compiled a 1,000-page manuscript on the subject, which won the Folger Shakespeare Library Award in 1955. Two years later, Cambridge University Press published an edited version of the manuscript as The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined, a title the Friedmans disliked because it implied that there were ciphers in the text in the first place.

The Friedmans began the book by writing that they had no "professional or emotional stake in any particular claim to the authorship of Shakespeare's plays" and that the anti-Stratfordian arguments "cannot be simply dismissed without examination." But their examinations proceeded to dismiss the cryptographic claims one by one.

The deathblow to Gallup's bilateral cipher claim came when Elizebeth Friedman discovered, in the rare books room of the Library of Congress, a report by an American type-designer that had been commissioned by Fabyan himself and then swept under the rug. The report revealed that variations in letter forms were largely due to factors such as worn or damaged type and imperfections in the paper or press. The Friedmans also consulted the FBI's most experienced document examiner, who could see no basis for dividing the letters and typefaces into "a" types and "b" types. "We suggest that those who do wish to dispute the authorship of the Shakespeare plays should not in the future resort to cryptographic evidence," the authors concluded, "unless they show themselves in some way competent to do so." Though the publication incurred the wrath of the Baconians, in 1958 it won the Fifth Annual Award of the American Shakespeare Festival Theater.

In the end, however, William Friedman did suspect there were suggestions of ciphers in the plays. But it wasn't a matter of hidden cryptograms; it was a case of Shakespeare alluding to the kind of diplomatic decipherment that dominated Friedman's professional life. His favorite passage: a line from Act II, Scene 2 of Henry V. "The King hath note of all that they intend," says Henry's brother, "by interception that they dream not of."

Published in Cornell Alumni Magazine. Used by permission.