"Oh, that? I never thought it was eavesdropping, Aslan. Wasn't it magic?
"Spying on people by magic is the same as spying on them in any other way.'
C.S. Lewis
On the eightieth anniversary of the Japanese surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, the "date which shall live in infamy" — as President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously put it on December 7, 1941, the controversy as to the responsibility for one the greatest intelligence disaster of World War II continues unabated. An avalanche of books, conspiracy theories, documentaries, cover stories in magazines, revisionist articles, and 'true stories' allegedly 'long-buried in dusty and ‘secret archives’ have continued to delve into how and why America in the words of the late Gordon W. Prange ‘slept at dawn’ and failed to exploit the invaluable intelligence collected by a group of gifted cryptographers. The wages of failure were paid in both blood and treasure: more than 2,400 Americans fell and 21 US ships were either sunk or damaged.
While the facts of the Pearl Harbours disaster are well-known, what remains shrouded in mystery is the decisive role played by William F. Friedman, the Jewish cryptographer, and his team in breaking the Japanese codes.
This is his story.
William Friedman was born Wolf Frederic Friedman in Romania, the son of Frederic Friedman, a Jew from Bucharest who worked as a translator and linguist for the Russian Postal Service and the daughter of a wealthy wine distributor. Like many Jews, they fled Russia in 1892 to escape pogroms and settled in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Fast forward, on January 1, 1921, William, possessing an extraordinary ‘puzzle-solving’ mind, began to work for the US Army Signal Corps to design cryptographic systems. As the danger of war grew in the mid-thirties, three other Jews, Solomon Kullback, Leo Rosen, and Abraham Sinkov, together with Frank Rowlett, joined Friedman, who had become the doyen of US airwave intelligence services. They were destined to make history with ‘Operation Magic.’ What Alan Turing was to breaking the Nazi Enigma in the UK at Bletchley Park under 'Ultra,' William Friedman was to deciphering the Japanese 'PURPLE’' under 'Magic' at the US Navy's cyptological unit and the SIS.
After Japan's ally Germany declared war in 1939, the German government began sending technical assistance to upgrade Tokyo’s communications and cryptography capabilities. One part was to send them modified Enigma machines to secure Japan's high-level communications with Germany. The new system, codenamed ‘PURPLE’ (from the color obtained by mixing ‘RED’ and ‘BLUE’ previous systems), was highly complex; the Japanese believed it was unbreakable.
Thanks to Friedman's uncanny ability to identify structural patterns in astronomic permutations and mathematically devise solutions to decipher messages [he was no mathematician; this made his discoveries all the more remarkable] and the computing work of his collages, a reverse-engineered machine was built in 1939. The team could now decrypt some of the ‘PURPLE’ codes by replicating the settings of the Japanese. This achievement enabled American cryptographers to read secret Japanese communication in real-time: it was a game-changer; it was magical.
'Magic' worked as follows: the US Signal Services harvested Japanese signals from the ionosphere, 'unbuttoned,' translated, and transmitted the ‘raw’ information to all key decision-makers rapidly through a secure communication system. Unfortunately, the only civilian agency, the OSS, the precursor of the CIA under Bill Donovan, due to interagency rivalries, was excluded from the list of recipients. The military did not trust the upper crust civilian spies called the ‘cardinals’ to keep secrets much less analyse the material coherently. It was a prelude to calamity!
"By 1941," wrote Anthony Cave Brown in The Last Hero The 'Wild' Bill Donovan, "'Magic' was producing a great volume of most secret intelligence about Japanese plans, capabilities, intentions, and instructions, not only in the field of diplomacy but also on intelligence matters, on a current, worldwide basis.” For example, the ‘Magic’ intercept dated November 14, 1941, and accumulating HUMINT [human intelligence], made it abundantly clear that Pearl Harbour was the target. Yet, the American security system failed miserably as there was no one in charge of placing the jigsaw pieces, from all sources, on the intelligence board [integrating multi-sourced material], which would have revealed Tokyo's malignant plans.
Writing for the US National Security Agency in 1955, Friedman stated, "In 1946, when we reread those messages...., I realized that it is fantastic that somebody in the US Intelligence did not or could not see that the coming blow was being prepared against Pearl Harbour."
After the war, Friedman continued to work for Signals Intelligence. In 1949 he became head of the cryptographic division of the newly formed Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA) and in 1952 became chief cryptologist for the National Security Agency. He wrote a series of canonical textbooks on Military Cryptanalysis widely used to train a new generation of NSA staff. During his early years at NSA, he encouraged the agency to invest in mega computers which revolutionized data processing and integration. Today, the multi-billion NSA complex in Utah, containing super computers managing a gargantuan trove of secret intelligence, stands as the affirmation of Friedman’s vision.
America recognized William F. Friedman as one of the “world's leading cryptologists,” and bestowed upon him many awards for his inventions and achievements, including the War Department's Civilian Service Award, the Presidential Medal for Merit by President Truman, and the National Security Medal by President Eisenhower. Friedman was also inducted into the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame. Also a building was named after William and his wife Elizabeth, America's first female crypto analyst, at the NSA complex at Fort George G. Meade in Maryland.
On Sunday, November 2, 1969, William Frederic Freidman, the 'Einstein of the airwaves,' the dapper-dressed, ballroom dancer, golf player with exquisite old-world manners passed away in Washington. He was interred with full military honors in Arlington Cemetery. When Elizabeth passed away in 1980, she was laid to rest next to her husband.
His disciple, successor and life-long friend Lambros D. Callimahos, distinguished US Army cryptologist, writing in the Winter 1974 edition of Cryptologic Spectrum, paid him the ultimate tribute: "The legendary figure is with us still- in the works he left behind, in the science he created, in the inspiration to his colleagues and friends."
