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William F. Friedman

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Spy

The Resume

    (September 24, 1891-November 12, 1969)
    Born in Chisinau (Kishinev), Moldova
    Birth name was Wolfe Frederick Friedman
    Cryptographer (code breaker)
    Headed the US Army’s Signal Intelligence Service (1930-45)
    Chief cryptographer of the National Security Agency (1952-56)

Why he might be annoying:

    He started as a geneticist and got into codebreaking because his boss wanted to prove that ciphers hidden in Shakespeare’s plays proved that they had really been written by Francis Bacon.
    He suffered a nervous breakdown from the stress of breaking Purple (the Japanese diplomatic code) and was hospitalized for three months.
    One of his hobbies was trying to translate the Voynich Manuscript, but he conceded defeat after four decades of effort.

Why he might not be annoying:

    He and his wife Elizebeth, a fellow cryptographer, were married for 52 years.
    He coined the term ‘cryptanalysis.’
    The team he headed built a replica of the Purple cipher machine without ever having seen an original.
    He was co-designer of the ECM Mark II, which became the US military’s high-security cipher machine during World War II. (Although, since the machine was top secret, he was not officially granted a patent for it until 2001.)
    His ‘Military Cryptanalysis’ served as a basic training manual for the NSA and military intelligence for two decades.
    He and Elizebeth won the Folger Library’s Shakespeare Literary Prize for ‘The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined,’ in which they showed that, by using the same techniques other investigators used to find secret messages ‘proving’ that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays, you could also decode messages claiming authorship by Theodore Roosevelt, Lewis Carroll, and Gertrude Stein, among others.

Credit: C. Fishel


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Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 3 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 3 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 17 Votes: 41.18% Annoying