CIPHER EXPERT

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 146, 18 December 1933, Page 8

CIPHER EXPERT

TRAILING OF SMUGGLERS

AN AMERICAN WOMAN

(From "Tho Post's" Representative.) NEW YORK, November 22. ■ Many criminal syndicates, engaged in the liquor, narcotic, and- alien smuggling traffic, owe their downfall to a woman, Mrs. Elizabeth Smith Friedman, of the United States Intelligence Department. Tho old controversy as to whether or not Sir Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays and concealed his real message in a cipher first interested Mrs. Friedman in the subject. It was an easy step from literary to military ciphers, and the war found the youthful enthusiast in the employ of Ithe United States Government, handling secret messages. Later, she was transferred to her present position. She has trained her own staff. Only rarely is she unable to decipher secret code messages used by law violators. Until recently the illicit liquor traffic kept her bus}'. Now that Prohibition lias gone, there has been a startling increase in the narcotic and alien traffic. Great international organisations, sho says, control both —organisations directed by men of the highest intelligence. Their profits run into millions. They must develop cunning to the last degree to evade detection. Their ciphers are very complex, but few are untranslatable. "A ten-year-old boy could write a single message .that the most highlytrained expert could not decipher, but it is another matter when it comes to devising one that can be" put to'everyday use," she says. "Sometimes we do find a, single message that baffles us, but, when we have a- series of messages, even the most complex yields. Your jewel smuggler seldom has to resort to ciphers to communicate with his associates. The time element is not. so important, nor is the scope of operation so vast." . Referring to the cipher-in Edgar Allan Poe's "Gold Bug," Mrs. Friedman says: "He had a real flail* for the business, but in his day, decoding was not so highly, technical. Today it is a real science."" '..■... |