Original subtitles

- [Narrator] A bloody war

rages on America's streets

fought with secret code.

- Capone and his outfit are

sending tens of thousands

of messages each year.

- [Narrator] Cracking the mob's codes is

the job of just one woman.

- If we hadn't found these code messages,

we might never have solved the case.

- [Narrator] Her work will

help bring down Al Capone.

- She is the linchpin in this fight

against mob violence in America.

- [Narrator] Save countless lives.

- I am sitting here speaking to you

because she may have saved that ship.

- [Narrator] And even stop

a Nazi invasion of America.

- [Voice-Over] Information received that Germany plans

direct attack on Panama Canal

with German planes.

- [Amy] Her job now is listening

out for spies.

- [Narrator] These are the codes

that changed our world.

Bizarre markings, random letters,

and numbers, words that make no sense,

but cracking them unlocks military secrets,

decodes ancient civilizations,

and reveals enemies in our midst.

Now we uncover how they were decoded,

the genius minds that broke them,

and the secrets they revealed.

On January 17th, 1920,

after decades of campaigning

from religious and political groups.

- Alcohol is hindering the coming

of world peace because it is

befuddling the thinking of humanity.

- [Narrator] America goes dry.

The National Prohibition Act heralds

a new era of sobriety in the U.S.

- Alcohol production across America shuts down.

Breweries, saloons, restaurants, anywhere,

and anywhere that you can

normally get a drink,

you just can't do it anymore.

- [Narrator] Distributing or selling alcohol is illegal,

but drinking it isn't.

- Anytime you make something illegal

that's in high demand,

criminals are gonna step in

and take control of that.

That is going to put a lot

of money in the pockets

of some very, very dangerous people.

- [Narrator] To quench America's thirst,

street gangs begin to organize themselves

into structured criminal mobs.

- Many of these gangs became very,

very powerful precisely because people

still wanted to drink.

- [Narrator] They're led by elaborately named mobsters,

Lucky Luciano, Bugs Moran, and Machine Gun Kelly.

But the most notorious mobster

of all is Al, "Scarface" Capone.

- Al Capone is going to build a criminal empire

that spans the country,

tens of thousands of speakeasies.

The profits of this enterprise are just incredible.

He's making about $100 million a year.

In modern terms, that would

be $1 billion a year.

- [Narrator] Like all criminal empires,

Capone's is built on the bodies of his enemies.

- You don't become the mobster

of all mobsters by being a nice guy.

He's gonna have gangs of gunmen

taking out his rivals,

bonding establishments that refused

to pay their protection money

or buy his product.

They'll show up and just unleash

a hail of machine gunfire

into the guy's car in the middle

of a street in the middle of the day.

- [Narrator] By 1926, more than 12,000 murders are

taking place every year across America.

And the homicide rate in large cities,

soars by 78% during Prohibition.

America is at war.

And this war is being waged

with one weapon above all others,

secret code.

- Capone and his outfit are

sending tens of thousands

of messages each year.

It's a level of sophisticated encryption

that has never been seen before

outside of military conflict.

- [Narrator] These coded messages

allow the mobsters selling liquor

to communicate with the smugglers supplying it.

- And these codes and ciphers are

changing constantly to keep

the police on their toes.

- [Narrator] To win the war against the mob,

law enforcement must crack the codes.

- If you can break the code,

if you can figure out

how your opponent is communicating,

you have a vital piece of information

that allow you to get the upper hand.

- [Narrator] But from the get-go,

it's the mobsters who have the upper hand

because not only is this war

being fought with secret codes,

the frontline is far

from the reach of the police...

at sea.

The illegal liquor fueling

the bloodshed is being brought

into the U.S. by boat from Canada

and Mexico via the West Coast

and the French and British territories

and Cuba off the East Coast.

- What you have is a system

where freighters will pick up

large amounts of alcohol in foreign port,

and then they'll anchor in international waters

where the Coast Guard

cannot legally seize them.

We have motherships the size

of baseball fields that can

hold 100,000 crates of liquor

worth in today's terms, $8 million.

- [Narrator] High speed contact boats

manned by so-called rum-runners

meet the motherships and run

the liquor back to shore.

- Some of them are

even armored to protect them.

This has become just

an incredible undertaking.

- [Narrator] America's main line

of defense against the illegal smuggling

is the U.S. Coast Guard.

But it's no match for the mobsters.

- The U.S. Coast Guard had a problem,

ill-equipped, underfunded,

and not paid very well.

- Rum-runners were speedy,

were well-armed, were well-staffed,

and could outrun, outgun,

outman the Coast Guard.

- It doesn't have enough ships.

It doesn't have enough men.

It just doesn't have anywhere

near the power to make a real dent

in this massive well-funded,

well organized criminal enterprise.

- [Narrator] But it's not just speed

and manpower that helps

this vast illegal enterprise

stay one step ahead of the law.

It's coded messages sent

via radio using Morse code.

- There's a huge amount of alcohol

coming with boats and ships.

And the only way

for them to rendezvous is

to communicate with each other.

They communicate by radio.

You have to make sure

that those messages are so scrambled

that even once you got the Morse code

and you've written down the letters,

you don't know what

this thing is supposed to be saying.

And so the gangsters are paying

for great cryptography for ciphers

and codes that no one can break.

You have to break

the codes to stop them.

- [Narrator] This level of sophisticated encryption is

far beyond the capabilities

of the underfunded U.S. Coast Guard.

- The Coast Guard intelligence section

was literally one guy

and he was not a codebreaker.

- The Coast Guard doesn't stand a chance.

It needs another weapon.

- [Narrator] Enter the woman who will take

on the might of the mob,

armed with nothing more

than pencil and paper,

mother of two, Elizebeth Friedman.

- To all appearances,

as far as anyone can tell,

she's just nice, Mrs. Friedman

who's working from home

who has her small children

and yet she will be the linchpin

in this fight against

mob violence in America.

- [Narrator] After graduating with a degree

in English literature in 1915,

a chance meeting with eccentric millionaire,

George Fabyan, propels Elizebeth

into a career as a codebreaker.

- George Fabyan is a man

who's made a lot of money.

His family has had a lot of money

and he decides he's going

to run his own think tank.

- [Narrator] Fabyan had established

a private research center

outside Chicago called Riverbank

to investigate his eclectic range of interests.

- He has a lot of bright,

young people doing research

in topics that he's interested in.

And one of the topics is this idea

that there are codes in Shakespeare

that Shakespeare really didn't

write his own plays.

- [Narrator] Instead Fabyan believes

they were written by Tudor philosopher

and scientist, Sir Francis Bacon.

- Bacon put these codes into the writing

that would tell people

who were smart enough to find them

that he was the one

who had written the Shakespeare plays.

- [Narrator] And so the 23-year old,

English literature graduate finds herself

plowing through letter by painstaking letter,

the entire works of Shakespeare

despite knowing nothing

about codes or codebreaking.

- When I graduated from college,

I was totally unaware

that there was such a thing

as codes and ciphers,

not even to call it

by its scientific name,

cryptography and cryptanalysis.

- [Narrator] Despite her lack of formal training,

Elizebeth soon shows a natural ability

for analyzing patterns and language.

But she rapidly realizes

the hidden codes in Shakespeare's texts are

just a figment of Fabyan's imagination.

- She was afraid to tell her boss

'cause she figured he'd probably fire her.

Instead she tells another employee

and that's William Friedman

who's a young scientist

who's there and he's intrigued by this.

He's also very intrigued by Elizebeth.

- [Narrator] On May 21st, 1917,

Elizebeth marries William Friedman

but the celebrations are brief.

A month earlier, America

had entered World War I.

Now the young couple is called upon

to crack Germany's coded communications.

- Elizebeth and William Friedman

find themselves cracking messages

for the War Department, the Navy.

They're responsible for

a huge number of messages

that are coming in by the sackful.

- Messages were sent as rapidly

by as rapid a means

as possible to Riverbank.

And were usually deciphered within

and on their way back

to Washington within two hours.

- [Narrator] When the war ends in 1918,

Elizebeth looks set for a life

as a homemaker and mother.

But there's another war brewing,

the war against the rum-runners,

bootleggers, and mobsters.

And by 1925,

five years after the Prohibition Act,

it's a war the U.S. Coast Guard is losing.

- The Coast Guard had thousands of messages backlogged

and they didn't know

what to do with them

because they couldn't pull the information

out of them that they needed.

- William Friedman is still working

as a codebreaker for the U.S. Army.

So the Coast Guard turns

to his wife, Elizebeth.

- When the Coast Guard

comes looking for Elizebeth,

she is thinking about

a very modern concept, work-life balance.

She's thinking that she's

also a young mother.

She says, can she work

on these messages from home?

- This of course was absolutely

unheard of in the mid 1920s.

No one worked from home,

certainly not a woman

saying I will do this but,

only on the proviso

I can work from home.

- And they decide, yes, she can.

They really need a codebreaker.

She can set the conditions.

- [Narrator] Elizebeth's brief is simple,

decipher the mobsters' coded radio messages.

This should enable the Coast Guard

to intercept the rum-runners' boats,

stop the illegal liquor

from being brought ashore,

and provide a paper trail

back to the mob bosses

that will help bring them to justice.

But there's a problem.

A letter or phone call can

be traced from sender to recipient

but because these messages are

broadcast over the airwaves,

it's almost impossible to pinpoint

who's writing and who's receiving them.

But that's exactly what Elizebeth needs

to do in order to beat the mobsters.

- What makes things especially difficult is

you don't know who

this message is intended for.

It could be anyone just plucking

those transmissions out of the air.

- [Narrator] This makes radio the perfect medium

for sending secret information.

This is a recording

of what's become known

as a numbers station.

Since the end of World War I,

people have been tuning

into dozens of mysterious radio stations

broadcasting on shortwave

frequencies around the world.

- Number stations are a very odd phenomena.

Most typically they involve

a little bit of music or tone,

followed by a voice,

often a sort of unnerving woman's voice

just reading off a string of numbers.

- [Narrator] The meaning of these bizarre broadcasts

is a mystery as are the organizations

or individuals behind them.

Many people believe they're

related to espionage,

allowing government intelligence agencies

to send messages to their agents

in the field without revealing their location.

Back in 1925, broadcasting to anyone

and everyone in secret code,

the mobsters operate safe

in the knowledge their communications

can't be used to trace

them or their suppliers.

This makes the task

facing Elizebeth even tougher.

- So there's not just the codebreaking.

There's also the analysis

that goes with it.

Is this from the Atlantic?

Is this from the Pacific?

Is it the same ship?

Is it different ships?

Where are these radio stations?

And so there's

the whole problem of locating

where these messages are coming from.

- [Narrator] Against these seemingly impossible odds,

Elizebeth sets to work,

drawing on the skills learned

during World War I

to plow through the mountain

of intercepted messages.

- When Elizebeth gets into this project,

she realizes the enormity

of what she has facing her here.

And keep in mind,

there are no computers.

She's working with pencil and paper

and her own experience breaking code.

- What she's looking at

usually is a jumble of letters.

And then you've got to figure out

what do those letters mean?

- [Narrator] The messages have been encrypted

using multiple different codes and ciphers.

- One of the things

they might be using would be something called

a mono-alphabetic substitution cipher.

- [Narrator] In this basic and widely known cipher,

A might become B,

B, C, and so on.

The writer swaps each plain text letter

for the letter one place

ahead in the alphabet.

- But what if A equals X

and B equals D and C equals R.

There are many other things

they can do with ciphers.

There are other things

they can do with codes

and then they can

also combine these in layers.

And that makes it

much more difficult to crack.

- [Narrator] For example, faced with the letters,

M, Y, H, G, C, Elizebeth would look for a pattern.

Shifting the letters back four places

might produce a block of letters

that corresponds to a number

in a commercial Telegraph codebook.

- Legitimate companies used codebooks

because telegrams and cables are really expensive.

The more you can boil your message down,

the cheaper it will be.

- [Narrator] The number itself means nothing.

So Elizebeth would have to dig deeper,

adding and subtracting numbers

until she finds a match

in a different codebook

which finally gives her the solution.

- She had such a talent

for finding patterns in all of

these numbers and letters jumbled together,

that it enabled her

to get her foot

in the door with codes

much more quickly than others were

getting a foot in the door.

And so we have her knowledge,

we have her experience,

and we have her talent.

- [Narrator] But once Elizebeth has

cracked the code in one message,

she has to do it all again for the next.

- The whole system might be different.

So what a Y is in one message,

doesn't tell you what a Y is

in the next one.

- [Narrator] Despite this seemingly impossible task,

in her first two months,

Elizebeth solves two years

worth of backlogged messages.

This allows her to begin

connecting the bosses, the boats,

their routines, and routes.

- She is finding the names of the motherships,

the names of the small speedy boats,

and it enables the United States government

to access the records for those ships

and open up this whole huge enterprise.

- We could actually graph

where the ships were

by the code they were using

so that we could

almost draw a map of

where these ships were at a given time.

- [Narrator] In response, the mobsters raise their game.

- Month on month, Elizebeth is watching

these codes and ciphers

from the rum-runners

getting harder and harder.

- [Narrator] Within just a few years

of the Prohibition Act,

the codes are as complex

as those Elizebeth faced

during World War I,

codes composed by the

mighty German military machine.

- That kind of level of codebreaking is

what rum-runners are capable of now.

And she's just one woman

who is trying to oppose all of this.

- [Narrator] Against all the odds,

between 1928 and 1930,

Elizebeth Friedman cracks over 10,000

of the rum-runners' coded messages.

She smashes smuggling rings

in the Gulf of Mexico,

the Pacific Coast, and the Eastern seaboard,

all while working alone

and raising two young children.

- As the codes get more and more difficult,

Elizebeth is forced to get better

and better and she does.

- [Narrator] Then in the spring of 1929,

something happens that will

test Elizebeth's skills to the limit.

She's called in to help

when a confrontation at sea escalates

into an international diplomatic crisis,

one that threatens to undermine

America's global reputation

and cost the country millions.

- The "I'm Alone" is registered

as a Canadian vessel

and that's important because

in Canada, there is no prohibition.

- [Narrator] In reality, the "I'm Alone"

belongs to rum-runner, Dan Hogan.

Hogan is not from Canada.

He operates out of Louisiana

where he is known to locals

as the "Capone of the Bayous."

He's head of a rum-running syndicate

that's smuggling at least $15 million

worth of illegal liquor every year.

- The "I'm Alone" would load up

on liquor in Belize,

and then it would transport it

to just outside U.S. territorial waters

and wait there

while the smaller ships came

and picked up the cargo.

- [Narrator] The "I'm Alone" has

been using the same MO for years

but in March 1929,

the U.S. Coast Guard spots the vessel

within the 12 mile limit

of the Louisiana coast.

- Two Coast Guard vessels give chase.

And this pursuit goes on for two days

before the Coast Guard ships

get close enough to the schooner.

- The captain of the "I'm Alone" says

that if you try to board

and inspect my cargo,

we'll try and kill you.

The Coast Guard opens fire

and they sink the "I'm Alone."

- [Narrator] But instead of

being a much-needed win for

the beleaguered U.S. Coast Guard,

it's a disaster.

- Gunning down a vessel

in international waters is

an act of great violence

that's gonna have legal consequences.

- [Narrator] The sinking of the "I'm Alone" is

seen as a violation

of international maritime law,

an illegal act of aggression against Canada.

And as Canada is part

of the British Commonwealth against Britain.

- To the rest of the world,

it looks like the Coast Guard

may have committed an act of war.

- [Narrator] To avert a damaging international crisis,

the U.S. authorities need Elizebeth

to prove the ship was smuggling alcohol

and that its owners are Americans.

- Any physical evidence that "I'm Alone" is

a notorious rum-runner is

at the bottom of the Atlantic

but there is one hope.

- [Narrator] Elizebeth focuses on

a cache of intercepted telegrams

that she suspects are

linked to the "I'm Alone."

The messages are a random jumble of letters

but Elizebeth thinks she's seen

these combinations before in one

of the many commercially available codebooks.

- [Amy] The "I'm Alone" is depending

partly on a business codebook

that was very well known.

- [Narrator] Using this, Elizebeth is able

to decrypt much of the messages' content.

The string of random letters

becomes a series of numbers

and five letter words.

- She can see certain things are

being bought and sold,

certain things that look a lot

like they're alcohol.

But there are certain words

in these cables that she's

not able to read.

They aren't in any business codebook.

- So she begins to think

that they are a privately derived code

talking about specific objects.

She's very frustrated

because they seem unbreakable.

Until she knows what the objects are,

there's no case to prosecute here.

- [Narrator] But then Elizebeth

has a light bulb moment.

Working with a New Orleans Customs agent,

she compares the coded messages

with official cargo manifests

from the port in Belize

where the "I'm Alone" collected its cargo.

- She's able to look

and see for instance,

that a cable will say

they're requesting 1,700 of this code word.

And she'll see that on that date,

the "I'm Alone" loaded

1,700 bottles of a certain kind of whiskey.

And each time the amounts

that are in the cables are matching

with what the "I'm Alone" is taking on.

- [Narrator] This proves the five letter words are

all types of alcohol.

- Now that Elizebeth Friedman

has cracked the code,

she can translate the messages.

And those prove beyond

the shadow of a doubt

that the "I'm Alone" was

carrying liquor and lots of it,

3,000 cases worth roughly

$1 million in today's terms.

- [Narrator] But the U.S. government

needs something bigger to justify

the Coast Guard's aggressive

and potentially illegal actions.

Who owns the boat?

And are they Canadian or American?

- The messages that were sent

from Belize were sent by telegram.

And this becomes a very useful thing

because U.S. law enables

the Coast Guard to subpoena the records

from the Telegraph company

and be able to see

who the sender and the recipient are.

- [Narrator] This reveals the cables were

sent to a Joseph H. Farran

at the Western Union office

of Manhattan's exclusive, Hotel McAlpin.

U.S. Treasury agents visit the hotel

and discover Joseph H. Farran is in fact,

none other than the "Capone

of the Bayous," Dan Hogan.

- What's important for the United States' case is

that Dan Hogan is not Canadian, he's American.

And by all the evidence

that has turned up is

the owner of the "I'm Alone."

- [Narrator] Thanks to Elizebeth Friedman,

the Canadian government's claim is denied.

An international crisis is averted.

And Hogan ends up spending six years

in prison for rum-running.

- The messages were really the basis.

They were the solid rock

of the "I'm Alone" case.

And if we hadn't

found these code messages,

we might never have

solved the "I'm Alone" case.

- [Narrator] It's a triumph for Elizebeth.

But she isn't done with the mobsters.

There are even bigger,

deadlier fish to be caught

including perhaps the biggest catch of all,

public enemy number one,

Al Capone.

- He's a crime boss of the sort

that America hasn't really seen before.

Al Capone has become

so rich and so powerful.

And he's got so

many politicians in his pocket,

he can flaunt it.

- He took the idea

of being a celebrity criminal

and portrayed himself as

a modern day Robin Hood,

someone that steals from the rich

and gives to the poor.

In fact, he was stealing

from the poor and giving to himself.

- He can go out and wear the fancy coat

arrive in the fancy car,

go to the fancy restaurants,

smoke his big cigars,

and no one can do anything about it.

- [Narrator] Capone gets his illicit liquor

from contacts working for a company called

Consolidated Exporters Corporation of Vancouver

or CONEXCO.

- They've basically got

a monopoly on liquor smuggling

on the West Coast

and the Gulf of Mexico.

- [Narrator] CONEXCO is the largest

and most powerful

smuggling network in the world.

And not surprisingly,

one of its best customers is America's

biggest single seller of illegal liquor.

- Capone is making an

estimated $50 to 100 million a year.

He's got a monopoly on supplying liquor

to an estimated 10,000 speakeasies in Chicago.

For him Prohibition,

it's basically a license to print money.

But the heart of this business enterprise is

not just bullets and bombs.

It's also codes.

- [Narrator] Now the authorities

with the help of Elizebeth Friedman

plan to turn the mobs' codes against them.

In April 1931, federal agents

raid CONEXCO's New Orleans headquarters

and make multiple arrests.

Among these are several of Capone's lieutenants

from his Chicago outfit,

and they seize hundreds

of encrypted messages

that Elizebeth must decode

to prove the mobster's guilt.

But the codes are exceptionally complex

even for a cryptanalyst of Elizebeth's caliber.

- They would use different codes simultaneously

to confuse the issue.

They never used a code

more than six months.

- [Narrator] And each message is made up

of multiple layers of ciphers and codes.

- First, you would take your message

and then you would

look up in the codebook

each word or phrase,

and you would change your message

to reflect to all

of the different code words.

- [Narrator] A second codebook

might then be used

to convert the numbers back into letters.

- Once you had your code word,

you would put them into a cipher.

So letter by letter,

you would switch and swap them out.

- [Narrator] After adding two layers

of code and one cipher,

the message is converted to Morse code

and transmitted via radio.

Luckily for Friedman,

some of these messages include words

that aren't in the codebooks

and have only been encrypted

using the penultimate stage

of the process, the substitution cipher.

- Leaving out that middle part

creates a place where Elizebeth can get

her foot in the door.

She's able to figure out

what cipher they're using

at the end and be able to work

her way backward through the message.

- [Narrator] Two years after the raid on CONEXCO,

Elizebeth is called to give evidence

at the trial of the mob kingpins.

Now her life is in danger.

- The organized crime bosses did not

have any problem at all

with having people disappear.

And if taking out Elizebeth

would stop the case,

they weren't beyond that.

So she's put herself

into a dangerous situation

by decoding these messages.

- [Narrator] The CONEXCO trial

takes place in New Orleans

and it's the single biggest trial

in the Prohibition Era,

the state versus the largest

and most powerful

smuggling network in the world.

- This is in many ways

a trial of the century.

It has cost $500,000,

a huge sum in the teeth of the Depression.

It's covered by reporters from all over.

Everybody's watching that witness stand

when Elizebeth comes

to tell them what she's seeing.

- [Narrator] On one side,

23 of the most dangerous men in the country

represented by some of America's

most highly paid lawyers

including Al Capone's own personal lawyer.

- Up in the dock,

you have very dangerous criminals

and they have no trouble

dealing with anybody who's opposing them.

And here's Elizebeth coming up

into the witness stand to testify

against them without any hesitation.

She doesn't even see it really

as a matter of courage,

just as something that

this is what you have to do.

It's part of the job.

- [Narrator] The suburban housewife

and master cryptologist is

the prosecution's star witness.

- Although she was rather a small person,

only about 5' 2'',

she was a powerful witness.

- [Narrator] Elizebeth's job is

to connect the criminal bosses

with the operation of the smuggling vessels.

- The important thing is you've got

to prove that they're working together

that there's a conspiracy here.

The way that they work together was

through their encrypted radio messages.

So they need Elizebeth

to show how she decrypted this

and how they show the connections.

- [Narrator] As Elizebeth begins her opening testimony,

the defense continually interrupts,

questioning her credibility.

- They objected to Elizebeth

being brought forward as an expert.

They objected to the idea

that there is a science to codebreaking.

And they call Elizebeth incompetent,

irrelevant, and immaterial.

- [Narrator] The defense argues

Elizebeth's solutions to the coded messages are

simply personal interpretation

rather than fact.

- She got pushed so hard on this point

that she finally turned

and said, your Honor,

is there a blackboard

available to the court?

- [Narrator] Standing beside the chalkboard,

Elizebeth unleashes a meticulous

and devastating rebuttal.

She writes a seemingly

random collection of letters.

Then she substitutes those letters

for letters two places

earlier in the alphabet.

For example, Q becomes O,

N becomes L,

until the random letters

become the name of

a popular brand of liquor.

- The court can see that,

yes, there's a pattern here.

This really is a science.

She's not making it up.

She knows exactly what she's doing.

- [Narrator] Friedman goes on

to coolly unpick the gangs' coded messages

revealing the connections between

the boats, booze, and bosses.

- The messages that Elizebeth is able

to decrypt for CONEXCO are showing

what all the parts of the system are

and how they're connected

to the land-based operation.

They really are a record,

kind of day by day message by message

of how this entire network is functioning.

- [Narrator] After just four days,

Elizebeth's testimony convinces the jury.

The mobsters are convicted

and sent to jail.

Al Capone is arrested and tried separately.

Despite being charged with

an incredible 5,000 violations

of Prohibition Law,

he's ultimately convicted

on 22 counts of tax evasion.

- Much of what we think about

in terms of the breaking

of Al Capone's organization lies

in the mythology that

these heroic federal agents

with gun in hand, single-handedly

took on Al Capone's organization.

That's not quite what happened.

Most of the work and the activities done

in breaking down Al Capone's organization

was work done in secret

and not by individuals carrying guns.

- [Narrator] One of those individuals

was Elizebeth Friedman,

armed with only pencil and paper.

- Did she end organized crime?

No.

Did she make their lives a living hell?

Yes.

The Coast Guard was so very lucky

to have her abilities

and her drive to let organized crime know

that they couldn't run rampant

over the United States government.

- [Narrator] She fought the mob

and made their lives hell.

But now eight years

after Elizebeth took the stand,

America needs her brilliant

mind more than ever

in the battle against

an even deadlier adversary,

the Nazis.

- The world is on the verge of a war.

Everybody can see this and sense it.

And her job now is

listening out for spies.

- [Narrator] Between 1940 and 1945,

Elizebeth assisted by a team

of just three other codebreakers

cracks 4,000 coded messages

sent by Nazi spies

including a network operating straight

out of New York City.

- [FBI Agent] A spy trap was set.

Walking into this trap

is Colonel Fritz Duquesne,

a leader of the spy-ring

and a professional German spy.

- [Narrator] What the spies don't know is

that the FBI is watching.

- [FBI Agent] A concealed camera

in the next office

took these incriminating pictures.

- [Narrator] And Elizebeth is listening.

- [FBI Agent] These spies at a radio station

on Long Island which unknown

to them was operated by an FBI agent.

- [Narrator] She decrypts hundreds

of the spies' messages.

This plus the surveillance is

all the evidence the FBI needs.

In 1942, the Nazi spies are

sentenced to a combined total

of 300 years in prison.

It is the largest espionage case

in the history of the United States.

But it's just the tip of the iceberg.

As World War II rages in Europe,

Nazi spies in both North and South America,

keep sending coded messages

to their masters in Berlin

and the stakes keep getting higher.

- Some of the most important information

that they're supplying

is about Allied shipping

that's going from South America

up into the North Atlantic

and across to supply Britain.

- [Narrator] Guided by the spies' encrypted messages,

Nazi submarines hunt the supply ships

that keep Britain armed and fed.

If this lifeline is cut,

the Nazis will take

a critical step closer to victory.

Elizebeth and her team

crack thousands of these messages

working around the clock

so Allied ships can be forewarned

about impending U-boat patrols.

One of those ships is the "Queen Mary."

- In the fall of 1942,

the "Queen Mary" is a troopship carrying troops

from New York City to Scotland

to be trained in Great Britain.

- [Narrator] For months, Nazi spies have

been sending details of

the ship's Atlantic crossings

but Elizebeth decodes the messages

allowing the "Queen Mary"

to change course and dodge the U-boats.

- She really honestly changed

the face of the war.

From a personal note,

I am sitting here speaking to you

because she may have saved that ship.

One of the units that's

on the "Queen Mary" is

the 29th Infantry Division.

The 29th Infantry Division is the unit

that hits Omaha Beach on D-Day

and is involved

in the Battle of the Bulge.

My father was part of the 29th

and he sailed in September of '42

on the "Queen Mary" from New York Harbor.

So Elizebeth could have saved the war

by saving this ship.

She certainly provided the life

of myself and my siblings.

- [Narrator] But at the Coast Guard headquarters

in Washington, D.C.,

despite catching dozens of spies,

saving thousands of lives,

and helping to win

the Battle of the Atlantic,

Elizebeth is demoted.

- The Navy took over the Coast Guard

and the Navy had a policy

that neither a civilian

nor a woman could lead an office.

So she was basically demoted

and someone without the knowledge

of codebreaking that she had

was put in charge.

- [Narrator] Elizebeth is undeterred

because she's fighting the biggest,

most important battle of her life,

a battle for the survival of America itself.

- [News Reporter] A network of German airlines

had spread as far north as Colombia,

a neighboring and friendly continent

could become an armed menace.

- It was a real worry

that South American countries

might end up becoming allied to Germany.

Germany could then put troops

and planes in South America

which would put them

in reach of first the Panama canal

and then to the United States itself.

- [Narrator] Nazi spies based

in South America are sending hundreds

of coded messages to Berlin every month.

But one name appears

over and over again,

"Sargo."

- Elizebeth doesn't know who this man is

but she can tell he's important.

And she's right.

- [Narrator] "Sargo" is the codename

of Johannes Becker,

the Nazi's main agent in South America.

- [Amy] Becker is an SS man.

He's one of Himmler's

hand-picked shock troops.

- [Narrator] From his base in Argentina,

Becker travels widely across South America,

directing a network

of at least 250 agents

and working to incite a revolution.

- The spies want to turn

each nation in South America

so that it's allied to the Nazis.

They are also interested

in staging warfare against

the United States directly.

- [Narrator] Elizebeth knows exactly what's happening

because she's cracked the code "Sargo" is using.

With every message she decodes,

she can see the danger unfolding

but she's powerless to stop it.

- The problem that Elizebeth has

that many codebreakers face

is that they know what's going on

but in order to act on it,

they might end up inadvertently revealing

that they can read the messages.

If the Germans change their codes

and the Allies are locked out,

then the Allies could well lose the war.

- [Narrator] All Elizebeth can do is

decode the messages and wait

until the autumn of 1943

when "Sargo" finally slips up.

- Elizebeth finds out that "Sargo" is

helping to arrange for one

of his key people

to travel over to Germany as an envoy

from the Argentinian government.

- [Narrator] This envoy will meet Himmler,

one of the Nazi regime's most powerful men

to ask for weapons

and negotiate a secret alliance

between Argentina and Nazi Germany.

- What nobody knows is

how he's traveling,

exactly when he's going to get there.

If they can find out what ship it is,

they can nab him.

- [Narrator] Once again,

it's Elizebeth and her team

who provide the breakthrough.

They decode the messages

to identify the ship

allowing "Sargo's" agent to be arrested

when the ship stops to refuel

in British ruled Trinidad.

Now the Allies can blame the agent

for divulging information under interrogation

without revealing "Sargo's" codes have been cracked.

- They are then able

to go to Argentina and say,

get rid of your Nazi spies.

We have proof.

One of the spies has talked.

And if you don't get rid

of any official relationship

that you have with Nazi Germany,

then the United States will

make sure you suffer the consequences.

- [Narrator] Publicly shamed in January 1944,

Argentina officially severs all relations

with Germany and Japan.

And the Nazis lose

their last chance of finding

a foothold in South America.

- From that point onward,

"Sargo" and all of the people

he's recruited are on the run.

And Elizebeth has helped

to successfully destroy the most

effective opposition in South America.

- [Narrator] Without Elizebeth Friedman's

codebreaking skills honed in World War I

and the fight against the mob,

America may have been fatally

compromised by Nazi spies.

The Battle of the Atlantic

might have been lost

and the Nazis might

even have launched an offensive

on the United States from South America.

- I think it's amazing to note

that with a small team

of codebreakers armed with

literally pencils and paper,

no computers here, no fancy technology,

they potentially helped win the war.

And I think that you can honestly say

that in this case,

the pencil is mightier than the sword.

- [Narrator] But in the decades after the war,

Elizebeth Friedman's contribution

to the Allied victory

is all but forgotten.

- We have guarded the secrets,

have given the Army and Navy

its striking force in the field.

- J. Edgar Hoover would always

claim the decryptions that were done

by Elizebeth had been done by the FBI.

It wasn't true but Elizebeth was

under the terms of the Espionage Act.

- [Narrator] Elizebeth was sworn

to secrecy for life.

- She could not say I did that work

'cause she had to keep quiet.

She also had a boss

at the end of the war.

He received six different medals and honors.

Elizebeth got none.

- [Narrator] Elizebeth Friedman was

a true 20th century hero.

She served her country

through not two but three wars,

both world wars and the war against the mob.

Now two decades

after her death, aged 88,

Elizebeth is finally receiving recognition

for her brilliance and bravery.

In 1999, she was inducted

to the National Security Agency's Hall of Honor.

And in July 2020,

the U.S. Coast Guard announced

it was naming a new ship

in honor of Elizebeth Friedman.

- Elizebeth broke glass ceilings

before we even knew

what glass ceilings were.

She invented the science of cryptography

and she invented it

as she went along.

There was no instruction book.

She wrote the instruction book.

She didn't look for the attention

but I think that she would be glad

to know that the work

and the accomplishments could

be inspiring to young women today

who think that the cards

are stacked against them,

because if the cards

were stacked against anyone,

they were certainly stacked against Elizebeth.