Photo By Lori Stewart | William and Elizebeth Friedman, 1916. On 19 October 1917, American cryptologist...... read more read more
Subscribe
by Lori S. Stewart, USAICoE Command Historian
19 OCTOBER 1917
On 19 October 1917, American cryptologist William Friedman testified in a trial to convict several Indian and German activists of violating American neutrality laws. He and his wife Elizebeth had decoded several “baffling” intercepted letters with details of a conspiracy to foment a rebellion against British rule in India.
As early as 1914, the German government, through its consulate in Washington, D.C., began encouraging and supporting Indian immigrants living in the United States in their attempts to instigate a rebellion against the British in India. Disorder in India as war raged in Europe would distract Great Britain and possibly divert British forces to its distant colony. In 1915, German funds, carefully cloaked by multiple transactions through Mexico, were used to purchase American-made guns and ammunition. These were to be used in German-funded military expeditions to India from the United States.
British intelligence uncovered evidence of this “Hindu Conspiracy” and fed the information to the U.S. government to force it to suppress these revolutionary activities. Much as they would later do with the Zimmermann Telegram that forced the United States to enter the war [see "This Week in MI History" #23 17 January 1917], British intelligence passed to the State Department intercepted messages containing details of the conspiracy. In April 1917, American federal agents arrested thirty-five German and Hindu activists in at least six different cities for conspiracy to violate American neutrality laws. Ultimately, 105 persons of various nationalities, some in high diplomatic positions, were indicted.
The first of two trials was set to begin in Chicago in mid-October 1917. In September, a stack of the intercepted coded letters was delivered to William and Elizebeth Friedman, two civilian codebreakers working at George Fabyan’s Riverbank Laboratories in Illinois. They had already been assisting the government in decoding messages and training military personnel in cryptanalysis. Although the British had already decoded the messages, presumably the Department of Justice sought an independent solution for verification at trial.
As the Friedmans began studying the letters, they had only the names of a few of the suspects with which to work. In Elizebeth’s unpublished memoir, she described the code of one letter: “The letters consisted of series of figures in groups of three, such as 7-11-3; 8-5-6; 3-9-15; etc. After preliminary study it was determined that these figures referred respectively to page, line, and position in the line of a certain book.”
Which book, however, was unknown to the Friedmans, but they noted the author of the messages had repeated the same sequences of numbers for some words instead of finding different instances of the word in the same book. Eventually, they determined one piece of the code that correlated to the name of one of the Hindu agents and, from there, “fragment by fragment” pieced the rest of the code together, all without the actual book. Based on the words used in the letter, they deduced the book pertained to the political economy or history of Germany.
When the trial of ten Indians and five Germans commenced in Chicago on 17 October 1917, William Friedman was set to testify on the second day. The Department of Justice had told him to have the book at hand to strengthen the credibility of his solution of the code. A coast-to-coast search failed to turn up the right book, the title and author of which was still unknown. The day William was to take the stand, he stopped in one of Chicago’s largest bookshops. Elizebeth wrote, “Imagine his astonishment at picking up the very book which the previous nationwide search had failed to produce!” The book was the 1914 edition of "Germany and the Germans from an American Point of View" by Price Collier. Through a quick check by William, according to Elizebeth’s handwritten notations on her manuscript, their solution had been 95 percent correct.
A similar situation occurred during the second trial in San Francisco, which began in November. Although the authors of the letters used different types of codes, the Friedmans determined the book used and, after a lengthy search, found the 1880 edition of an English-German dictionary.
What role the Friedmans’ efforts played in the outcome of the trials is not known, but it did strengthen William’s reputation as a cryptologist. Of the thirty-five defendants—nine Germans, nine Americans, and seventeen Indians—who had been apprehended and tried in the two court proceedings, twenty-nine were convicted of violating the United States neutrality laws. Many of the sentences were later commuted or thrown out after the war.
----
"This Week in MI History" publishes new issues each week. To report story errors, ask questions, or be added to our distribution list, please contact: TR-ICoE-Command-Historian@army.mil.
| Date Taken: | 10.13.2023 |
| Date Posted: | 10.13.2023 16:58 |
| Story ID: | 455772 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 176 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Friedman Testifies in Hindu Conspiracy Trial (19 OCT 1917), by Lori Stewart, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
No keywords found.
