HISTORICAL NOTES: Secret Weapons

To the untutored eye, the photograph, on the library wall in a quiet brick house on Capitol Hill looks like any other sentimental memento of World War I—a double rank of Army officers seeming foolishly dated in their choked collars. But, like virtually everything else surrounding slight, modest, 64-year-old William Frederick Friedman, there is more to the picture than meets the eye. "Note," he says, pointing with enthusiasm to his old colleagues, "some of the faces are slightly turned. That's because the picture is actually a sentence in biliteral code." Its message:...

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