When Herbert O. Yardley left the employ of the U.S. Army, William F. Friedman, already employed to make codes, took on the additional task of codebreaking. He assembled a brilliant team of cryptanalysts that broke the Japanese diplomatic cipher machines that had replaced their earlier paper codes. Friedman is regarded as the father of American cryptology, having pioneered in communications security and cryptanalysis, as well as being a great teacher of the art.
What William Friedman was to the Army, Laurance Safford was to the Navy. Beginning in the mid-1920s with a staff of one (civilian cryptanalyst Agnes Driscoll), Safford assembled the nucleus of the team that broke the Japanese naval codes during World War II.
George Washington, while never a codebreaker himself, recognized the value of military intelligence, and used the secret arts, including codebreaking, in the epic struggle against Great Britain during the Revolutionary War.
