NSA Hints for the Mysteries of Shakespearean Studies

Typically, the task of government special services is closely related to the protection and keeping all kinds of secrets. But sometimes it happens that an especially secretive agency helps to uncover great and ancient mysteries of history...

Among the myriad of questions surrounding Shakespeare's life and works, one of the most mysterious areas is everything related to the play Troilus and Cressida. After centuries of thorough research, scholars have neither been able to reconcile differing opinions nor definitively establish key facts about this play.

When was it written? Was it performed on stage during Shakespeare's lifetime? To which dramatic genre — comedy, history or tragedy — did the author himself assign it? Who wrote The Prologue that opens the play in the (posthumously published) First Folio if there was no prologue for Troilus and Cressida during Shakespeare's life? And finally, why is the play not listed at all in the Table of Contents ("A Catalogue") of the First Folio, the main collection of Shakespeare's works, though it's included in the overwhelming majority of the surviving copies of the book, albeit without page numbers?

For all these questions, of course, modern Shakespeare scholars have long had more or less plausible hypotheses and explanations. But the hypotheses here are not just abundant and varied, but often contradict each other. Therefore, in 2023, when the entire enlightened world was celebrating the 400th anniversary of the First Folio, numerous publications by Shakespeare scholars once again confirmed the obvious. That no additional documents, in any way clarifying the dark spots in the history with the mysterious play, have appeared in science.

However, if one looks at this problem somewhat differently, while simultaneously expanding the search area, it's still possible to find substantial documentary evidence on this matter. But to obtain these ancient original documents for direct study, one should pay closer attention to the history of government cryptographic services.

Because it is there that facts and circumstances of the relatively recent past are now emerging, which significantly revise and reinterpret key events of much more distant times. In a rather intricate way, that very mysterious Shakespearean work Troilus and Cressida begins to play a rather important role in this major revision of history.

To see all this clearly and distinctly, one should pay closer attention to the scientific-historical monograph "From the Ground Up: American Cryptology during World War I" [o1]. This book was prepared and released in 2023 by the NSA, more precisely, by the Center for Cryptologic History at this largest electronic intelligence service in the world...

With enough details already provided about this new substantive book and its author, NSA veteran Betsy R. Smoot, earlier in the text "History Science as an Art of Cutting Out" [i1], the focus now shifts to one of the characters in this monograph who previously did not feature in crypto-historical researches at all.

Previously, it was customary to remove this character from the accepted history of cryptography, which is why information about him was practically nonexistent. However, since Betsy Smoot's new book is distinguished precisely by providing more reliable historical facts instead of the long-established omissions and deceptions in science, our character, Captain John Arthur Powell, has also clearly emerged in the early history of US cryptology.

The new book about the NSA history, "From the Ground Up", recounts the key facts of this person's life as follows.

Although he was engaged in very responsible work at the MID, the US military intelligence service, there is very little information available about John Powell's biography. It's reliably known only that he was born in Lille, France, on March 9, 1866; his father was an American from Virginia named Hanmer Powell. What the family was doing in Lille is unknown. It also is not known what formal education John received.

By the age of forty, in 1907, Powell was in Chicago working as a writer and editor. In 1913, he teamed with the chair of the Department of English at the University of Chicago, John Matthews Manly, to write A Manual for Writers. In 1917, when the US entered the war, Professor J. Manly, who held a doctorate in philology as well as military and mathematical education, offered his services to the army. More specifically, he volunteered his services to Major Ralph Van Deman of the MID. In October 1917 Manly temporarily left his position at the university and moved to Washington, DC. He was commissioned as a captain and assigned to active duty in MI-8, the new cryptographic unit, where he served as Herbert O. Yardley’s deputy.

John A. Powell's path to military cryptography was somewhat different. In 1916, still a peaceful year for the US, when John Manly was consulting George Fabyan, a Chicago millionaire patron and owner of the Riverbank Laboratories, on historical and literary matters, the latter needed someone with expertise in typography. Manly recommended Fabyan to turn to John Powell, who, after a personal acquaintance, was offered attractive working conditions in Fabyan's Laboratories. So, soon Powell moved to Riverbank for permanent work.

In 1917, with the US entering the war, George Fabyan actively engaged his Laboratories, specifically the employees of the Riverbank Department of Ciphers, in decrypting enemy messages for the benefit of the military and law enforcement agencies of the government (since the American authorities initially had no cryptoanalysts of their own).

The work of Fabyan's skilled cryptographers almost immediately began to yield decryption successes, but the Riverbank Laboratories remained strictly a private enterprise. Therefore, the military intelligence soon took care of how to organize this evidently beneficial cooperation with the proper level of management and security in such a delicate espionage matter.

As the key link — or "liaison officer" — for ensuring reliable interaction between the parties, John A. Powell was chosen by the military. The head of MID, Major Ralph Van Deman, proposed to commission him as an armed forces officer, and in this capacity, to make the Riverbank Laboratories Powell's place of military service. "[Which] will give us," as Van Deman put it, "an official hold on the place, which at present we do not possess." [Author's note: The history doesn't explain why Powell was specifically chosen for this role. However, closer to the end of the episode, additional information will emerge on this account — also, in a sense, "prompted by the NSA"...]

Under military pressure, in July 1917, George Fabyan agreed, albeit reluctantly, to Powell's trip to Washington for a meeting with Ralph Van Deman. There, Powell became an intelligence officer, received the rank of captain, after which his regular trips between Washington and Riverbank ensued — to assist the cryptographic efforts of MID and to coordinate these tasks with the State Department (since the new cryptographic intelligence service MI-8 was, in a sense, a joint venture with the US State Department).

With the creation of MI-8, the government intelligence service began to conduct more decryption work on its own. Therefore, in early 1918, as an MI-8 employee, John A. Powell received a new assignment as the officer for intelligence-cryptographic liaisons with the US military allies. After obtaining a diplomatic passport, he traveled to Europe acting as a liaison among MID and G2A6 (the decryption division of the US Army in Europe) on one hand, and the British War Office, the British Admiralty, and the French Cipher Bureau on the other.

Following a very successful mission in Europe, in September 1918, Powell was transferred to Vladivostok, Russia, to serve as chief censor of mails. [Author's note: According to long-established tradition, all military mail overseas is subject to scrutiny and censorship to detect/remove secret information. The episode with the brief US military intervention in the Russian Far East was, naturally, no exception.] Nothing more is known to historians of his time there.

He returned to the United States in early 1919, after the war ended. In the following years, he wrote two books on business writing. One of them, for the Drake Press in 1921, was prepared together with his long-time co-author and colleague in decryption intelligence, John Matthews Manly. The other book, for the University of Chicago Press in 1925, Powell wrote on his own.

Three years later, on March 24, 1928, John Powell died of pneumonia at the age of 62. He was survived by his wife Charlotte and one son, Murray Arthur Bacon Powell, presumably named after his father's work with Bacon's ciphers at Riverbank. In April 1928, John Arthur Powell was buried with full military honors in Mount Greenwood Cemetery in Chicago...

Some might find all this very interesting and informative (think particularly impatient readers), but what does Shakespeare's play Troilus and Cressida have to do with it? After all, in the book about the early cryptologic history of the NSA, John Powell's name, as far as one can tell from the text, is nowhere and in no way connected to Shakespeare's name. Right?

Indeed, that seems to be the case. However, by employing a certain analytical trick from the OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) arsenal, it becomes possible, with careful examination of the text, to extract information about which there is deliberate silence...

What is this trick, and how does it work? The essence of the technique is quite simple, as it boils down to a series of careful comparisons – what is already known in advance, with what is conspicuously omitted in the source being studied. Carefully advancing through this chain of connections often allows for the discovery of an omitted fact that leads to important, but previously unknown information.

And in this investigation – on the specific example of the new book from the NSA and applied to the mysteries of Shakespearean studies – there is plenty to demonstrate how this analytical method actually leads to substantive new documents. As well as to important new leads for uncovering the true picture from beneath the veils of secrecy.

The large and intricate cycle of previous investigations into the "Bacon-Shakespearean Saga" [i2] was almost entirely focused on two important figures in the history of cryptography in the 20th century: William F. Friedman and General François Cartier. Given the stature of these personalities, it's natural that both are repeatedly mentioned in the NSA book "From the Ground Up".

However, it must be emphasized that the names Friedman and Cartier in this book are nowhere and never linked with the name of Shakespeare. Although it's absolutely reliably known that in the biographies of each of these cryptographers, the topic of ciphers in the Bacon-Shakespeare problem occupied a very important place. Moreover, both Cartier and Friedman produced very serious and detailed monographs entirely devoted to analyzing this topic. However, "From the Ground Up" completely omits any mention of these works.

In the section where the book on the early history of the NSA talks about George Fabyan and his Riverbank Laboratories, it's simply impossible to omit the fact of connections with the Bacon-Shakespeare theme. After all, the Riverbank Ciphers Department was initially and fundamentally created for deciphering works with the books from the Elizabethan era. To reliably scientifically confirm the facts of discovering and decrypting Baconian ciphers in these books. And to widely disseminate the decrypted truth about the secrets of Francis Bacon's life and his authorship of Shakespeare's works.

The book "From the Ground Up" says nothing about Fabyan setting up his own modern printing press at Riverbank, where John A. Powell was in charge of book production, to popularize the achievements of his Department of Ciphers. However, there is information that before Riverbank, Powell was an editor and writer at the University of Chicago Press, where he wrote and released, among other things, several of his own books.

Considering all these facts, it's quite natural to inquire (since NSA historians obviously tend to omit information), whether John Powell published his own books at Riverbank? Relatively brief internet searches reveal that indeed, there were such books. More precisely, at least one such book was definitely published in 1916, titled "The Greatest Work of Sir Francis Bacon" [o2].

Since the original of this work has been digitized and made freely available on the Internet Archive website, anyone interested can download the book for reading and study. Even a cursory acquaintance with this rather small brochure is enough to understand two important things.

First, to what extent meaningful and useful materials were printed at Riverbank for researchers who really wanted to restore the authentic historical picture.

And second, why there has always been a tendency to remain silent about Captain John A. Powell and his significant role in the early history of American military cryptography.

If Powell's Riverbank booklet is read carefully and in its entirety, then anyone – with patience and accuracy – will be able to make astonishing historical discoveries on their own. These discoveries not only explain why the play Troilus and Cressida holds a very special place in Shakespeare's First Folio but also allow for the independent detection and decryption of important secret messages from Francis Bacon in the play's Prologue (as well as on other pages of the volume). That is, messages from the true author of this unique collection of works, rightfully considered a precious treasure not only of English but also of world literature.

In other words, readers have direct access to documents that remain as if unknown to official science to this day...

Although Powell's brochure, "The Greatest Work of Sir F. Bacon" fully deserves a complete translation, for brevity's sake, we will limit ourselves to summarizing its essence here. Concurrently, we refer readers to another Riverbank pamphlet closely associated with it, "The First of Twelve Lessons in Deciphering Baconian Ciphers" [o3].

The unified essence of these two works is that they are detailed instructional guides helping anyone interested to independently master the decryption and reading of the vast multitude of secret messages hidden by Bacon (and then by his followers) in various printed books of that era. Structurally, these guides are designed to lead readers along the same path to this great discovery that Elizabeth Wells Gallup took.

In the second half of the 19th century, Gallup, a passionate philologist and teacher deeply interested in Elizabethan literature, became intrigued by the biliteral cipher invented and detailed by Bacon in one of his books. Deeply immersed in these topics, Gallup was well aware of the heated debates surrounding Bacon as the true author of Shakespeare's works. However, no one before her had attempted to prove this using the biliteral cipher.

Since the First Folio of Shakespeare had always been at the center of these debates, Gallup decided to search for messages encrypted by Bacon's method there. The book by John Powell, who personally and extensively interacted with Elizabeth Gallup at Riverbank, details how she began her searches and the criteria she established for solving the task.

One of her most important intuitive guesses (suggested by illustrative examples from Bacon's book) was the idea that encrypted messages should be searched for in texts printed in italic. Although there are many such fragments in the thick volume of the First Folio, Gallup chose The Prologue to Troilus and Cressida for several reasons. First, The Prologue's text is almost entirely in italic. Second, The Prologue's font is noticeably larger than that of all other play texts. Third, just this one text occupies the entire page. Fourth, Gallup admitted that she was simply lucky to start her analysis with a truly meaningful fragment.

Initially, of course, she couldn't extract anything meaningful from the text. But after definitively establishing that the italic fonts of The Prologue indeed divide into two different types, Gallup persistently continued her analysis and trials of various sign grouping options.

And in the end Mrs Gallup felt sure that she had made a correct classification of the letters. She produced intelligible texts with it; she was using Bacon's own key; what more could be asked?

From the Prologue to Troilus she produced this:

Francis St Alban, descended from the mighty heroes of Troy, loving and revering these noble ancestors, hid in his writings Homer's Iliads and Odyssey in cipher, with the Aeneid of the noble Virgil, prince of Latin poets, inscribing the letters to Elizabeth, R. F. St. A

[Author's note: In Elizabethan England, the idea was very popular that London was founded by the descendants of Troy, destroyed by the Greeks in the Trojan War]

From 'A Catalogue of the several Comedies' she produced a more interesting avowal:

Queene Elizabeth is my true mother, and I am the lawfull heire to the throne. Find the Cipher storie my bookes containe; it tells great secrets, every one of which, if imparted openly, would forfeit my life. F. BACON.

During 1916, George Fabyan, John Powell and William Friedman, who had actively switched from genetic research to cryptography at Riverbank, released a whole series of educational guides. These guides, using examples of decryptions by Gallup, taught how to break various modifications of the biliteral cipher in ancient books. An expanded story about this usually silenced chapter of history can be found in the text "Bacon as Shakespeare: Keys and Hints from William Friedman" [i4].

With the United States entering the great war in 1917, all Bacon-Shakespearean work at Riverbank was halted for known reasons. However, immediately after the war, the enterprising George Fabyan contacted the head of the French Cipher Bureau, General François Cartier, on Powell and/or Friedman's recommendation. He managed to deeply interest the general in the topic of Baconian ciphers, leading Cartier, after completing his military service in 1921, to publish a series of his own analytical articles. These were later collected into a book entirely devoted to this "Problem of Cryptography and History". [i5] [o4]

Thus, in 1923 – marking the simultaneous 300th anniversary of Shakespeare's First Folio and Bacon's "Of the Advancement of Learning" describing his biliteral cipher – a very notable situation arose for a whole range of scientific fields, from history to literary studies.

The established situation in all these sciences could have been radically disrupted by three very serious military cryptographers. Namely, the head of the French Cipher Bureau, General Cartier, the liaison officer for US cryptographic intelligence with allies in Great Britain and France, Captain Powell, plus Lieutenant Friedman, at that time still a young man but later famed as the "father of American cryptology."

By 1923, all these individuals were not only experienced specialists in their field but also authors of crypto-historical works. Through examples of decryptions from ancient books, they extensively, illustratively, and most importantly, reliably provable showed that contemporary scholars fundamentally misunderstand the history of Queen Elizabeth's England. Not to mention deciphering documents proving that Francis Bacon is the true author of Shakespeare's works…

The "external" side of story about how and why the military cryptographers ultimately failed to change the firmly established scientific status quo, is told in the book "4in1" [i6] with numerous details and documents.

However, this story also has an "internal" side, for which practically no serious documents have been discovered yet. There are only indirect testimonies and vague hints pointing to the secrets of occultism, secret societies, and the Deep State. For each of these topics individually, there are quite enough resource materials available to piece together and recreate a coherently plausible "inner history" of the Bacon-Shakespearean mystery. Starting from the reasons for its very ancient origin and up to the facts of its persistent preservation to the present day.

One of the substantive leads or clues to this matter is provided, in particular, by that photograph of our main character, John Arthur Powell, accompanying his biographical box in the book "From the Ground Up".

If you take a closer look at the details of this photograph, you can notice a specific keychain on Powell's pocket watch, depicting the "square and compasses," a well-known symbol of Freemasonry. Information about the Masonic lodge of Washington's political elite and its significant role in matters such as appointing people to positions in special government services can be found, for example, in the investigation "Pages of Hoover's Life. 1920: Masonic Brothers" [i7].

Here, the role of the Masons – and their predecessors, the Rosicrucians – will be examined in the context of the centuries-long concealment of the Bacon-Shakespearean mystery. Notably, The Prologue to Troilus and Cressida provides documentary evidence on this matter as well...

Additional Reading

[i1] History Science as an Art of Cutting Out

[i2] Cryptographic Baconiana and Mythology of Shakespeareana (rus.)

[i3] "The New Document" and Its Value (rus.)

[i4] Bacon as Shakespeare: Keys and Hints from William Friedman (rus.)

[i5] General Cartier, "The Problem of Cryptography and History" (rus.)

[i6] 4in1: Mask of Shakespeare and Mysteries of Bacon, Book by Cartier and the Secrets of the NSA (rus.)

[i7] About the Masonic Lodge of Washington's Political Elite: Pages of Hoover's Life. 1920: Masonic Brothers (rus.)

Main Sources

[o1] Betsy Rohaly Smoot. From the Ground Up: American Cryptology during World War I. Ft. George G. Meade, MD: NSA, CCH, 2023

[o2] The Greatest Work of Sir Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount of St. Alban. By J. A. Powell. Riverbank Laboratories, 1916.

[o3] The first of twelve lessons in the fundamental principles of the Baconian ciphers; and applications to books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By George Fabyan. Riverbank Laboratories, 1916

[o4] François Cartier, Un problème de Cryptographie et d’Histoire. Paris: Editions du Mercure de France, 1938.