The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies

Immediately added to my favorites shelf. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.The Woman Who Smashed Codes will be compared with Hidden Figures, and that's fair, to a point. Both books have at their core a story of remarkable scientific/mathematic achievement, overlooked because of gender, largely forgotten (until now) as others took credit. But it is so much more, so rich in its account of not only an extraordinary woman, but the time in which she lived, two World Wars and her central role in both, the incredible marriage that gave birth to modern American cryptanalysis, that I think it deserves to be evaluated on its own.Even in the hands of a merely serviceable writer, it would be an enjoyable read. But Fagone elevates the story, weaving it into as rich a tapestry as you could hope for. Secondary characters jump from the page just as much as Elizebeth and her husband William; little details transport you to the small, smoke-filled rooms where Elizebeth and her tiny team toiled in obscurity in defense of the country. Fagone firmly establishes Elizebeth Friedman's place in our history, and not only gives her her due, but demands that we reevaluate what we thought we knew about the wars, and the origins of America's intelligence services (nearly all of them have her fingerprints on them), and the people who are given credit for critical milestones in the country's history.This is a magnificent, memorable, important book.

Anyone interested in the History of cryptography knows William F. Friedman, known as the man who broke Purple the Japanese cipher machine and many things. But who did know that his wife, née Elizebeth Smith, was his equal in cryptographic skills? She created a Coast Guard cryptographic team, broke an Enigma without any help from Bletchley Park, helped expose many Prohibition-era gangs and Nazi spy networks in South America during WWII and worked in tandem with William during WWI. She is as much part of cryptographic history as her husband is.This is her history in that book, I highly recommended it.I knew she was very good but I didn't know she was that good. Thanks to the author for the book, loved it.

When Richard Nixon asked Chou En-Lai in 1972 about the impact of the French Revolution, the Chinese Premier famously said, "It's too early to tell." That terse response is generally understood to illustrate the Chinese ability to take the long view of history. But it might be more accurate to regard it as reflecting the constraints on those who write history. Historians can only work with available records: there is no history without documentary evidence. And sometimes decades, even centuries pass before the most crucial evidence comes to light.In fact, ironically, the exchange between Nixon and Chou reflects a misunderstanding that drives the point home even more strongly: they were both referring to the events of 1968, not 1789. Only now, much later, once a diplomat present at the scene clarified the exchange, can historians accurately interpret what the two men meant.There are few areas in which the unavailability of documentary evidence has been more telling than in the history of espionage in the 20th century. Only in recent years have the archives of the CIA, the KGB, MI6, the NSA, and other leading intelligence agencies opened widely enough for us to understand what really took place in the world of espionage in World War II and the Cold War. (Doubtless, some explosive documents are still locked away and won't surface until later in this century, if ever.) And there is no more dramatic example of how what has passed for history has misled us than what we have been taught about the FBI's role in counterespionage in the 1920s and 30s (combating rumrunners and smugglers) and in the 1940s (catching Nazi spies).Working with recently declassified files from the World War II era as well as long-ignored archival records and contemporary press reports and interviews, journalist Jason Fagone has brought to light at last the astonishing story of Elizebeth Smith Friedman and her husband, William Friedman. (Yes, her first name is spelled with three e's.) As Fagone shows in his beautifully written story of this surpassingly brilliant couple, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies, the Friedmans may well have been the most important 20th-century American codebreakers, and quite possibly the best and most successful in the world.William Friedman is celebrated in cryptology circles as the man who broke the Japanese military code called Purple. "MAGIC became the top-secret moniker for these Japanese decryptions . . . MAGIC led directly to bombs falling on imperial ships at Midway," the turning point of the war in the Pacific.Fagone notes, "Today historians of cryptology believe that in terms of sheer, sweaty brilliance, the breaking of Purple is a feat on par with Alan Turing's epiphanies about how to organize successful attacks on German Enigma codes." However, independently, before the US and Britain's Bletchley Park were collaborating on the effort, Elizebeth Friedman broke not one but three different types of Enigma machines. Fagone makes abundantly clear that the two were at least equal in ability. In fact Elizebeth may have been just a bit smarter. (William always insisted she was.)"William Friedman is . . . widely considered to be the father of the National Security Agency," Fagone writes. But both he and Elizebeth came to loathe the practices of the agency not long after its formation in 1952. It's very likely they would be scandalized by the indiscriminate collection of information about civilians by today's NSA.As Fagone notes, "Elizebeth and William Friedman unscrambled thousands of messages spanning two world wars, prying loose secrets about smuggling networks, gangsters, organized crime, foreign armies, and fascism. They also invented new techniques that transformed the science of secret writing, known as cryptology." Although today Elizebeth isn't nearly as famous as her husband, that was by no means always the case. During the 1930s, she become a celebrity for her work against rumrunners and other smugglers and gangsters during the Depression. The public attention halted when she was enlisted by the Coast Guard for a top-secret effort to identify the extensive Nazi spy network in South America—work at which she and her team were extraordinarily successful. Their efforts led to the dismantling of the Nazi network well before the end of the war. However, J. Edgar Hoover claimed the success for the FBI, ignoring their efforts, and he was able to get away with it because he had become so powerful. "It's not quite true that history is written by the winners," Fagone writes. "It's written by the best publicists on the winning team."The Woman Who Smashed Codes is an astonishing story that simply has to be read to be believed. His principal subject, Elizebeth Friedman, was an extraordinary woman he refers to more than once as a genius. (The evidence is there.) And Fagone writes the tale with often-elegant, metaphorical prose. He calls the book a love story, but it is of course far more than thatThe same declassification of secret files that allowed Jason Fagone to write The Woman Who Smashed Codes has led to the publication of several other recent books about women in espionage. The most prominent of these was Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II by Liza Mundy.

Move over Mata Hari! Elizebeth Smith Friedman extracted secrets from enemies not by her feminine wiles, but by her intelligence and innate ability to solve codes. She became fascinated with codes while working at Riverbank Laboratories to reveal what were believed to be codes in the works of Shakespeare. She met William Friedman there and, as a married couple they were recruited by the army to decipher codes during WWI. Using pencil and graph paper, the Friedmans were instrumental in the defeat of Germany. From 1920-1930, Elizebeth worked for the Coast Guard in deciphering codes sent by bootleggers and drug smugglers. Many were arrested and convicted based on both her evidence and testimony. During WWII, she deciphered radio codes, especially from Nazi agents working in South America. Her husband worked for the OSS and developed both cypher machines and code manuals. He was the breaker of the Japanese Red Code while she broke the Nazi Enigma Code. Mrs. Friedman swore an oath never to reveal what she had done during the wars. Thanks to the diligence of Jason Fagone, archives in the Marshall Library bring to light the work of this American heroine. Though the title is too long and the portion on George Fabyan and his Riverbank Laboratories a bit tedious, the rest of the book reads like a fascinating spy novel. Yet, this is a work of history which finally gives credit to a woman who lived in the shadow of her brilliant husband, but through her own superior capabilities, served her nation tirelessly on the cryptic battle front.

Elizebeth (with three ‘e’s) Smith became one of the most renowned codebreakers in history by a quirk of serendipitous fate. As a young woman brought up in a Quaker household, she wished to extend her horizons and at the age of 23 she went to Chicago in search of work. The quest was unsuccessful – but on the last day of her trip, on a whim, Elizebeth decided to visit the Newberry Library where a rare copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio was on display. The librarian noted the visitor’s interest as well as her obvious intelligence and told Elizebeth about an eccentric local tycoon, George Fabyan, who was looking for a research assistant. Fabyan was called and, there and then, virtually kidnapped Elizebeth and brought her back to his Riverbank estate to work on one of the many research projects he championed; this one, an ongoing mission to prove that Bacon was the writer of Shakespeare’s plays and that the entire body of work was actually a coded memoir of Bacon’s life. Mad right?It wasn’t long before Elizebeth realised that her assignment was a nonsense. But in the meantime, she had become friends with another Riverbank researcher: William Friedman. Like Elizebeth, William had a ferocious intelligence but had also not yet found his niche. Together, they became a kind of outsourced decoding department for the US authorities. With America about to become embroiled in the First World War, deciphering expertise was thin on the ground. Elizebeth and William not only became ‘an item’, their unique skill at unlocking codes made them an invaluable help to the War Department and the fledging secret agencies sprouting up in Washington. William went on to become America’s foremost decoding expert; Elizebeth’s role was no less vital but remained rather more low-key and certainly lower-paid: the fact that she was a woman deprived her of due recognition and reward. She went on to break codes that were used in various illegal activities from illicit liquor to drug-running, but it was her work in preventing Nazism from gaining a foothold in South America that made her a (comparatively unsung) heroine.This is an interesting story and one that was well worth exploring by journalist Jason Fagone. In the early 20th century, radio was the equivalent of the internet now. A new technology that required a new set of skills to fully comprehend its functionality and maximise its potential. The key issue then, as ever, was where to draw the line between privacy and security in a democracy. In this book, Elizebeth Smith Friedman clearly has a warm champion in Jason Fagone but unfortunately, the author seems to lose sight of her as a three-dimensional personality after she leaves Riverbank. (Perhaps the secret nature of her wartime work made her personal life less accessible to researchers.) I found the writing – er, how to put this tactfully? – satisfactory rather than satisfying but, nevertheless, this is a recommended read for anyone interested in the power of words – and their rearrangement.

The story that this book tells is gripping. I read it within 24 hours of receiving it. How it is told is another matter. Jason Fagone praises his editor, Julia Cheiffetz at Dey Street, for her “sharp eye, her instincts, and her belief.” I won’t fault her belief (in this book), but I would have hoped for a sharper eye and surer instincts.The opening chapter is disorganized. Instead of a strict chronological sequence, which would have better served the reader, it jumps around in time. This is what second-rate journalists do to make their story “interesting”. This book needs none of that. And later chapters occasionally suffer from the same vice.Every now and then, in the middle of a chapter, there’s a line in boldface, in a style that reeks of the same populism. Fagone goes inside the mind of a minor character like this: “Osmar Hellmuth had never felt so important before. He ...” A reader who has reached page 275 of this book does not need this kind of “thriller-writing style” to keep going.Then there are the mistakes. The most glaring one comes on p.127, which reproduces a love note, in French, using “rail-fence” (the simplest of codes), from the heroine to her husband. She writes, “Je t’adore mon mari!” Right below, in running capital letters (why not small caps?), Fagone offers his transcription: “Je t’adore mon mar”. And the sentence is repeated later on in the book, again in capital letters and again without the last letter and the exclamation mark.With a mistake like this, my trust in the text, and more particularly its editor, was shattered.So the story this book tells is really great. It deserved a better editor.

This is the story of Elizabeth Friedman, a pioneering cryptoanalyst whose contribution to her area was huge and has only recently become fully acknowledged. She stumbled into the field when in the employ of a highly eccentric and very wealthy American called George Fabyan, who funded a research facility called Riverbank near Chicago, and hired her to assist in unlocking supposed secret messages from Frances Bacon embedded in the works of Shakespeare. Although Elizabeth quickly realised that this work was well-meaning but nonsensical, by chance she was redirected to working on breaking real codes when Fabyan offered the services of his facility to the US government when the US entered the first world war. Although a linguist rather than a mathematician, Elizabeth had a gift for spotting patterns in text, and quickly moved beyond the knowledge set out by the only textbook on the subject at that time. She was joined in this activity by her soon-to-be husband, Willaim Friedman, a scientist working at Riverbank. The careers of the husband and wife code breaking team are set out in this well-written and meticulously researched book (the bibliography runs to 90 pages) and a remarkable tale it is. Both were extremely talented in an obscure field that was about to become very important with the increasing use of radio, meaning that transmissions (say between governments) could be quite easily intercepted, and so needed to be encoded to preserve privacy.Elizabeth's career involved breaking coded messages used by gangsters in the Prohibition era 1920s through to decrypting the messages of both the Japanese military and Nazi spies in the second world war. This included cracking the codes of the famous Enigma machine and its Japanese equivalent, roughly at the same time as was done at Bletchley Park in the UK by Alan Turing and his team. Elizabeth's work was far less publicised than her husband's due to the social norms of the day, but they literally wrote the book(s) on modern cryptography. Indeed when William was sent to Germany just after the war ended to try and discover what he could about German code-breaking, he was amazed to find their own textbooks, carefully translated into German, in pride of place inside the Nazi code-breaking labs.The tale is told skilfully by the author, who does not get bogged down in the intricacies of the code-breaking (for me, a little more depth here would have been welcome) but brings to life the characters in the story. Fortunately, the Friedmans documented their work meticulously, though much of this was classified for decades, and so a wealth of material is available to draw on. It is fascinating to see how US inter-agency rivalry frequently caused setbacks, with the FBI anxious to claim credit for the remarkable results of Elizabeth's code-breaking team based at the less glamourous US coastguard agency. Her dismantling of a Nazi spy network in South America in particular reads like something from a crime novel.A fascinating story, well told.

Great thanks

If you like historical non-fiction, you HAVE to read this book.It's the real story about Elizebeth Smith Friedman and her husband William, both pioneers in crytology and code-breaking. They both played an immensely important role in World War II breaking encrypted codes that were supposed to be unbreakable, with Elizebeth hunting Nazi spies in South America and her husband breaking codes from the Japanese.Elizebeth was brilliant, yet her role in fighting the war and creating techniques in code-breaking that are still used today have been largely edited out of the history books. This happened due to an unfortunate combination of politics, male chauvinism, the power-hungry J. Edgar Hoover taking all the credit for himself, and Elizebeth's inherent modesty and habit of downplaying her achievements.Author Jason Fagone did a fantastic job shining the spotlight on this great woman and giving her the credit that is her due.