The Woman Who Smashed
Codes. A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted
America’s Enemies.
Jason Fagone. 444pp. Dey St.
I’ve
always liked something Norman Mailer said about journalists and why he wasn’t
one of them even though he had received a Pulitzer Prize for his book, Armies of the Night. In a subsequent
book, he said of journalists: "They had first of all to have enormous
curiosity, and therefore be unable to rest until they found out the secret
behind even the smallest event."
Jason
Fagone is a curious journalist and because of that, he has given us The Woman Who Smashed Codes, the story
of Elizabeth Smith Friedman who with her husband spent most of their adult
lives cracking codes using “pencil, papers and their brains” (to quote from the
book) long before computers existed. Fagone explains that he first learned
about the Friedmans in 2014 and decided to do research on Elizabeth, who seemed
to be an afterthought in any of the stories written about her husband, William,
in effect, the man who gave us the NSA.
Fortunately
for Fagone, there existed a rich collection of his and hers personal papers,
hers, though, mostly ignored. Fagone found love letters, letters to her
children, handwritten diaries, a partial autobiography. The hunt was on!
From
those boxes he had a good idea what Elizabeth was doing until 1940 when the
records trail off. Then he wanted to know what she was doing during World War
II. It took him two years to find out that during the war Elizabeth decoded
messages exchanged by Nazi spies at a time when few people knew how to crack
the codes. Pencil, paper and brains, not computers.
But
that’s all I’m going to tell you. You have to read the book to learn about an
almost forgotten American heroine. When you do you’ll also get a good overview
of how codes were created and used, not just by spies but by organized crime. And
you’ll read the story of the woman who cracked many of those codes and helped
fight crime and win the war. This is a book worth reading.
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