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

This was a fascinating biography of a woman who had a profound effect on codebreaking and who almost managed to be totally overlooked. Elizebeth Smith was a Quaker schoolteacher hired by an eccentric millionaire to work on his odd theory about William Shakespeare's plays. He believed that they were written by Francis Bacon, and the proof lay in obscure marks found in an early printing of the plays.

The search for proof that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays was only one of the many experiments going on at Riverbank. Also there working on genetic research was an American Jew named William S. Friedman. The two formed a friendship and then a romance and a duo that is directly responsible for the United States' codebreaking agencies. show more

Elizebeth and William worked on various codes which allowed Elizebeth, working for the Coast Guard, to track down and capture rum runners and other local criminals, and William to be instrumental in breaking the codes sent by America's enemies during World War I.

While William's work is well known and celebrated, Elizebeth's was lost in file cabinets and classified by the nascent NSA. But her role in breaking codes and locating Nazis in South America was vital to the war effort in World War II.

There are lots of take-aways for me. I didn't form a good impression of J. Edgar Hoover and the early years of the FBI. He was quick to claim credit for other people's successes. As this quote says: "It's not quite true that history is written by the winners. It's written by the best publicists on the winning team."

I came away from this story with really impressed at how a man and woman working with pencil, paper, and brains could do so much to solve so many puzzles. I was also impressed by Elizebeth's modesty in that she didn't think what she did was all that special. show less

Knowledge itself is power.

So said Francis Bacon in 1597, but it was to become the byline of Elizebeth and William Friedman, America's top cryptanalysts during the world wars. A husband and wife team, the Friedman's decoded more spy transmissions, broke more Enigma and Purple machines, and wrote more how-to papers than any other cryptographers in the country of their time. Historically most of the credit was given to William, but recently unclassified records show that Elizebeth's work was equal to and perhaps greater than (and certainly longer running) than her more famous husband.

In 1916 Elizebeth was in Chicago trying to drum up a job in literature or research. Something unusual, she told the librarian at the Newberry. She was there show more to see a First Folio of Shakespeare that was on display. The librarian introduced her to George Fabyan, a textile tycoon who was obsessed with finding secret messages in the Shakespeare texts proving that Francis Bacon was the true author. He hired her to work on this project and took her to Riverbank, his estate outside Geneva, Illinois.

Riverbank was a fascinating place. Fabyan had built a sort of scientific commune with numerous labs, renowned scientists, and research projects in a wide array of fields, from acoustics to genetic engineering. Although Elizebeth dunked the Baconian theory of Shakespeare authorship, through the project she met a young genetic botanist, William Friedman, who would become her partner in life and work. When WWI broke out, America had no cryptographers, and Fabyan offered up Riverbank and the Friedmans for government use. Before long all encrypted messages intercepted by any branch of the US government were finding their way to the Friedmans. They not only broke codes, but wrote papers documenting their methods, and taught military personnel the basics of cryptology.

After the war, William continued to work for the army, but Elizebeth was recruited by the Treasury Department, specifically the Coast Guard, who had all the internal listening posts. She became the head cryptologist there and spent the 1920s and 30s breaking the codes of rum runners and drug dealers. The intelligence she provided led to the arrest of large rings in both America and Canada. She testified in numerous court trials and became known as the "Key Woman of the T-Men" and "Lady Manhunter." Later she would call these years, target practice, for the invisible war of 1939-45.

As fascism increased worldwide and America tried to stay out of the war, FDR and others in his administration became increasingly concerned about the threat of fascist governments in the Western Hemisphere. If the Nazis gained a foothold in South America, they would be within striking distance of the US itself. So Elizebeth's ears were trained on Nazi spies based primarily in Brazil and Argentina. She and her Coast Guard team began breaking codes, including three Enigma machines, that proved the Nazis were trying, sometimes successfully, to orchestrate coups and establish fascist governments in countries like Bolivia. In addition, she monitored channels that were providing US ship movements to Germany. This intel would save countless ships and sailors from Nazi U-boats. Although the nascent FBI's chief, J. Edgar Hoover, would claim all the credit, it was Elizebeth and her team that broke the Nazi spy ring in South America.

After the war, Elizebeth, like all cryptologists, signed an agreement of secrecy. She never spoke about her work to anyone for the rest of her life. She spent the ensuing decades tending her ailing husband and ensuring that his legacy was not forgotten. She died, unrecognized and poor, in 1980. Fortunately, her papers finally came to light when some Coast Guard records were declassified, and she started to get the recognition she deserved. She was an amazing woman, and this book is a must-read for anyone interested in the foundation of American cryptology or codebreaking during the world wars. With almost 100 pages of notes and references, the book is well-researched and is a prime example of good narrative nonfiction. show less

If you've ever enjoyed working puzzles, this book will get you hooked. It is a fascinating biography of Elizebeth Smith whose work breaking codes in WWI started her on a life-changing path. Born in Indiana, she went looking for adventure in New York City after earning a degree in literature and found herself dragged back to Illinois by an eccentric millionaire to decipher the secret messages hidden in Shakespeare's works. Fortunately for her, WWI broke out just as she was realizing there were no such messages and the millionaire promoted her skills to his contacts in the War Department. Without training but with a strong ability to detect patterns, she and her co-worker basically wrote the book on cryptography while deciphering messages show more between Germany and Mexico, and related to the uprising in India, despite not knowing which language any particular message might be written in.
The thorough research done by the author provides extensive historical details that make the story come alive through the decades. He had access to interviews of her by the National Security Agency and to her diaries, letters, and other writing archived at the Virginia Military Institute. Using her words, we see her as a saucy young woman with a love of language. As an example: this description of the budding romance between her and William Friedman--"a small, persistent tilt in his direction, like a plant bending toward a patch of sun." show less

A nicely judged biography of an unduly overlooked cryptographer, Elizebeth (sic) Smith Friedman. Jason Fagone makes a convincing case for her having been a key figure in the professionalisation of cryptanalysis in the US in the early twentieth century. Smith Friedman got her start in the 1910s working for an eccentric millionaire, George Fabyan, who was convinced that Francis Bacon really wrote Shakespeare’s plays (sigh) and had hidden cyphers within them that proved as much. While Smith Friedman didn’t buy the theory, she did meet her future husband—William Friedman—while in Fabyan’s employ. They would go on to work for the US government breaking codes during both world wars, with Elizebeth playing a key role in the show more disruption of Nazi spy networks in South America. Fagone largely resists the temptation to sensationalise or claim exceptionalism that bedevils so many popular histories. show less

My first recommended book for 2019 (though admittedly I read most of it in the waning days of 2018). It's all here: spies, rum runners during Prohibition, the leaking of secrets by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and his subsequent ostracism by the coast guard, Enigma and bombe machines, sexism and gender bias, the governmental paranoia of McCarthyism, and in the midst of it all, Elizebeth (with an "e") Smith Friedman. Not familiar with her name? If so, that might be a hint that it's time to get off Facebook and pick up the book. Oh yes, I nearly forgot one more theme in this very readable history: Are there codes hidden in Shakespearean plays placed there to reveal the identity of the true author? Find out in THE WOMAN WHO SMASHED CODES.

This is a crazy romp of a story: Elizebeth Smith, bored of women's work and afraid she'll never be taken seriously as a scholar first gets taken in by a larger than life self-made millionaire and self-declared colonel, where she joins his intentional community as one of several women looking for secret messages in the Shakespeare folios, to prove that they were indeed written by Sir Francis Bacon. However, once the Great War starts, she finds herself the only person in the country with any serious expertise in codes. So she, and her future husband forge the field of cryptanalysis. Following the war, mostly discarded by the military, she continues to work for the coast guard to decrypt coded messages by the mob as they traffic moonshine. show more So she is well-poised to lead the American effort when WWII truly becomes the war of codes.

Despite my obsession with the British female codebreakers of Bletchley Park, I knew less about the American side: we decrypted Engima! And defeated a bizarre secret South American-takeover plot!

If I had one complaint it's that the book to some extent sidelined her husband, William Friedman. This bothers me not just because "The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies And Her Husband, the Brilliant Jewish Geneticist, Who Also Smashed Codes" is EVEN more likely to be mistaken for a Markov Chain generated specifically from Becca's Interests, but also, Elizebeth and William made clear that they saw themselves as equals and I think they would have preferred it that way.

Nonetheless, this is a fascinating piece of history, well told by Fagone. show less

In The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True History of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies, Jason Fagone examines the life of cryptanalyst Elizebeth Friedman and her work from the early twentieth century through the World Wars. Elizebeth began her work trying to find a hidden cypher in Shakespeare’s works that proved the true author to be Francis Bacon. Her sponsor, George Fabyan, pushed this above all his other projects (p. 54). Unfortunately, this turned out not to be true and was a case of confirmation bias (p. 56).

Her and her husband William’s work became a part of U.S. military and foreign policy following the successful decrypt of the Zimmermann Telegram (p. 64). Fabyan sought to ingratiate show more himself to military officials, who proved reluctant, but the Friendmans’ work spoke for itself (p. 66). Fagone writes, “as Elizebeth would later write, ‘There were possibly three or at most four persons’ in the whole United States who knew the slightest thing about codes and ciphers. She was one of them, William another” (p. 67). Fagone describes the burgeoning science thusly, “One way of thinking about science is that it's a check against the natural human tendency to see patterns that might not be there. It's a way of knowing when a pattern is real and when it's a trick of your mind” (p. 77). The Friedmans proved themselves in World War I. According to Fagone, “For the first eight months of the war, as incredible as it sounds, William and Elizebeth, and their team at Riverbank, did all of the codebreaking for every part of the U.S. government: for the State Department, the War Department (army), the navy, and the Department of Justice” (p. 83). Though their work began to dry up after the War, Prohibition and the looming Nazi threat catapulted Elizebth to new heights.

William began working for the Army, “showing that the human was still king” in “this new era of machines” (p. 114). As for Elizebeth, “There were just so few cryptologists of her ability, or William's. They were like a binary star system in a void, twin suns rotating around each other, drawing lesser bodies by their light” (p. 129). As she worked in the Treasury department, Elizebeth began developing methods and systems that she would later employ (p. 137). Elizebeth began her own unit and trained a staff (p. 141). Ironically, J. Edgar Hoover began his training as a clerk in the Library of Congress, demonstrating the role of library studies in compiling information and methods even as he later build a cult of personality around himself (p. 157). In William’s case, he zealously defended his methods, particularly against Yardley’s fictionalizations. As Fagon writes, “Truth was truth and anything else was fuckery” (p. 162).

With war clouds darkening in Europe, the U.S. needed a clandestine service. Fagone writes, “it promised to be a war of languages and secrets, codes and conspiracies, masks and seduction, wireless transmitters and cipher machines- the type of war where everything depended on the invisible flashes of energy radiating from a radio coil hidden on a farm or beneath the floorboards of an unremarkable house” (p. 184). The Brits’ efforts to foster a connection with U.S. forces paid dividends. Fagone writes, “So this is where the CIA began – with J. Edgar Hoover telling the British to go to hell, and the British not appreciating it. This was also when the British began making friendly advances toward Elizebeth Friedman” (p. 216). Fagone continues, “When Elizebeth sent them a decrypt, the FBI placed it in their own SIS filing system, with a new tour-digit identifying number, and the FBI invented new names for the radio networks that Elizebeth had already named. This is how the history of the Invisible War would become distorted; these are the small decisions that erased Elizebeth from the record and later allowed J. Edgar Hoover to take credit for her achievements” (p. 232). Despite that, Elizebeth made connections with FDR’s soon James and OSS head Donovan (p. 240). Fagone writes, “Elizebeth Friedman solved and disseminated these messages like all the others. Such were her weapons against fascism: pencils. puzzles, circuits, names, dates, places, check marks, handwritten notes affixed to typed pages with staplers, stacks of solved messages rising with the hours and days and weeks. And she stepped lightly as she worked. Her name did not appear on the documents of the Cryptanalytic Unit” (p. 258). The FBI torpedoed much of their work due to Hoover’s desire for publicity, but “through terrific effort, teamwork, and long hours, the coast guard codebreakers and their partners finally regained mastery over the clandestine circuits after an unpleasant period of blindness” (p. 260). When a doll saleswoman in the Midwest proved to be a spy, Elizebeth demonstrated her “analytical brilliance” and “native cautiousness” as sh resisted the urge to “Say anything that couldn’t absolutely be proven” (p. 295).

Fagone concludes, “During the Second World War, an American woman figured out how to sweep the globe of undercover Nazis. The proof was on paper: four thousand typed decryptions of clandestine Nazi messages that her team shared with the global intelligence community. She had conquered at least forty-eight different clandestine radio circuits and three Enigma machines to get these plaintexts” (p. 298). A fascinating read for those interested in linguistics, the history of the world wars, or women in STEM. show less