From Dinner Parties To Spy Rings, 'The Woman Who Smashed Codes' Bursts With Detail
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September 30, 20177:00 AM ET
The Woman Who Smashed Codes
A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies
by Jason Fagone
"No code is ever completely solved, you know."
It's quite a time to be reading The Woman Who Smashed Codes. Subtitled The True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies, Jason Fagone's book delivers on that promise, bringing one woman's deliberately erased accomplishments back into the limelight. But it also resounds with warning bells that should sound farther away than they prove today.
There's really no way to write about Elizebeth Friedman without making it a thriller; like many great people caught up in great events, there's a sense of serendipity in retrospect. A last-minute trip she makes to a Chicago library becomes a job with George Fabyan (the kind of Gilded Age oligarch who kept bears on his property). She aids Elizebeth Wells Gallup in Gallup's quest to prove Francis Bacon hid coded messages in the Shakespeare plays she contends he wrote. By the time Elizebeth and future husband William Friedman are decoding messages for the government at the start of World War I, her life seems almost incredible. And that's before Fagone gets to the ciphers themselves.
Government outsiders called them magic, and though Fagone dutifully details cryptology concepts and ciphers, you'd be forgiven for suspecting something supernatural in the Friedmans' abilities. Starting out side-by-side on a tycoon's landscaped estate, they became the founders of modern codebreaking. (After Fagone establishes their methods, the codebreaking moves so briskly it really begins to seem uncanny: A coded message crosses Elizebeth's desk — "Certain letters repeated vertically" — a page later, she's solved the first Enigma.) Fagone's assiduous style reflects Elizebeth's inexhaustible pragmatism. She spent most of her career in the Coast Guard, catching smugglers and, later, Nazis, but her quoted remembrances are workaday: "You did what you could with what you had to do it with."
After Elizebeth's surreal beginnings, Fagone keeps the focus largely on her work, and on a marriage strained by government pressure — a codebreaking team forbidden to talk to each other about what they were doing. "A competent codebreaker was suddenly a person of the highest military value," Fagone writes. Their skill made them threats; they were treated accordingly, and this intelligence-gathering operation begins to feel more John Le Carré than James Bond.
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https://www.npr.org/2017/09/30/548666129/from-dinner-parties-to-spy-rings-the-woman-who-smashed-codes-bursts-with-detail
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