Starting out side-by-side on a tycoon's landscaped estate, they became the founders of modern codebreaking. 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. And that's before Fagone gets to the ciphers themselves. 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. She aids Elizebeth Wells Gallup in Gallup's quest to prove Francis Bacon hid coded messages in the Shakespeare plays she contends he wrote. 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). 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. But it also resounds with warning bells that should sound farther away than they prove today. 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. It's quite a time to be reading The Woman Who Smashed Codes. "No code is ever completely solved, you know."
Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Woman Who Smashed Codes Subtitle A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies Author Jason Fagone
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