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Jason Fagone - The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted Americas Enemies

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The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted Americas Enemies
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Jason Fagone
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HarperCollins
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2017
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National Bestseller

NPR Best Book of the Year

Not all superheroes wear capes, and Elizebeth Smith Friedman should be the subject of a future Wonder Woman movie. The New York Times

Joining the ranks of Hidden Figures and In the Garden of Beasts, the incredible true story of the greatest codebreaking duo that ever lived, an American woman and her husband who invented the modern science of cryptology together and used it to confront the evils of their time, solving puzzles that unmasked Nazi spies and helped win World War II.

In 1916, at the height of World War I, brilliant Shakespeare expert Elizebeth Smith went to work for an eccentric tycoon on his estate outside Chicago. The tycoon had close ties to the U.S. government, and he soon asked Elizebeth to apply her language skills to an exciting new venture: code-breaking. There she met the man who would become her husband, groundbreaking cryptologist William Friedman. Though she and Friedman are in many ways the Adam and Eve of the NSA, Elizebeths story, incredibly, has never been told.

In The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Jason Fagone chronicles the life of this extraordinary woman, who played an integral role in our nations history for forty years. After World War I, Smith used her talents to catch gangsters and smugglers during Prohibition, then accepted a covert mission to discover and expose Nazi spy rings that were spreading like wildfire across South America, advancing ever closer to the United States. As World War II raged, Elizebeth fought a highly classified battle of wits against Hitlers Reich, cracking multiple versions of the Enigma machine used by German spies. Meanwhile, inside an Army vault in Washington, William worked furiously to break Purple, the Japanese version of Enigmaand eventually succeeded, at a terrible cost to his personal life.

Fagone unveils Americas code-breaking history through the prism of Smiths life, bringing into focus the unforgettable events and colorful personalities that would help shape modern intelligence. Blending the lively pace and compelling detail that are the hallmarks of Erik Larsons bestsellers with the atmosphere and intensity of The Imitation Game, The Woman Who Smashed Codes is page-turning popular history at its finest.

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Table of Contents

Landmarks

The king hath note of all that they intend,
By interception which they dream not of.

SHAKESPEARE, HENRY V , 1599

Knowledge itself is power.

FRANCIS BACON, SACRED MEDITATIONS , 1597

CONTENTS

T his is a love story.

In 1916, during the First World War, two young Americans met by chance on a mysterious and now-forgotten estate near Chicago. At first they seemed to have little in common. She was Elizebeth Smith, a Quaker schoolteacher who found joy in poetry. He was William Friedman, a Jewish plant biologist from a poor family. But they fell for each other. Within a year they were married. They went on to change history together, in ways that still mark our lives today. They taught themselves to be spiesof a new and vital kind.

What they learned to do, better than anyone in the world, was reveal the written secrets of others. They were codebreakers, people who solve secret messages without knowing the key. Puzzle solvers. In a time when there were only a handful of experienced codebreakers in the entire country, the two lovers became a sort of family codebreaking bureau, a husband-and-wife duo unlike any that existed before or has since. Computers didnt exist, so they used pencil, paper, and their brains.

Over the course of thirty years, while raising two children, 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. Today the insights of this one couple lurk at the base of everything from huge government agencies to the smallest fluctuations of our online lives. And the Friedmans did it all despite having little to no training in mathematics. The basic unit of their life was not the equation but the word. At heart they were people who loved wordswords kneaded and pulled and torn, words flipped and arranged in grids and squares and strips and in lines marching down the pale sheet of scratch paper.

In the decades since the Second World War, the husband, William Friedman, has become a revered figure to intelligence historians. He is called the worlds greatest cryptologist by the eminent chronicler of secret writing David Kahn: Singlehandedly, Kahn writes, he made his country preeminent in his field. William Friedman is also widely considered to be the father of the National Security Agency, the part of the U.S. government that intercepts foreign communications and sifts them for informationsignals intelligence. He wrote the definitive textbooks that trained generations of NSA analysts who are still working today. In 1975 the agency named its main auditorium after William Friedman, at its headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, and a bronze bust of Williams head still stands guard there, above a plaque that reads CRYPTOLOGIC PIONEER AND INVENTOR, FOUNDER OF THE SCIENCE OF MODERN AMERICAN CRYPTOLOGY .

Today Elizebeth isnt nearly as famous, despite her talent and contributions. Early on she worked side by side with William and collaborated on several of their groundbreaking scientific papers; she was considered by some of their friends to be the more brilliant of the pair; she ultimately carved out a spectacular career of her own; and by 1945 the government considered both Friedmans to be pioneers of their field. A then-secret document said of Elizebeth, She and her husband are among the founders of American military cryptanalysiscryptanalysis is another word for codebreakingand a federal prosecutor told the FBI that Mrs. Friedman and her husband... are recognized as the leading authorities in the country. Yet in the canonical books about twentieth-century codebreaking, Elizebeth is treated as the dutiful, slightly colorful wife of a great man, a digression from the main narrative, if not a footnote. Her victories are all but forgotten.

I started reading about the Friedmans in 2014, after Edward Snowden shocked the world by revealing that the NSA was gathering the phone records of millions of ordinary Americans. Curious to know more about Elizebeth, I found a brief bio on the website of a Virginia library, along with a set of pictures. There she was, a petite woman in a white dress, standing on a patch of grass almost one hundred years ago, skin porcelain, head cocked at the photographer, smiling and squinting slightly in what must have been a blinding sun.

The library held the Friedmans personal papers. One morning I drove down to Virginia and asked the chief archivist to show me what Elizebeth had left. In the back of an office, he unlocked a solid gray metal door and an inner door of silver metal bars, led me into a darkened, humidity-controlled vault, and pointed to multiple shelves of gray archival boxes, twenty-two boxes in all. We try to tell people that Elizebeths stuff is amazing, the archivist said, but usually researchers want to see Williams papers.

You get these moments sometimes as a journalist, if youre lucky. You hear a voice that bursts from a body or a page with beauty or urgency or insight. Elizebeths boxes contained hundreds of her letters. Love letters. Letters to her kids written in code . Handwritten diaries. A partial, unpublished autobiography. Im not a mathematician, and Ill never be an expert on codes and ciphers, but Elizebeths descriptions of her work gave me a sense of what it must have felt like to be herthe excitement of solving the kind of puzzle that could save a life or nudge a war. She liked to say that codes are all around us: in childrens report cards, in slang, in headlines and movies and songs. Codebreaking is about noticing and manipulating patterns. Humans do this without thinking. Were wired to see patterns. Codebreakers train themselves to see more deeply.

As rich as Elizebeths papers were, they struck me as incomplete. The records trailed off around 1940. What was she doing in the Second World War? No one seemed to know.

It took me almost two years to find the answer. She spent the war catching Nazi spies, among other little-known feats. Working with an elite codebreaking unit that she founded in 1931 and collaborating closely with both British and U.S. intelligence, Elizebeth became a secret detective, a Sherlock Holmes on the trail of fascist agents infiltrating the Western Hemisphere. She tracked and exposed them, smashing the spy rings, ruining Nazi dreams.

In a broader sense, she filled gaps in agencies that werent prepared for the battle of wits that now faced them, a pattern that repeated throughout her entire career. The FBI, the CIA, the NSAto different degrees Elizebeth pressed her thumb into the clay of all these agencies when the clay was still wet. She helped to shape them and she battled them, too, a woman hammering herself into the history of what we now call the intelligence community. But when powerful men started telling the story, they left her out of it. In 1945, Elizebeths spy files were stamped with classification tags and entombed in government archives, and officials made her swear an oath of secrecy about her work in the war. So she had to sit silent and watch others seize credit for her accomplishments, particularly J. Edgar Hoover. A gifted salesman, Hoover successfully portrayed the FBI as the major hero in the Nazi spy hunt. Public gratitude flowed to Hoover, increasing his already considerable power, making him an American icon, virtually untouchable until his death in 1972.

Its not quite true that history is written by the winners. Its written by the best publicists on the winning team.

What follows is my attempt to put back together a puzzle that was fragmented by secrecy, sexism, and time. I relied on the Friedmans letters and papers, declassified U.S. and British government files, Freedom of Information Act requests, and my own interviews. Anything between quotation marks in this book is from a letter or other primary source document.

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