The Woman Who Smashed Codes

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

By Jason Fagone

In 1916, a young Quaker schoolteacher and poetry scholar named Elizebeth Smith was hired by an eccentric tycoon to find the secret message he believed were embedded in Shakespeare's plays.  She moved to the tycoon's lavish estate outside of Chicago expecting to spend her days poring through old books.  But the rich man's close ties to the U.S. government, and the urgencies of war, quickly transformed Elizebeth's mission. She soon learned to apply her skills to an exciting new venture: codebreaking - the solving of secret message without knowledge of the key.  Working alongside her on the estate was William Friedman, a Jewish scientist who would become her husband and lifelong codebreaking partner.  Elizebeth and William were in many ways the Adam and Eve of the National Security Agency, the U.S. institution that monitors and intercepts foreign communications to glean intelligence.

In The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Jason Fagone chronicles the life of this extraordinary woman who played an integral role in our nation's history - from the Great War to the Cold War. He traces Elizebeth's developing career through World War I, Prohibition, and the struggle against fascism.  She helped catch gangsters and smugglers, exposed a Nazi ring in South America, and fought a clandestine battle of wits against Hitler's Reich, cracking multiple versions of the Enigma machine used by German operatives to conceal their communications.  And through it all, she served as muse to her husband, a master of puzzles, who astonished friends and foes alike. Inside an army vault in Washington, he worked furiously to break Purple, the Japanese version of Enigma - and succeeded, at terrible cost to his personal life.

This one was a gift to me from my mother, who sometimes gets me non-fiction books that I am less than wholly interested in, but this was a pleasant enough read.  It's a biography of Elizebeth Friedman, who was apparently instrumental in early American code-breaking.  I do sometimes struggle with non-fiction because in life, unlike in a story, you have to tell an interesting story from the things that actually happened - which can be sometimes very boring, and frequently changes are made of things that were pieced together through myriad small incremental details, which doesn't always make the most exciting narrative: "We're about to enter early married life - now let's describe the ten background characters who you need to know in order to understand what happened next - but they'll never be mentioned again!"  It's understandably hard to keep the balance between the actual facts and a good story in nonfiction, so I'm somewhat sympathetic when I inevitably don't feel the same "high" from a nonfiction as I do a good fiction book.  For example, I really enjoyed Show Me a Hero and Personal History, but was a little let down by Killers of the Flower Moon and The Radium Girls, both of which are boosted by built-in dramatic storylines involving death and cover-ups.  And Ben Macintyre's books, Operation Mincemeat and Double Cross, were both okay, but honestly I barely remember them.  I just don't generally find myself mulling over a good nonfiction book or wanting to re-read it afterwards, and I don't think TWWSC will defy the odds. Sidenote: it's interesting to me the similarities with A Personal History - both women quietly getting things done while their husbands suffered nervous breakdowns, although Graham's work came after and as a direct result of her husband's deterioration, while Elizebeth is just quietly getting shit done 24-7. 

So the good things: it's a well-told story, manages to keep your attention throughout, and doesn't feel too long.  If anything, it feels oddly incomplete, which is maybe not a total surprise when talking about a codebreaker whose work was highly classified until relatively recently.  But although we hear about Elizebeth's affinity for codes, only one or two types is broken down and explained to us as readers, and some of the leaps in deduction (figuring out what codephrase or book is being used for a code in another language) are so little touched on that they seem practically miraculous.  Maybe they were, maybe they weren't, but I can't help but wonder if the author left it out because he thought it would be too boring or difficult to understand to the lay reader, or if he himself didn't know how she did it - after all, her materials wouldn't necessarily have a step by step manual for her thoughts.  I think it would have made a good appendix - to walk us through a (short) puzzle and see exactly how some of these mysteries were cracked.

The other problem with telling Elizebeth's story is that, frankly, although she did an important and thorough job as codebreaker during the second world war, there were no threats or danger lurking if she failed, no personal stakes, aside from the ones she sets herself.  She gets in, is very competent, and then gracefully exits when the war is done.  The decisions about when to crack down on the South American spies was made over her head and by a separate department.  I'm certainly not going to fault Fagone for not having better facts, but it is true that it is just always going to be hard to write a gripping story about someone who went to work in an office everyday and then came home, even though (or maybe especially because) their office consists of a lot of detail oriented paperwork.  It's also sort of difficult because both big "breakthrough" moments for Elizebeth and William in the war - cracking Enigma and Purple, respectively, fall flat, as Enigma was cracked simultaneously by Bletchley Park, and Purple's decoding does nothing to prevent Pearl Harbor, because of government red tape.

Fagone's style is.... definitely something.  There's a strong modern feminist bent, and a few interjections of swearing, so you do get a little more personal than most biographies, but that adds to its charm, not detracts.  Hss pu hss, h nvvk zahya mvy zvtlvul thrpun h kpcl puav jyfwahuhsfzpz!

29 - A Book With "Love" In The Title (or sub-title, I cheated a bit on this)