The Woman Who Smashed Codes

If you enjoy reading about spies and secret codes, you'll love the biography The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies, by Jason Fagone.

Elizebeth (yes, that is the real spelling) Smith Friedman was a former schoolteacher who was hired by a rich man to help verify secret messages left by Bacon in Shakespeare's plays. (Spoiler alert: There aren't any.) While she stayed at his estate in Illinois (not too far from where I live), she met a geneticist named William who also worked for the millionaire. Elizebeth and William gradually worked out a scientific approach to codebreaking, fell in love, and got married. The couple both became highly sought after codebreakers during World War I and served the country through World War II. They wrote volumes about the science of cryptography and trained others in the techniques. They learned how to break book ciphers (where a cipher key is taken from a book) without ever seeing the text and even learned how to crack Enigma machines manually. Some of their projects were so secret they couldn't discuss them with each other. During Prohibition, Elizebeth worked for the Coast Guard deciphering messages from smugglers. She gained fame as a codebreaker, but she promoted her husband's work in front of her own.

All of this codebreaking served as a warmup to Elizebeth's work during World War II. She was assigned to decrypt radio messages sent by Nazi spies in South America. The spies hoped to promote fascism in the region with the ultimate goal of using the continent to target the United States. Elizebeth broke multiple codes used by the spies, including those using Enigma machines, and passed the information along to authorities (including Hoover and the FBI). They had to be careful how they used the information she gleamed from the spies, for fear if the spies learned their codes were no longer secret, they would change them. Eventually, the English were able to kidnap a low-ranking German spy and "extract" information from him. From that point, the FBI worked with local police to break up the spy ring. Hoover got the credit, and Elizebeth was told never to discuss her World War II work with anyone. Fortunately, records of her work were saved. This unsung heroine passed away in 1980 at the age of eighty-eight, but she's been rediscovered.

Do you admire any little-known historical figures? Are you interested in codes? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.