You can read her letters from a hundred years ago, her college diary, her original poems, her original code work, letters that she wrote to her kids in code. I saw there was an old biography of William from the ’70s, but no books about Elizebeth. And I thought, that’s unusual: Married codebreakers. She was a poet who taught herself to break codes she caught gangsters during Prohibition and, oh yeah, she was married to a godfather of the N.S.A. It was really just a bare description of her life. While I was doing that, I stumbled across a web page about Elizebeth Smith Friedman at the library where she donated her personal papers - the George C. Like a lot of Americans, I didn’t know a lot about it. When did you first get the idea to write this book?Īfter the Edward Snowden story broke in 2013, I started reading about the history of the N.S.A. Below, Fagone talks about the long odds he faced in filling in the gaps in his subject’s life, the role sexism played in her career and more. (“American history is very strange,” Fagone told me.) Smith met and married the cryptologist William Friedman helped break up smuggling rings during Prohibition and spent World War II successfully decoding messages sent between Nazi spies, ruining the Germans’ operations in South America, among other triumphs. Those messages didn’t exist, but within a year Smith was recruited into a wartime code-breaking project. In “The Woman Who Smashed Codes,” Jason Fagone recounts the stranger-than-fiction story of how the 23-year-old Smith was hired in 1916, along with other scholars, by an eccentric tycoon who wanted to find secret messages in the work of Shakespeare. Not all superheroes wear capes, and Elizebeth Smith Friedman should be the subject of a future Wonder Woman movie.
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