Elizebeth Smith Friedman (1892-1980) is the central figure of The Woman Who Smashed Codes, a pioneering American cryptanalyst whose work spanned Prohibition and the two World Wars. Recruited from a literary background into the eclectic Riverbank Laboratories, she applied a unique blend of linguistic intuition and scientific rigor to codebreaking. She later founded and led the US Coast Guard’s Cryptanalytic Unit, where she dismantled the complex communication systems of Prohibition-era smuggling rings. During WWII, her small team penetrated clandestine Nazi spy networks across the Western Hemisphere and provided the vital intelligence behind raids, ship rerouting, and the frustration of Axis plans. Fagone’s biography seeks to restore Elizebeth to the center of US intelligence history, showing how her methodical, evidence-based work formed a cornerstone of US signals intelligence, even as institutional secrecy and gender bias allowed others to claim credit for her achievements.

Elizebeth’s journey from a Quaker upbringing in Indiana to a key national security asset forms the narrative spine of the book. Recruited in 1916 to investigate supposed ciphers in Shakespeare’s works, she quickly pivoted to real-world codebreaking with the onset of WWI. Her marriage to fellow cryptologist William Friedman in 1917 established a lifelong personal and professional partnership that began at Riverbank and shaped the development of American cryptology. Fagone uses these biographical details to ground her transformation from a literary puzzle solver into a leader whose work had life-or-death consequences.

Her most significant contributions came after she left Riverbank and built the Coast Guard’s Cryptanalytic Unit. There, Elizebeth and her team made methodical breakthroughs against the sophisticated book, grille, and machine-based ciphers used by smugglers and spies. By solving the communications of major smuggling syndicates and, later, the Enigma-based spy circuit codenamed 3-N run by Nazi agent Johannes Becker, her unit provided the actionable intelligence that directly led to arrests and the disruption of enemy operations. Fagone frames these technical triumphs as direct contributions to law enforcement and national security, with Elizebeth’s story and personality grounding these triumphs in a personal narrative. Her story shows how Cryptology Blends Rigorous Science With Creative Intuition, even if her contributions have been overlooked by history. 

Fagone also humanizes the immense personal and emotional costs behind Elizebeth’s technical success. The book shows her balancing relentless wartime duty, strict secrecy oaths that isolated her from friends and family, and the strains of her husband’s recurring mental illness, as well as the responsibilities of motherhood at a time of global upheaval. This focus reveals the immense pressure she faced as a woman in a male-dominated, high-stakes field, making her perseverance and professional discipline all the more remarkable.

Throughout her career, Elizebeth clashed with powerful men and institutions that prioritized publicity and narrative control over scientific rigor. At Riverbank, she and William contended with George Fabyan’s pseudoscientific obsessions. Later, she saw her unit’s vital counter-espionage work co-opted by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who used his publicity machine to claim credit for her team’s successes. Fagone highlights these conflicts to explore the persistent tension between quiet, evidence-based intelligence work and the self-serving nature of institutional power. Elizbeth’s story—and the book itself—is a repudiation of the existing narrative of cryptoanalysis, with Fagone seeking to bring Elizebeth’s work back into the public consciousness.

William Friedman (1891-1969) was a groundbreaking US Army cryptologist and a pioneer of US signals intelligence during the interwar period and World War II. As Elizebeth Smith Friedman’s husband and lifelong collaborator, he is a pivotal figure in the book, representing both her personal partner and her professional counterpart. Known for foundational breakthroughs like the “index of coincidence” and his leadership in developing secure machine systems like SIGABA and breaking Japan’s Purple cipher, William helped professionalize a field that was still in its infancy. For this, he is celebrated by history. Buildings are named after William, and his contribution to cryptoanalysis is well understood, even if his personal story is not. The Woman Who Smashed Codes suggests that Elizebeth was just as significant and influential a figure, even if The Patriarchal Bias of the Historical Record has elevated her husband above her. 

William’s story began alongside Elizebeth’s at Riverbank Laboratories, an eccentric private research estate where they met, married, and began their collaborative work. This origin story anchors their personal partnership within the birth of modern US cryptology. Fagone presents their relationship as a unique intellectual and emotional alliance that sustained them through decades of high-pressure, secret work, rather than an intense and passionate romance. From the beginning, William was seemingly much more in love with Elizebeth than vice versa, yet the profundity and importance of their relationship grew from these humble beginnings. 

William’s scientific contributions were fundamental to Allied strategy. His development of statistical methods, particularly the index of coincidence, provided a mathematical basis for breaking complex ciphers and became a cornerstone of the new science of cryptanalysis. His leadership of the Army’s SIS culminated in the breaking of Japan’s diplomatic Purple cipher, an intelligence coup that gave US leaders extraordinary insight into Axis plans. In this sense, William’s efforts during the war are shown to be significant and vital. He helped to win WWII, though the book illustrates that the credit due to William in part obscures the credit due to Elizebeth and others. William would be among the first to credit his wife, the book suggests, while Elizebeth herself was proud of her husband’s acclaim. 

However, Fagone also uses William’s story to expose the immense personal strains that accompanied this work. William struggled with credit disputes, the suffocating demands of government secrecy, and recurring bouts of depression that were exacerbated by his intense, classified duties. At a time when mental illness was deeply stigmatized, William hid his depression from the world, fearing that the revelation about his so-called “heebeegeebees” would sideline him from his cryptology work. Not only did William feel loyal to the field of research he helped to develop, but he also felt a patriotic duty to apply his intellect to this field to help to win the war, even while suffering from the burden of doing so. His journey reveals the psychological toll of a life spent in the shadows. His enduring legacy lies not only in his scientific breakthroughs but also in the generations of US cryptanalysts he trained, cementing the institutional foundations of the modern NSA.

George Fabyan (1867-1936) was the eccentric textile magnate and research patron who founded Riverbank Laboratories, the unconventional private estate where US codebreaking was born. Fabyan served as the catalyst who brought Elizebeth and William Friedman together and provided the resources for their early work. A product of the Gilded Age, he channeled his wealth into creating a multi-disciplinary research campus that blended legitimate science with pseudoscience.

Fabyan’s key contribution was assembling the people and infrastructure that launched the Friedmans’ careers. By hiring assistants and hosting code schools for the US government during WWI, his patronage created a unique incubator for cryptology outside of official channels. Fagone presents him as an essential, if deeply flawed, visionary whose private funding seeded a critical national capability.

However, Fabyan’s domineering personality and his obsession with proving that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays created significant conflict. His tight control over his staff and his promotion of questionable cryptographic methods generated tensions that pushed the Friedmans to establish their own rigorous, scientific standards and seek independence. Allusions to improper behavior in letters by Elizebeth also color the portrayal of Fabyan, hinting at darker secrets in his past that are not explicitly explored in the book. In spite of this, both William and Elizebeth were “genuinely grateful” for him bringing them together, though they developed this view long after his death and long after they had escaped his domineering presence. Fabyan represents the unsystematic, patronage-driven model of research that the Friedmans’ professionalized approach would eventually supersede.

Elizabeth Wells Gallup (1848-1934) was an educator and a leading proponent of the theory that Francis Bacon secretly authored Shakespeare’s plays, concealing messages within them using a biliteral cipher. As the head of the cipher research department at George Fabyan’s Riverbank Laboratories, she was Elizebeth Friedman’s first mentor and a formative, if controversial, influence. Her work is central to the book’s origin story, as it was her need for an assistant that led Fabyan to recruit a young Elizebeth.

Gallup’s methods, which involved identifying minute and often inconsistent variations in printed letterforms, came into direct conflict with the Friedmans’ developing commitment to scientific, repeatable analysis. Fagone shows how their methodical testing ultimately falsified Gallup’s claims, a process that was crucial in clarifying the standards for modern cryptanalysis. Though her theories were ultimately disproven, Gallup’s work served an essential purpose: By forcing the Friedmans to engage with and refute her pseudoscience, she inadvertently sharpened their commitment to rigor and evidence, helping to define the new, scientific approach to codebreaking. Her legacy is thus an indirect but important contribution to the field, serving as a warning for aspiring codebreakers not to allow desire to influence the work.

Herbert Yardley (1889-1958) was the head of MI-8, the US Army’s codebreaking unit during World War I, which later became the clandestine American Black Chamber. He serves as a crucial foil to the Friedmans in The Woman Who Smashed Codes. After the government shut down his peacetime operation, Yardley published a sensational, best-selling memoir, The American Black Chamber (1931), which exposed the US’s secret codebreaking activities to the world. This irritated William in particular, as Yardley’s loud, braggadocio style seemed an affront to the careful, secretive, and calculating approach that William believed to be essential. 

Fagone contrasts Yardley’s pursuit of publicity and profit with the Friedmans’ quiet, scientific practice under strict oaths of secrecy. The controversy surrounding Yardley’s book highlights the fundamental tension between operational security and public disclosure. While his exposé created a public fascination with codebreaking, it also provoked a fierce backlash within the government, leading to stricter secrecy laws and shaping the culture of future intelligence agencies like the SIS and NSA. Even more irritating to William, it allowed Yardley to make money by flouting the rules of secrecy—rules that William himself refused to break even when he felt the burden of financial pressures. Yardley’s story provides the essential context for understanding the high-stakes environment of secrecy and professional ethics in which the Friedmans operated.

J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) was the long-serving director of the FBI and a master of public relations. In The Woman Who Smashed Codes, he functions as a primary antagonist in the story of historical credit. Having built the FBI’s reputation through high-profile gangster cases and carefully managed media narratives, Hoover was adept at positioning his agency as the sole hero in major investigations. When called upon to tackle spy rings and break codes, however, Hoover’s heavy-handed approach was lackluster and faltering. In this sense, he serves as an ideological counterpoint to both Elizebeth Smith Friedman and cryptanalysis itself. 

During WWII, this ideological difference brought him into direct conflict with Elizebeth’s work. Fagone details how Hoover and the FBI publicly claimed credit for dismantling Nazi spy rings in South America, successes that were actually possible by the intelligence produced by Elizebeth’s small Coast Guard unit. By benefiting from the secrecy that bound her while promoting his own agency, Hoover successfully shaped public memory and erased her contribution. His role in the book demonstrates how powerful institutional narratives can eclipse the foundational work of technical experts, particularly women, and underscores the book’s central theme of The Patriarchal Bias of the Historical Record.

Major General Joseph Mauborgne (1881-1971) was a leader in the US Army Signal Corps and a key advocate for US cryptology. As an early champion of the work being done at Riverbank Laboratories and a co-developer of the unbreakable one-time pad cipher, he was one of the few military officials who understood the importance of signals intelligence before WWII. Fagone presents Mauborgne as a crucial military ally whose support provided institutional legitimacy for the Friedmans’ work, as well as a competitor for Fabyan for the attention of the Friedmans. 

Mauborgne’s technical foresight and managerial decisions were instrumental in the growth of US cryptanalytic capabilities. He validated the Friedmans’ early code school at Riverbank, steered Army radio-collection efforts toward Japan, and provided the organizational backing that enabled William’s SIS to flourish. By connecting the Friedmans to official government channels, Mauborgne ensured that their unique talents were directed toward national security, effectively bridging the gap between their eccentric origins at Riverbank and their central role in the nation’s wartime intelligence efforts. Thus, Mauborgne represents a form of institutional innovation that was difficult to come by in the early days of cryptoanalysis. Through his willingness to trust the Friedmans, Mauborgne illustrates the importance of new ideas.