The Woman Who Smashed Codes (2017) is a narrative nonfiction biography by American journalist Jason Fagone. The book tells the true story of Elizebeth Smith Friedman, a pioneering cryptanalyst whose work for the US government helped define modern American intelligence. Fagone reconstructs the life of a woman whose foundational contributions were obscured by institutional secrecy and sexism, exploring themes like The Patriarchal Bias of the Historical Record, Secrecy and the Consolidation of Institutional Power, and the way Cryptology Blends Rigorous Science With Creative Intuition.

Fagone is a narrative journalist specializing in stories about science and technology. His other books include Horsemen of the Esophagus and Ingenious. The Woman Who Smashed Codes was a national bestseller and was named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2017. The biography was adapted into the 2021 PBS documentary The Codebreaker. 

This guide refers to the 2018 Dey Street Books paperback edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of graphic violence, illness, death, mental illness, suicidal ideation, physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and religious discrimination.

Summary

In June 1916, Elizebeth Smith, a restless, 23-year-old college graduate from Indiana, visited the Newberry Library in Chicago, Illinois. While admiring a rare 1623 First Folio of William Shakespeare’s plays, she was approached by a librarian who knew of an unusual job. Moments later, the eccentric millionaire George Fabyan arrived and whisked Elizebeth away to his estate, Riverbank, in Geneva, Illinois. During the train ride, Fabyan explained his belief that Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare’s works and hid secret messages within them using a complex cipher.

Riverbank proved to be a bizarre, 350-acre private research compound, featuring laboratories dedicated to genetics and acoustics, a Japanese garden, and a menagerie of animals. Fabyan cultivated a public image as a scientific visionary, though many of his experiments were eccentric or ethically questionable. At the estate, Elizebeth met the key figures in the cipher project, including the elderly scholar Elizabeth Wells Gallup, who led the research, and William Friedman, the head of the Genetics Department. Gallup explained that Elizebeth’s job would be to help verify her decipherments. Intrigued, Elizebeth accepted the position.

Elizebeth began her training but struggled to discern the subtle variations in Gallup’s method. As she worked, a friendship and then a romance blossomed with William. They bonded during bicycle rides and picnics. Elizebeth learned of his background as the son of poor Jewish immigrants. Together, they began to harbor secret doubts about the scientific validity of Gallup’s work.

The 1917 Zimmermann Telegram, a coded German message proposing an alliance with Mexico against the United States, thrust cryptology into national importance. With the US lacking skilled codebreakers, Fabyan offered Riverbank’s services to the government. Elizebeth and William transitioned from analyzing Shakespeare to solving intercepted military messages. They quickly mastered existing techniques and invented new statistical methods of analysis, which became the foundation of the modern science of cryptology, published by Fabyan as the Riverbank Publications. William coined the term “cryptanalysis” to describe their new approach. Their professional collaboration deepened their personal bond, and they married in May 1917.

Life under Fabyan’s control became increasingly oppressive. He was manipulative and tyrannical, intercepting the Friedmans’ mail to prevent them from taking other jobs and installing listening devices to monitor them. Determined to escape, William secured a commission as a first lieutenant in the Army Signal Corps and was deployed to France in 1918, where he worked on breaking German military codes. While he was away, Elizebeth remained at Riverbank and endured Fabyan’s sexual advances. After the war, Fabyan lured the couple back with false promises and published William’s groundbreaking paper on the “index of coincidence” without proper credit. In December 1920, the Friedmans finally escaped, abruptly leaving for Washington, DC.

In January 1921, Elizebeth and William began working for the Army Signal Corps. William quickly became the Army’s leading expert on the new generation of cipher machines, successfully breaking the supposedly unbreakable Hebern rotor and Kryha machines. In 1922, Elizebeth resigned to start a family, and she gave birth to their daughter, Barbara, in 1923, and son, John Ramsay, in 1926. In 1925, the US Coast Guard recruited Elizebeth to break the codes of Prohibition-era liquor smugglers. Working from home, she deciphered thousands of messages from criminal syndicates like the Consolidated Exporters Corporation.

By 1931, Elizebeth’s work led her to establish and lead the Treasury Department’s first formal Cryptanalytic Unit. Her expert testimony in major federal trials turned her into a media celebrity. After Prohibition was repealed, her unit began to target narcotics smugglers, and her fame grew. The publicity, coming after Herbert Yardley’s sensational tell-all book, The American Black Chamber, made Elizebeth famous but also attracted unwanted scrutiny from a government increasingly concerned with secrecy.

With the start of World War II in Europe, US leaders became concerned about Nazi espionage in South America. In early 1940, Elizebeth’s unit discovered a clandestine Nazi radio network operating on the continent. As the US moved toward war, the Coast Guard was transferred to Navy jurisdiction in November 1941. A naval officer was appointed the unit’s formal head, but Elizebeth remained its operational leader. Meanwhile, William’s Army Signal Intelligence Service was tasked with breaking Japanese diplomatic codes. After a 20-month effort, his team, with a key breakthrough by cryptanalyst Genevieve Grotjan, solved the Japanese “Purple” cipher machine in September 1940. The resulting intelligence became a vital source of information on Axis strategy. The immense strain of the project, however, contributed to William experiencing a mental-health crisis. He was hospitalized in early 1941.

On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. William, aware from “Magic” intercepts that an attack was imminent, was devastated by the failure to pinpoint the location. The US entered the war. Elizebeth was temporarily detailed to the new Coordinator of Information office, where she established its first cryptographic section. She then returned to her work tracking the Nazi spies in South America, led by SS Captain Johannes Siegfried Becker (“Sargo”) and radio expert Gustav Utzinger (“Luna”). Her unit’s decrypts of the spies’ shipping reports helped save the troopship RMS Queen Mary from a U-boat attack. In March 1942, a premature roundup of spies in Brazil, led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, alerted the Nazis that their codes had been broken.

The Nazi network regrouped in Argentina, using more secure codes. Elizebeth’s team broke these new codes: The decrypts revealed a massive conspiracy involving high-level Argentine officials, including Juan Perón, to stage coups across South America and negotiate a secret deal with Germany. The spies then received a new, even more secure “Red” Enigma, which Elizebeth’s team also solved. Using this intelligence, the British exposed the entire plot, and the Nazi network in South America subsequently collapsed. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover publicly took sole credit for the victory.

As the war ended in 1945, William was sent on a top-secret mission to Germany to capture Nazi cryptologic intelligence. He toured the war-torn country and consulted with British counterparts at Bletchley Park. After the war, Elizebeth retired from government service and signed a secrecy oath that forbade her from ever discussing her work. She and William co-authored The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined (1957), a book debunking the theories they encountered at Riverbank. William worked for the new National Security Agency (NSA) but grew disillusioned with its culture of intense secrecy. His mental health declined, and he underwent electroshock therapy. In 1958, the NSA confiscated many of their historical papers. William died in 1969. Elizebeth spent her final years preserving his legacy and donated their vast collection of papers to the George C. Marshall Foundation. She died in 1980, with her own vital contributions to the war effort still largely unknown. Decades later, with the declassification of her files, historians and a new generation of female intelligence professionals rediscovered her work, leading to posthumous recognition of her foundational role in US cryptology.