Friedman was a pioneer of American cryptology. She virtually established the field in the US along with her husband, William Friedman. Her work shaped modern codebreaking at a fundamental level. The book shows that her methods and successful code breaks influenced the outcome of both WWI and WWII. The book is carefully researched and written in clear, readable prose. I found it hard to put down. I read all 345 pages in only two sittings (427 pages including the notes). In her lifetime, her work and contributions to cryptology were frequently obscured by the requirements of government secrecy and often she was overshadowed by the accomplishments of her more famous husband, but the book makes a convincing case for thinking they were at least equals.
The first part of the book focuses on Elizebeth’s serendipitous, somewhat bizarre introduction to pattern analysis when she accidentally lands a job with one George Fabyan (another character I had never heard of) as an assistant to one of Fabyan's hangers-on (Elizabeth Wells Gallup) who was obsessed with proving that Shakespeare's plays were actually written by Francis Bacon and that Bacon encoded secret messages in the texts of the plays, a pursuit that Fabyan supported and Miss Smith doggedly stuck with under Gallup's tutelage until it became clear to her that the idea was nonsense. It was at Fabyan's Riverbank compound in Geneva, Illinois that Miss Smith got her start in codebreaking and also where she met William Friedman.
From these beginnings working side-by-side with Friedman, she became a crack codebreaker working on her own to take down rum-running gangs during prohibition and later breaking Nazi codes and helping to lay the foundation for the National Security Agency. Author Fagone combines historical detail with personal narrative, showing in detail how her work dismantled domestic smuggling operations and exposed Axis espionage networks in South America during WWII. Her feats of codebreaking made significant contributions to Allied successes during the war but they could not be publicly acknowledged. Among the book’s strengths is how it challenges the male-dominated narrative of intelligence history in the US, in particular, showing how much of the work she and her teams did (working mostly for the US Coast Guard) was attributed to others when shared with agencies such as the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover appears to have routinely passed off Coast Guard cryptanalysis as work done by the FBI. Because of the need for secrecy in many cases, Elizebeth was never in a position to set the record straight. Here, Fagone has done that. He not only restores her legacy but also explores the emotional toll on both her and her husband of lives spent in secrecy, dealing with the pressures of wartime service, and of the personal sacrifices they made (William Friedman was largely responsible for breaking Japan's "Purple" code during WWII, a code generated by Japanese code machines similar to the Nazi Enigma machines).
I rarely read reviews of books I've read, but, for some reason, I looked at reviews of The Woman Who Smashed Codes at Goodreads and found a wide spread of reviews. Most were four stars. Slightly fewer were five-star reviews. Clearly, the book has been well received by readers. However, there were also many two-and one-star reviews. These were mostly based not on the content of the book or the research but aimed at the presentation. Many complained that the narrative is not strictly chronological or that it gets mired in detail about subjects these readers thought unimportant to the story (for example, not a few of the reviews object to the large amount of space devoted to George Fabyan and the main character's time working for him). Others felt there was too much space devoted to William Friedman and that the book buries Elizebeth's story in his story, once again shrouding her life behind that of her spouse.
In contrast, I found these sections interesting, important in elucidating Elizebeth's character, and not out of proportion. The book, in my view, makes a convincing case for the importance of Elizebeth Smith Friedman's life to US and world history and it seems a worthwhile book for having done that. I suspect (although I have no evidence to support this guess) that many of the negative reviews were written by younger readers who have lost the capacity to take in a story at its own pace, to savor details, to enjoy tangential explication. These may be the same people who can't sit through an older movie because it requires them to pay attention to dialogue and character development – people who require entertainment to incessantly bludgeon them with stimulation. It would be interesting to see a graph of the ratings on one axis and the ages of the reviewers on another. Maybe I'll post this review on Goodreads. I'd give the book five stars.
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