The Woman Who Smashed Codes

When Quaker mother, Mrs Sophia Smith of Huntington, Indiana, gave birth to her ninth child, a girl, in 1892, she decided that her daughter would need something to set her apart from the average Miss Smith, and so she gave her the first name of Elizebeth (ze instead of the usual za). Not that this Elizebeth could ever have been average. She was gifted with an extraordinarily brilliant mind and was destined to be one of the greatest code-breakers in history.
 
In 1916, after a chance encounter with the eccentric American tycoon George Fabyan in a library, she was “head-hunted” to work on his estate at Riverbank near Chicago where Fabyan had a private laboratory that conducted research into cryptography. He was particularly keen to prove that it was really Francis Bacon who wrote Shakespeare’s plays and that this could be established via secret ciphers in the text.
 
Although Elizebeth would eventually disprove the theory, it was while she was at Riverbank that she met her future husband, William Friedman, who had also been hired by Fabyan to work on genetics. Together they would create a lifelong partnership working in cryptology and cryptanalysis.
 
During the Prohibition years, Elizebeth cracked the codes used by the gangsters and bootleggers. Throughout the 1930s and into World War II, she deciphered secret messages from Japan, China and Germany and was one of the first people to figure out the workings of the Enigma machines, and she was also instrumental in the exposure of the Nazi spy network in South America.

It was Elizebeth’s husband William who gained most of the kudos in this field, but this book will show that she was every bit as important as her husband and, in some cases, even more talented and certainly better able to deal with the high stresses of the job, although her contributions were often dismissed and she had to sit by and see others take credit for her work, in particular by J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI.
 
There are some places where the invented dialogue and descriptions border a little on romantic fiction, but that doesn’t detract from this absorbing tale of how the famous intelligence networks came into being and often competed against one another, and how Elizebeth had to negotiate the outright sexism of the era.

Although there are several chapters where the steps in deciphering codes are explained in such great detail that the eyes of the uninitiated reader will glaze over, one doesn’t need to have a mathematical or scientific leaning in order to still enjoy discovering this truly astonishing woman who is well overdue for the credit she deserves.

4.5 stars

(With many thanks to Dey Street Books via Edelweiss for the ARC.)


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