Audiobook Review: The Woman Who Smashed Codes by Jason Fagone

The Woman Who Smashed Codes
Author: Jason Fagone
Narrator: Cassandra Campbell
Publication: HarperAudio (September 26, 2017)
Length: 13 hours and 3 minutes

Description: Joining the ranks of Hidden Figures and In the Garden of Beasts, the incredible true story of the greatest codebreaking duo that ever lived, an American woman and her husband who invented the modern science of cryptology together and used it to confront the evils of their time, solving puzzles that unmasked Nazi spies and helped win World War II.

In 1912, at the height of World War I, brilliant Shakespeare expert Elizebeth Smith went to work for an eccentric tycoon on his estate outside Chicago. The tycoon had close ties to the US government, and he soon asked Elizebeth to apply her language skills to an exciting new venture: code breaking. There she met the man who would become her husband, groundbreaking cryptologist William Friedman. Though she and Friedman are in many ways the Adam and Eve of the NSA, Elizebeth's story, incredibly, has never been told.

In The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Jason Fagone chronicles the life of this extraordinary woman, who played an integral role in our nation's history for 40 years. After World War I, Smith used her talents to catch gangsters and smugglers during Prohibition, then accepted a covert mission to discover and expose Nazi spy rings that were spreading like wildfire across South America, advancing ever closer to the United States. As World War II raged, Elizabeth fought a highly classified battle of wits against Hitler's Reich, cracking multiple versions of the Enigma machine used by German spies. Meanwhile, inside an army vault in Washington, William worked furiously to break Purple, the Japanese version of Enigma - and eventually succeeded, at a terrible cost to his personal life.

Fagone unveils America's code-breaking history through the prism of Smith's life, bringing into focus the unforgettable events and colorful personalities that would help shape modern intelligence. Blending the lively pace and compelling detail that are the hallmarks of Erik Larson's best sellers with the atmosphere and intensity of The Imitation Game, The Woman Who Smashed Codes is riveting popular history at its finest.

My Thoughts: This was a fascinating biography of a woman who had a profound effect on codebreaking and who almost managed to be totally overlooked. Elizebeth Smith was a Quaker schoolteacher hired by an eccentric millionaire to work on his odd theory about William Shakespeare's plays. He believed that they were written by Francis Bacon, and the proof lay in obscure marks found in an early printing of the plays. 

The search for proof that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays was only one of the many experiments going on at Riverbank. Also there working on genetic research was an American Jew named William S. Friedman. The two formed a friendship and then a romance and a duo that is directly responsible for the United States' codebreaking agencies. 

Elizebeth and William worked on various codes which allowed Elizebeth, working for the Coast Guard, to track down and capture rum runners and other local criminals, and William to be instrumental in breaking the codes sent by America's enemies during World War I. 

While William's work is well known and celebrated, Elizebeth's was lost in file cabinets and classified by the nascent NSA. But her role in breaking codes and locating Nazis in South America was vital to the war effort in World War II. 

There are lots of take-aways for me. I didn't form a good impression of J. Edgar Hoover and the early years of the FBI. He was quick to claim credit for other people's successes. As this quote says: "It's not quite true that history is written by the winners. It's written by the best publicists on the winning team."

I came away from this story with really impressed at how a man and woman working with pencil, paper, and brains could do so much to solve so many puzzles. I was also impressed by Elizebeth's modesty in that she didn't think what she did was all that special. 

I bought this one March 17, 2025. You can buy your copy here.