February 5th 2018
The Woman Who Smashed Codes. The true story of love, spies, and the unlikely heroine who outwitted america’s enemies. Jason Fagone.
Shakespeare (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Woman Who Smashed Codes. The true story of love, spies, and the unlikely heroine who outwitted america’s enemies. Jason Fagone. 2017. ISBN 9780062430489. This is the story of Elizebeth Smith and William Friedman who married and together built the American tools and teams for cryptography (code breaking) prior to WW2 , which eventually became the NSA. There are many smaller stories in the larger one. A wife who always let her husband shine ( yet history shows that she was the absolutely brilliant one) . How society (and the military) ruthlessly and cavalierly ignored her true value in position and salary. They worked on unscrambling puzzles from crooks, spies, informants, and the enemy military. They wrote the definitive earliest books on code breaking. Their work was routinely used and seized by the always publicity seeking Hoover who always ignored their contributions. Toward the end, the US governments paranoia about secrecy ended up in the seizure of much of the Friedman’s personal papers and rare books collection. They got their start through an eccentric millionaire, George Fabyan ( who wanted to prove that Francis Bacon wrote all of Shakespeare’s work) on his estate called Riverbank. It is highly readable, almost improbable (until you remember the context), and the authors text flows well along. This would make an exceptional movie.
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Category: History, Technology Industry
