She also meets a sensitive plant geneticist named William Friedman, and they run off together to Washington, where William decodes Japanese missives and lays the groundwork for the NSA and Elizebeth becomes the head of a Coast Guard codebreaking team she assembles herself. Yet Fagone’s book is simultaneously a stately, painstakingly researched work of history, a well-formed, elevated, deeply human tome that is a sheer delight to read.Įlizebeth begins her career at Riverbank Laboratories, situated on an estate in small-town Illinois, where her job is to assist a woman who’s convinced Francis Bacon encoded messages into Shakespeare’s plays. Elizebeth meets her future husband in a scientific arcadia populated by eccentric millionaires, windmills, and monkeys in diapers, and her decryptions help take down Nazis during World War II. codebreaking and the intelligence community as we know it - and it reads like some wild cross between a fairy tale and a gripping detective thriller. “You hear a voice that bursts from a body or a page with beauty or urgency or insight.” And Elizebeth Friedman, the woman in question and one of the first, best codebreakers in the United States in the early 20th century, is a gem of a voice.įagone’s book details Elizebeth’s long and rollicking career - one where she lays the foundation of U.S.

“You get these moments sometimes as a journalist, if you’re lucky,” he writes. When Jason Fagone discovered the subject of his new book, “The Woman Who Smashed Codes,” he felt as if he were stumbling on buried treasure.

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