Shropshire Star

This badass female codebreaker hunted Nazis during the Second World War

It took a writer years to uncover what this code breaker had achieved during the wars.

Published
Elizebeth Smith Friedman (NSA/CSS)

You probably haven’t heard of Elizebeth Smith Friedman, an American whose work cracking codes by hand helped win the Second World War.

Writer Jason Fagone has penned a book about her, and he shared some of what he uncovered about the mysterious heroine on Twitter.

The code breaker was born in 1892 to Quakers in Indiana, and was more into Shakespeare than maths when she was young, graduating from college with an English literature degree.

According to Fagone she began to teach herself to break codes at 23 before quickly becoming one of the greatest cryptographers in America, and probably the first female.

Fagone said he first heard about the little known code breaker on a library website.

Unfortunately, she’s often better known as the wife of one of the first cryptographers at the National Security Agency (NSA), William Friedman.

Fagone was given access to a library archive containing 22 boxes of papers about her.

He read her personal letters and code breaking efforts, many of which were done by hand.

Some of her love letters to her husband had also been written in code.

Between the wars, she used her code breaking skills to break up drug rings, summed up in one newspaper with the sub-heading “solved by woman”.

After the 1920s, there was a gap in the notes and Fagone initially struggled to find what she did during the Second World War.

After two years of looking through wartime archives, he came across a reference to “spy stuff”.

During the war she hunted Nazis, intercepting thousands of messages they were sending from south America via radio to Germany, and also working with British interceptors.

This was invaluable to the FBI, who didn’t have the skills to do this alone.

She never got any credit though, which Fagone puts down to J Edgar Hoover, the then-director of the FBI, who took it all in a “publicity blitz” after the war.

Jason Fagone’s book, The Woman Who Smashed Codes, is out now.

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