Review: The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies

The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies by Jason Fagone
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I found “The Woman Who Smashed Codes” to be very entertaining. My enjoyment keyed off of two topics, local history and the discussion of codebreaking. Roughly the first third of the book introduces a true character in history, Colonel Fabyan, and his compound in Geneva, Illinois. I have lived less than 10 miles from what’s left of his compound for more than 20 years and had never heard this story, and it was quite unexpected given the area. Fabyan had his own kind of “Wonderland Ranch”, with diapered monkeys walking the grounds, visitors including Presidents, three miles of trenches dug for soldier training, and a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Those grounds were used for different kinds of research, including what began as an investigation into the belief that Shakespeare was an invention of Francis Bacon but later became a hotbed of cypher codebreaking. The descriptions of Fabyan’s Riverbank Labs and the combination of odd and historically significant happenings there will ensure I visit the compound, now partly a park.

The main topic of the book was the life of the Friedmans, a husband and wife team hired by Fabyan as researchers, who later used the knowledge they gained searching for cyphers in Shakespeare to become world renown code breakers. The Friedmans leave Fabyan’s compound about a third of the way into the book, and head off to Washington, working the rest of their careers for the military, the FBI, the Coast Guard, and others. Given the secret nature of their jobs, their work paths didn’t often cross. This enabled each of them to independently drive cryptography and code-breaking as a science, and in use. Their working life included code-breaking during both World Wars as well dealing with organized crime. The sadness of their later life is also described. The biography aspects of this book were well done, and a big part of what made these subjects interesting was the sheer variety of work that they did. They were unique and ground-breaking, involved in the most interesting events of interesting times. True science heros.

The author also included short and simple descriptions of the different kinds of codes that the Friedmans were working on throughout their lives, culminating in the breaking of the German Enigma code machine. This was done in easy-to-understand language, which was a pleasant surprise given the complexities in the concepts. It never felt like a math class, although there is a whiff of statistics…

This is the second book by Fagone I have read. He is on my short list of non-fiction authors to watch for upcoming books. Well done.

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