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

In 1916, with the United States watching the First World War, Elizebeth Smith, a young expert on Shakespeare, takes a job on a tycoon's estate outside Chicago. The tycoon has close ties to the U.S. government, and he asks her to turn her skill with language to codebreaking. On the estate she meets William Friedman, a cryptologist who becomes her husband.

This is narrative non-fiction, a biography of Elizebeth that follows her across about forty years. After the war she works against gangsters and smugglers during Prohibition. She then takes a covert assignment to find and expose Nazi spy rings operating in South America and drawing closer to the United States.

During World War II she fights a classified contest of wits with Hitler's Reich and cracks several versions of the Enigma machine used by German spies. In Washington, William works inside an Army vault to break Purple, the Japanese counterpart of Enigma. He succeeds, and the effort costs him dearly in his private life.

Jason Fagone uses her life as the path through the early history of American codebreaking, with a cast of colorful figures who shaped modern intelligence. The pace is brisk and the detail is rich. It suits readers of popular history who like spycraft, wartime secrecy and the people behind them.