'The Woman Who Smashed Codes' taught her biographer cryptology after her death

Journalist Jason Fagon, when he set out to write a biography of the extraordinary Elizebeth Friedman, America's chief codebreaker during World War II, had an obstacle to overcome that most biographers don't face: He had to learn cryptology, the art and science of secret writing.

Fortunately, Fagon had a good teacher: Elizebeth Friedman herself.

Friedman had been dead for more than two decades when Fagon began his research -- she died in 1980 -- but she had left much of her work in papers given to the George C. Marshall Research Library in Lexington, Virginia.

Fagon started by reading about cryptology and trying to get an idea of how it happened. He admitted in an interview with Fortune magazine that he didn't feel he had gotten very far.

But then this lucky thing happened, and I discovered a codebreaking manual written by Elizebeth herself, left behind in her personal archive. It’s an unpublished manuscript of a book she wrote for young adults, explaining how to break common types of codes and ciphers with a pencil and paper, in this very clear and encouraging and witty style. The spirit of the book is like: You can do it! Jump in! Have fun! It’s a game! Don’t be afraid! And it was perfect for me, as an amateur. That’s how I learned the basics of cryptanalysis, by reading Elizebeth’s own book and stepping through some of the example problems that she laid out. Elizebeth Smith Friedman: 'The Woman Who Smashed Codes'

Besides his willingness to dig into cryptology, Fagon had another advantage as a biographer: he had a spectacular and important subject that few people knew anything about. Friedman's life defies a short description.

She stumbled into cryptology after being asked by an eccentric millionaire to help prove that Sir Francis Bacon had written the plays of William Shakespeare. (He didn't, according to a book she and her husband wrote many years later.) This job led her to her working for the government during Prohibition, breaking codes of smugglers and testifying against them in court.

When World War II broke out for America in 1941, she became America's chief cryptanalyst, breaking Nazi and Japanese codes and helping the FBI track down Nazi spies throughout North and South America. Because her work was often classified and because she was a woman, and a modest one at that,  FBI director J. Edgar Hoover never gave her the credit she deserved for her work.

Fagon's book, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies, published in 2017, has helped to correct that injustice. The book has become a best-seller and was named as a National Public Radio Best Book of the Year. Stuart Smith's biography, A Life in Code: Pioneer Cryptanalyst Elizebeth Smith Friedman, is available at WorldCat at this link.

 

Timothy Webster: The Pinkerton Who Paid the Full Price

Of all the agents that spymaster Allan Pinkerton ran during the Civil War, Timothy Webster was the most effective and the one who paid the highest price. 

An English-born detective who had worked for Pinkerton since the 1850s, Webster infiltrated Confederate networks in Maryland and Virginia with a skill and audacity that produced some of the most valuable intelligence of the early war years. He was caught in early 1862 and hanged in Richmond in April of that year — the first American executed as a spy since the Revolution.

Webster’s cover story was that of a Southern sympathizer, and he played it so convincingly that he was welcomed into Confederate social and political circles in Baltimore and Richmond. He was betrayed by two other Pinkerton agents who had been captured and, under pressure, identified him. Confederate authorities arrested him in March 1862 at his hotel in Richmond, where he was bedridden with acute rheumatism — so ill that he had to be carried to his trial and to the scaffold.

He was tried within days of his arrest and condemned to death. His execution on April 29, 1862, was attended by a large crowd and badly botched — the rope was improperly set and Webster had to be hanged twice. He died, by contemporary accounts, with composure. He was forty-five years old.

Pinkerton was devastated by Webster’s death and never quite forgave himself for the exposure that had led to his capture. Webster received little official recognition — the intelligence he provided had no formal government sponsor, and his death occurred at a moment when the Union’s attention was focused elsewhere. 

His name is not widely known. It deserves to be.

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The Nathan Tower Espionage Series

About the Series

In the years after the Civil War, the United States had no real intelligence service — and Commander Nathan Tower built one anyway.

Operating out of a modest post at the Office of Naval Intelligence, Tower assembles a network of operatives who work in the shadows of Gilded Age Washington, Europe, and the Americas: gathering secrets, running operations no one will officially acknowledge, and defending American interests against rivals who have been playing this game far longer. Tower himself rarely takes the field. He orchestrates — recruiting, training, and deploying operatives whose skills he understands better than they do themselves.

The Nathan Tower Espionage Series is historical spy fiction grounded in real events, real institutions, and real historical figures of the 1860s–1880s. Each book stands on its own — new readers can start anywhere — but longtime readers will find a network of characters, relationships, and consequences that deepens across the series.

The series can be read in any order, but for readers who want the full arc, the suggested order is below: the prequel novellas first, then the main sequence of novels, with the short story collection filling in the gaps between them.

READ MORE ABOUT THE SERIES HERE 

New from the I'm No Expert, But series: Bletchley Park.

You've probably seen a movie about this. Here's what the movie left out: the Polish mathematicians who broke Enigma first, the Americans who showed up with a codebreaking machine of their own, and the wartime intelligence-sharing agreement that quietly became the alliance the modern world still runs on.

Seven things that surprised me most, plus a bonus chapter on the computer nobody credits as the first one — because it stayed classified for thirty years.

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HDMLR471

Allan Pinkerton: The Detective Who Helped Define American Intelligence

In January 1861, a Scottish immigrant named Allan Pinkerton learned of a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln during his inaugural journey to Washington. Pinkerton had been hired to investigate threats to a Baltimore railroad, but the intelligence he gathered pointed toward something far more dangerous. He rerouted Lincoln’s travel, moved the president-elect through Baltimore in the middle of the night under an assumed name, and delivered him safely to Washington. It was, in miniature, what would become the practice of American intelligence.

Pinkerton had come to the United States from Glasgow in 1842, fleeing Scotland after his involvement in Chartist political activities. He settled in Illinois, became a deputy sheriff, and in 1850 founded the Pinkerton National Detective Agency with the motto “We Never Sleep.” His early cases involved railroad theft, counterfeiting, and the kind of interstate crime that local police forces were structurally unable to handle.