She caught gangsters and organized-crime kingpins during Prohibition. But she turned out to be a genius at solving these very difficult puzzles, and her solutions changed the 20th century. She taught herself how to solve secret messages without knowing the key. A hundred years ago, a young woman in her early twenties became one of the greatest codebreakers America had ever seen. Introduce us to this remarkable woman-and explain what drew you to her. (Go inside the daring mission that stopped a Nazi atomic bomb.) Elizebeth Friedman is probably not a name familiar to most of our readers. Edgar Hoover rewrote history to sideline her achievements, and how the cryptology methods that she and her husband, William Friedman, developed became the foundation for the work of the National Security Agency (NSA). When National Geographic caught up with Fagone by phone, he explained how Friedman, like Alan Turing, broke the Enigma codes to expose a notorious Nazi spy, how J. Jason Fagone rescues this extraordinary woman’s life and work from oblivion in his new book, The Woman Who Smashed Codes.
