The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

The author James Bamford relied partly on William’s collection to piece together his 1981 book, The Puzzle Palace, the first popular history of the NSA, whose publication the agency tried and failed to stop. The NSA sent representatives to the library twice, in 1979 and 1983, each time removing an unknown number of William’s items, but the Friedmans had done such a careful job of indexing that a sharp-eyed professor at Virginia Military Institute, Rose Mary Sheldon, noticed that about 200 of the 3,002 index cards were missing. Sheldon submitted a series of Freedom of Information Act requests that eventually prodded the NSA to release 7,000 additional Friedman documents. In the last two decades the agency has gotten more comfortable telling its history—today it holds public cryptologic history conferences and operates a museum—but it took a while, and in the meantime, the Friedmans had created this alternate archive, beyond U.S. government control, where anyone could learn about U.S. codebreaking.