The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

William Friedman, has become a revered figure to intelligence historians. He is called “the world’s greatest cryptologist” by the eminent chronicler of secret writing David Kahn: “Singlehandedly,” Kahn writes, “he made his country preeminent in his field.” William Friedman is also widely considered to be the father of the National Security Agency, the part of the U.S. government that intercepts foreign communications and sifts them for information—“signals intelligence.” He wrote the definitive textbooks that trained generations of NSA analysts who are still working today.

It’s not quite true that history is written by the winners. It’s written by the best publicists on the winning team.

A code is a fixed relationship between one set of symbols or ideas and another. It can be a very ordinary and everyday

cipher is a rule for altering the letters in a message.

cryptogram is a catchall term for a string of garbled text, solution unknown. It can be generated by a code or a cipher.

community, a person who had not only invented many of its tools but also built a successful organization