Elizebeth Friedman Broke Nazi Codes

The first female cryptanalyst in the United States was Elizebeth Smith Friedman, a self-taught codebreaker who cracked hundreds of ciphers for the government. During World War II, her Coast Guard team monitored Nazi agents reporting Allied ship movements from South America and, by December 1942, had broken three Enigma systems and exposed a network led by SS officer Johannes Siegfried Becker. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover later presented the operation as an FBI triumph without crediting Friedman, who was bound by a secrecy oath and died in 1980 without publicly correcting the record. Her role remained largely hidden until the government declassified the relevant files in 2008.

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