The Codebreaker honors Quaker woman who helped bring down Nazi spy ring

The 2016 film Hidden Figures brought the forgotten Black women who worked at NASA during the Apollo program into the national spotlight. Now PBS is doing the same for Elizebeth Smith Friedman, a Quaker poet who helped pioneer the field of cryptography with her husband, William Friedman, in a new documentary for the American Experience series. The Codebreaker is based on the 2017 book The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies by San Francisco Chronicle journalist Jason Fagone. Per the official premise:

The Codebreaker reveals the fascinating story of Elizebeth Smith Friedman, the groundbreaking cryptanalyst whose painstaking work to decode thousands of messages for the U.S. government would send infamous gangsters to prison in the 1920s and bring down a massive, near-invisible Nazi spy ring in WWII. Her remarkable contributions would come to light decades after her death, when secret government files were unsealed. But together with her husband, the legendary cryptologist William Friedman, Elizebeth helped develop the methods that led to the creation of the powerful new science of cryptology and laid the foundation for modern codebreaking today.

Director Chana Gazit told Ars she was drawn to the story for a variety of reasons, including the fact that it has taken so long for Elizebeth Smith Friedman’s vital contributions to come to light. “If we missed Elizebeth, who contributed so much in the first half of the 20th century to the safety of this country, who else are we missing?” she said. “It just felt good to be able to portray a brilliant woman with ambition, who wanted a bigger life, who was able to overcome so many obstacles, but also had a rounded life that included the personal as well as the professional.”

To learn more about this extraordinary woman, Ars sat down with Fagone, upon whose book the documentary is based.