Code Name Purple

The thrilling true story of the unlikely American codebreakers who cracked Japan’s top cipher machine, eavesdropped on Hitler, and helped win World War II.

In 1937, Japanese engineers invented Purple, a cipher machine capable of scrambling a message more than 500 quadrillion ways. It encrypted many of the Axis powers’ deepest secrets, including crucial conversations with Hitler and his inner circle. Because the machine was so advanced, Japanese leaders believed it was perfectly secure.

In 1940, a scrappy team of American codebreakers in Washington DC proved them wrong.

Sweeping from the Great Depression through to the final victories of World War II, Code Name Purple tells the riveting story of the outsiders who broke Purple. Mostly civilians, they came from all across America. Many were women, Jewish, or disabled. Working in shabby rooms on a shoestring budget, they accomplished one of the greatest codebreaking feats of all time. Their work helped defeat the Axis powers, including the Nazi regime that considered so many of them subhuman.

Drawing on thousands of pages of interviews, personal papers, and recently declassified documents, award-winning historian Amy Butler Greenfield brings these outsized characters to life. They include William Friedman, an enigmatic genius who risked his sanity on Purple; John Hurt, a language whiz who worked from a bed in a secret vault; Genevieve Grotjan, a shy mathematician who made a brilliant breakthrough; Frank Rowlett, Friedman’s assistant turned rival; and Leo Rosen, a young engineer who braved the journey to Britain’s Bletchley Park, where a secret Purple-Enigma exchange supercharged Allied codebreaking.

This enthralling narrative history captures not only the team’s work, but their lives—their parties, arguments, anguish, friendships, romances, and courage in peace and war. Set in an era when no one knew if people could keep up with machines, Code Name Purple is a powerful story of challenge, resilience, and what it means to be human.