Book Review: Code Warriors

Code Warriors by Stephen Budiansky is about the history of the NSA and covers aspects of code usage and code breaking.  I listened to the audiobook version over about 2 weeks.  The book focuses on, firstly, a lot of details about codes and ciphers and covers the WW II era in quite a lot of detail including recounting the famous deciphering of messages encrypted by the German Enigma code machines.  It discusses how through some mathematics, you can create systems that are practically unbreakable through brute force methods on conventional computers or even computers that might have 10 or 1000-fold improvements over current technology.  There is a lot of discussion in the later part of the book regarding bugs and other methods that have been employed and documented in the 50's, 60's and 70's to be able to get information without having to resort to breaking the code (clear text intercepts, either prior to encryption by the sender or after decryption at the destination).
The book was fascinating because of the shear amount of detail as well as the reconstruction of some well known events in history, for example the Cuban missile crisis, with a commentary of how the state of the art encryption and code breaking played a part to inform the decision makers of salient details that were not known publicly.  However, I found that in some places the progress in the narrative became excruciatingly slow simply because of the long descriptions of the fine details of the innards of various coding and decoding machines.
The author uses the technique of trying to make history interesting through narrating events through the eyes of whomever seems to have had the most interesting character that was involved in the incident.  And I think it gets overused since it started to feel like the book was a biography at a few points rather than about encryption and code breaking.
The opening describes Edward Snowden's flight with lots of information to Russia from the NSA.  At the very end, there is a little bit of a loop back to this incident.  The author tries to describe why the NSA was doing some of the things it was doing and also does elaborate how these activities are anathema to democracy.  However, we don't really get to a clear picture of the philosophical conflict between privacy and security that the revelations of the sweeping NSA surveillance programs that were brought to light by Snowden.  At best, it is framed as privacy vs. bureaucracy with a caveat that the political leaders should have the personal moral integrity not to use the spy agencies for personal or political advantage wherein Nixon and his enemies list is provided as a case study.
As such, it is difficult for me to strongly recommend the book unless you happen to have a great interest in both 20th century history and the theories that underpin codes and ciphers.  If only one of the two topics interest you, it'd tell you to read it, but be prepared to skim over some parts that might be out of scope for you.