Elizabeth Smith Friedman (1892-1980) is often referred to as America’s first female cryptanalyst. She began her work at Riverbank Labs attempting to prove that Shakespeare’s work was actually written by Sir Francis Bacon, where she met her husband, William F. Friedman. During World War I, the owner of Riverbank Labs created a Department of Ciphers, in which Friedman and her husband worked, and offered their services to the government as two of only three or four cryptologists in the nation. Many government departments asked for their help and sent employees there for cryptanalysis training. In 1921, the Friedman’s went to work for the War Department. In 1922, during Prohibition, the Coast Guard hired Mrs. Friedman to decipher messages to intercept international alcohol and drug smuggling schemes. In 1931, her proposal for a decryption team was approved and she was put in charge of the first and only code-breaking team in America to be run by a woman. The analysts she compiled and trained quickly became the best radio intelligence team in the nation. She also testified as an expert witness in 33 cases, gaining international fame for her work. This included a case against Al Capone, in which she famously explained cryptanalysis to the jury on a blackboard. See National Archives and Records Administration at pages 140-174. She was further asked by the Canadian government for help in one of their drug cases and was able to crack a Chinese cipher, without having knowledge of the language. At the beginning of World War II, Mrs. Friedman and her team were transferred to the Navy and became the primary US codebreakers and source of intelligence. They solved multiple cipher systems used by the Germans, including three different Enigma machines. Throughout the war, her team ultimately decoded an estimated 4,000 messages from 48 different radio circuits. After WWII, Mrs. Friedman became a consultant to the International Monetary Fund, creating communications security systems for them based on the one time pad ciphers. The impact Mrs. Friedman’s work had on the information security field is invaluable. She was recognized as an NSA Hall of Honor Inductee in 1999 and a Women in American Cryptology Honoree. The NSA also dedicated their OPS1 building as the William and Elizebeth Friedman Building.
Ruth Wilson was an American linguist and cryptologist. She joined the American Black Chamber, the first peacetime cryptologic service, in 1918 as a Spanish linguist. She decoded multiple Spanish codes that had been used in Central and South America. She also studied Japanese during her time there and was a Japanese linguist when the Black Chamber closed in 1929, which contributed to her being the highest paid employee other than the head of the organization. She continued studying languages and international affairs at Columbia University, earning a degree in Far Eastern Affairs in 1947.
Agnes Meyer Driscoll (1889-1971) was a pioneer in American cryptology, serving as a cryptanalyst in both World Wars, which earned her the title as the First Lady of Naval Cryptology. In 1918, Ms. Driscoll joined the United States Navy, where she was eventually assigned to the Code and Signal section under the Director of Naval Communications. Within a few days in the department, she had co-developed one of the US Navy’s first cipher machines, the Communications Machine. After World War I, she decided to continue working in this department as a civilian. In 1920, she also began working at the American Black Chamber (sometimes known as the Cipher Chamber and a precursor to the US National Security Agency), which was America’s first peacetime code-breaking and deciphering agency designed to decode diplomatic messages. Ms. Driscoll helped break the Japanese Navy Manual Codes, the Red Book Code in 1926 and the Blue Book Code in 1930. In 1935, she also spearheaded the attack on the Japanese M-1 cipher machine (also known as the ORANGE Machine), which had been used to encrypt Japanese messages. While still working on Japanese issues, she made critical advances in the work on the JN-25 (the Japanese operational code used for the most important messages) and successfully solved the cipher part of the “5-num” system (this used number groups as substitutes for words and numbers and was encrypted with a digital cipher). She was then transferred to a different group that was working to decode the German Enigma ciphers early in World War II. Ms. Driscoll then joined the Armed Forces Security Agency (later the National Security Agency). Throughout her career, she mentored many male Navy Officers in cryptanalysis. Agnes Meyer Driscoll laid the groundwork for future cryptanalysis in America. She was inducted into the NSA's Hall of Honor in 2000 and was named a Women in American Cryptology Honoree.
Amy Elizabeth Thorpe (1910-1963) was an Anglo-American spy, codenamed Cynthia. She began her work with the British Security Coordination, which was established during World War II in 1940 in New York City by the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). She went on to work for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency). She seduced high-level foreign diplomats to gain information. She successfully obtained intelligence on the German Enigma machines and the Black Chamber in Poland, the cipher books of fascist Italy, and stole the Vichy French naval codes from a locked safe within an embassy. Between 1931-1939, she passed along information she gathered from high-ranking foreign diplomats and politically active Nazi sympathizers and passed the information along to the Secret Intelligence Service. She also wrote anti-Nazi articles for local newspapers in Chile. After she began working with BSC, she was instructed to persuade two prominent US senators to support Lend-Lease legislation and was successful with one of them, who voted in favor of Lend-Lease and it was adopted. In 1941, she was able to get the Italian codebook from an Italian cipher clerk while posing as a reporter. In 1942, while posing as pro-VIchy journalist, she was able to get the Vichy press attache on her side, befriend a guard at the embassy, and steal the Vichy cipher books, which enabled the OSS to decipher the Vichy Navy’s communications.
Mary "Polly" Hughes Budenbach (1914-2005) was a cryptanalyst with the Navy during WWII, where she focused on Japanese naval cryptosystems. After the war she began working for the US National Security Agency (NSA), where she became a senior cryptologist and administrator, working on computerizing analytical tasks in cryptology. She also chaired a committee for the promotion and assignment for women at the agency. At the height of her career, she was considered one of the foremost technical authorities in the US government and was one of the first women with a super-grade rank (the highest ranking and highest paid position for civilian service at the time). Mrs. Budenbach received the Navy's Meritorious Civilian Service Award in 1945, the Federal Woman's Award in 1969, and the NSA's Exceptional Civilian Service Award in 1975. She was additionally posthumously inducted into the NSA's Hall of Honor in 2017.
Wilma Z. Davis (1912-2001) was a leading American codebreaker and cryptologist during World War II and the Vietnam War. She began her work in the Army’s SIgnal Intelligence Service (a predecessor of the US National Security Agency) in the 1930s. She worked on various international issues, from decoding Italian diplomatic codes, to deciphering Japanese messages during World War II, quickly becoming the head of the department solving the Japanese Army code messages. She then worked on Chinese and Russian issues and eventually worked on the Venona Project, deciphering Soviet messages. She took a break from her work at the NSA to have children, and then returned to work on codebreaking during the Vietnam War until her retirement in 1973. She is often remembered as a Founding Mother of cryptology.
Mary Louise Prather (1913-1996) was an American cryptologist. She joined the Signal Intelligence Service as a civilian stenographer in 1938, ultimately becoming the Chief of the Stenographic Division. She intercepted coded messages and distributed the decoded messages. In her work, she identified a connection with two Japanese messages, which enabled the Signal Intelligence Service to develop a decryption key for the Japanese code, allowing for the decryption of encrypted Japanese messages in 1940. In 1969, she received a Commendation for Meritorious Civilian Service for her work.
Virginia D. Aderholt was an American cryptographer. She worked as a codebreaker with the US Army intelligence services as the head of one of the language units. In 1945, the Army intercepted a Japanese message to Switzerland. Ms. Aderholt was tasked with decoding and translating this message. After deciphering the message, she became the first American to learn that Japan was intending to surrender and World War II would soon be over.
Genevieve Grotjan Feinstein (1913-2006) was hired by WIlliam Friedman in 1939 as a junior cryptanalyst for the Army’s Signals Intelligence Agency. For months, she worked with other codebreakers to decode the Japanese Type B Cipher Machine, code-named Purple, and was instrumental in decoding the cipher, as she realized there was a cyclical pattern in the code in 1940. Her team was then able to build their own machine that allowed them to intercept most of the messages to and from the Japanese government and its diplomats. She was later assigned to work on the Venona project where she worked to decode encrypted messages from the Soviet KGB. She made a major breakthrough in 1944, allowing American codebreakers to identify when a one time pad cipher was reused by the Soviets. These invaluable discoveries continued to enable valuable communications exploitation, which provided valuable intelligence to policymakers and which was used by senior government officials throughout World War II and the Cold War. Mrs. Feinstein worked with the Army Signals Intelligence Service until 1947. She was awarded the Exceptional Civilian Service Award in 1946 for her war-time work. She was also recognized as an NSA Hall of Honor Inductee in 2010 and Women in American Cryptology Honoree.
Katharine Swift was a highly respected American linguist and cryptologist. She worked for the US National Security Agency (NSA) and its predecessor at the Army for 30 years. She joined the organization in 1942 to contribute to the war effort. She began with weather codes, but quickly began working in codebreaking, decoding many ciphers throughout her career. She received the NSA Exceptional Civilian Service Award and then retired in 1972. She is also well-known for her manual, Standards and Techniques of Code Reconstruction. After retirement, she continued to teach code reconstruction at the National Cryptologic School.
Louise Persall (1920-2010) joined the Navy in 1942 as a member of the first class of Women Accepted for Volunteer Service. She attended a specialized training camp, where she studied physics, Morse code, and radio operation, but she was unable to graduate because of an audio dyslexia. She was then sent to work on the Enigma project in Washington, DC instead of being a radio operator. There, she worked to test Enigma key settings, eventually breaking U-boat and Luftwaffe codes. In 1943, she was then relocated to Sugar Camp in Dayton, Ohio. There, she worked with a team to create using bombe machines to speed up the decoding process for Enigma ciphers. She became an officer in the Navy and continued to work in cryptanalysis until the war ended in 1945. Later in life, she took a position with IBM.
Ann Z. Caracristi (1921-2016) was a pioneer in American cryptanalysis. In June of 1942, she was hired by the Army’s cryptologic organization as an assistant cryptologic specialist. Her team deciphered messages of Japan’s plan to surrender at the end of World War II in 1945. She went on to work for the US National Security Agency (NSA) where she pioneered the use of early computers and mechanized processing for cryptanalysts. While there, she established both a laboratory to study new means of communication and the infrastructure needed to efficiently train the many employees entering the NSA at the time. She also helped design the agency’s career development program and served as the Chief of Research and operations. In 1975, Ms. Caracristi was the first woman to be promoted to the GS18 rank, the highest ranking and highest paid position for civilian employees at the time. In 1980, she became the first female deputy director of the NSA. She also received the Department of Defense Distinguished Civilian Service Award that year, which is the DoD’s highest civilian honor. Ms. Caracristi retired in 1982, but continued to serve on the NSA’s Scientific Advisory Board, the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel, and President Clinton’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. In her career, Ms. Caracristi actively engaged in and influenced national policy-making for cryptology and the Intelligence Community.
Barbara Clark (1922-2003) served in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II and then joined the Armed Forces Security Agency (predecessor of the US National Security Agency) as a Special Research Analyst. In this position, and with foreign language capabilities, she conducted research and made reports on various international issues. She was later promoted to division chief in the Operations organization. Mrs. Clark remained active at the NSA until her death in 2003.
Marie Meyer (1897-1969) was an American linguist. Ms. Meyer began working for the National Security Agency in 1943, and is thought to have been a German linguist, as she knew and studied many languages. After taking a correspondence course in Russian, she was put on the Venona project to decode Soviet diplomatic and espionage communications. She made some of the first recoveries of the Venona codebook. She later developed and taught several Russian language classes at the NSA training school. When she retired in 1960, she was the first person - male or female - to receive the NSA’s Meritorious Civilian Service Award.
Juanita Moody was an American cryptographer and intelligence analyst. She began working with the Signal Security Agency in 1943 and stayed on at the end of the war. As the head of the group responsible for Signals Intelligence in the region, she went on to supervise the National Security Agency’s (NSA) day-to-day response to the Cuban Missile Crisis, frequently briefing high-level military and civilian leaders. She additionally broke a German one time pad cipher. In the years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, she revolutionized Signal Intelligence reporting and initiated an NSA presence in the White House Situation Room. She was the first recipient - male or female - of the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement, presented by then-Director of Central Intelligence, George Bush. In 2003, she was inducted into the NSA Hall of Honor and is a Women in American Cryptology Honoree.
Velva Klaessy joined the World War II cryptology effort in 1944. She continued to work in cryptology in the Armed Forces Security Agency and later the US National Security Agency (NSA). She worked with the Technical Consultants group for years, which was a group of some of the Agency’s most talented cryptographers who assisted other analysts with their most difficult issues. She notably spent time in the Far East training military personnel, which was unheard of at the time for female NSA employees. She also went on another temporary assignment in the United Kingdom while working with the group. In 1958, she was became a member of a three-member team called the Advanced Weaponry and Astronautics Research Division. She then became the Deputy Chief of the New and Unidentified Signals Division and then became the Chief of the division in 1964. In 1967 she became the Deputy and then the Senior (in 1970) United States Liaison Officer in Ottawa, Canada. In this position, she represented the US Intelligence Board and NSA in all signals intelligence and communication security matters with various Canadian agencies. Holding this position made her the first woman to hold a senior liaison officer post anywhere in the world.
Dorothy Toplitzky Blum (1924-1980) was a pioneer in the fields of cryptanalysis and computer science. She began her cryptologist career at the Army Security Agency in 1944. After World War II, she began her career at the US National Security Agency (NSA). Mrs. Blum significantly changed how the NSA addressed cryptanalysis, specifically the use of computers to manipulate and automatically process data. In 1972, she was appointed as chief of the Computer Operations Organization, C7, as the only woman in the organization at the time. During her time at the NSA, she wrote computer software for the agency and pioneered efforts to have NSA employees write cryptanalytic programs. In the years leading up to her death, she served as the Chief of the Requirements and Plans office of the Telecommunications and Computer Services Organization. The NSA later created the Dorothy T Blum Award for excellence in employee personal and professional development in her name. In 2004, she was inducted into the NSA Hall of Honor. She was later also named one of the 100 most outstanding women in the Federal government.
Minnie McNeal Kenny (1929-2005) began working at the Army Security Agency (predecessor to the National Security Agency) in 1951. She worked her way up from a communications clerk to a member of the Senior Executive Service by the time she retired. Throughout her career, she served as the Deputy Chief of the Office of Techniques and Standards as the chief of language and linguistics, the Deputy Assistant Director for Education and Training, where she oversaw the day-to-day operations of the National Cryptologic School, and the Assistant Deputy Director for Administration. Mrs. Kenny advocated for every cryptanalyst to have a personal computer and introduced various computer-assisted teaching techniques, founding the Computer Assisted Learning and Instruction Consortium at the National Cryptologic School. She additionally represented the Department of Defense (DoD) on the Congressional Task Force on Women, Minorities, and the Handicapped in Science and Technology. At the end of her career, she served as the NSA Director for Equal Employment Opportunity. Mrs. Kenny received several awards, including the President’s Citation from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, the Don Quixote Award from the National Hispanic University, the Doctorate of Humane Letters from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. The NSA also recognized her professional contributions by awarding her both the Meritorious and the Exceptional Civilian Service Awards and inducting her into the Hall of Honor in 2009. She was also recognized by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. for the Meritorious Executive Award and by the Director of Central Intelligence for the Intelligence Community’s Distinguished Service Award.
Dr. Sarah "Sally" Botsai worked in Operations at the US National Security Agency (NSA) for twelve years. She was then selected for a tour as the NSA representative in the White House Situation Room, being the first NSA woman to do so. After this tour, Dr. Botsai was asked to stay on as the Deputy Director of the White House Situation Room. She was additionally the first NSA woman to attend and graduate from the National War College. Dr. Botsai received the Meritorious Civilian Service Award in 1976 and the Director's Distinguished Service Medal in 1998.
Barbara McNamara (1941-) is an American linguist and cryptologist. Ms. McNamara joined the US National Security Agency (NSA) in 1963 as a Chinese linguist. Throughout her career, she served as the Chief of Staff to the Deputy Director of Operations, the Office Chief for a country analysis office, Chief of the Office of International Economics and Global Issues, and was then named the NSA representative to the Department of Defense (DoD). In 1994, she became the first woman to be named the Deputy Director of Operations. In 1997, she became only the second woman to be named the Deputy Director of the NSA. Shortly before her retirement in 2003, she served as the NSA’s Senior United States Liaison in London, England. Ms. McNamara received the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal in 2000 and was inducted into the NSA Hall of Honor in 2020.
Julia Wetzel is an American cryptologist. Ms. Wetzel began her cryptologic career at the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) Operations organization as a Special Research Analyst. She later served in the Legislative Affairs Office in the late 1970s and worked with the House Select Committee on Intelligence. She went on to serve as NSA’s representative to the State Department. Following this position, Ms. Wetzel received the Presidential-conferred rank of Meritorious Executive. She then served as the Chief of a major operational analysis group as the Soviet Union collapsed and led the agency through this realignment. In the 1990s she served as the Commandant of the National Cryptologic School. Ms. Wetzel was the Executive Director of the NSA, the third highest-ranking position at the agency, at the time of her retirement in 1999.
Toby Merriken was an American cryptanalyst, computer scientist, and linguist. She began working at the National Security Agency (NSA) in 1966, beginning in the Cryptanalysis Intern Program. In 1970, she joined a new branch working with computer science in cryptanalytic applications where she wrote computer programs on FORTRAN. In 1974, she left that branch to go back to cryptanalyst and later became a linguist.
Renetta Predmore-Lynch worked for the US National Security Agency (NSA) for several years. In 1972, she was passed over for a promotion, which she felt was solely because she was a woman. She filed a formal complaint with the NSA’s Equal Employment Opportunity Office (EEOO). The NSA”s EEOO launched an investigation into the situation and found that the NSA had been excluding women from their promotion boards. However, the NSA did not make any changes after this finding, as the Director at the time disagreed with the decision. In September 1973, the Board of Appeals and Review reviewed the case and found that the EEOO investigation was correct - that Mrs. Predmore-Lynch was discriminated against and that the promotion procedures were discriminatory against women. In 1976, the US DIstrict Court also found this procedure to be discriminatory and ruled that the NSA must include at least one woman on every promotion board. From her commitment to this issue, she paved the way for women working at the NSA to have fair promotion hearings.
Maureen Baginski (1953-) was the Signals Intelligence Director at the US National Security Agency (NSA) and was critical to the NSA's response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In 2003, Ms. Baginski left her position at the NSA to become the Executive Assistant Director of Intelligence at the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), where she successfully led the agency's first-ever intelligence program. Under this program, she adapted the agency's intelligence capabilities with information technologies. She also created an intelligence-sharing platform to help identify and address potential terrorist attacks. Ms. Baginski has received several awards for her work, including two Presidential Rank Awards, two Director of Central Intelligence National Achievement Medals, the Director of Military Intelligence’s Leadership Award, NSA’s Exceptional Civilian Service Award, and the FBI Intelligence Analysts Association Award.
Dr. Anita Jones (1942-) is an American computer scientist. From 1993-1997, she served as the Director of Defense Research and Engineering under the US Department of Defense (DoD), where she managed the science and technology program. She oversaw the Defense Advanced Research Projects and all of the DoD laboratories, in addition to serving as the principal advisor to the Secretary of Defense for any defense-related scientific and technical matters. It was the highest technical job ever held by a woman at the time. Dr. Jones has received multiple awards, including the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award from the Association of Women in Computing in 2004, the Computing Research Association's Service Award, the Air Force Meritorious Civilian Service Award, the Department of Defense Award for Distinguished Public Service, the IEEE founders medal, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)’s 2012 Phillip Hauge Abelson award. The U.S. Navy has additionally named a seamount in the North Pacific Ocean (51° 25’ N and 159° 10’ W) for her.
Rebecca Bace (1955-2017) created the Computer Misuse and Anomaly Detection (CAMD) research program at the US National Security Agency (NSA). In 1989, Mrs. Bace took an assignment with the National Computer Science Center, which was chartered under the NSA to address the Department of Defense's and Intelligence Community's computer security issues. She was the program manager for the intrusion detection research and is known for creating the Distributive Intrusion Detection System (DIDS), which proved that trace back and capture were possible. She later received the NSA Distinguished Leadership Award. Mrs. Bace is now known as the "den mother of computer security" for the impact she had and the mentorship she offered for other professionals in the field.
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