The Forgotten Code Breakers: Part One

Today, the field of cybersecurity is becoming ever more critical as hackers find increasingly sophisticated ways to break into networks and steal both information and money. Attacks are increasing year upon year, and the financial costs for businesses and organizations have also risen accordingly. Despite this, there is a massive skills gap when it comes to cybersecurity professionals. In particular, there are far fewer women in the industry than there are men, and attracting and retaining them has proved a problem in recent years. And yet, it will surprise many that women were at the forefront of a profession that was a forerunner to today’s cybersecurity – cryptology. Just before and during World War II, women in both the US and Great Britain became experts at code breaking – cracking encrypted enemy messages. Sadly, many of these women were soon forgotten after hostilities ceased, or else the credit for their successes was given to their male colleagues. This, and the following three articles, are dedicated to telling the stories of these women.

One of the first of these pioneering women was Agnes Meyer Driscoll. She was born in 1889 in Illinois, and at college, as well as majoring in mathematics and physics, also found a great aptitude for languages, statistics, and music.¹ In 1918, she enlisted in the United States Navy – one of the first women to do so. Unless you were a nurse, as a woman, you still could not go to sea, so Agnes was restricted to a desk job. Nevertheless, she entered as a Chief Yeoman (F), which was the highest rank achievable for a woman at the time (F stood for female) and, to begin with, worked in the Postal and Cable Censorship Office.² After a while, she was transferred to the Code and Signal Section of the Director of Naval Communications, where she worked on the development of codes and ciphers for use by the Navy.³

At the end of the war, she received an offer to continue her work for the Navy as a civilian, which she happily accepted. She was still working in this role in 1920 when she was invited to study at Riverbank Laboratory in Geneva, Illinois, founded by the somewhat eccentric George Fabyan. Fabyan was a wealthy textile merchant whose work with various military departments later earned him the honorary title of colonel. He became interested in codes and ciphers, not just for decoding enemy communications for the military, but also in trying to prove that Sir Francis Bacon was really the author of the works of Shakespeare. He was convinced that the works held several secret messages by Bacon, and hired a team of experts in cryptography. ⁴

Agnes was part of this team, as were William and Elizebeth Friedman, also later to be known for their expertise in code-breaking. Shortly afterward, she also worked for five months at Herbert O. Yardley’s Cipher Bureau – also called the ‘Black Chamber’, where she may have learned about Japanese cipher systems.⁵ During this time, surprisingly, the US Navy did not possess its own communications intelligence unit; work to protect its dispatches was being done by individuals. One of these was Agnes who, in 1921, working with Lieutenant Commander William Gresham, the head of the Code and Signal Section, developed a cryptographic machine. This ‘Communications Machine’ soon became the standard device for coding messages and was used throughout the 1920s.⁶

The next few years saw Agnes take a break from the Navy when she went to work for an inventor named Edward Hebern. He was attempting to develop a rotor cryptographic machine with better security than anything yet in existence. He hired Agnes to help him, but the device turned out to be a dud, and she returned to work for the Navy. She came back to a newly created ‘Research Desk’ (renamed later as OP-20-G)- a cryptanalytic unit within her old department concentrating on Japanese communications. Working with its commander, Lieutenant Laurance Safford, one of her first successes was the breaking of the Japanese Navy’s manual codebook – also known as the Red Code Book.⁷

When the Japanese navy went on maneuvers in 1930, OP-20-G used their new-found knowledge to discover that Japan had surprisingly good intelligence about the US Navy’s plans for future operations. Agnes was key to the deciphering of Japan’s communications, breaking them every time, despite the cipher being changed and a different key used every day. By December of that year, Japan changed to a new code called the Blue Book. Even though this cipher was far more challenging than that of the Red Book, Agnes was still able to decrypt it with the help of an IBM ‘tabulating machine.’

Although she was highly skilled in the cryptanalysis of manual codes, by 1935 she was tackling ciphers produced by one of Japan’s early encrypting machines, known as M-1, or Orange. Having worked on the similar Hebern machine, Agnes was familiar with its working and, still using a manual system of decryption, soon managed to crack it.⁸ In solving the Orange cipher, not only did she uncover Japanese military secrets, but she  also exposed two American spies who had covertly been passing intelligence to the Japanese. ⁹

The year 1937 saw her seriously injured in a car crash, which required more than a year of convalescence. Even though her injuries never completely healed, she returned to work as soon as she could, and by 1939 was working on the latest Japanese general-purpose fleet code, also known as JN-25. The new cipher was the most complicated yet: it ‘involved three separate codebooks, a 300-page book of random additives, and an instruction book.’ ¹⁰ By 1940, although Agnes had made significant progress, she was moved off the project and instead tasked with leading a team working on German naval systems and focusing in particular on the Enigma machine. At this point, her star began to wane, as cracking the German codes seemed to be beyond her abilities. It did not help that she resisted using both machine support and a mathematical approach. Always one to be suspicious of working with outside units, she also refused help from British code breakers at Bletchley Park, who had traveled especially to the US to provide assistance.¹¹

In 1943, Agnes was moved again and was back working on the new Japanese attaché machine known as Coral. Although Coral’s code was broken in 1944, it seems that she had minimal influence on the outcome. Over the following years until her retirement in 1959, she appears to have been involved in working on other ciphers but never again achieved the successes for which she had become famed. Nor did she receive the recognition of promotion to senior ranks.¹² Agnes Meyer Driscoll, one of the first and most successful female code breakers of her time, died in 1971 and was buried in Arlington cemetery. At the time, there was no official obituary by either the Navy or the NSA, whom she worked for in her later years. It wasn’t until 2000 that she was finally inducted into the NSA’s Hall of Honor.

1. Agnes Meyer Driscoll, National Security Agency, accessed at https://web.archive.org/web/20080726113217/http://www.nsa.gov/women/women00021.cfm
2. ‘Cryptologic Almanac 50th Anniversary Series’, archived from the original (PDF) on 18 September 2013 and accessed at https://web.archive.org/web/20130918015635/http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/crypto_almanac_50th/Madame_X_Agnes_Meyer_Driscoll.pdf
3. Ibid.
4. ‘Riverbank Laboratories,’ archived from the original web page of the City of Geneva, Illinois, accessed at https://web.archive.org/web/20090727114137/http://www.geneva.il.us/riverbnk/riverpag.htm
5. ‘Cryptologic Almanac 50th Anniversary Series’, archived from the original (PDF) on 18 September 2013 and accessed at https://web.archive.org/web/20130918015635/http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/crypto_almanac_50th/Madame_X_Agnes_Meyer_Driscoll.pdf
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Robert Hanyok, ‘Agnes Meyer Driscoll,’ Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed at https://www.britannica.com/biography/Agnes-Meyer-Driscoll
10.  ‘Cryptologic Almanac 50th Anniversary Series’, archived from the original (PDF) on 18 September 2013 and accessed at https://web.archive.org/web/20130918015635/http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/crypto_almanac_50th/Madame_X_Agnes_Meyer_Driscoll.pdf
11. Robert Hanyok, ‘Agnes Meyer Driscoll,’ Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed at https://www.britannica.com/biography/Agnes-Meyer-Driscoll
12. Ibid.

Saya Cyber Awareness Editor

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