Dr. Sarah Valentine

speaker

102 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 27 Jul

Dr. Sarah Valentine’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Science Friday · The Black women codebreakers of the Cold War · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

So I came across the story kind of by accident.

I was looking at a website and it turned out to be NSA's website.

And there was a little history section about this group.

It was called Invisible Cryptologists.

And it discussed these black cryptologists.

code-breaking specialists who learned Russian and were part of this top secret project on Soviet nuclear intelligence.

And I thought, I need to know more about this.

And this was, you know, over 10 years ago, but I never found anything.

So eventually I decided to write the book myself.

Yes.

My Ph.D.

is in Russian literature and I taught Russian literature and Soviet history for a long time.

I also happen to be a black woman.

So when I came upon this subject, I just thought this is this is really fascinating.

So the traffic processing division was in the basement, a warehouse-like space in one of the operations buildings on Arlington Hall's secret campus near Washington, D.C.

And it was very noisy.

It was very densely packed.

There were over 100 people working in this space.

And

They had a white manager who was part of the military, and it was segregated.

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