Dr. Sarah Valentine

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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 the operation was upstairs-downstairs.

So the white analysts and the people doing the higher-level code-breaking work, they were upstairs.

And the traffic processing unit, with its loud machine noises, they were in the basement pulling out this data for the analysts to work on further.

What they were doing was analyzing Soviet telecommunications that were intercepted.

So we had a link to a Soviet telegraph line, and that data just came streaming into our listening station at NSA.

And there was no time to translate, so the women, it was mostly women, there were some men who were doing this too, but they had to read the encoded telegraph strips

which were in Cyrillic, and find keywords.

They were like the manual Google of their time.

They were looking for any words that related to the Russian military, anything scientific, anything that would indicate where the nuclear research was happening.

And they went through millions of these communications a week.

Exactly.

And it was considered grunt work because they had to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, looking for needles in haystacks.

Because maybe 1% or 10% of all of the messages they scanned had good intelligence in them, but they still had to go through every single one.

They were recruited and it was kind of word of mouth.

So some of the women I profile in my book, they had friends who worked at the agency and maybe they worked in another area of government because many of the

middle-class Black folks in Washington, D.C.

worked for the federal government in this era, the 1940s and 50s.

It was one of the best kinds of jobs with benefits, with retirement, which in many parts of the country, Black people weren't allowed to get in their jobs.

So federal government was kind of a good job to have.

Yes, the agency trained everyone they hired.

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