The Black women codebreakers of the Cold War
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Hey, it's Flora Lichtman and you're listening to Science Friday. During the early Cold War era, the United States Army and later the NSA began recruiting and training codebreakers and intelligence officers to decipher intercepted Soviet messages. Among those recruits were a group of highly skilled black women who were employed as cryptologists to decode these messages. But until now, their role in Cold War intelligence operations has largely been overlooked. My next guest, Dr. Sarah Valentine, digs into this history in her new book, Decoding the Devil, Black Women Codebreakers and the Secret War Against Stalin's Bomb. Sarah, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. How did you come across this story?
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.
And you, this is sort of a topic near and dear to your heart, right? Because you have a background in Russian language.
Yeah.
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.
Take us into the so-called traffic processing division where these black women codebreakers were working.
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. 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.
Millions. I mean, this is big data before big data.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And it was considered grunt work because they had to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, looking for needles in haystacks.
How were Black women recruited and discovered as Cold War codebreakers?
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.
How did these Black women find themselves working there? Were they recruited?
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.
Mm-hmm. I mean, did these women come in with specialized knowledge?
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