Your Great Aunt Might Have Been a Codebreaker During the Cold War
The Venona Project and the many women behind it
Hi friends! Happy Wednesday! Who else feels like a new person after basking in the sun like a tiny turtle on a log all weekend? I did a call-out on my Instagram for women people would like to see covered in upcoming newsletters. My friend Lauren suggested female spies, so this one’s for you, Lauren!
Venona Project
The Venona Project represents yet another example in history of women doing the work and the men at the top getting the credit. Venona was a counterintelligence project through the U.S. Army that broke codes during and after WWII. Because the war was almost half over by the time they started up, most of their focus was on the Cold War and deciphering messages to the Soviet Union. It was classified until 1995 which is probably why you haven’t heard of it. Don’t worry, it’s still ripe for someone to win an Oscar by playing a codebreaker. My money’s on Florence Pugh or Anya Taylor-Joy. But enough about the basics, let’s get into the women behind this project.
First things first, this project was initiated (in part) by… you guessed it, a woman! Gene Grabeel was a cryptanalyst and mathematician working at the Signal Intelligence Service. Prior to that, she was bored out of her mind working as a home economics teacher in Lynchburg, VA. The Army was looking for females to fill spots as most of the men they would normally employ were off fighting in WWII. Gene went up to DC basically knowing nothing about the job, she and her father thought she would be a paper pusher, and after two months was founding the Venona Project under the orders of Colonel Carter Clarke. Not bad for a twenty-something former home ec teacher.
Grabeel worked with several other women including Angeline Nanni, Mary Joe Dunning, Gloria Forbes, Mildred Hayes, Carrie Berry, Joan Malone Callahan, Jo Miller Deafenbaugh to break several significant ciphers during The Cold War. Most had been former teachers and the salary of $1,800 was almost double what they made teaching.
Angeline Nanni had grown up with a knack for numbers. She kept the accounting ledger at her dad’s grocery store when she was only 12. When she graduated high school, she enrolled in beauty school because employment pickings were very slim for women in the 1940s. But, thankfully, she was a beauty school dropout (without the pink hair disaster). She and her sisters moved to DC in 1945 to help with the war effort and she responded to the vague Army job advertisement just like Grabeel. After solving the math problem application test with ease, she was officially part of the Venona Project.
The Venona Project, and the women behind it, are responsible for several big breaks for U.S. intelligence including finding the Soviet spies who were embedded in the Manhattan Project as well as the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case. It was incredibly difficult work as the Soviets prided themselves on having unbreakable codes. But Venona was highly classified. So classified it’s reported that President Truman didn’t even know of its existence. This led to a lot of the women never marrying or having kids because they were so committed to maintaining the secrecy of the project. And even after the project was declassified, many took the secret of their participation to their grave. Grabeel’s great-nephew said all her nephews and nieces had very elaborate theories about her past life.
Of course, when the project was finally declassified in 1995, the public face of the project was a man. And I’m not saying that man wasn’t important but the women doing the actual codebreaking were just as important and should also be recognized! It’s pretty amazing that a group of (mostly) unmarried and childless women were responsible for helping bring down the Soviet Union. I wonder what Phyllis Schlafly would have to say about that? I like to think her ghost-hate reads my newsletter and this edition has her rolling in her fiery grave.
There’s so much more to learn about these amazing women that I can’t cover here. If you want to learn more about them, the Smithsonian article I used for this newsletter was authored by Liza Mundy who also wrote Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II. There is a book specifically about the Venona Project, but it only features the two men at the head of the project. Tomato, tomato, tomato, throwing tomatoes!
Until next week, my friends!
Citations
“The Women Code Breakers Who Unmasked Soviet Spies” Smithsonian Magazine
“Brilliant Codebreakers Exposed Soviet Spies – and Launched the McCarthy Era” Daily Beast
“Women’s History Month: Gene Grabeel and the Venona Project” Code Platoon
“Venona Project” Wikipedia