Cryptologic Quarterly, #40

Cryptologic Quarterly #40, 2021-01
Images used for educational purposes only.

Cover: “Executive orders have addressed national security classification for decades. Top, President Harry Truman in the Oval Office in 1949, displaying the National Security Act Amendments of 1949, which he has just signed. Two years later, he signed Executive Order 10290, which established standards for classification of information related to US security. (National Archives and Records Administration 200169, Abbie Rowe photographer.) Bottom, President Barack Obama signing an executive order in the Oval Office in 2009, the year he signed Executive Order 13526, “Classified National Security Information.” (Official White House photo by Pete Souza.)”

In This Issue… Plus: A Milestone in Women’s History
… by Nancy Welker
Researching Code Girls: Lessons from the Women Codebreakers of World War II
… by Liza Mundy
Evelyn Akeley: Training Army Codebreakers During World War II
… by David Sherman
Pulling Back the Curtain: NSA’s 50-Year Path to Transparency
… by Sarah Parsons
Book Review | On-the-Roof Gang: The Intercept Operators Who Made Naval Intelligence History
… by Jessica Garrett-Harsch.
Where Did They Come From? Why Classification Advisory Officers Are Unique to NSA
… by Patrick Bomgardner

In This Issue… Plus: A Milestone in Women’s History
Recognizing the 100th anniversary of women being given the right to vote in the U.S., and introducing the articles in this issue that highlight the achievements of women in cryptology. The primary article is a transcript of a presentation made by Liza Mundy to “NSA information management professionals.”

Researching Code Girls: Lessons from the Women Codebreakers of World War II
Liza Mundy is the author of the 2017 book Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II The main emphasis of her talk was to thank the information researchers in the room for their help in finding the still-living members of the Code Girls group, or their surviving family members, arranging interviews, and locating archive files verifying the stories those women told. I haven’t read the book yet, but it’s on my to-get list. I expect that it’s more riveting than Liza’s presentation.

The problem is that while Liza wants to bring the stories of the Code Girls to light for the American public, she reveals her complete lack of understanding of cryptology, and she spends more time talking about her trials and tribulations, and not knowing if she should believe anything these women were telling her, than she does in relating what actually came out from the interviews.

(But the photos are good)

One of her interviewees was Ann Caracristi, which could have resulted in a complete book right there. Anyway, the Code Girls talked about their work on Purple, the Japanese Water Transport Code and the 5-digit Japanese Naval Code, among other topics. A lot of the work was assembly-line like, and some was just looking for indicators or stripping off superencipherments. Overall, the transcript is ok if you’ve already read the book and want to see behind the scenes as to how Liza tracked down her subjects and did the research work, but her skepticism over what they told her, and her surprise at being able to confirm their claims, to me gets old fast.

Evelyn Akeley: Training Army Codebreakers During World War II
In general, David Sherman isn’t a bad historian. I’m not sure if he’s great at it, but the articles I’ve read by him haven’t been bad. This time though, the result isn’t wonderful. David apparently wasn’t able to interview Evelyn herself, or anyone that knew her personally. He spends a lot of time writing things like “this is probably the kind of office setting she occupied,” or “this is the kind of scenery she might have seen going to the classroom.” It’s very speculative and not particularly informative.

(Evelyn)

Born Evelyn Niemann in Manhattan on August 24, 1907, she moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1924 to attend Smith Women’s College, where she “majored in mathematics; was president of the Mathematics Club; and was a member of the society for physics, her second field of study. She played in the Smith orchestra’s first violin section, sang in the glee club and choir, was captain of Smith’s soccer squad, and played on its baseball team.”

Evelyn joined Skidmore College in 1931 as a math instructor, and to teach physics. In 1935, she married Edward Stowe Akeley, “professor of theoretical physics at Indiana’s Purdue University.” In 1937, “Edward held a fellowship in the theory of relativity at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Among the faculty of the Institute’s School of Mathematics during Edward’s semester there was Albert Einstein. Also in residence were John von Neumann and Oswald Veblen, who developed one of the first digital computers, ENIAC.” At some point before 1939, Evelyn divorced Edward, but retained Akeley as her last name.

After the Pearl Harbor attack on Dec. 7, 1941, Evelyn met with recruiters from the Signal Corps, was granted a leave from Skidmore in May, 1942, and began working with army sergeant Stanley Kretlow in teaching the cryptology courses (with Stanley grading the assignments the students turned in). Evelyn had the math background but apparently hadn’t read any of William Friedman’s books before starting work at George Washington University. She was the instructor Ann Caracristi had said was in the same classes, only one month ahead of Ann’s group.

Note that initially, there weren’t enough instructors, and copies of Friedman’s textbooks were mailed to students for correspondence courses. “Two students at Yale who took [the correspondence course] were William Bundy, who would become assistant secretary at both the State and Defense Departments during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and William Kunstler, who later headed the American Civil Liberties Union and defended members of antiwar and civil rights groups during the 1960s and 1970s.” Kretlow was the one that evaluated the assignments the students mailed back.

Akeley and the classes moved to Arlington Hall in August 1942, where she was unofficially named Director of Training (unofficial because of Army regulations) of the SIS Training School. SIS was renamed the Signal Security Agency in 1943. That summer, the influx of students was ebbing, and she was reassigned to Operations. However, “Solomon Kullback asked her to assist five other Arlington Hall women—Mildred Lowrance, Olivia Fulghum, Alice Beardwood, Elizabeth Hudson, and Juanita Schroeder—in designing a course for all recruits earmarked for the Japanese Army Code Section, a course that was still in use two years later as the end of the war approached.”

Sherman’s details on Evelyn’s activities start thinning out even more at this point. She gets into codebreaking activities, and in “June 1944, she was working in the research element of Arlington Hall’s effort against Japanese Army codes, its largest component, as its deputy under Dr. C. R. Cassity. This element studied new cryptographic systems as they were introduced by the Japanese.” One of her tasks was breaking the discriminants (code system indicators) used by the Japanese Army, and she also helped analyze the Green machine the Japanese Army developed but hadn’t put into operation before the end of the War.

After the War, Evelyn stayed with Arlington Hall as a cryptanalyst, and “was promoted to Grade 13 in January 1953, by which time the wartime Signal Security Agency had become NSA, and as of early 1955 she was the sixth most senior woman at that grade.” She retired in 1958, moved to Florida, began playing golf and going on ocean cruises. “She renewed her interest in music, playing cello and violin and studying viola at Rollins College. She also sang in local choral groups. She moved to Sarasota and in 1973 toured Eastern Europe with the Florida West Coast Symphony as a violist.” Evelyn passed away on March 28, 1998, at the age of 90.

[Note: Page 51, footnote 36 says “Drafted into the army in the summer of 1941, William Bundy was assigned to the Signal Corps school, where he first studied and later taught cryptanalysis.”]

Pulling Back the Curtain: NSA’s 50-Year Path to Transparency
Looking at the long, torturous path NSA took towards declassifying its papers and records to make them available to the public, in part as a way of dispelling its reputation as a black-ops organization. Includes a good photo of Frank Rowlett showing a SIGABA to NSA Director Vice Admiral Bobby Ray Inman and NSA Deputy Director Ann Caracristi.

On-the-Roof Gang: The Intercept Operators Who Made Naval Intelligence History, by Matt Zullo (2020)
Book review by Jessica Garrett-Harsch, who identifies it as a “heavily-researched historical novel.” The characters are real, but most of the dialog is manufactured. The main character is Chief Radioman Harry “Pappy” Kidder, “a young radio electrician, Morse code expert, and ham radio enthusiast was stationed in Los Baños, Philippines, with the US Navy”, set in 1921. “The cast of characters at OPS-20-G is a who’s who of early naval intelligence: Laurance Safford, Agnes Driscoll, Joseph Rochefort, and eventually Kidder.”

Kidder was the one selected to set up intercept training classes for the Navy. The Navy building in downtown D.C. was so crowded, the only space available was on the roof, hence the name. Jessica liked the book, which is vol. 1 of a 2-book set.

Where Did They Come From? Why Classification Advisory Officers Are Unique to NSA
Administrative history which may only appeal to a very small category of readers.