Joseph Wenger also spent his career in the highest echelons of the intelligence world. “One of the first naval officers to realize the role of communications intelligence,” he was a U.S. Naval Academy graduate who would rise to become a rear admiral—and along the way would transform the way the Navy thought about and implemented cryptologic operations, becoming “one of the architects of centralized cryptology.” In the Pacific Theater of World War II, he found that the close study of Japan’s “message externals,” or seemingly trivial details ranging from call signs to communication habits, could
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