Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

by Liza Mundy

Codes have been around for as long as civilization, maybe longer. Virtually as soon as humans developed the ability to speak and write, somebody somewhere felt the desire to say something to somebody else that could not be understood by others.

The point of a coded message is to engage in intimate, often urgent communication with another person and to exclude others from reading or listening in. It is a system designed to enable communication and to prevent it.

Some WACs got assignments that were challenging and important, but in a much less painful way. In May 1945, two WACs working at the Vint Hill intercept station—their last names were Regan and Solek—were assigned to test Arlington Hall security by seeing if they could penetrate the code-breaking compound and steal classified information. The two resourceful women were put up at a nearby hotel and told to apply for a job. They did not know anything about the layout, nor how the system worked. They came to the front gate wearing civilian clothes, said they wished to apply for work, and were admitted and given visitors’ badges. They acquainted themselves with the compound, went to the PX and started chatting, learned what badges gave entry into certain buildings, altered their visitors’ badges accordingly, stole more badges from some coats lying around, and proceeded to wander around taking classified documents from desks and drawers. They turned in everything to an intelligence officer at the end of the day. The next day they did exactly the same thing. Nobody reported the badges or documents missing. The escapade found its way into the Washington Post, which noted the breach in a gossip item headlined SECRET WAR DOCUMENTS PROVE ABOUT AS HARD TO GET AS A COLD.

But once they became bona fide civil servants, the women—and men—proceeded to do what civil servants have done from time immemorial: complain.

they discovered what workplaces are and have been since the dawn of time: places where one is annoyed and thwarted and underpaid and interrupted and underappreciated.

people with “high strung temperaments” and “overwrought imaginations.” (It is hard not to read these phrases as synonyms for “women.”)