January 2016
On a bright day in January 2016—sunny and chilly, but not too punishingly cold—a discreet line of sedans, SUVs, and pickup trucks files into a cemetery in the northern Virginia foothills. It’s not an undisclosed location, or not exactly. Just an obscure one, about seventy miles outside of Washington. The cars pull into a grassy parking area and people get out: men wearing dark suits and overcoats, ties fluttering in the wind, younger people helping elderly ones. The bundled-up mourners are wearing hats and gloves, picking their way across the soft ground to sit in folding chairs set up in rows under an awning. The group consists of family, neighbors, well-wishers, and eminent members of the U.S. intelligence and national security community. They have come to pay their respects to the woman who rose to become the first female deputy director of the National Security Agency, the federal entity the wartime code breakers begat.
In the crowd are men who worked for Ann Caracristi—many found her intimidating; she had this mesmerizing thing she could do, flipping a pencil between her fingers and never dropping it—and younger women who found her example inspiring. Ann, who died at ninety-four, maintained her razor-sharp intellect till the end, reading The New Yorker and watching the news on CNN, surrounded by stacks of books on subjects from Shakespeare to Kierkegaard. And she kept her sense of humor. When her tall caregiver would enter Ann’s tiny Georgetown home, Ann, confined in her final days to a cot in her sunny first-floor kitchen, would laugh every time the caregiver had to stoop to get through an interior doorway.
Ann Caracristi, once the twenty-three-year-old head of the Japanese Army address research section at Arlington Hall, did more than just return to Arlington Hall after the war. She worked on some of the toughest code-breaking challenges the Cold War era brought with it. After her brief foray into the newspaper business, Ann was assigned to the “Soviet problem,” a multifaceted effort. Her first assignment was working ciphers about Soviet weapon systems. The project was terminated after its existence was revealed to the Russians by a spy. She would move on to the East German problem. It was difficult and serious work at a difficult and serious time.
During her career Ann Caracristi rose through the ranks to become a senior member of the NSA brain trust. She received honors including the National Security Medal and the Distinguished Civilian Service Award, the Department of Defense’s highest civilian honor. When she went to the White House to receive an award from President Ronald Reagan, she asked her friend Gert’s nephew to accompany her, without once revealing how important the award was. Her public recognition was unusual: Most of the women who served during and after the war received no recognition, at least no public one. True, of course, of most of the men as well.
During a visiting session at a Georgetown funeral home, snapshots on display included one of Ann Caracristi looking wonderfully glamorous, wearing a white evening gown and a fur stole. She had come a long way from the bobby-soxer who washed her hair with laundry soap. During her career she was seen as fair and smart and tough. She was what one man who knew her described as a “magnificent bureaucrat,” meaning that she knew how to move a federal bureaucracy and get results. She worked with top military men and was respected by all of them. She did not like mistakes but she knew that mistakes happened. In the workplace, she did not display the easy humor she did at home. “She’s not a smiley person,” said Jo Palumbo Fannon, the young high school graduate who swore in Arlington Hall newcomers and made a career in the personnel operation afterward, and who liked her. Hugh Erskine, a younger relative of the wartime Erskines who moved en masse from Ohio, spent a summer between high school and college sorting messages, long after the war was over—the same job Ann had held when she started. He found her “a little scary.”
You would never know any of this to talk to her in her home. During five interviews I conducted with her before her death, Ann Caracristi was good-humored and never condescending, as she explained her long-ago work on the Japanese address codes. “It sounds so dumb,” she said, self-deprecatingly: the idea that sussing out such a thing as addresses could be helpful.
Ann spent most of her postwar life in the same little red house on a side street in Georgetown, so small it looked like a hobbit must live there. She dwelled in quiet companionship with Gertrude Kirtland, who left government work to become a published author of children’s books.
At the cemetery, the minister begins to talk about Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, which Ann—northerner though she was—came to love and know well. These are the same mountains that Ann Caracristi, Wilma Berryman, and Gertrude Kirtland used to visit for those rare respites during the war, driving Wilma’s car, for restorative breaks. Ann and Gert bought a weekend house not far from Mount Weather, the bunkered facility where the government would relocate in the event of a national disaster such as a nuclear attack. For NSA coworkers, to be invited to spend a quiet weekend in the hills with Ann and Gert was a treat and an honor. People always said yes.