Ann’s grave has been dug parallel to the grave of Gertrude Kirtland. They will rest side by side. In the funeral notice placed in the Washington Post by Ann’s family, Gert, who predeceased her, is described as Ann Caracristi’s “longtime companion.” This meaningful phrase came as a bit of a surprise to some in the national security community, who thought Ann and Gert were simply single ladies living together as dear friends. Her family never knew what the nature of the relationship was, and never felt they could ask: She was a peerless secret-keeper in every way. But it was a decades-long committed partnership. During the service, the minister talks about how Ann will be able to join Gert in eternity. Their relationship is worth remarking upon only because, for much of the postwar Cold War era, for a man working in intelligence or national security to be living in any kind of committed domestic relationship with a person of the same sex was a career deal breaker. In England, Alan Turing was persecuted until he poisoned himself. In the United States, NSA employees, like those at other federal agencies, for many years would be obliged to resign if they were found to be homosexual. There were purges.
In an interview before her death, I asked Ann Caracristi whether the postwar private lives of women working in the clandestine mail-reading business perhaps did not receive quite the same scrutiny men’s did. She agreed that this was likely the case. Being allowed a bit more latitude in one’s personal life seems to have been a rare instance in which being female was a career advantage after the war. It could be that women didn’t matter quite as much as men did. It could be that people didn’t care what women did in private. It could be that women working in intelligence were thought of as “honey traps,” capable of using their sex to lure a man into betraying his country, rather than as complicated human beings with quiet but rich interior lives.
After the war, Ann and Gert stayed good friends with Elizebeth and William Friedman, whose own relationship with the NSA did not end well. William Friedman felt the postwar NSA was going too far with secrecy and overclassification, and the NSA felt he had brought some papers home that he should not have, and there was a bitter rupture. There is now an NSA auditorium named after him, however. All has been forgiven. The Friedmans devoted their own retirement to driving a stake through the heart of the theory that Francis Bacon wrote the plays of William Shakespeare.
A number of women code breakers who distinguished themselves during World War II also went on to high posts at the NSA, which is the federal agency responsible for monitoring enemy communications and protecting those of the United States. Ann Caracristi at one point worked for Carrie Berry, a former Texas schoolteacher who became the first woman sent to Cheltenham, England, to serve as NSA liaison with the British. Ann’s good friend Wilma Berryman—later Wilma Davis—worked on the Chinese problem.
The tenor of the place was different after the war. The Army and Navy operations merged, and eventually the whole operation relocated to Maryland. But wartime affinities lingered, and so did wartime grievances. Polly Budenbach, a Smith College graduate who helped Frank Raven break the Japanese naval attaché cipher, stayed on, and after the war she had a funny run-in with Agnes Driscoll. She had never met the legendary Miss Aggie in person, but one day she saw the great lady approaching down a hallway. Even at her advanced age Agnes Driscoll was capable of taking names and holding grudges. Though they had never been introduced, she must have known that Budenbach’s mentor was Raven, the very man who did Miss Aggie in. As they passed each other in the hallway, neither woman spoke, but Agnes Driscoll did let out an unmistakable hiss.
A few other women stayed on and rose high. Within the NSA, many of the early “supergrades”—the top civil service rating—were female. Among these was Bryn Mawr’s Julia Ward, who built Arlington Hall’s library and information service. Also prominent was Juanita Morris, the young woman who left her North Carolina college and found herself deposited in the eccentric German section. During the war, Morris—later Juanita Moody—had played a leading role in solving a difficult German diplomatic code considered so hopeless that she had been forbidden to work on it. After the war, she found herself manning the desk responsible for breaking Cuban messages. People considered Cuba a little bit of a backwater. That notion was disproved during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
For some of the wartime women who stayed on, friendship took the place of a nuclear family. In the very early days of 1943, an ex-schoolteacher named Gene Grabeel had been seated at a table and presented with some Soviet intercepts. Gene, a graduate of Mars Hill, a two-year college in North Carolina, and Farmville State Teachers College in Virginia, had been unhappily teaching home economics to eighth graders when she was recruited by Frank Rowlett, who knew her from childhood. At her little table, Gene Grabeel was given a jumble of Soviet messages and told to see what she could make of them. The Russians were allies and Arlington Hall was not supposed to be reading their mail. But the climate was such that the Russians were not communicating their intentions. Would Russia come into the war against Japan? Would they pull out of the war against Germany and negotiate a separate peace? The intent of the top-top secret effort was to quietly look for Soviet diplomatic messages that might tell what the Russians had in mind.
But what Arlington Hall had—Gene Grabeel perceived—were messages in a number of different systems. These included communications from the KGB and GRU—the foreign and military intelligence services—containing the names of Americans and other Allies who spied for Russia during the war. The messages were enciphered using a “one-time pad,” a kind of additive book in which additives were rarely reused. Each page was to be used only once, so as to make it impossible for a code breaker to accumulate depth. But as Soviet factories were moved to the Ural Mountains during the German advance on Moscow, it became impossible to produce new pads and a few were reused. A few was all it took.