“Well, I’ll find the money and send it to you,” her mother told her, and that was that.
Idaho Hall was a two-story building composed of prefabricated-looking squares and rectangles, containing single and double rooms, door after door lining long corridors. There were ten dorms in all, each housing about seven hundred women. Idaho Hall had a lobby and lounges where occupants could play bridge, dance, drink tea, or sit with the soldiers and sailors who were always coming to visit. (“I am not running an old maids’ home,” said the head of the place, William J. Bissell, defending the rather easy fraternization that went on.) There was a recreation room and a shop selling cosmetics and sundries, and a mail desk where women could collect letters from a vast warren of mailboxes. Women were everywhere—some of them young, about Dot’s age, but some of them older, maybe as old as thirty or even forty. Dot found her way to Room I-106 and opened the door to find a tiny single furnished room with a bed, a desk, a mirror, an ashtray, two pillows, a chair, a wastebasket, and a window. Down the hall were a communal bathroom and showers, with sinks where residents could wash their clothes and their hair. Women were allowed to lounge in bathrobes or in bras and panties. Laundry had to be hung inside, not outdoors, so Arlington Farms would not look like a tenement. There were ironing boards, and a kitchenette on every floor. Murals by Works Progress Administration (WPA) artists adorned the walls, to inspire the women and prettify what was essentially a barracks. As she made her way down the hall, Dot could see that some occupants had put up curtains. She noticed quite a bit of flowered chintz.
That night was the first Dot had ever spent among strangers. In the morning she walked to a bus stop and waited with other young women who were clutching purses and wearing hats and shirtwaist dresses. The bus to Arlington Hall was unmarked, with no destination sign. Back at the fenced-in compound, Dot found herself again in a crowd of women, some of whom she recognized from the day before. None had any idea why they were here. Confusion reigned. As they milled about waiting for instructions, Dot chatted with a woman named Liz, who was from Durham, North Carolina, and who seemed a bit older than she was.
“I’m going to stick with you,” Liz said. “You look like you know what you’re doing.”
Dot had to laugh, hearing that. She had been in Washington for twenty-four hours and still felt as confused as she had when she arrived. She was photographed from the front and the side holding a sign that said DOROTHY V. BRADEN and the number 7521. The photo was affixed to a badge, and the badge permitted entrance to certain parts of the compound. During several days of orientation, she received strict lectures about the need for absolute secrecy around the work she would be doing. She visited rooms and workspaces where the activity gave her an inkling of what “cryptography” entailed—and it entailed quite a bit. She went back to her single room each night with the dawning awareness that as bizarre and unlikely as it might sound, she, Dot Braden, ex-schoolteacher, graduate of Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, had been hired to break enemy codes.
Dot was to spend the bulk of her time in Building B, a low two-story building built on sloping land behind the main schoolhouse. Like the dorm where she was staying, her new workplace was designed in a functional style that might be called “temporary wartime Washington.” From above, Building B, like its nearby counterpart Building A, looked like a giant comb. A horizontal passageway at the rear formed the central body, with a dozen or so slim “wings” jutting out perpendicular to the body, forming the teeth. Inside, each wing had an aisle down the middle, and rooms branching out to either side.
Those rooms were crammed with people—almost all women—working with graph paper, cards, pencils, and sheets of paper. Some sat at desks, but most were working at tables. Dot had never seen so many women side by side, not even during exam time in the library at Randolph-Macon. No one person seemed to be in charge, and yet the women at the tables seemed to know what they were doing. They sat focused and intent. Some tables were piled with stacks of cards and papers. Others had thin strips of paper hung from lines, like drying pasta. Lined up against walls were boxes and file cabinets. The cabinets were wooden, metal ones having been sacrificed to the war effort. Big six-foot fans stood at the crosswalks where corridors intersected. The fans made so much noise and blew so much paper that people argued constantly over where they should be directed. It was not as quiet as a library, not as noisy as, say, a cafeteria; instead, there was a sort of constant low murmur.
It took Dot several days to learn her way around. At first, much of the complex looked alike, but she soon came to see that there were distinctions between what was going on in many of the spaces. The operation also included rooms where women worked at machines—tabulating machines, punch-card machines, strange sorts of typewriters. There were small machines, huge machines, noisy machines, machines hooked up to other machines through thick nests of cables. Dot didn’t know this, but she had found her way into the largest clandestine message center in the world.
Everywhere women were attacking enemy messages pouring in via airmail, cable, and teletype. The messages originated in Nazi Germany, Japan, Italy, occupied Vichy France, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, even neutral countries like Switzerland, sent between top political leaders and military commanders. At the Allied listening stations where the messages were secretly intercepted, American operators further encrypted them using their own encoding machines. Once they got to Arlington Hall, the messages had to be stripped of the American encryption before they could be stripped of the underlying enemy encryption.
The whole thing was insanely complex.