Agnes Meyer Driscoll
Madame X. First lady of American naval cryptology, vanquisher of Japanese ciphers.
Author of the motto: Any man-made code can be broken by a woman.
Without her, there would have been no American victory over the Japanese in World War II in the field of cryptology. She was born on 24 July 1899 in Geneseo, Illinois. From the very beginning of her career, she displayed outstanding talent while simultaneously developing her skills in music, linguistics and the sciences. She graduated from The Ohio State University, specialising in mathematics and physics, while becoming fluent in German, French, Japanese and Latin.
In 1918, she joined the US Navy, in the cipher and communications section. Due to her knowledge of many languages and her skills in statistics, she was involved in creating secret transmissions and testing new cipher machines. Her unprecedented achievement was the cracking of the Japanese ciphers from the so-called Red and Blue Book naval codes and others used by the Japanese Navy during the inter-war period.
By flawlessly intercepting and deciphering messages, the Americans knew the positions, speed of movement and resources of enemy armies.
During the Second World War, Agnes Driscoll was involved in training the next generation of American cryptanalysts. This included Joe Rochefort and Edwin Layton, who were famous for correctly identified Midway Atoll as the next target for a Japanese invasion. This information – and the success of the Americans in the Battle of Midway – completely changed the face of the war in the Pacific.
Agnes Driscoll’s (nicknamed Miss Aggie or Madame X by her colleagues) achievements in cryptanalysis, and the knowledge passed on to subsequent US
naval specialists, influenced the course and shortened the duration of the Second World War.
She died in 1971. In 2000, her name was placed in the National Security Agency’s Hall of Honour, confirming her unquestioned status as the first lady of naval cryptology.
