Agnes Meyer Driscoll

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Agnes Meyer Driscoll

Agnes May Meyer Driscoll (born  July 24, 1889 in Geneseo, Illinois , USA; †  September 16, 1971 ) was an American cryptanalyst .

Life

Agnes May Meyer was born in 1889 in the American town of Geneseo , located in Henry County , a county in the US state of Illinois in the United States . From 1907 to 1909 she attended Otterbein College in the city of Columbus in the US state of Ohio , then Ohio State University . She studied mathematics , statistics , physics , music as well as the foreign languages German , French , Latin and Japanese , where she obtained the academic degree of Bachelor of Arts (AB) in 1911 . In 1914 she was appointed head of the mathematics department at Amarillo High School in the Texas city ​​of Amarillo .

In June 1918 a little over a year after the United States the more the German Empire declared war and thus into the First World War had occurred, Agnes Meyer joined the US Navy ( US Navy in). After a short time she reached the then highest possible for a woman rank of a " chief yeoman (F) " (chief administrative officer, additional F for female , so female ). Their work was the cryptanalysis that it is within the Department of codes and signals ( " Code and Signal section of Naval Intelligence Force (" ") Naval Communications ") exercised. In 1924, Agnes Meyer married the Washington attorney Michael Driscoll and became Ms. Driscoll. With the exception of a two-year hiatus from 1923 to 1924, during which she worked for the American inventor Edward Hebern in his company as a technical consultant on the development of one of the first rotor cipher machines , she remained with the US as one of the leading cryptanalysts until 1949 Navy .

During her more than thirty years of professional life , she broke a number of encryption methods , such as the Japanese “ Red Book Code ” in the 1920s and the “ Blue Book Code ” in the 1930s. These were code books used by the Japanese Navy for their secret message exchange. In 1940, Agnes Driscoll made some major breakthroughs in the cryptanalysis of an over-encrypted code used by the Japanese fleet in their operations, which the Americans called " JN25 " simply because it was the 25th Japanese code they were studying. Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor succeeded the American code breakers, fully uncover the Japanese method, and subsequently throughout the remainder of the Pacific War , all Japanese messages in this code encrypted to were decipher . The Japanese modified their method, " JN25 " became " JN25b ", making deciphering more difficult, but the ability of the American code breakers to read Japanese radio messages helped the US Navy later important sea battles, such as the battle in the Coral Sea and to win the battle for Midway against the Japanese fleet.

In addition to working as a code breaker (in the strict sense), Agnes Driscoll also worked on the cryptanalysis of machine encryption processes. In 1935 it was Meyer Driscoll that the slump in the Japanese machine key "M-1", called by the Americans, with the code name called "Orange", led. This was used by the Japanese naval attachés around the world for secret communication. In 1940 she also worked on the variant of the ENIGMA rotor key machine , the ENIGMA-M3, used by the German Navy , especially by the German submarines .

After the Second World War , she was initially taken over by the American secret service, the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA) in 1949 , before becoming an employee of the National Security Agency (NSA) in 1952 . On July 31, 1959, shortly after her 70th birthday, she retired.

Agnes Meyer Driscoll died in 1971. She was buried in Arlington National Cemetery .

Posthumous honor

In 2000, Agnes Meyer Driscoll was inducted into the Hall of Honor (German: Ehrenhalle) of the National Security Agency . The peculiarity of this posthumous award is underlined by the fact that she was the second woman to be honored in this form.

literature

  • Friedrich L. Bauer : Deciphered Secrets. Methods and maxims of cryptology. 3rd, revised and expanded edition. Springer, Berlin et al. 2000, ISBN 3-540-67931-6 .
  • David Kahn: The Code Breakers - The Story of Secret Writing . Macmillan USA, Reissue 1974, ISBN 0-02-560460-0
  • Fred B. Wrixon: Codes, Ciphers & Other Secret Languages ​​- From Egyptian Hieroglyphics to Computer Cryptology . Könemann, Cologne 2000, pp. 592f. ISBN 3-8290-3888-7

Web links

supporting documents

  1. ↑ Biography in Biographies of Women Mathematicians . Retrieved July 2, 2008.
  2. ↑ Fred B. Wrixon: Codes, Ciphers & Other Secret Languages ​​- From Egyptian Hieroglyphics to Computer Cryptology . Könemann, Cologne 2000, p. 370f. ISBN 3-8290-3888-7
  3. ↑ Fred B. Wrixon: Codes, Ciphers & Other Secret Languages ​​- From Egyptian Hieroglyphics to Computer Cryptology . Könemann, Cologne 2000, p. 593. ISBN 3-8290-3888-7
  4. ^ Alan M. Turing : Turing's Report on his Visit to NCR . December 1942, p. 4. cryptocellar.org , accessed June 30, 2019.
personal data
SURNAME Driscoll, Agnes Meyer
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Driscoll, Agnes May Meyer (full name); Meyer, Agnes May (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American cryptanalyst
DATE OF BIRTH July 24, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Geneseo, Illinois , USA
DATE OF DEATH 16th September 1971