German Army Attacks Poland; Cities Bombed Havas, French news agency, announced that a German declaration of war against Poland probably will lead France and Great Britain to take new military measures. Britain and France are committed to aid Poland in any fight to save her independence. | ||
| --New York Times, September 1, 1939 | ||
At the outbreak of the war in Europe in 1939, the Signals Intelligence Service (SIS),[10] the fledgling U.S. cryptologic organization, had been in existence less than ten years. Created in 1930 in the Army's Office of the Chief Signal Officer (OCSigO), it represented the consolidation of the missions of two post-WWI organizations. First, the SIS was to develop secure codes for U.S. military communications (communications security or COMSEC), formerly the responsibility of the Code and Cipher Section in the OCSigO. During wartime, it was also to intercept and solve enemy code and cipher messages (communications intelligence or COMINT), a role that had been assigned to the Cipher Bureau (MI-8) of the General Staff during WWI and continued primarily as a training mission after demobilization. At its formation, William F. Friedman, the Army's foremost cryptologist in the Code and Cipher Section, was named to lead the new organization. After hiring a secretary, Miss Louise Newkirk, he acquired four "junior cryptanalysts" – three mathematicians – Frank Rowlett, Abe Sinkov, and Solomon Kullback, and a Japanese linguist, John Hurt. Added to this small contingent during that first year were an Army officer, Captain Norman Lee Baldwin, whose job would be to establish the Second Signal Service Company, the intercept division of SIS; Lieutenant Mark Rhodes, a Signal Corps officer; and Larry Clark, a chemistry major who would analyze secret inks. These few individuals comprised the SIS in December 1930.[11]
In his account of the history of the SIS, William Friedman was unequivocal about the initial basis of the small organization's cryptanalytic activities. Interception and decoding of foreign communications were to be undertaken as training in preparation for the execution of its wartime mission, not as peacetime activities. Particularly interesting information uncovered as a by-product of this training would be shown to the Army Assistant Chief of Staff, G2, but there was not a functioning peacetime mission to actively collect and exploit the communications of targeted foreign governments.[12] It was in the execution of this training mission during the mid-1930s, however, that SIS made an indelible impression on senior War Department officials and paved the way for its future expansion. By 1933, the monitoring stations in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and at the Presidio in San Francisco were regularly providing intercepts of Japanese diplomatic communications (commonly referred to as "traffic"), the War Department's highest priority intelligence target. In 1936, the SIS, chiefly Frank Rowlett, broke the Japanese diplomatic code generated by the "Red" machine and used for their most sensitive communications. The recovered plaintext messages gave the nation's policy makers and military leaders unprecedented insight into the developing political ties between Japan, Germany, and Italy.
Thus, although fewer than twenty people comprised the SIS in mid-1939, it had established its value to the national leadership and plans existed for both gradual, modest, peacetime growth and contingency expansion during a national emergency. Eleven days after Hitler's army goose-stepped into Poland, the Chief Signal Officer recommended that funds be released for the acquisition of twenty-five additional civilians and more equipment in preparation for implementing its wartime mission. This was soon revised to reflect a request for funds for expansion, to include funds for twenty-six (rather than twenty-five) additional civilians. The final recommendation was approved, and by the end of the year expansion of the SIS professional force of cryptologists and linguists had begun.[13]
Although neither reflected in the War Department authorization letter nor noted in the histories, the tiny secret agency was increased by at least one other employee in late 1939.
On 13 November, Bernard W. Pryor, a thirty-nine-year-old former motor cycle messenger for the Navy Department, entered on duty as the SIS messenger. Almost certainly he was the first African American to be hired at the agency.[14]
Note
"In 1938, of the 9,717 Negroes regularly employed by the federal government in Washington, 90 percent held custodial jobs for which the top annual pay rate was $1,260; only 9.5 percent had clerical jobs, and only 47 men had subprofessional rank."[15]
"The population of the metropolitan [Washington, D.C.] area mushroomed from 621,000 in 1930 to well over a million by the end of 1941. Seventy thousand new people arrived in the first year after Pearl Harbor alone. Government employment had more than doubled since the beginning of 1940, and more than five thousand new federal workers were pouring into Washington every month, often bringing their families with them."
David Brinkley, Washington Goes To War (New York, NY, 1988), 107
SIS personnel authorizations, by July 1942, had increased to 364 civilians and 121 officers.[16] Already desperately short of space at the Munitions Building, but still expanding to support the war effort, the Army purchased a women's junior college at 4000 Lee Boulevard, Arlington, Virginia, for the burgeoning agency. The new location had an added advantage. The now vital SIS would be removed from downtown Washington where it was believed it was more vulnerable to enemy bombing or agent activity.[17] By the end of the summer, most of the agency had relocated to what came to be called Arlington Hall Station (AHS).
Frequently described as a beautiful, campuslike facility, AHS experienced rapid wartime growth. By mid-July 1943, 1,713 civilians, 157 officers, and 240 enlisted personnel[18] were distributed across six sections, most under the direction of a military officer:
Chief, Signal Security Agency
Colonel W. Preston Corderman
Director of Communications Research
Mr. William F. Friedman
A Branch/Protective Security
Major J.C. Sheetz
B Branch/Cryptanalytic
(solution of codes and ciphers)
Lt. Colonel Earle F. Cooke
C Branch/Cryptographic
(communications security)
Colonel Clinton B. Allsopp
D Branch/Laboratory
(secret inks)
Lt. Colonel A.J. McGrail
E Branch/Communications
Lt. Colonel H. McD. Brown
F Branch/Development
Major Leo Rosen
(From Organizational Chart, Signal Security Service, 15 April 1943-1 March 1944 (NSA Archives, Accession No. 18675)).
The larger population of linguists, cryptanalysts, engineers, and mathematicians was reflected in the increased hiring of messengers, probably all of whom were Afro-American. By mid-1943, Bernie Pryor was the senior messenger of fifteen, but one SIS researcher's comments suggest they were stereotyped as "colored" servants of limited intelligence:
It often happens that translators in distant wings are too remote and hot to bring questions personally. An attempt has been made to improve the situation by utilizing North Carolina messengers. They come, but either have not understood the message or have forgotten it on the way.[19]
The nation's capital that drew the new civil servants, both black and white, was a boom town. Seventeen-year-old Carl Dodd was a construction worker in the District of Columbia before becoming a messenger in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer during WWII. In his oral interview, he vividly described the living conditions for many African-American residents during this period of rapid expansion and provided a telling glimpse of the state of civil rights in the capital city as the country entered WWII.
Washington was very, very poor at that time. Where the Pentagon building is, there used to be a Hot Shoppe and an airfield. There was a 'colored' area right near there called Queen City. The Pentagon took all the property these people had. Then they built houses for the people that they had thrown out. That is when I saw the first low income housing – off of Columbia Pike, near Arlington – right near the Navy Department. It was called Johnson Hill. The people had to have some place to live; however, some of these buildings were like shanties, and they had cesspools – no plumbing. But it was their homes. You can't pay somebody $200 or $250 for a house and replace it for that amount of money, but that's what the government did. Just like they did in southwest [District of Columbia]. Many of those houses in southwest had no plumbing. They had a big truck to come around and pick up the sewage from the houses in big buckets. They used to call it the 'honey wagon', and you could smell it for blocks.
People lived wherever they could get low rent. When I first came to Washington [in 1941], I lived in a room on Fairfax Drive, and I got a job doing construction work. I paid $3.50 a week for my room, and I got $7.00 a week as a salary. When I went into the government in 1942, I was hired as a CU [custodial] 3 [$1,200 per year]. After taxes, I took home $42 every two weeks. So I had clothes, rent, food – everything to take care of. I had nothing left. Things weren't good, but a lot of black people came to Washington thinking things were much better than they really were.
My first government job in 1942 was as a messenger for the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, and I was at the Munitions Building at 2nd and T Street, Southwest [District of Columbia]. At that time, the cafeteria was segregated. I think it was desegregated about the same time as the Pentagon was completed. Roosevelt ordered that there would be no more segregation in the cafeteria. Prior to then, we could not go into it. They had little cubby holes in the back where you could go and get food, if you wanted, but I didn't go there. I went to a place on the wharf called Benny Bordnick's. We couldn't go in there and sit down either, but we could buy their fish sandwiches, crabcakes, or whatever we wanted and take it back. We got a good buy, and we got good food. There was another place called Cadillac, a black place, but we always went to Benny Bordnick's and brought our food back.
In early 1944, Colonel W. Preston Corderman, a 1926 West Point graduate from Hagerstown, Maryland, was chief of what was then being called the Signal Security Agency. Earle F. Cooke, who once headed the COMSEC side of the agency (C Branch), was chief of the cryptanalysis effort (B Branch). Interviewed years later, General Cooke described a pivotal conversation between the two that led to the creation of a segregated unit of black cryptologists at AHS.
Eleanor Roosevelt, through her channels . . . had the Signal Corps advise that . . . twelve percent or fifteen percent of our personnel had to be black and gainfully employed. A problem. We had one who was a messenger. I can't remember his name. Racked my brain and I can't remember it. Anyway, the problem was, what do we do now, because here we have a directive and we're going to have to put a lot of black people to work. We decided, I guess I did, because Corderman said to me, 'Your job. I'm not going to have them on any other staff. I'm going to have them on your staff, okay?' The problem [was] what to do and I decided I'm going to keep this bunch as a unit and find something which they can do worthwhile. The only help I had in selecting black personnel was this messenger. Well, I liked the guy. He was a good guy, and he was a hard-working guy and I told him I got this problem. I got to have about a hundred and some odd people of your race ('niggers' in that day), and I says, you're my personnel officer to see that I get the right ones. Did a marvelous job. Where the hell he got them and how he got them, I knew not. I put him in touch with the personnel people and said, that guy is my representative in hiring these people. Your job is to hire them when he says so. And he did. I haven't the slightest idea [what criteria he used], but we gave them some stuff working on some Allied system. I don't know what system we had them on. . . . It doesn't matter. The output, of course, was more or less negative . . . but so what? We had the unit, had no problem.[20]
[Editor's Note: There is no actual documentation that Mrs. Roosevelt ordered the hiring of African-Americans either in the Signal Corps or at AHS. Given the nature of the social picture at the time, however, such actions needed the intervention of "someone in a high place."]
The messenger whose name General Cooke could no longer recall was William (Bill) Coffee, once a houseman and waiter at the Arlington Hall School for Girls, who was then working for Bernie Pryor. Born in Abingdon, Virginia, in 1917, Mr. Coffee studied English at Knoxville College, Tennessee, in 1936 after attending the Kings Mountain Training School in Abingdon. During the closing years of the Depression, from 1937 to 1940, he was enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps. Thereafter followed a series of jobs as a waiter, before he was hired in September 1941 by the Arlington Hall School for Girls. When the Army acquired the property, Mr. Coffee applied for a federal position and was hired as a junior janitor for the SIS in June 1942, eventually being promoted to messenger. In January 1944, after Earle F. Cooke tapped him to satisfy Mrs. Roosevelt's concerns, he set about building a unit that would be "gainfully employed." His job title was officially changed to cryptographic clerk in June of that year, and an organizational chart dated 15 November 1944 identified him as Assistant Civilian In Charge of B-3-b, with nineteen subordinate civilians.[21] Their mission was not the analysis of Allied codes, as General Cooke recalled, but the exploitation of commercial coded messages. Several military officers very briefly served as chief of the unit before the position was assumed by Benson K. Buffham in mid-1944, who held it first as a young military officer, then as a civilian, until February 1947.