From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. | ||
| --Winston Churchill at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, 5 March 1946 | ||
The Soviet Union – the military intentions of its leaders, the success of its espionage efforts, the status of its advanced weapons and nuclear programs, and the globalization of its political ideology – dominated the American national psyche in the decades after WWII. The intelligence needs of the U.S. and its closest allies translated into manpower requirements which, in the late 1940s to mid- 1950s, were particularly acute at the GG-2/GG-3 level. Hiring of African-Americans rose dramatically, and by the early 1950s large concentrations existed in two areas of the Operations organization: machine processing (specifically, equipment operations and keypunch) and Russian plaintext processing. Among people of color, these areas came to be known as "Little Africa," "the hole," "the plantation," and "the snakepit."
William Friedman is credited with introducing IBM equipment to the Signals Intelligence Service in 1935 for the compilation of War Department codes. The initial acquisition consisted of a key punch (to record the plain text that was to be encoded and the corresponding code groups); a sorter (to randomize the punched cards); and a printing tabulator. Not long after the machines were acquired, however, their utility to cryptanalysis was recognized. They became the tools to manipulate intercepted code groups and to perform exhaustive searches, frequency counts, comparisons, and statistical computations in the effort to uncover the underlying plain text. Initially Friedman's cryptanalysts operated the equipment, but this proved inefficient as additional equipment and personnel were acquired. In October 1939, two full-time experienced key punchers were hired, and the policy of training cryptanalysts on IBM equipment was discontinued. In December 1939, Ulrich Kropfl, a tabulating equipment operator from the new Social Security Administration, joined SIS and became the first chief of the machine section.[36]
One of the early members of the new section was Norm Willis, a 1942 graduate of McKinley High School in Washington, D.C., who entered on duty as a tabulating equipment operator. Interviewed in 1999, Mr. Willis described his early assignment sorting Japanese army traffic and the section's racial composition during the war years:
There were intercept operators in the field, in Europe and in the Pacific, and they would intercept messages and would write them by hand. They then would somehow ship them back to the States, so you know by the time they arrived here, it was not time sensitive. The messages would come in, and we had a group of key punch operators, mostly girls, but some military men as well, who would put them in card form. Then they would be edited, and once they were accurate they might be listed or batched in certain ways, according to the needs of the intelligence analyst. I was an operator on the midnight shift. We handled Japanese traffic, and I was responsible for making sure that the cards were accurately punched from the traffic. For most of WWII, that is what I did, and the only black was a man named Bill Williams. He was custodial, but he also worked in supply. In other words, to punch cards, you had to buy these sixty-pound cartons of cards, five boxes of two thousand cards each. IBM would ship them in, and Bill Williams handled the unloading and loading, but there were no blacks at all in the machine section during WWII.[37]
Delores Schommer, one of the Agency's first key punch operators, was initially hired in 1936 for the new Social Security Administration. It was there that she met Ulrich Kropfl, whom William Friedman selected in 1939 to head up the machine section. Upon his recommendation, in July 1940 Mrs. Schommer transferred to SIS as a key punch operator. Although wartime requirements necessitated additional personnel, she too indicated the machine section was not integrated until later in the 1940s.
Before the war, we had huge tabulators, and men like Sam Snyder, Larry Clark, and Dr. Kullback, testing out this new equipment to see what it could do.[38] It was all very new. I know Ulrich wanted to get another tabulator, and he talked with General Akin about this. General Akin kinda huffed and finally ordered it, but it took quite a while to get it. Soon, I had three girls working with me. We decided to hire some more, so we hired five or six more who came to work at night. We were in a little room, probably not much bigger than 16 feet × 18 feet. Then the war came, and we needed to expand. They bought Arlington Hall, and built two buildings – A Building and B Building – and we moved on Thanksgiving Day of '42. I'm not sure when the first blacks came, but Geneva Arthur was one of the early ones.[39]
The year that the machine section first employed African-Americans cannot be pinpointed. Though both Norm Willis and Delores Schommer claim there were no blacks in the unit during WWII, Mr. Willis recalls seeing, "sometime early on," Alton B. Dunkinson, a technician who would "help in the development of special hardware that you connected to the IBM equipment." According to David Shepard, who arrived at SIS in 1944, "Tony" Dunkinson, once a signal man for the New York City subway system, was already there. His career with the agency, however, lasted only into the early fifties when he left to become an engineer at a systems development company formed by Mr. Shepard.[40]
The major influx of African-Americans into the machine section seems to have begun in 1947. Geneva Arthur, remembered by Delores Schommer as "one of the early ones," entered on duty, with several others, in December of that year.
Note
"Most of the civilians that were hired during World War II were from North Carolina, Virginia, and the South. These were white, a lot of them young girls right out of high school. They did not have a history of eating with people of color. I don't know when it was, but one day, in the cafeteria there was one of the other white workers eating lunch with [a black man]. That took nerve in that time. It took courage for the guy who was doing that because of the social environment."
Norm Willis, 11 January 1999
Geneva Arthur entered on duty at the Army Security Agency in December 1947 and spent her entire career in the key punch unit, retiring in 1973 as a section head. According to her, the key punch unit was always integrated, whites and African-Americans holding both supervisory and nonsupervisory positions.[41] Documentation on the changes in the demographics of the machine section is unavailable, but most retirees formerly assigned there supported this view only with qualification. They claim that while in the mid- to late 1940s the organization was integrated, by the mid-fifties civilian African-Americans overwhelmingly dominated in nonsupervisory positions in the key punch and tabulating equipment units. Repeatedly, the perception was voiced that the relatively few white civilians who were assigned to entry-level positions in the organization eventually were either promoted to successively higher supervisory positions or transferred to other parts of the Agency.
The ASA effort to exploit Russian plaintext traffic began in 1946 with the part-time assignment of several linguists to the target. At that time, however, the Agency's emphasis was on the translation of encrypted messages, and the employment of scarce Russian linguists on plain text was judged to be unwarranted. Later, in May 1947, the effort was revised at the Pentagon. Individuals without security clearances or with partial clearances would sift through volumes of messages and translate all or parts of those determined to have intelligence value. Placed in charge of this group was Jacob Gurin, an ASA Russian linguist who had immigrated to the U.S. with his parents at the age of three. A graduate of New York University, "Jack" grew up in a Russian-speaking household and spoke the language fluently. During the war, he served as a Japanese linguist for the U.S. Army, and after discharge, applied to the Army Security Agency. In 1946, natives peaking Russian language ability was a valuable and rare commodity. Security concerns arising from his birthplace were resolved, and he joined the organization as a Russian linguist. Within months of his entry on duty, he engineered a revolutionary approach to the exploitation and reporting of Russian plaintext communications.[42]
From the Agency's inception under William Friedman, its business was the breaking of codes and ciphers. Once the underlying text was revealed, individual messages were translated, and, after a reporting mission was established, selected ones were published on 3″ × 5″ cards. While individual decrypted messages could be extremely valuable, plaintext messages were most often preformatted status reports that were insignificant when considered singly. Jack Gurin was convinced that if these messages were assembled and analyzed in the aggregate, they could yield valuable information on Soviet defense capabilities. Initially, three linguists were assigned to him plus a writer/editor. Their task was to select messages that qualified for immediate translation and publication or which could be used in a research report on a subject of interest. Much of the intercept data was passed to the linguists by a group of processing personnel who would provide page print-outs of material that had been sent to the agency on tape. The tape conversion process involved running a paper tape of radioprinter signals through a machine (the CXCO tape printer) which read coded perforations and printed the corresponding Cyrillic characters. It was a repetitive, manual task requiring minimal cognitive skills and initially was accomplished by a small number of whites, who gradually transferred out of the positions. According to Agency retiree Dave Bryant, he and fourteen other African-Americans transferred to ASA from the Census Bureau in 1947. They were assigned to this traffic processing unit, and from this small cadre of black communications clerks grew a large, essentially allblack division in the Operations Directorate of NSA.[43]
