Ann Caracristi
More info
- Lived
- 1921–2016
- Known for
- First woman to serve as NSA deputy director
An Arlington Hall codebreaker who worked her way up to the second-highest post at the NSA.
Caracristi was recruited straight out of college in 1942 into the US Army's signals intelligence service at Arlington Hall. There she worked on Japanese army address codes — the enciphered field that told you which unit a message concerned, which made it possible to track troop movements.
After the war she stayed on as the work became the NSA, spending decades on, among other things, Soviet-bloc traffic. In 1980 she was named deputy director, the first woman to hold the job. She belongs to the same generation as Agnes Driscoll and Elizebeth Friedman, whose work stayed classified long enough to miss most of the history books.