Juanita Moody (1924-2015) was a cryptographer, intelligence analyst and National Security Agency executive who helped save the Western hemisphere from nuclear disaster.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Our story today was only unearthed in recent years, thanks to digging by a Smithsonian writer. Tales of this spy’s work as a spy service pioneer were buried in internal NSA reports, government archives and formerly classified documents. But her reports helped save the Western hemisphere from nuclear disaster.
Let’s talk about Juanita Moody.
Juanita Morris was born on May 29, 1924, in a small town in North Carolina. Her father, Joseph, was a cotton and soybean farmer. Her mother, Mary, was a homemaker. The family lived in a rented house with no electricity or running water.
As the oldest of Joseph and Mary’s nine children, Juanita was always, it seems, a leader. To her younger siblings, she was something of a third parent. To her own parents, she was something of a marvel.
The superintendent at their high school felt so, too. Juanita was recommended for the Western Carolina Teachers College, borrowing money in order to pay the enrollment fee.
But World War II was already looming. Soon, nearly every man at school was gone.
“I felt that it was wrong to be spending my time in this beautiful place,” she later said. “Clear blue skies, going around campus and studying and going to classes at leisure, when my country was in a war.”
Determined to help, Juanita walked into the Army recruiting office in Charlotte and asked to volunteer.
“What do you want to do?” the recruiter asked. “I’d like to get into intelligence work,” she said.
After taking a few tests, Juanita was sent to the headquarters of the Signal Intelligence Agency, in Virginia. She was trained in “cryptanalysis,” becoming part of a group that cracked open encrypted Nazi messages. Juanita was hooked. After her regular work day finished, she and a few analysts would stay at the headquarters late into the night, secretly working on an unsolved code that could only be deciphered with a one-off key.
Eventually, Juanita and a colleague convinced their engineers to build a machine that could generate cipher keys automatically -- a strategy initially thought up by Alan Turing during World War I. Although a bit clumsy, the machine worked, and helped decode messages sent from Berlin to the Germany embassy in Tokyo.
When the war ended in 1945, Juanita began making plans to return to college. But her superior stopped her. “This is your cup of tea, and there are going to be other targets,” he apparently told her. “This effort is not going to stop today. This is just the beginning.”
So Juanita stayed.
For the next two years, Juanita worked as a staff cryptanalyst, focusing on signals collection -- which is to say, she gathered communication, whether it was between people or machines, encrypted, or tapped out in code.
In 1947, she was promoted to chief of the Yugoslavia section.
On October 24, 1952, President Truman signed a secret memorandum that would change not just Juanita’s life, but the landscape of international intelligence work: he created the National Security Agency, better known today as the NSA.
From the outset, the NSA was responsible for gathering information.
During the NSA’s first decade, Juanita hopped around different leadership roles -- chief of European satellites, chief of Russian and East European high-grade manual systems. She excelled in identifying inefficiencies, and making use of the latest technologies to fill those gaps. Her departments were early adopters of IBM computers, intranet precursors, and searchable databases.
Juanita became famous in the agency for her leadership style. She called her teams her “troops.” She would sometimes call meetings to order by hitting the table with a hockey stick. And each morning, she would call in division heads one by one, and grill them about the highlights from the previous day. Where had they intercepted the information? When had they passed it along to what Juanita referred to as their “customers” -- the CIA and the White House? If the turnaround time was slow, she’d remark, “You people are doing a tremendous job producing beautiful history. You’re not producing intelligence.”
In 1961, Juanita was promoted again, this time as chief of a section called G-Group, which oversaw signal collection for over 120 countries, including Cuba. Around this time, the now-infamous Bay of Pigs Invasion occurred. A herd of American-trained, CIA-backed Cuban defectors stormed Cuba, in an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. In less than 24 hours, they surrendered, and tensions between the U.S. and Cuba exploded. Cuba and the Soviet Union became allies. And within a few weeks, the Soviets detonated a 50 megaton-hydrogen bomb in the Arctic Sea. Its blast was equivalent to Hiroshima --- 3,800 times over.
Suddenly, Cuba was a new front in the Cold War, and Juanita was responsible for its intelligence collection.
What she and her beloved troops found was scary -- but what was perhaps more alarming was her colleagues’ hesitance to believe her findings. She and her team spent three days and nights compiling what she later referred to as “wheelbarrow loads of material” for the assistant secretary of defense. But despite reports of Soviet technicians and Strategic Rocket Forces arriving in Cuba, and Soviet missiles arriving on Cuba’s shores, Juanita’s bosses refused to circulate her report to other agencies. It wasn’t the NSA’s place, they said.
But Juanita wouldn’t let up. Finally, her report, the first of its kind, was circulated in February 1962. We can’t say for sure what was in it, because the report remains classified even to this day, but we do know that Juanita’s reporting directly helped President Kennedy guide the United States safely out of the Cuban missile crisis. Juanita became a living legend in U.S. intelligence. For the next decade, a gaggle of young intelligence staffers could often be seen trailing her, taking notes on everything she said.
In 1976, Juanita retired. She and her husband, Warren Moody, often traveled to their mountain getaway -- nicknamed “Hoot n Holler” -- and to North Carolina, where Juanita’s parents and siblings still lived. When Warren got sick in the 1980s, they moved full time to a coastal Carolina town.
In 2015, Juanita Moody died at the age of 90, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. In a Smithsonian profile, published after her death, a friend recounted asking her about her career. And all Juanita would say was,
“Oh, I’ve done lots of interesting things for a country girl from North Carolina.”
All month, we’re talking about spies.
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