Juanita Moody

Juanita Moody (née Morris; May 29, 1924 – February 17, 2015) was an American cryptographer and intelligence analyst. She worked for the Signals Intelligence Service and National Security Agency from 1943 until 1976.^[1][2]

Biography

Juanita Morris was born in 1924 in Morven, North Carolina. She began studying at Western Carolina University in 1942.^[3]

She left in early 1943 to join the war effort; she volunteered at a recruitment office in Charlotte, North Carolina, and in April she was sent to Arlington Hall, the headquarters of the Signals Intelligence Service, in Arlington, Virginia.^[3][4] She began training in cryptanalysis while waiting for her security clearance but was later transferred to an administrative library role. She remained interested in cryptanalysis, however, and joined a group that met outside of work to study a complex, unbroken German code system; as a result, she was assigned official code-related tasks.^[3] She was successful in breaking a German one-time pad cipher, and by the end of the war she had been promoted from code clerk to a head of office.^[5] She planned to return to Western Carolina University at the end of the war, but her supervisor asked her to remain with the SIS.^[3][4] She agreed on the condition that she was given a more complicated job. In 1948, she married fellow civil servant Warren Moody.^[3]

Moody was promoted to the National Security Agency's research and development department after the war, where she became involved in computational cryptanalysis and analytic machines. Through the 1950s, she was a supervisor of Soviet analytic affairs and in the early 1960s was the head of signals intelligence operations to gather information about Cuba in Operation Mongoose as the chief of the Office of Non-Communist Nations.^[3][5] She oversaw the NSA's responses to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 and was responsible for deciding what information relating to the crisis would be collected, processed and released.^[3][4] She was promoted to higher positions in the NSA throughout the 1960s and early 1970s but became the focus of controversy in 1975 when she was called to testify in front of a Senate committee that was investigating abuses of power in federal intelligence agencies. Her name was widely associated with the investigation in the press, but the NSA later clarified that she was not involved in any abuses of power and that her involvement in the investigation was as a spokesperson.^[3]

In 1975, Moody was awarded the inaugural National Intelligence Medal of Achievement. She retired from the NSA the following year after 33 years of working for the agency. She was inducted into the NSA Hall of Honor in 2003.^[4]

References