Evelyn Niemann Akeley ’28: Teacher to the Code Breakers

Evelyn Niemann Akeley ’28, who had excelled in mathematics at Smith, was teaching math and physics at Skidmore College in 1942 when the Army came calling.

She was recruited to come to Washington and teach young people—including many women—how to crack enemy codes as part of the military's clandestine Signal Intelligence Service.

Learn more about Smith's code breakers: “When We Went to War: Smith’s Hidden Weapon”

Within a year, Akeley was named director of training, and the cryptanalysis school had moved to Virginia’s Arlington Hall (in photo, above), where it trained several thousand new code breakers.

By the end of the war, Akeley’s students had broken every major code used by the Japanese army. One decrypted code allowed American submarine captains to sink enough Japanese merchant ships to sever Tokyo’s supply lines to its far-flung Pacific outposts. Another broken code, which was used by Japan’s wartime representatives in Nazi-occupied Europe, provided crucial intelligence to American and British officers planning the D-Day invasion.

Akeley retired in 1958 as the sixth most senior woman in what had become the National Security Agency. She died in 1998.

Summer 2019 Smith Alumnae Quarterly

David Sherman is an independent historian who writes extensively on wartime intelligence. His biography of high-ranking intelligence officer Ann Caracristi (one of Akeley’s students) is set to be published this year by the Center for Cryptologic History.