The Women Code Breakers Who Unmasked Soviet Spies
At the height of the Cold War, America’s most secretive counterespionage effort set out to crack unbreakable ciphers
By Liza Mundy, photography by Maggie Steber
September 2018
Numbers came easily to Angeline Nanni. As a girl of 12 in rural Pennsylvania during the Great Depression, she kept the books in her father’s grocery store. In high school, she took all the accounting classes on offer. Enrolled in beauty school after graduation—cosmetology being one of the few fields open to women in the 1940s—Angie focused on the business side while her sisters, Mimi and Virginia, learned to style hair. Before the war, the three Nanni sisters had opened a beauty parlor in Blairsville, Pennsylvania, and Angie ran it. So yes, numbers were her calling.
But the numbers on this test were like nothing she had ever seen.
Angie—intent, graceful, unflappable—was seated in a small classroom in a large, ill-built temporary structure. The year was 1945, and World War II was over. The Nanni sisters had moved to Washington, D.C. to take jobs in the war effort, but now the beauty shop in Blairsville beckoned. Angie, though, wanted to stay. This test would determine whether she could.
Read more:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/women-code-breakers-unmasked-soviet-spies-180970034/#LTZ5hk78AILmU6L6.99
