Agnes Meyer Driscoll (July 24, 1889 – September 16, 1971), known as "Miss Aggie" or "Madame X'", was an American
cryptanalyst during both World War I and World War II and was known as "the first lady of naval cryptology."
Early years
Driscoll was born Agnes May Meyer in Geneseo, Illinois, in 1889. She moved with her family to Westerville, Ohio, in 1895, where her father, Gustav Meyer, had taken a job teaching music at Otterbein College. In 1909, he donated the family home to the Anti-Saloon League, which had recently moved its headquarters to Westerville. The home was later donated to the Westerville Public Library and is now home to the Anti-Saloon League Museum and the Westerville Local History Center.
Education
Driscoll attended Otterbein College from 1907 to 1909. In 1911, she received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Ohio State University, having majored in mathematics and physics and studied foreign languages, statistics and music. She was fluent in English, French, German, Latin and Japanese. and worked as director of music at a military academy and, later, chair of the mathematics department at the local high school.
1918–1939
On June 22, 1918, about one year after America entered World War I when America had just started allowing women to enlist, Driscoll enlisted in the United States Navy. She was recruited at the highest possible rank of chief yeoman and after some time in the Postal Cable and Censorship Office she was assigned to the Code and Signal section of the Director of Naval Communications. After the war ended, she made use of an option to continue working at her post as a civilian. Except for a two-year break, when she worked for a private firm, she remained a leading cryptanalyst for the U.S. Navy until 1949.
In 1920, while continuing to work with the Navy, Driscoll studied at the Riverbank Laboratories in Geneva, Illinois, where fellow code breakers, including William F. Friedman and Elizebeth Smith Friedman worked. She returned to the Navy in spring 1924.
In August 1924, she married Michael Driscoll, a Washington, D.C. lawyer.
Driscoll, with Lieutenant Joseph Rochefort, broke the Japanese Navy manual code, the Red Book Code, in 1926 after three years of work and helped to break the Blue Book Code in 1930.
In early 1935, Driscoll led the attack on the Japanese M-1 cipher machine (also known to the U.S. as the ORANGE machine), which was used to encrypt the messages of Japanese naval attaches around the world. Ultimately this work was superseded by the US-UK cryptologic exchanges of 1942–43.
In 1943, she worked with a team to break the Japanese cipher Coral. It was broken two months later, although Driscoll is said to have had little influence on the project.
In 2017, an Ohio Historical Marker was placed in front of the Meyer home in Westerville honoring Agnes Meyer Driscoll and her achievements, referring to her as "the first lady of naval cryptology."