Welcome to Spycraft, a podcast that tells gripping life and death spy stories and
the amazing devices and operations that made them possible. Now let's get started.
Welcome Everybody. The once classified A tale of Juanita Moody. Yes, as
he came out of an article from Smithsonian magazine that just came out. On
the morning of Sunday, October fourteenth, Janita Moody exited the headquarters of the
National Security Agency in Maryland and walked a short distance to her car, parked
to one of the front row spaces reserved for top leadership. The sky was
beautiful, and Moody had just learned that the Air Force was sending a U
two spyplane over Cuba to take high altitude photographs of military installations. Moody was
worried for the pilot. Twice already in the past two years, a U
two spy plane had been shot out of the sky, once over the Soviet
Union and once over China. He was also worried for the country. Tensions
between the US and the Soviet Union were worsening by the day. JFK.
American military leaders of the Intelligence Committee believe that the Soviet military is up to
something in Cuba, but nobody can say what. So Moody went out and
got into her old convertible with that precise moment, and had been told this
pilot was going to get into his plane. What unfolded over the next few
weeks was one of the most dangerous periods in the history of civilization, the
Cuban Missile Crisis. It was considered a nearly catastrophic failure on the part of
America's national security apparatus. How America's top agents, soldiers, diplomats, intelligence
analysts failed to anticipate and uncover the build up of a nuclear arsenal less than
one hundred miles of the coast is still being debated. However, the story
of American intelligence activities before and during the crisis is far from complete. Most
of the time, when you listen to intelligence stories, folks, it's usually
complicated and not everybody has the answers. So even these journalists think they do,
they don't have everything. They have whatever they are allowed to have.
One of the most extraordinary emissions to data to date is the central role played
by Moody, a thirty or eight year old code breaking wizard and the head
of the NSA's Cuba desk during the perilous Fall of nineteen sixty two. Even
today, her name is largely unknown outside this agency, and the details of
her contributions remained closely guarded. You see what I mean of medium height,
brown hair. Moody was not a spy in the secret agent sense. Her
world was signals intelligence organ as it's known sig I n T. There's human
to human intelligence SIGANT. There's also OCENT and SGANT is radio messages, radar
data, electronic communications, weapons systems, reading things of that nature. Her
only brief turn in the spotlight came more than a decade after the Cuban Missile
crisis, when she found herself caught up in the domestic surveillance scandals that engulfed
Washington. But who was she Well, years of data has come out through
government archives revealing reviewing normal classified documents. Now including internal NSA reports that have
been released, we have a little bit more information of who she was.
And she was born in nineteen twenty four, the first of nine children.
But that history, we're not going to worry about what we're going to look
ats. We're going to zoom to spring nineteen forty three. When she was
nineteen, she took a few tests in Virginia, headquarters of the Signal Intelligence
Service. She was trained quickly on what was known as crypto analysis, and
was soon part of a group that used cipher's to crack the encrypted Nazi communications.
When she finished work for the day, she and a few other obsessives
stayed late into the night, working illicitly on an unsolved one time pad,
a code that can only be cracked with a key provided to the messages recipient
ahead of time. She recalled working every working moment and subsisting on buns made
by a sympathetic local baker. The painstaking nature of code breaking, when teams
of analysts sifted through piles of intercepted texts and tabulated and computed possible interpretations using
pencil and paper, made a very deep impression on Moody, Very different than
today folks. Eventually, she and a colleague, a linguist who had worked
at Bletchley Park in Britten's code breaking headquarters, persuaded agency engineers to custom build
a machine for the one time pad problem based on Alan Turing's work that could
generate cipher keys automatically. It was a very clumsy thing, said Moody,
but it worked. Helping the Americans decode secret messages sent to Berlin from the
German ambassador in Tokyo was the first of many times in her long career the
Moody who would face who herself became a familiar face at Bletchley Park helped advance
intelligent work intelligence work by pushing for an ambitious and innovative use of new technologies.
After japan surrender, Moody told her superior at the SIS that with the
war done, she planned to return to college. Her superior had earned a
PhD, and he told that she was making a big mistake. This is
your cup of tea. There are going to be other targets, other secrets,
storing cust This effort is not going to stop today. This is just
the beginning. Moody decided maybe he was right and stayed with the Sis as
a staff cryptanalyst focused on signals collection in Eastern Europe. In nineteen forty seven,
she was promoted to chief of the Yugoslavia Section. Five years later,
on October twenty fourth, nineteen fifty two. So now she's about twenty eight
years of age. President Truman signed a secret memorandum and the NSA was born.
During the fifties, Moody took on several new leadership roles at the NSA,
Chief of European Satellites, Chief of Russian Manual Systems, Chief of Russian
and Eastern European High Grade manual Systems. She fretted over a lot of the
technical inefficiencies, just as she had in the past. She was an advocate
for using big data long before the concept had taken hold. She managed whole
teams of people, her troops as she called them. As a leader,
she was in politic by her own measure, occasionally calling meetings to order by
whacking a hockey stick on the table. When it came to being a woman
in the male dominant world, had a simple outlook. I had never had
much of a problem. Moody and her husband, Wore, an executive at
Eastern Airlines, would escape to Belwigh, eventually for the Shenandoah Valley, where
they had a mountain cabin nicknamed Hoot and Holler. Life away from Washington was
about cocktails, lawn games, music, tracking turkeys, anything but national security
officials from Washington, friends from around the globe, and my six agents were
usual guests of hers. Moody's favorite pastimes were listening to jazz, working in
the garden, and hunting deer. She'd been singing Roger Miller songs and had
a drink. Was all happy, Moody's nephew, Peter Jacobs, had told
a reporter, And in nineteen sixty one, having been attached to the so
called Soviet Problem for several years, Moody moved up again, becoming chief of
a section known as G Group, which was responsible for overseeing NSA's operations nearly
everywhere excluding China and the Soviet Union, some one hundred and twenty countries.
On the way home the night of her promotion, she stopped at a store
and bought maps of AFT, Africa and South America. She wanted to learn
what the countries were. On April seventeen, nineteen sixty one, paramilitary soldiers
storm Cuba's Plaia Geron, launching the brief and doomed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro.
And this is where she really plays a big role. That spring,
the NSA re organized its operations, shifting resources to Cuba, which fairly squarely
which fell squarely under Moody's command there might have been the equivalent of two people
on the problem at that point. One of the first things her team detected
was Cuba's improved communications security, which had then until then been relatively unsophisticated.
Now it was strengthened with the introduction of a microwave system across the whole island.
The technology provided a high level of secrecy because land based microwave antennas relay
information in a chain, and the only way to intercept the message was to
be close to the antenna. US military and intel agencies knew about the towers,
but couldn't intercept the signals being transmitted. The NASA responded by establishing new
intercept facilities in Florida and flying surveillance aircraft around Cube, but that wasn't good
enough. Over the next few months, Moody's team discovered that the microwave retires
with the lease of America's worries. Sinjin revealed increased maritime but traffic from Soviet
naval bases to Cuba. Cargo manifests intercepted from Soviet ships docking in Cuba were
sometimes blank, other times declared cargo didn't match the weights reported in port.
Through intercepted conversations, the NSA learned of clandestine unloading at night, as well
as the delivery of Soviet tanks. Moody recalls things were getting hot and hotter
around this time. Intercepted communications in Europe contained Spanish language chatter. At air
bases in Czechoslovakia, the Soviets were training Cuban pilots. By the fall of
nineteen sixty one, the Soviets had backed out of a bilateral moratorium a nuclear
weapons testing. They debtonated a figure fifty megaton hydrogen bomb in the Arctic Sea.
A few weeks later, deputy director of the NSA showed up in Moody's
office with two high ranking officials from the Canady administration. They stepped into a
small conference room where the agent the deputy director, closed the door and drew
the blinds. We want to know what you know about Cuba, even if
it's a hunch, even a guess. We just want to know. Moody
started in on her highlight reel of intercepts the anti aircraft guns to Soviet money
and personnel flowing to the island. At one point, the director interjected,
now, come on, as if Moody was exaggerating. She was unfazed.
I don't have to have any hunches, she said, it was all in
the intelligence. Impressed by her expertise, alarmed by what she had to say,
White House, no no one, no one was providing the White House
with this level of detail by an aggressive military build up in Cuba. So
the Deputy Director asked Moody to write up her findings. Along with a few
colleagues. She spent the next three days and nights compiling wheelbarrow loads of material
to what she called the specialist little summary. When she was done, Moody
urged Tordella, the Deputy Director, to publish a report meaning circulating among the
intell agencies. Cash has not to step outside an essay's prescribed role. The
Deputy Director rebuffed her, but he did send it to Lansdale, who sent
it to President Kennedy, who returned it with his initials signaling he'd read it.
I told my troops keep this updated. Over the next few months,
Moody repeatedly and unsuccessfully pleaded with Tordella to release her updated report. By early
nineteen sixty two, she said she was really getting scared the amount of military
equipment piling up in Cuba didn't square with the Soviet's reputed assertions that it was
all defensive. In February, not long after, the NSA learned that a
general from the USSR's Strategic Services Forces arrived in Cuba, Moody went to Todello
one more time, look publish it. We can't do that. Tordella director
said, it will get us in trouble because it would be considered outside of
our charter. It has reached the point, she says that I'm worried about
the trouble we're going to get in having not published it. Tordella relented.
It was the first such NSA report distributed to the wider intel community, and
it quickly made the Before long, an old CIA friend of Moody showed up
at her office. He wanted to congratulate her. Everyone knows that you're responsible
for getting that serialized report on what's happening in Cuba out, and I want
you to know it was a good thing. But he also warned her the
night everyone was thrilled about her initiative, he had just come from a high
level meeting at the CIA, during which officials tried to decide what to do
about NSA overstepping their bounds. In spite of the fact that so much about
the Cuban missile crisis has been made public, Moody's report remains classified. Nevertheless,
it's possible to track a crucial impact it had. By springtime, it
was clear that the Cubans had established an air defense system similar to the one
in the Soviet Union. The CIA. Meanwhile, I was hearing from spies
and double agents about missiles, but what kind of missiles was still unknown.
The rest of the story can be found on Smithsonianmagazine dot com, but we'll
take it towards the end because it's amazing story, and it goes on and
on, and it really covers a lot more detail. But again, these
podcasts are designed to be short face. They'll see here face something with an
unprecedented threat. Kennedy ordered a maritime quarantine of Cube at the block any further
transport of weapons to the island and declared the non compliance. But the Soviet
Union would mean war. The hope was the Light in the Sea strategy would
demonstrate force and readiness to attack, while providing both sides with breathing rooms so
they can begin inching away from the ledge, Moody was put in charge of
an effort She spent many nights sleeping on a cott in her office thinking about
it was to get more intelligence about this whole situation. She recalled the soleious
holidarity throughout the agency, with staff members from other groups showing up at her
office at the end of the day. Moody contributed quite a bit about in
regards to the Cuban missile crisis. Nobody knew intelligence that well, and she
was how would you say, prescient and having this report distributed in a few
weeks after this whole Cuban missile crisis, a letter of thanks addressed that the
NSA director came from the commander of the US Atlantic Fleet, wrote to the
intelligence coming from NSA's Cuba desk was one of the most important single factors in
supporting our operations and improving our readiness. Moody's use during the crisis, where
we're known as electrograms, essentially top secret intel reports sent to the highest levels
via teletype forever reshaped how agencies handled urgent intelligence. And that's it for now.
Thanks for listening.