Madame X was born today, in 1889. Madame X was born in Illinois, in the US, and her childhood home was donated by her father to the Westerville Public Library, and is now the location of a museum and history center. But not a museum about Madame X.
Madame X was a brilliant student, and when she graduated from Ohio State University in 1911, she was fluent in English, French, German, Latin, and Japanese, and had majored in physics and math. What did she do with those skills, you might ask? Well, obviously, she moved to Texas and became a music teacher.
She did, however, become the chair of the math department at the local high school. Her big change, and the original source of her nickname (OK, her real name was NOT “Madame X,” it was Agnes Meyer Driscoll) came in 1918, when the US changed a rule about women in the military and allowed women to enlist. The US had already entered World War I, and Driscoll enlisted in the Navy. She was assigned to the Code and Signal corps, which was in charge of codes. She was really good at codes.
After the war ended, Driscoll stayed in her role, but as a civilian. By the mid-1920s she was one of the top cryptanalysts in the US. In addition to creating and deciphering codes, she designed some early cipher machines, including one the Navy used called (with the height of bureaucratic imagination) “The Communication Machine.” They used it throughout the 1920s.
Tension between the US and Japan was rising, and Driscoll managed to crack the Japanese military codes. This led, indirectly, to a question that’s still open in some circles; some say there’s evidence that US authorities had advance news about the impending attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, but did nothing about it.
She was transferred in 1940 to the team trying to decrypt German military codes — the British code breakers from Bletchley Park pulled it off, but in those days the US and British teams didn’t cooperate. She became known as “Madame X” sometime during her 40+ year career with the Navy — possibly because her role was so important that she needed a secret identity! Really, though, it was probably just a nickname.
She retired in 1959, and was inducted into the National Security Agency’s hall of Honor. And although her childhood home is a museum that has nothing to do with her, there is a marker out front that refers to Agnes Driscoll ad “the first lady of naval cryptography.”
