We should have a party — but keep it confidential, with a very carefully vetted guest list — because today is the anniversary of the birth of Madame X.
Madame X was not her real name, of course. She was born Agnes Meyer in 1889, in a small town in Illinois in the US. Her father taught music at Oberlin College, and must have been against the consumption of alcohol, because years later he donated the family home to the Anti-Saloon League. It’s still the Anti-Saloon League Museum. Meyer graduated from Ohio State University in 1911 with a degree in math and physics. She’d also studied languages, and was fluent in English, French, German, Latin, and Japanese.
After college, her first job was music director at a school, after which she became chairman of the math department in the high school in Amarillo, Texas. She left that job in 1918 when the US began allowing women to enlist in the US Navy during World War I. She was assigned to the Code and Signal department in the Director of Naval Communications (the “Director” was an organization, not a leader). She liked it pretty well, and stayed there, even as a civilian, for the rest of her career.
She helped break codes during the first world war, then when peace broke out again, worked in the first US peacetime code breaking efforts, decyphering diplomatic communications. She also helped developed the Navy’s first encoding machine, which somebody with no imagination christened the Communications Machine. The Navy used the machine throughout the 1920s.
Meyer married Michael Driscoll in 1924, and in the next couple of years was one of the lead cryptographers who cracked the Japanese military code called the Red Code Book. Three years later the same team cracked another Japanese code, the Blue Code Book. It’s an open question why British and German cryptography teams got to use names like Enigma and Ultra while the Americans and Japanese evidently couldn’t coin anything similarly interesting. But for whatever reason, the trends persisted and Agnes Meyer Driscoll’s next feat was cracking most of the JN-25 code used by the Japanese Navy.
Because all her work was, obviously, secret, there are some aspects of Driscoll’s career that aren’t entirely clear. In the 1940s and 1950s she may have worked on cracking Soviet codes. During those years she kept doing the same job, but along with her whole team was transferred toe the Armed Forces Security Agency in 1949, then the National Security Agency when it was named in 1952. She had actually worked with that group before, at the beginning of her career during the 1920s, when it was called The Black Chamber. That one flash of naming evidently consumed all the creativity in that US sector for decades to come.
It’s not clear (or it’s secret) when and where Agnes Driscoll acquired her nickname, Madame X. It seems like the sort of moniker most likely to come out of The Black Chamber, but if anybody knows for sure, they’re not saying. She retired in 1959, and in 2000 was inducted into the NSA Hall of Honor. Note that it’s not a “Hall of Fame,” those folks are not much into celebrity. In 2017 an historical marker was installed outside her childhood home. But she passed away at 82 in 1971 and didn’t live to see either of those commemorations. But if you look over your left shoulder occasionally, especially in a public place, and give a nod or a wave, who knows — somebody in a windowless room somewhere is sure to see it, and maybe they’ll pass along the greeting to Madame X. In code, of course.
