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Black Women Codebreakers and the Secret War Against Stalin's Bomb
by Sarah Valentine
As groundbreaking as Code Girls and Hidden Figures, this is the shocking true story of two segregated codebreaking units racing to unlock Stalin's atomic secrets in the face of a rapidly expanding Soviet nuclear threat at the dawn of the Cold War.
Facing the global threat of a rising Communist world power in the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. employed hundreds of Black Americans to speed read Russian communications and gather essential information on the US's most dangerous nuclear rival.
The result was the creation of a segregated civilian codebreaking unit known as the Traffic Processing Division—The Plantation. Despite wage discrimination, grueling hours, strict quotas, and harsh conditions, the Plantation's 100 college-educated Black women made invaluable breakthroughs in United States' Soviet intelligence even as the Red Scare and the backlash against civil rights eroded their democratic freedoms at home. Their underappreciated top-secret work led directly to victory over the USSR and the end of the Cold War thirty years later.
In this thrilling history, Sarah Valentine tells their remarkable story in full for the first time. Decoding the Devil pays long overdue tribute to these little-known Black cryptologists' critical contributions to national security during the civil rights era, and offers a fresh perspective on the Cold War and American heroes of color.
"As a black cryptologist on submarines for 10 years, I was often unable to reconcile the contradictions of my race, cryptology, and the U.S Military. Nobody talked about the black cryptologists, and if I'd known about them and read a book, I prolly woulda felt less alone and had more historical context to what I was doing. I run a veterans' writers workshop. I told them about the book, and it inspired them." —Steven Dunn, author of Water & Power
"I am excited about this project. It is long overdue." —Liza Mundy, author of Code of Girls and The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA
This information about Decoding the Devil was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sarah Valentine, Ph.D., is a widely published author and translator. In 2013 she was a Lannan Foundation Writers Fellow and has taught literature and creative writing at Princeton, University of California–Los Angeles, University of California–Riverside, and Northwestern University. In her memoir When I Was White, she recounts growing up in Pittsburgh as a mixed race African American in a white family who kept her identity a closely held secret. She lives in Pittsburgh.
If you liked Decoding the Devil, try these:
by Ben Macintyre
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The "master storyteller" (San Francisco Chronicle) behind the New York Times bestseller The Spy and the Traitor uncovers the true story behind the Cold War's most intrepid female spy.
by Scott Anderson
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From the bestselling author of Lawrence in Arabia, a gripping history of the early years of the Cold War, the CIA's covert battles against communism, and the tragic consequences which still affect America and the world today.
by Liza Mundy
Published 2018
"Code Girls reveals a hidden army of female cryptographers, whose work played a crucial role in ending World War II.... Mundy has rescued a piece of forgotten history, and given these American heroes the recognition they deserve." - Nathalia Holt, bestselling author of Rise of the Rocket Girls
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