Building E on the Foreign Service Institute’s leafy Arlington campus is stately, with columns out front and a beige brick facade. These days, the place houses administrative offices and a handful of classes for the institute, which trains State Department diplomats in languages, leadership, and other skills critical to their mission representing the U.S. abroad.

But during World War II, Building E served a very different purpose. The Army took over Arlington Hall, a junior college for women, and built a series of large, unheated, unairconditioned buildings nearby. They put more than 10,000 women to work there, breaking enemy codes.

There, they used math and patterns to decode intercepted enemy messages. The women of Arlington Hall and a similar Navy facility in Northwest D.C. ultimately contributed to the breaking of several key codes, including the famous German Enigma machine, the Japanese Navy’s fleet code, the cipher used in communications from Japanese diplomats, and the code used by Japanese supply ships in the Pacific.

Their work eighty years ago was critical to the Allied war effort, but it’s only recently begun to be publicly recognized.

The Foreign Service Institute is adding to the public acknowledgment of the women’s service, naming a new cafe in a nearby building “Code Breaker Cafe” and decorating it with murals and exhibits about the Arlington Hall operation and the women codebreakers’ experiences there. The cafe windows feature a panoramic view of Building E. While the cafe and exhibits are not open to the public, official visitors and students at the Foreign Service Institute can view them.

“My personal hope is that for generations to come, State Department personnel [and] people from other foreign affairs agencies who are coming here for training will just take a moment and remember the really important contributions that happened here,” said Joan Polaschik, the institute’s director, at an event to dedicate the new space on Thursday.

“One way to make the history public is to name institutions,” said Liza Mundy, the author of Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers Of World War II.

Mundy said she recognized many of the old photos, now enlarged to decorate the walls of the cafe, from her archival research for the book. Relevant government intelligence records from the war were only recently declassified, allowing a glimpse of the women’s crucial work for the first time.

“It’s really thrilling to see them up on the walls and to see this beautiful facility and to know that the cafe is named after the codebreakers, who spent many hot summer days and cold winter days here during the war,” she said in remarks at the event.

Mundy’s book, published in 2017, is the first major public account of the experiences of American women codebreakers in World War II, who mostly worked for the Army at Arlington Hall or across the river at a Navy facility in Northwest D.C., off of Nebraska Ave.

Speed saved lives

The women knew the speed with which they broke messages could be a matter of life and death for American servicemembers at the front. And they were terrified of accidentally revealing secrets about what they did for work outside of Arlington Hall and the Naval Annex, a crime they were told was treason and punishable by death.

And even under pressure, they succeeded. Their work gave American submarine captains the coordinates of Japanese supply ships to sink, cutting off supplies for the Japanese advance through the Pacific. It allowed Allied leaders to read Japanese diplomats’ detailed descriptions of German fortifications along the coast of France, vital information for planning the D-Day landings.

“The codebreakers who worked here saved countless American lives and shortened the war by what many historians estimate to be at least two years,” Polaschik said.

A group of Black women who worked at Arlington Hall — they were segregated from their white counterparts — kept tabs on messages from the private sector, ensuring that American companies were not doing business with Nazi Germany or Japanese companies.

Overall, women made up 70% of the American domestic codebreaking force, noted Adam Howard, the director of the Office of the Historian at the State Department.

For many of the women, living and working in wartime D.C. was a thrilling taste of independence and an unexpected chance to be of use to the war effort. It also paid far more than most jobs open to women at the time.

And the U.S. military was in dire need of help. Before the conflict, American code breaking capacity was extremely limited. Once the fighting began, the military had to rapidly expand its counterintelligence operations, at a time when a generation of men were being called up to fight overseas.

So they started hiring women. The Navy snapped up soon-to-be women’s college graduates who demonstrated good math and language skills.

“They were asked two questions: Do you like crossword puzzles, and are you engaged to be married?” Mundy quipped. “If they said yes to the first and no to the second, they would be invited to train for the Navy’s codebreaking effort.” The Navy recruits received a final round of training at Smith College, a women’s college in Massachusetts, and then shipped down to begin work in Northwest D.C.

The Army recruited codebreakers from the ranks of public school teachers, many of them from the South. One of the central figures in Code Girls, Dorothy “Dot” Braden, a southwest Virginia teacher, arrived at Arlington Hall in 1943, fresh from a taxi ride that cost her nearly all the money she’d brought with her.

What is now Building E is where Braden took her loyalty oath — no talking about what was going on at Arlington Hall, or risk treason — and was assigned to work in Department K with 217 other former teachers on the code the Japanese used to communicate about the positions of supply ships.

“Her welcome to Washington was being told she didn’t have a place to stay and she would be shot if she talked about what she did,” Mundy summed up.

Braden had to ask her mother to wire her money so that she could rent a room at Arlington Farms, a series of hastily-constructed dormitories to house the so-called “G-Girls,” or government girls, who flooded D.C. to take government jobs left open by men enlisting. The land where Arlington Farms once stood is now part of Arlington National Cemetery, according to Mundy, but Braden’s second apartment building, Fillmore Gardens off of Columbia Pike, is still standing.

Mundy said she’d spent years living in Arlington, driving her kids around to sports practice along Arlington Boulevard and George Mason Drive, but had no idea the FSI campus held such extraordinary history.

“As an Arlingtonian, it was also exciting for me to learn more about the hidden landscape of this area,” she said.

Finally allowed to tell their stories

At the end of the war, the women were mostly pushed out of their jobs to make way for men returning from the war. The few who continued — including Ann Caracristi, who became the first female deputy director of the NSA — had to choose to remain unmarried.

Many made their postwar lives in the D.C. area. One codebreaker Mundy interviewed, Dorothy Ramale, had gone on to become a beloved math teacher at Swanson Middle School in Arlington.

“I just particularly love thinking of these kids taking algebra one and algebra two…having no idea that this sweet woman, who many Arlingtonians remember as the best math teacher they ever had, a little knowing that she was a badass codebreaker during World War II,” Mundy said.

After the war, the women also kept in touch, continuing the close bonds they’d formed with their colleagues. One group of women, Mundy said, kept a round-robin letter going for 75 years.

The codebreakers also kept the vows of secrecy they’d taken. Many died without revealing what they did during the war, leaving families to try to piece together their suspicions about their mothers’ and grandmothers’ work.

The few codebreakers still living when Mundy was beginning her research were sometimes hesitant to talk, including Braden.

“She was not at all convinced that she was free to tell her story, but she also clearly really wanted to because for 70 years she had not gotten credit for her codebreaking work,” Mundy recalled.

For Polaschik, the FSI director, the story of the women codebreakers at Arlington Hall offers an important lesson to today’s diplomats about the power of diversity and inclusion.

“During the urgent, terrible days of World War II, women and people of color suddenly were given access to and stepped up to professional opportunities that previously had been closed to them,” she said. “Thanks to the brilliance and dedication of these historically marginalized citizens, the U.S. was able to turn the tide of the war and secure a victory. It’s hard to imagine how that could have happened without giving everyone a seat at the table.”