By Kevin Seabrooke

Time, declassification and diligent researchers continue to give us the untold stories of those who made significant contributions to the history of this nation. Stories like that of the “Code Girls”working in the U.S. Army cryptologic center at Arlington Hall Station in Virginia, 15 percent of whom were African American. Stories of the more than 50 African American women—of Hidden Figures fame—working as part of the segregated “West Area Computers” at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory for the agency that became NASA.

Valentine’s research now gives names and faces to another group of cryptographers, the 100 college-educated Black women who worked in the Traffic Processing Division, known as “The Plantation.” These women were part of the top-secret effort to gather and decrypt Russian messages sent to and from Moscow. Their work was only declassified in 1995 and then, it was mostly high-ranking military officers and a few select cryptanalysts who were given credit, not the segregated analytic units where the foundational math and traffic processing were done.

Decoding the Devil: Black Women Codebreakers and the Secret War Against Stalin’s Bomb (Sarah Valentine, Harper, New York, NY, 368 pp., June 2, 2026 $30 HC)