AN EIGHTEEN-WHEEL TRUCK WAS PARKED ACROSS THE END OF AN alleyway in downtown Washington, DC. Dudley Buck, and the other young officer with him, started to panic. Their jeep was blocked in with nowhere to go.
They had no idea what was in the package they were carrying across town, but they assumed it to be important. There was rumor of spies lurking around every corner; paranoia was at an all-time high.
Buck sat behind the wheel, trying to stay calm. His partner was struggling to keep hold of his nerves.
“Move! Get out of the way!” the officer screamed at the driver of the giant rig. He got nothing more than a wave of the hand by way of response.
Pulling his pistol from its holster, the officer sprang from his seat.
“You’ve got five minutes to move this truck,” he cried, pointing the Colt .45 squarely at the driver’s face.
Flustered, the red-faced trucker fired up his engine. He stalled it five times as he shuffled the rig back and forth to make space for the two young officers—who sat revving the jeep’s engine.
Washington was on edge. It was July 1948, and after a number of false starts, the Cold War had begun in earnest. Two weeks earlier, Soviet soldiers had cut all road and rail connections to Berlin. It was the Soviet Union’s first open act of defiance against its World War II allies, breaching the terms of the Potsdam Agreement that had carved up postwar Germany.
Berlin, the German capital, was one hundred miles inside the Soviet zone, but the city had been split equally between the new postwar nations of East Germany and West Germany. Soviet premier Joseph Stalin thought he could lay claim to the whole city by starving out the American- and British-controlled quarters—cutting off supplies of food and fuel. The Berlin blockade ultimately backfired, but it set the tone for forty years of tension between the two new global superpowers: America and the Soviet Union.
Ensign Dudley Buck—now twenty-one and six foot one with brown hair, blue eyes, and an easygoing smile—had been posted to the navy’s communications headquarters in Washington, DC. Like all junior officers, Buck had to do his share of the grunt work—incinerating classified documents or shipping sensitive intelligence to government departments or friendly foreign embassies.
When he wasn’t doing that, Buck was hunting Soviet submarines, rooting out spies, and building machines to speed up the task. He had been officially assigned to work under special duty code 1615, meaning he was part of the navy’s cryptology team.
This elite group of military eavesdroppers was based at Communications Supplemental Activities–Washington (CSA-W)—called Seesaw by the thousands of codebreakers, mathematicians, and engineers who worked there. The giant red-brick complex on Nebraska Avenue, in the northwestern corner of Washington, close to the border with Maryland, was where the US Navy intercepted and processed Soviet intelligence.
Housed on a sixty-one-thousand-square-meter site, the Seesaw complex had been built originally in 1875 as the Mount Vernon Seminary for Women, educating the daughters of Washington’s prominent families. It schooled the children of senators, congressmen, and other luminaries—including the daughters, granddaughters, and nieces of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone.
In the autumn of 1942, just as America entered the war, the US Navy approached the school’s aging founder, Elizabeth Somers, and offered her the grand sum of $1 million for the ivy-clad complex. Within days of the girls vacating their classrooms, the building on Nebraska Avenue was transformed into one of the most important information hubs of World War II.
Located at one of the highest points in Washington, DC, a short hop from the US Naval Observatory, it was the perfect spot from which to intercept and send messages around the country, and on to the front lines in both Europe and the Pacific.
From its new base the navy helped the British break the Germans’ Enigma code, which was used to encrypt cables detailing everything from troop movements to intelligence from the heart of Adolf Hitler’s empire. That was just the start, however.
Seesaw began spying on the Soviet Union before World War II had even ended, when the Russians were still allies. Now that the USSR was a clear and present danger, breaking Soviet codes and processing the intelligence had become all the more important. Operation Venona, as the Soviet codebreaking program was called, unmasked some of the most famous spies and double agents of the Cold War, such as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had passed secrets of the Manhattan Project to the Kremlin. It also helped expose the British spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean.
Buck was posted to a junior officer’s residence at Aberdeen Hall, 3415 Thirty-eighth Street NW. It did not take long for him to settle down to life in Washington, even though he was a long way from home.
His sister Virginia arrived in town at roughly the same time, having qualified as a stenographer and landed a job working for Commander John L. Nielsen in a neighboring navy building on Nebraska Avenue.
Buck often had lunch with his sister. Virginia’s security clearance was not high enough to allow her access into Seesaw but she would call in advance and wait for her big brother outside the gates. Buck never breathed a word about what went on inside.
Seesaw was an eccentric place. Signals experts would play around with new Morse code combinations. Telephone gurus would practice clever ways to route calls around the world so as to avoid detection. There were linguists specializing in French, German, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, and just about every other language imaginable, some of whom would often wander around chanting out loud to practice crucial new phrases.
Banks of mathematicians sat at desks devising ever more complex ciphers, sometimes in a script that looked like hieroglyphics. There were also engineers, fiddling around with radar sets. Somehow or other they were all trying to break down Russian codes.
For some of the younger recruits, Seesaw was just a staging post on the career ladder of a navy officer—a necessary stop-off on the way to higher ranks. Others, like Buck, had been picked out especially because of their technical background.
Not long after joining Seesaw, Buck designed a new type of radar to hunt Soviet submarines. In later correspondence he described the system elusively as “special purpose pulsed radar equipment.” Yet there was one thing in particular that the navy wanted him to do: invent new computers.
At the time, the word “computer” did not really have meaning outside a tight group of academics, engineers, and military scientists working on classified research projects. On the rare occasions that newspapers referred to computers, they were dubbed “electronic brains,” “mechanical brains,” or simply “electronic calculating machines.” They were abstract devices that would be made to perform complex arithmetic in public demonstrations. The notion that anyone might want such a device in the home—or shrunk down to pocket-size dimensions and connected to a telephone—was at the time totally alien.
The concept of computers did not sit entirely comfortably with some of the veteran codebreakers, who had broken Japanese ciphers with sheer brainpower. It was from these veterans that Buck learned his craft.
One of the most famous tutors at Seesaw was Aggie Meyer Driscoll, who had volunteered for service in 1918 when a crisis of manpower prompted the navy to allow women to enlist for certain positions. She gave up her post as head of mathematics at Amarillo High School in Amarillo, Texas, and soon became one of the top cryptologists in the American military.
In World War II, Driscoll had broken many of the early Japanese codes with a notepad and pencil. Now that codes were being broken with machines her skills were becoming redundant, but she retained a formidable reputation. When everybody else had given up on trying to break a particular code, it was passed to Driscoll. She also ran a training program for young recruits like Buck.
A handful of Seesaw’s veterans had spent time during the war stationed at Bletchley Park, the British codebreaking center that was set up in a stately home in Buckinghamshire, to the north of London.
Howard Campaigne, Seesaw’s head of mathematical research at the time, had been America’s top wartime cryptologist. He had been a math teacher at the University of Minnesota before the war, but built crude mechanical calculators as a hobby. When it looked like America might join the war, he wrote to the US Navy to offer his services. The navy made him complete a correspondence course on cryptanalysis, then hired him straightaway.
Campaigne first arrived at Seesaw on January 5, 1942, and was plunged straight into cracking Japanese codes. He had spent a year at Bletchley Park, starting in August 1944, deciphering German diplomatic cables.
Solomon Kullback was Seesaw’s head of research and development at the time Buck arrived. A New Yorker, raised in Brooklyn, “Kully” had signed up to be a government cryptographer in 1930 after getting bored of life as a high-school math teacher. He had been part of the American team that broke the Japanese Navy’s code Purple before he was shipped to England in 1942 to work on the German codes.
Then there was Joe Eachus, Seesaw’s technical director. Before the war, Eachus had taught mathematics at Purdue University Indianapolis, where he had always liked to play around with codes and ciphers. Like Campaigne, he had been plucked for wartime service after receiving top marks in a correspondence course on cryptanalysis.
While many wartime cryptographers went on to set up companies to exploit the skills they had learned, or simply returned to academia, this small cabal of veterans had remained in service and were committed to taking on the Soviet threat. Campaigne, Kullback, and Eachus became central to Buck’s career.
Although he had been processed through the navy training program at the University of Washington, Buck’s studies were not yet complete. The navy sent him to night classes in advanced calculus, vector analysis, and advanced mathematical statistics at George Washington University. He used his new skills daily, especially after being tasked with helping to build Seesaw’s first computer.
Captain Joe Wenger, the head of Seesaw, had become a computer enthusiast after seeing a demonstration of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) at the University of Pennsylvania. It was one of the first computers ever built, and much more advanced than the Colossus Mark 1 that had been built at Bletchley Park.
ENIAC was commissioned by the US Army in 1943 to solve what was then an immediate problem. Large pieces of artillery being sent into battle were supposed to come equipped with a range table that would show how far a shell or missile could be expected to travel given a set elevation and amount of gunpowder. The range table was, in essence, the instruction manual.
Every new gun design needed its own range table. Yet it took twenty man-hours to calculate each trajectory, and each gun’s range table needed about five hundred different trajectories. There were not enough mathematicians capable of producing the calculations. Neither was there a stream of new students coming through, as they had all been sent to war at the age of eighteen, before they had even started to gain a sufficient knowledge of mathematics.
ENIAC cost $400,000 to build—equivalent to $5.4 million today. It occupied the Moore School of Engineering’s entire basement, a space fifty feet long by thirty feet wide. It was made up of forty panels, each two feet wide by two feet deep and eight feet high, arranged in a U-shape around three walls of the room. It could execute five thousand additions per second, ranking it as the quickest computer ever built at the time.
ENIAC was not handed over to the army until February 1946, by which point the war it was supposed to be fighting was already over and there was no longer such an urgent need for artillery range tables. That did not matter too much, however: ENIAC was repurposed to perform calculations related to the construction of hydrogen bombs, and remained in operation until 1955.
The machine was unveiled to an awestruck press corps on February 14, 1946. Arthur Burks, one of the scientists who had built the machine, was given the job of demonstrating its prowess. “I am now going to add five thousand numbers together,” he announced before ostentatiously pressing a button on the machine.
Headlines were made in Sunday newspapers across America and Europe the next day. The ENIAC machine became a rumbling topic of conversation, and was anthropomorphized: it was described as a mathematical “whiz-kid,” a “mechanical Einstein,” and a “mathematical Frankenstein.”
After seeing the ENIAC demonstration, Captain Joe Wenger, the head of Seesaw, had been convinced that his codebreakers needed a similar machine. He was even more convinced after seeing the revised model, the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC), which could add two numbers in 864 microseconds and multiply two numbers in 2,900 microseconds. Wenger could see that processing data at those type of speeds could revolutionize codebreaking.
Wenger had a team of engineers already lined up to solve such a problem. He had encouraged a group of about forty wartime staff from Seesaw to go into business together after the war, continuing their work in the private sector. Defense budgets were being cut after the war, but Wenger told them that if they could find private capital to get started, he would hand them a fair share of juicy contracts from Seesaw. It was a way to get some of his research work off Seesaw’s books, where it could avoid close scrutiny from government accountants.
Engineering Research Associates (ERA) was set up in St. Paul, Minnesota. The company hired a lot of staff who had been building military codebreaking machines during the war at an NCR computer manufacturing plant in Dayton, Ohio.
Wenger followed through on his promise. Seesaw would build a new computer named Atlas, and ERA was contracted to build it. Atlas was intended to advance Seesaw’s codebreaking and data processing prowess to new levels. It was to take advantage of all the new tools inside the ENIAC and EDVAC machines.
Campaigne and Eachus were put in charge of running the project for Seesaw. With the help of Buck and the other Seesaw staff they ended up designing most of the computer themselves before passing on the design to ERA.
Seesaw decided to build a prototype in its own lab. Over just four months in 1949, Seesaw assembled a machine named ABEL. It was intended to teach the new generation of computer experts how the new technology worked and to train them on how to program the real Atlas machine when it was finally delivered.
It was Buck who got the ABEL machine up and running. He bullied Campaigne into letting him fire it up before anyone else thought it was ready. It looked like a “bare frame” to Campaigne, who laughed when he saw it. Then Buck plugged it in and it worked. It was slow, but it worked.
“Dudley Buck was a real young engineer with a tremendous amount of enthusiasm,” Campaigne recalled. “He just bubbled over with enthusiasm. He was smart, but real enthusiastic.”
David Brock at the Computer History Museum sees Buck’s involvement in ABEL as evidence that he was already recognized as something special. “This was one of Dudley Buck’s first big things in computing,” he explains. “They gave Dudley, who was still very young, the job of building this machine while they waited for Atlas 1. Dudley built an analog simulator of that machine, using relays. It was the same logic, but using relay switches. He built that so that they could start to develop their programs and debug their programs on this giant, superslow simulator of the Atlas. That project must have been crazy. It must have been so huge and so complicated to build that machine—just so they could start programming.”
Buck’s enthusiastic research propelled him into the limelight in the codebreaking community, working with the most senior ranks of engineers at ERA and Seesaw on the Atlas machine, which was eventually delivered to Seesaw in the spring of 1950 on a heavily guarded freight train.
“I have known Ensign Buck for a little over a year and have had an opportunity to observe his work closely,” wrote Lawrence Steinhardt, one of the top engineers at ERA in a letter of recommendation for Buck in early 1950. “He has been engaged in the planning and pioneer development of the electronic aspects of certain apparatus which might be characterized as digital computing equipment.”
Campaigne was also asked to write a letter of recommendation for Buck: “He is intelligent, ingenious, and quick. He is also inclined to be enthusiastic and over optimistic. He has initiative and perseverance, and is resourceful and imaginative in the designing and building of electro-mechanical equipment.”
Now that the “electro-mechanical equipment” of the Atlas computer had been delivered, Buck was assigned to a new task. Although his obligatory two years of navy service were almost up, he would not see out his time in the shelter of a heavily guarded complex in Washington. Ensign Dudley Buck was about to be sent on a covert mission behind enemy lines.