A newly graduated home economics teacher was dying of boredom in small town in rural southern Virginia when a chance meeting set her on a path that would put her in the front line of the Cold War battle between two superpowers.
At the age of 22, Gene Grabeel could never have imagined that she would die a hero after a 36-year career with the Army Signal Service, which later became the National Security Agency. Grabeel was the first team member assigned to work on a top-secret counterintelligence campaign that would become known as the Venona Project.
From her humble beginnings, the bored cookery teacher would become a key figure in the fight against Soviet designs on world domination. But how did she get there? “It’s such a fascinating story and she’s just a fascinating human being. It almost sounds fictional. She gives up home cooking, home economics teaching to go and become a codebreaker,” Richard Kerbaj, an award-winning documentarian turned author, told the Daily Beast.
Kerbaj, who has specialized in investigating matters of national security for more than 15 years, fell down an untapped well of declassified files, which sparked his fascination with Grabeel, who died aged 94 in 2015.
“You can go down rabbit holes. Sometimes the most wonderful things can reveal themselves to you when you do that,” he said. But not content with skim-reading old intelligence files or flicking through Wikipedia like the rest of us, this award-winning investigative reporter decided to track down Grabeel’s family.
Kerbaj tells her extraordinary story in his remarkable book The Secret History of the Five Eyes: The Untold Story of the International Spy Network, which was published on Jan. 7.
It focuses on the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. But the book also delves into the fascinating individuals involved.
“I called up the National Security Agency who couldn’t help, as a lot of the information around Grabeel was not declassified,” he said. Then, by the grace of God, a call with the codebreaker’s local church in Blackstone, Virginia, yielded results. “I tracked down her family, and the way I did that is I found an obituary, which identified the local church that she went to, and I rang up the local church and they were extremely helpful and connected me with some family members… and I took it from there,” Kerbaj explained.
Describing life before her incredible career, he painted a picture of a farm setting with not much excitement. “It’s rural. And then she took a chance,” he said. “And I think it’s quite significant that she took a chance at the time that she did, because if you were to look at the unfolding war as a backdrop, this is shortly after Pearl Harbor, after the U.S. had joined the war, you’ve got hundreds of thousands men heading out to fight.
“You would’ve thought that you would want some stability in your life, some regular income and some stability in your professional life. But she was essentially a disruptor. She’s like an early disruptor who said, ‘No, despite all of this, what’s happening around here? I want to take a chance.' And she did.”
Grabeel was recognised by her peers as homecoming queen in her youth and was a respected member of her local Blackstone Baptist Church. But she had designs on something bigger.
It was back in her hometown in Lee County, Virginia, southwest of Richmond, that she got her big break. Frank Rowlett, a local success story because of his job as a federal government employee, was back in the town of 300 people for Christmas 1942.
Grabeel had actually confided to her parents over the festive period that she had already grown bored of life as a small-town teacher, but Rowlett—an old family friend—was about to flip the script for young Gene.
Kerbaj wrote in Five Eyes that since 1930, Rowlett had been a senior code breaker at the U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service (SIS). He had also played a role with other members of the SIS, commonly known as Arlington Hall, in breaking the Purple cypher machine, used by Japan for its top-secret diplomatic traffic. That enabled the U.S. to launch a surprise attack against Japan and turn the tide of the war in the Pacific.
A former teacher himself, Rowlett saw something in the savvy and intelligent young woman before him. He sized her up for a job on the newly formed Venona Project.
“She had no idea what was going on because she was invited to Arlington Hall on the basis that there would be a job for her, but she had no idea what that job would be," Kerbaj told the Beast. “All she knew is that she no longer wanted to do what she was doing. So she sort of went off unaware of what would come next.“
The imposing Greek Revival-style Arlington Hall in Arlington, Virginia, was the base of the United States Army’s Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) cryptography operations during World War II. Before that, it had been a private girls’ school. “So she went from one girls’ school that she’s teaching at to another, except that this one had been converted into a code breaking operation for the U.S. Army. The parallel was somewhat fascinating,” Kerbaj said.
What she would go on to achieve was monumental. She spent most of her career trying to break and decipher Soviet codes as part of an effort to protect America’s nuclear secrets. She, and other Venona members, were publicly recognized by the CIA director as “American Heroes” after files about the project were declassified.
“She joined an effort without knowing what the outcome would be, hoping to just get away from the job that she felt completely shackled by,” Kerbaj said. “And then she would go on to help create an effort that was the biggest counter Soviet espionage operation created by the U.S. It helped elevate the standards of national security within the entire Five Eyes alliance.”
She did this even when the White House warned her and her team away from secretive work. The administration had been assured that Arlington Hall was not snooping on Russian communications, but government officials were still suspicious. “The White House was aware of the organization’s work on the Japanese, German, and Italian communications and had presumed that we would do the same on Russian and had taken steps on their initiative to cool the effort,” Frank Rowlett later recalled. “Did we stop? We did not. We kept working and went to work harder and harder.”
Kerbaj said: “That just shows that there’s a degree of dissent that exists within the intelligence community. I think that’s a real important factor in the intelligence community because they’re not there as instruments. They’re there to actually have their own take on national security matters. That’s why they inform policy and policy informs them.”
And despite the huge stakes of her espionage in dimly lit hallways with top secret files, Grabeel was still just plain old Gene to her family back home. Kerbaj explained that while her family spoke about her “with a great deal of pride,” her ability to compartmentalize her work “away from family life,” meant they didn’t actually know much about what she did day to day. “She’s very, very likable. I mean, her niece spoke about her so fondly and with such great deal of pride. But even then, despite her closeness to her niece, she never ever went into any details about the work that she did,” he explained.
She remained silent despite the fact that she was part of a small team that stymied the Soviet Union’s progress in the pre-Cold War years. And Kerbaj thinks that—were it not for Grabeel and her colleagues at Arlington Hall—we could be looking at a very different global power balance. “There’s the cause and effect issue,“ he said, noting that the Verona Project led to revelations in Australia of Soviet spies, that then led the Truman Administration to kick Australia out of the so-called Five Eyes.
That, in turn, led MI5 in Britain to help Australia back into the fold because of its geographical proximity to adversaries—perhaps curtailing Soviet efforts in the process. “So once you start adding these things up, you go, ‘Wow.’ Unbeknownst to her [Grabeel], unbeknownst, to anyone, she helped contribute so enormously to the formation of the Five Eyes. And that in itself is so extraordinary when you see it through that lens,” Kerbaj added.
It may seem like a Hollywood tale, but Kerbaj wants to eventually make the story into a documentary series. “That’s definitely going to be happening,” he told the Beast.
Grabeel, one of America’s great unsung heroes, is buried in Pennington Gap, VA, next to her parents. “Aunt Gene” held a special place in the hearts of her family members, and perhaps one day, in the hearts of Americans, too.
