Lee County Code Breakers

Frank B. Rowlett (1908-1998) and Gene Grabeel (1920-2015) grew up in Rose Hill, seven miles northeast of here. Rowlett, working in the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service, led the team that in 1940 cracked the Japanese diplomatic cipher machine known as PURPLE, and he was instrumental in designing the American SIGABA encryption machine, which the Axis never decoded. This work greatly aided the Allied cause in World War II. Grabeel was one of two cryptanalysts who in Feb. 1943 began work on the decades-long VENONA project, which painstakingly deciphered encrypted Soviet communications and exposed a network of Soviet spies in the United States. She retired in 1978.

Department of Historic Resources, 2019