Decoding the Devil - by Sarah Valentine (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

As groundbreaking as Code Girls and Hidden Figures, this is the shocking true story of two segregated codebreaking units racing to unlock Stalin's atomic secrets in the face of a rapidly expanding Soviet nuclear threat at the dawn of the Cold War.

Facing the global threat of a rising Communist world power in the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. employed hundreds of Black Americans to speed read Russian communications and gather essential information on the US's most dangerous nuclear rival.

The result was the creation of a segregated civilian codebreaking unit known as the Traffic Processing Division--The Plantation. Despite wage discrimination, grueling hours, strict quotas, and harsh conditions, the Plantation's 100 college-educated Black women made invaluable breakthroughs in United States' Soviet intelligence even as the Red Scare and the backlash against civil rights eroded their democratic freedoms at home. Their underappreciated top-secret work led directly to victory over the USSR and the end of the Cold War thirty years later.

In this thrilling history, Sarah Valentine tells their remarkable story in full for the first time. Decoding the Devil pays long overdue tribute to these little-known Black cryptologists' critical contributions to national security during the civil rights era, and offers a fresh perspective on the Cold War and American heroes of color.

Review Quotes

"As a black cryptologist on submarines for 10 years, I was often unable to reconcile the contradictions of my race, cryptology, and the U.S Military. Nobody talked about the black cryptologists, and if I'd known about them and read a book, I prolly woulda felt less alone and had more historical context to what I was doing. I run a veterans' writers workshop. I told them about the book, and it inspired them." - Steven Dunn, author of Water & Power
"I am excited about this project. It is long overdue." - Liza Mundy, author of Code of Girls and The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA