Born: 7 April 1897, United States
Died: 1969
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is republished from the National Security Agency. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
Marie Meyer was a language scholar from Illinois with a Master’s Degree in Latin as well as knowledge of Greek German and Sanskrit. She was hired in 1943 probably as a German linguist by the Signal Security Agency.
During the summer of 1946 Ms. Meyer took a University of Chicago correspondence course in Russian and moved to the Venona problem a project attempting to decode Soviet messages to emissaries in the United States. Meredith Gardner a well-known linguist on the problem credited Ms. Meyer with making some of the initial recoveries of the Venona codebook.
Ms. Meyer spent the remainder of her career on some facet of the Russian problem and taught several Russian language classes at NSA.
Ms. Meyer was the first person to receive NSA’s Meritorious Civilian Service Award.