Editor’s note: The author, Steve Bailey, is outreach coordinator at the Anson County Historical Society.
We do learn something new every day. Thanks to Anson County Historical Society member Speed Hallman of Wadesboro for notifying me of the interesting life of Juanita Morris Moody, who was originally from Morven Township and who I had never heard of until now. Of course, this influenced me to discover who her parents and grandparents were.
She was born in Morven, N.C., to Joseph Luther Morris, born March 1, 1900, died Feb. 2, 1989, buried at Sandy Plains United Methodist Church Cemetery in Morven Township. He was married to Mary Elizabeth Prevett Morris who was born July 1, 1903, died Dec. 24, 1989, also buried at Sandy Plains United Methodist Church Cemetery.
Joseph Luther Morris was a son of Louis A. Morris who was born about 1869, died in 1944, also buried at Sandy Plains United Methodist Church Cemetery in Morven Township. He was married to Susan Delila Campbell Morris, born Dec. 11, 1869, died April 12, 1954, in Morven Township and also buried at Sandy Plains United Methodist Church Cemetery.
Louis A. Morris was a son of Joseph Morris, born Aug. 7, 1842, in Anson County, died Aug. 27, 1919, in Morven Township, also buried at Sandy Plains United Methodist Church Cemetery. He was married to Jane “Jennie” Burr Morris, born May 10, 1844, died March 10, 1925, in Morven and also buried at Sandy Plains United Methodist Church Cemetery.
Death certificate information states that Joseph Morris was a son of Wiley Morris and Charity Short Morris, and Mary Elizabeth Burr Morris was a daughter of Louis Burr and Mary Elizabeth Long Burr.
The following biography is from the Wikipedia website: Juanita Moody (née Morris; May 29, 1924 – February 17, 2015) was an American cryptographer, intelligence analyst and NSA executive. She worked for the Signals Intelligence Service and National Security Agency from 1943 until 1976.
Moody was responsible for providing intelligence to the White House and Department of Defense during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Her reports helped the United States avoid war with the Soviet Union.
Biography
Juanita Morris was born in 1924 in Morven, North Carolina. Her father Joseph Morris was a railroad worker and cotton-and-soybean farmer. Her mother Mary Elizabeth was a homemaker. Juanita was the first of nine children.
She began studying at Western Carolina University in 1942. She left in early 1943 to join the war effort; she volunteered at a recruitment office in Charlotte, North Carolina, and in April she was sent to Arlington Hall, the headquarters of the Signals Intelligence Service, in Arlington, Virginia.
She began training in cryptanalysis while waiting for her security clearance but was later transferred to an administrative library role. She remained interested in cryptanalysis, however, and joined a group that met outside of work to study a complex, unbroken German code system; as a result, she was assigned official code-related tasks. She was successful in breaking a German one-time pad cipher, and by the end of the war she had been promoted from code clerk to a head of office. She planned to return to Western Carolina University at the end of the war, but her supervisor asked her to remain with the SIS. She agreed on the condition that she was given a more complicated job. In 1948, she married fellow civil servant Warren Moody.
Moody was promoted to the National Security Agency’s research and development department after the war, where she became involved in computational cryptanalysis and analytic machines. Through the 1950s, she was a supervisor of Soviet analytic affairs and in 1960 was the head of signals intelligence operations to gather information about Cuba in Operation Mongoose as the chief of the Office of Non-Communist Nations. In 1961 she was promoted to section chief of G-Group, which was responsible for overseeing the NSA’s operations nearly everywhere except China and the Soviet Union. She oversaw the NSA’s responses to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 and was responsible for deciding what information relating to the crisis would be collected and processed.
In the fall of 1961 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Moody was visited by Louis Tordella, the deputy director at the NSA, with two high-ranking officials from the Kennedy administration, one of whom was Edward Lansdale, an assistant secretary of defense. Lansdale said, “We want to know what you know about Cuba. Even if it’s a hunch, or a thought, or a guess, I want to know everything that’s on your mind when you think Cuba.” Moody began reciting information gathered from the sigint. Lansdale said in disbelief, “Now, come on!” as if Moody was exaggerating. Moody replied, “I don’t have to have any hunches. It is all in the sigint.”
Lansdale was concerned that no one was providing the White House with that level of detail about an aggressive military buildup in Cuba, and asked Moody to write up her findings. Moody spent the next several days compiling “wheelbarrow loads of material” for the assistant secretary of defense. When she finished the report, Moody urged Tordella to “publish” the report, meaning circulate it among the intelligence agencies, the White House, the State Department and the military. Tordella refused citing the NSA charter which did not allow it. (It was the CIA’s purview to release the information.)
Moody unsuccessfully pleaded with Tordella to publish the reports her and her team were compiling. Tordella continued to reply, “We can’t do that. It will get us in trouble, because it would be considered outside of our charter.” Moody told him, “It has reached the point that I am more worried about the trouble we’re going to get in having not published it, because someday we’re going to have to answer for this.”
Tordella finally published the report in February 1962. It was the first such NSA report distributed to the wider intelligence community. Before long, an old CIA friend of Moody’s showed up at her office. He wanted to congratulate her, he said. “Everybody knows that you were responsible for getting that serialized report on what’s happening in Cuba out, and I want you to know that was a good thing you did.” But he also warned her that not everyone was thrilled about her initiative; he had just come from a high-level meeting at the CIA during which officials tried to “decide what to do about NSA for overstepping their bounds.”
After the discovery of nuclear weapons in Cuba in 1962, the mission at the NSA shifted to assessing the Soviet Union’s war capabilities in real time or as close to it as possible. NSA director Gordon Blake established an around-the-clock team to provide sigint summaries twice a day as well as immediate updates as needed. Moody was put in charge of this effort. She once called United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson in the middle of the night at his hotel to apprise him of intelligence gathered a few hours earlier because State Department officials refused to put her through. Stevenson used the information in a UN speech the next day; and he sent Moody and the agency congratulations afterwards.
After the Cuban Missile Crisis wound down, Adm. Robert Dennison, Commander of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, wrote to the NSA director that the intelligence coming from NSA’s Cuba desk was “one of the most important single factors in supporting our operations and improving our readiness.”
She was promoted to higher positions in the NSA throughout the 1960s and early 1970s but became the focus of controversy in 1975 when she was called to testify in front of a Senate committee that was investigating abuses of power in federal intelligence agencies. Her name was widely associated with the investigation in the press, but the NSA later clarified that she was not involved in any abuses of power and that her involvement in the investigation was as a spokesperson
In 1975, Moody was awarded the inaugural National Intelligence Medal of Achievement. She retired from the NSA the following year after 33 years of working for the agency. She was inducted into the NSA Hall of Honor in 2003.
More here.