On the recommendation of a friend of hers, Frank Rowlett, Grabeel joined the Signal Intelligence Service on December 28, 1942, where she was assigned to attack intercepted Soviet ciphertext.[4][6] Her father gave her his permission to do so and "push some papers around" during the next few months.[6] Thus Grabeel began her 36-year career with the Signal Intelligence Service.
On February 1, 1943, she founded the Venona project, a counterintelligence program aimed at decrypting Soviet communications.[7][8][9][10] She and others spent months sifting through stored and incoming Soviet telegrams.[11] Grabeel initially worked with Leonard Zubko, a Russian speaker, but he was soon replaced.[4]
In his book Code Warriors: NSA's Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union, Stephen Budiansky describes how she came into the opportunity to work as a U.S. government cryptanalyst:
Gene Grabeel ... was teaching high school near Lynchburg in central Virginia and dissatisfied with her job when she met a young Army officer in the post office who was looking for college graduates to go work at an undisclosed location near Washington, to do a job he could not offer any details about. ... Grabeel had been thinking about trying to get a job with the federal government and asked her father what he thought of the idea. He told her she might as well "go to Washington for six months and shuffle papers." She was off to the capital as soon as she found a replacement teacher to take over for her.
Grabeel retired from service in 1978, as the Venona project came to a close.[4]
Personal life
Grabeel attended Blackstone Baptist Church.
She was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and of the 17th Century Colonial Dames.[5] Later in life, she was a fan of University of Virginia basketball.[4] She dated men, but was not interested in marriage, similarly to her colleagues.[4]
