Station HYPO

William Loren McGonagle was born in Wichita, Kansas, on 19 November 1925 and attended secondary school and college in California. He was active in the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps and was commissioned in the rank of Ensign upon graduation from the University of Southern California in June 1947.

In a brief email Nov. 6, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth laid out a new Cyber Force Generation plan, meant to give U.S. Cyber Command more authority over the employment, training, and equipping of U.S. troops preparing for and waging cyber war. Former Air Force officers and national security officials say the plan is meant to fix longstanding problems that have beset the U.S. military’s cyberspace efforts—and to head off growing calls for an entirely new military service.

Have you ever given any thought to living in Kentucky? How about Kansas City? Tulsa? Had conditions been just a little bit different, NSA could have ended up in anyone of those places instead of here at Fort Meade.

November 16, 1912, Herbert O. Yardley was hired as a U.S. State Department code clerk. While working there during the night, he became interested in the construction of State Department codes, and he began to try and solve them. By his own account, he solved a 500-word message to President Wilson from Colonel Edward House (the President’s confidant and adviser in Europe) in less than 2 hours and after that, became determined to become a cryptologist. Yardley went on to eventually head up the Cipher Bureau or “American Black Chamber” and wrote a book by the same name about his experiences with the organization.