Mildred Hayes; Helped NSA in Spying on Soviets

Mildred Louise Hayes, 78, a retired Russian cryptologist with the National Security Agency, died of respiratory failure Sept. 23 at her home in Gulfport, Miss. The former resident of Fairfax Station had lived in Gulfport since 2005.

At the NSA, Mrs. Hayes was involved with Venona, a computer-created code name for a small, very secret program set up to examine Soviet diplomatic communications. Established in 1943, Venona soon expanded its message traffic to include espionage efforts. The Central Intelligence Agency finally unveiled the project in 1995, 15 years after it ended, hailing it as one of the most significant counterespionage accomplishments of the Cold War.

Over the years, the program uncovered information about Soviet efforts to acquire information about U.S. atomic bomb research and the Manhattan Project and about Soviet spy networks in the United States. It led to the unmasking of Klaus Fuchs, the German-born scientist convicted of spying for the Soviets; Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed for espionage in 1953; and British intelligence officer Kim Philby, who after defecting to Moscow in 1963 admitted that he had been a Soviet spy for two decades.

Mrs. Hayes was one of the dozens of language teachers and professors, many of them young women, who were recruited by the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service, forerunner to the NSA, to come to Washington and work as code breakers after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Based at the headquarters of Signal Intelligence at Arlington Hall in Northern Virginia, the Venona cryptanalysts sifted through thousands and thousands of encrypted cables from the Soviet Union.

Mrs. Hayes, who was recruited for the program in 1952, was born in Cisco, Tex. Her father died when she was 6, and when her mother remarried, her stepfather decided he didn't want to raise the girl and her sister, only their little brother. An aunt and uncle in Little Rock took in the two girls.

She grew up in Little Rock and received a bachelor's degree in languages from Arkansas State University in 1944. She received a master's degree in Russian language and linguistics from George Washington University in 1980.

During the last two years of Venona's existence, Mrs. Hayes and an NSA colleague, Howard W. "Bill" Kulp, were given the task of determining whether the long-running program was still worthwhile to its customers: the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the CIA and their counterparts in other countries. She and Kulp concluded that the program should come to an end as scheduled. She continued doing cryptanalytic work until the Venona project was halted in 1980 and retired that year.

Mrs. Hayes, who spoke several languages, spent her leisure time reading and doing crossword and number puzzles. She also enjoyed travel, ballet, theater and the arts.

Her marriage to Paul Hayes ended in divorce.

Survivors include a daughter, Sharon Hayes of Gulfport; and a brother.